I came across this article where my friend had written about me, and honestly, I had totally forgotten that it was just two years ago. It was when the new Rotaract Club was formed for the year 2012 at my University, Informatics Institute of Technology. I just felt like sharing it here, on my own blog, because something like that, I feel, should be treasured.

The write-up is here:

Rtr. Krishnakripa Jayakumar

Editor (2012-2013)

Compiled by Sai Ma Devakumaran

The empress of the Seventh Soul Mountain a short beautiful lady with truly innocent eyes that targets the unbelievably unexpected (haha) is none other than Kripa Jayakumar who is most lovingly known as ‘Gundoos’, The Lady Genius in IT who passes all her exams with flying colors recently revealed the secret of her success which ultimately turned out to be a drink that increases memory power and concentration (lol) She is a wise soft spoken girl who is very thoughtful about others. What I truly admire about her is that she is someone who never comments on anyone at any circumstance. She is someone who speaks less but a glimpse of food makes her open her mouth very easily. If she ever loves something, they are books as you can always find her with a book or a laptop in hand. Last but not the least I will never forget to mention about her writing skills! She is a really good writer, owning a blog with her little beautiful writings. I’m sure she will have a bright future ahead. I wish her all the very best from the bottom of my heart..

You can read the complete article here:
http://rciit.blogspot.com/2012/09/an-insight-into-lives-of-our-very-own.html

In commemoration of the all new Firefox Australis launch that was globally awaited by all on the 29th of April 2014, the Mozilla Sri Lankan Community also hosted the celebration of this aforementioned launch on 10th of May this year. In addition to it, the launch party also marked the re-establishment of the Mozilla Sri Lankan Community.

I was also part of the crowd, apart from different enthusiasts from different Universities across the country, who gathered at the event to see what all the hype about the new Firefox was and was pretty thrilled to see a whole new change in Firefox. I was also here because my friends were speaking too (was thrilled :D).


The event proceedings started off with a history to Mozilla Foundation and all the work carried about to this day. Milestones achieved and the success stories were shared with the audience. Of all the milestones, I remember one very well. Quoting the speaker, "Mozilla named 'Most Trusted Internet Company privacy in 2013'". Apart from one of the safest browsers, Firefox also is very keen on the speediness of the browser.

What is a launch without a cake? ;) Yes, we had a cake, two to be precise, and finally everyone had a sugar overdose (just kidding :P).  I also tottered along with the rest of the audience to sing "Happy Birthday" and sneak out with a cake piece.

So it wasn't totally only the Firefox Australis, on the agenda. There also was a session on FirefoxOS, the mobile operating System and how to create apps that can easily be uploaded to the Marketplace. Local apps created by developers here were showcased and the audience were given Firefox mobiles to experience the feel. And the good news (or not so good news) would be that these apps are simply web apps and you can easily create one using HTML, CSS and Javascript. And what about Frameoworks? Yeah, yeah them too. Porting the apps to different platforms too is really easy. PhoneGap? Yes, you can use it.

Some of the hardcore Twitterholics grabbed some cool gifts at the end of the event, while the rest of us got hold of some merchandise too ;) . The event was a success I should hope so, and the Social Media was streaming with #MozillaLK hashtags and photos and #Panchali (:P), while the online magazine partners, ReadMe and dIGIT.lk did a good job too on covering the event.




And to wrap it all up a good group photograph as well :)

I am a free bird,

Okay, so I came across a situation where I needed to migrate my wordpress site from local to server (in my case which was running on Ubuntu). Everything was working fine until I came across many issues after setting up the site on the server. I had made some changes to the permalinks and now , suddenly, everything just turned into a mess.

Hence I decided to pen down this article in the hope that it may help some of you because I had searched up and down and suffered a lot trying to understand why it was causing issues.

This is the message I got:




Before we proceed on fixing the issues, lets try to put the pieces together now, shall we?

What Really Happened before the 404

2. You save the changes.

3. Depending on certain scenarios, you may or may not get this message at the very bottom of your screen.





4. In this case, you would manually have to change the contents. And hence you have to copy the contents listed there and paste it into the .htaccess file.




