Ramesh Thiruchelvam's Blog

Enable sudo & disable root account

After installing the debian in my netbook; fist thing I wanted to do is to disable the root acocunt and get the sudo privilege for my account, so that I do not need to remember/login to two different accounts in my netbook.

sudo can be enabled by running the visudo and appending the follwong lines. Once appended any command that requires root privilege can can be executed by running it through the sudo command. eg:sudo halt.

# give sudo permission to a user
ramesh ALL=(ALL) ALL

# give sudo permission to a group
%root ALL=(ALL) ALL

Once the sudo is enabled the root account can be disabled by locking the password.

passwd -l root

Cambio Healthcare Systems, Grand Opening

Cambio Healthcare System a Swedish based e-healthcare provider officially named it's presence in Colombo with grand opening of it's largest state of the art development facility in Deal Place, Colombo.

Mirroring subversion

Wanting to keep a backup mirror copy of the subversion repository I looking up on the net for ways and found the svnsync a simple way. It has it's limitation too, it's just one way meaning the local copy can't be updated directly but via the main repository.

Setting up is simple, just init the svnsync in the mirror repository with the following command. (it has to be done in an empty mirror repository)

svnsync init <mirror> <source uri>

Then when every you wanna update the mirror with the latest changes from the source.

synsync sync <mirror>

2 Nights 3 Days Holiday Package at Haldummulla Estate Bungalow

Last Saturday while we are at the Pettah public car park two guys came and handed over a raffle tickets mentioned "Win 2 Nights 3 Days Holiday Package at our Holiday Bungalow Free" and asked us to fill it and handover them. We only had to fill the name, occupation and the phone no so we didn't mind.

Yesterday(Tuesday) morning I received a call from a company named "Need Wood Lanka" saying that I've won the "2 Nights 3 Days Holiday Package" and to come and collect it from there office with my Wife on Wednesday evening. It was a coincidence that Wednesday was our wedding anniversary, so we thought of collecting it from them in the evening and going for dinner. (we canceled some of our other plans)

Wednesday I received a call from them early in the morning about the appointment. In the evening at 5:30 PM we visited there office, which is at 7/103, Galle Road, Colombo 03. It was a surprise that another 20 families have come to collect their gift.

One of there officers took us to table and told us that in order to collect the gift we have to stay for there presentation about there estate and products, which didn't feel right but we agreed. He then explained about there Need Wood Estate in Haldummulla, and the Teak trees there and how useful there and about there "Holiday Bungalow" which is entirely constructed using Teak trees and how stable that it, blah, blah...

After 15 minutes of blah blah, they came to the point; that there company have started a new project to cultivate Teak trees in Putlam and asked us to invest for 10 perch land with 20 teak trees for the price Rs.285,000.00. If we purchase it on the table they were willing to give us 15% discount, ownership of the land and an annual holiday package to there Holiday Bungalow free. They were pushing us to take the deal on the table, but we wanted to know what we are investing on, so we didn't take the deal on the table! We just collected the "2 Nights 3 Days Holiday Package" offer and left.

On the way back I called my friend Thushara, and told him about the offers and he told he get got calls from them and they have asked him to come on Thursday to collect it. I advised him to fucking skip it... Only thing they are doing is tempt you for a "2 Nights 3 Days Holiday Package" which will cost you only Rs.10,000 - Rs.20,000 and make you invest on something for Rs.285,000.00, which you are not sure about and wait for return 20 years, and find out you can't get a return...

Google Chrome OS

Google is to make it's own flavor of Linux which will boot up quick and give access to the net via it's own Chrome Browser. All applications you need will be available on the web...

1. GMail (Mail Client)
2. Google Calendar (Calendar Application)
3. Google Docs (Word, Spreadsheet, Presentation and PDF Viewer)
4. Google Reader (RSS Reader)
5. Picasa Web (Photo Organizer)
6. Google Maps (Map)

What else we want?

Select a random row from a table

I was looking for a clean and simple way of selecting a random record from a table. Here is what I found...

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

Symbolic links in NTFS

After working in Linux for quite a long time, I'm a fond of symbolic links to save space on disk and share the common libraries and keep them all in sync. NTFS junction point is the same thing, that does it bit differently.

Set PHP Register Globals Using .htaccess

If you wanna override the Register Globals settings in PHP and you don't have access to php.ini in the server, then you can simply add a single line to your .htaccess file and enable it. Here is how...

php_flag register_globals 1