Ahmed El Gamil

Assalamu Alykom Everybody,

I know that this blog has almost been dead and you can only see my twitter updates laying around (seen this line before ?! well, it is the most famous line that bloggers write when they stop writing for some time, — Back to the topic chatty !! –)

So i have been working in the Egyptian market for quite some time now in the field of UNIX-like/Linux Systems administration, dealt with a lot of technologies like: web operations/scalability, Infrastructure management, web farms,VoIP, Security systems and whole bunch of stuff, which gave me some idea on how do sysadmins (or systems engineers whatever you like ) do and achieve their goals.

The point is, I DON’T LIKE IT, WE ARE BEING KILLED BY OUR JOBS, Systems are evolving and we are not ?! ..

Virtualization and Cloud Computing brought a whole lot of machines, and we still manage them using “almost” the same technologies ?! ..

If you are like me and have been searching for a solution for the past year or two, You will see around the internet that people are talking about “Agile Systems Administration”, “Infrastructure As Code” , “Command and Control”, “Configuration Management”, “Server Orchestration” and “DevOps”.

So I started asking people working on our industry, and there is almost NOBODY individually or an enterprise in Egypt that started working with those technologies, just some tiny trials and i just cannot stand the time/power we are wasting on managing our servers “Old School”. (If your Enterprise is using some of the technologies mentioned above, please tell us in the comments or mail me personally, I would love to have a chat about that.)

So within the next days isA, i will start doing some steps to get us out of the misery , may be creating some collaboration channels, contacting key professionals on that topic, who knows may be even making and event/sessions about it ..

But first I need your trusty comments, What do you think of the technologies mentioned ? Do you see it applicable at your employer ? Did you start using it ?

Since this blog was starting to be full of ghosts, i said that i must break the silence by some quick post.

Last Saturday I attended the JDC 2010 (Java Developer Conference) which is organized by EGJUG , I attended the last JDC which was at 2008 and it was pretty good and after looking at the agenda of 2010, i just couldn’t resist

Most of the sessions were quite interesting, i got to know some of the new technologies and made some good contacts with great people in the industry here in Egypt.

I also bought an excellent book “Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers” by Ed Burns who was a speaker at the conference (and he was also a speaker at 2008), and he signed it for me , Thanks Ed.

After the conference we had a quick visit to Google

Actually that was at the Google Booth , Some of the Google guys were there like AbdelKarim Mardini showing the new Nexus one and some other cool stuff.

A lot of interesting people was there like Sang Shin, Fred Sauer, also from Egypt Mohammed El-Refaey whom i really enjoyed talking to.

So in the end, it was a pretty good day and meeting a lot of my friends added a tasty flavour to the mixture, JAK Shabab.

Time to move on and finish that piles of work to do !

الحمد لله و كفى وصلاة و سلاماً على عباده الذين اصطفى ثم أما بعد..

فبينما أقوم بتجربة لغة البرمجة Ruby كلغة بديلة لل Bash Scripting للقيام ببعض أعمال اداره نظم التشغيل (System Administration) (والتى تبين لى انها قوية جداً فى هذا المجال و يبدو أنى سأستخدمها من الان فصاعداً), اذ تعرضت لل Interactive Ruby او ما يسمى أختصاراً  Irb و هو عبارة عن نوع من ال Shells و لكنه للتعامل مع لغة Ruby نفسها لتجربة بعض الطرق البرمجية قبل استخدامها فعلياً فى برامجك..

المشكلة التى قابلتنى هى انى وجدت Irb لا يقوم بعملية الاكمال التلقائى (Auto completion) لل Class & Methods و هذا شىء صعب للغاية على مدمن Shells مثلى !

و بعد البحث عن الموضوع مع العملاق جوجل وجدت انه يجب عليك ان تقوم بضبط بعض الخواص فى ملف ال Configuration الخاص ب Irb و الذى يوجد فى مجلد ال Home بأسم irbrc. حتى يكون الملف كالاتى

IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] = []  unless IRB.conf.key?(:LOAD_MODULES)
unless IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES].include?('irb/completion')
  IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] << 'irb/completion'
end

و هكذا ترى النتيجة بعد الانتهاء من هذا التعديل البسيط 

سبحانك الله و بحمدك..أشهد ان لا اله إلا أنت..أستغفرك و أتوب إليك