5. Now the reason you may wonder you don’t see the .htaccess file (along with some others) is because it’s a hidden file.

You may have to make the hidden files visible. (Ctrl+H or google it up to find the way). If its still not visible, you could just create a .htaccess file and paste the contents in. Like given below:




From the above code, <IfModule checks within apache whether the mod_rewrite.c module is included within itself. If it is, the code block runs. Else it does not. (which is the problem I and most of you out there is facing).

Somehow the damage is done. How do I fix the permalink issues?

If you had tried changing permalinks, your .htaccess file will get updated using new rewrite rules. This is generally what should happen, but the reason the 404 error comes is simply because none of the rewrite rules of your .htaccess file gets executed.

Why doesn't the rewrite rules get executed?

Note: throughout the tutorial i am assuming that you have permissions to carry out commands and also you have permissions to edit files. You may come across situations where you would have to do it, so if you get an error stating you do not have permission for carrying out a task, make sure you get access rights.

Enabling mod_rewrite.c module on Apache

1. To do that, simply open up terminal and type in this command :

sudo a2enmod rewrite

This will simply enable the rewrite module in apache.

2. If this was successful, then you could simply restart apache using the below command.

service apache2 restart

or

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

3. Now refresh your browser and check if your 404 error has vanished. If it has, congratulations.

It still does not work. What do I do now?

Scenario 1: 

If you are still stuck maybe there is one thing you would have forgotten.You should do the following:

1. Give .htaccess files permission to override previous directives

You would generally have to open up httpd.conf file. (I have tried high and low trying to figure out where this file was, but if you don’t find this file, apache2.conf is the file you need to be looking at (in my case)).

If you don't find this file, don't worry According to their documentation, find one of these: 

On Ed/X/Ubuntu 6.06 and Ubuntu Edgy Eft, the "main server configuration file" is /etc/apache2/apache2.conf . 

in the LAMP download about a week ago with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) the default configuration file was /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default

So feel free to trotter around these folders within apache2 to find the file.

On my server, this is where it resides.




2. Open up the file and locate a section that looks like (fully, partially or almost close) to this:

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# Uncomment this directive is you want to see apache2's
# default start page (in /apache2-default) when you go to /
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>

3. Replace the “AllowOverride None” with “AllowOverride All. This tells Apache that it's okay to allow.htaccess files to over-ride previous directives.

After the change the piece of code looks like this:



4. You might need to reload or restart (step given above) Apache before this change will have an effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now your .htaccess files in your wordpress root directory will be able to make a difference. Your permalink issues should be sorted by now.

Scenario 2: 

If you got an error message as such after you tried to enable the rewrite module, like this…



... it is probably because your userdir is not enabled in apache. In the apache documentation it says that by default, access to these directories is not enabled.

Lets enable it now.

1. Type into the console the following as you can see in the image:




2. Open your mods-enabled folder under the apache2 folder. You can now see the rewrite.load file has appeared in it.

3. Refresh your browser and now you can see the site running fine.

Scenario 3: 

Maybe your rewrite rules are not included within your .htaccess file or something along that line. Idk. Read the first heading given above to check around a bit.

If none of them also work, I am sorry I don’t think I can find any other way. You may just have to search for more ways.

Eventually you shall come up with a solution like I did.

Tell me one person who hasn't watched or heard of Godfather. I'll persuade him to do so (not strictly speaking, so...don't redirect anyone to me). WHY? Because Al-Pacino is one hell of an actor and his acting has moved me so much so, that he is one of my favorite actors of all time! But this blog post isn't about Al Pacino, but rather one of my favorite moments in his movie, The Godfather.

There are a lot of scenes to be named when it comes to this particular movie, but let me pick out my favorite from it all.

I remember the excitement and the awe-struck expression I had when I saw that scene for the first time. The acting so natural and the expected revenge that lead to an unexpected scenario.

*Spoiler ahead*

Jack Waltz turns down a request from Don Corleone and since he is someone who is not accustomed to getting his requests turned down, punishes him by presenting him with the head of his favorite racehorse on his bed.
That scene was perfectly natural because Jack Waltz never expected a real Horse Head in his bed (yes, that horse head was freaking real) and he is as dumbfounded as the rest of us are.