“Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.” - Stephen R. Covey

Here is a list of choices I made :

Operating System : Linux

There are lot of reasons why you should use linux : easy access to software, no viruses/adware, fast, possibility of configuring every bit. There is also a long list reasons why you shouldn’t run linux, which I don’t agree with most of them, except some great Windows only(may be Mac supported) software like Photoshop; and few drivers.

Desktop : GNOME
Simple elegant interface. Pretty stable.

Window Manager : compiz (compiz-fusion)
Rather than the cool 3D effects, there are some really useful plugins in compiz. For example : Expo, Scale.

Web Browser : Firefox 2
Firefox 3 has some great fixes on critical bugs like memory leaks, but there is one flaw. Some of the plugins I’m using are not available/stable for Firefox 3. So, I’ll stick to Firefox 2 for few more months.

Mail Client : Thunderbird
I’m not a heavy user of the desktop mail clients. I only use thunderbird for one of my mail accounts. There is no specific reason I’m choosing thunderbird over evolution, just like the interface.

IM : piding / emesene
Pidgin is one of the best multi protocol IM clients available in linux(kopete is also nice). Depicts the fact it supports many protocols, that’s only basic features. Most of my friends are using MSN network, and emesene is capable of handling those, and thousand times better than the crappy aMSN interface.

VOIP : Skype
Just one word : clear

IRC : xchat
Nice interface.

File Transfer (ftp/sftp) : Filezilla/GVFS
If I’m using a separate client for file transfer, that would definitely filezilla, but it’s much easier to mount the shares directly using GVFS and use it like a local directory.

Word Processing : abiword
It’s a light weighted, really fast word processor. Even though it’s light weighted, all necessary features are there.

Graphics : Adobe Photoshop
Yes, Adobe Photoshop, that’s the best I’ve ever seen. I never got along with gimp. Anyhow, I rarely mess with graphical stuff, yet I still miss Photoshop.

Text Editor/IDE : gedit
Simple, clean interface and have syntax highlighting. I can survive without an integrated debugger.

Video Player : mplayer/vlc
Those will play almost anything.

Audio player : banshee
Banshee has a nice audio library management features. Similar artists + cover info rocks.
Worth mentioning : one of the best media library management softwares I’ve seen is Windows Media player.

Twitter Client : twitux
Very stable, with many features. twhirl is stunning, but adobe AIR still doesn’t support tray icons on linux.

File Sharing : bittorrent
The content is reliable - well you have to read the comments.

Torrent client : azureus
Many features + plugins. I’m using the webui plugin, with auto start init script. (If you are curious, there is a azureus command line option : –ui=console)

Email Service : gmail / Google apps
It’s the cool ajax interface. The usage of conversations instead of individual mails is also remarkable. I’m using google apps to handle my gunathilake.com domain.

RSS Reader : Google Reader
Easy to use. Rather than a desktop RSS client, I can access it from anywhere. When I’m at somewhere with an internet connection killing time, I always have something to do. The sharing feature is handy too.

Photo sharing : Picasa
It’s the desktop application - It’s easier to upload.

Blogging platform : wordpress
Wordpress is a solid, easy to use platform. From a developers point of view, it’s internal structure is amazing.

Bookmarking : foxmarks
I tried to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. But I don’t bookmark much, so I just use the firefox builtin bookmarking. I don’t want to experience losing my bookmarks again, that’s why I’m using foxmarks.

Web Developer plugins : firebug / web developer toolbar
Just check the plugins - you’ll see.

Virtualization : VirtualBox
I’m using VirtualBox to access IE to test sites. VirtualBox has nice integration features like free mouse.

What I read
Except reading my friends blogs, here are few feeds from my RSS reader.

• Techcrunch - I believe they have spies all over the world. Anything related to startups, it’s over there. Easy to keep track of what’s happening on the internet.
• Linux today - Everything related to linux/open source
• Gnome planet - Some nice content over there, related to gnome.
• ReadWriteWeb - This is like techcrunch. Techcrunch gives you more news, this will give you analysis/comparisons.
• Smashing Magazine - A source to get inspired - collections of creative work all over the internet.

Last week, proving one of the most effective open source successes, firefox hit 500+ million downloads. There are no arguments, they have definitely changed the world. Now, in honor of firefox downloads, they are going to change the world in another perspective by helping the Free Rice foundation.

Now, it’s your turn.

Today, I wanted to install Ajaxian theme for my photo gallery. So, I just download it to my gallery2 themes folder, extracted the contents, the tried to install. But my gallery 2 version is way too old for the theme, so that I had to upgrade the gallery 2 itself.

The first step was to overwrite the old files with new ones. Then, I started the installation process. It went smoothly, and then they have asked to dump the mysql database and make a backup. But, as usual without doing anything, I continued. OMG.. There is an error. I got shocked. Fortunately, they have a nice debugging output. The error was regarding a mysql table. So, I opened the database manually, it was there. Oh!! The table names are case sensitive (only in Linux). I have set the mysql to only use the lowercase names, so it saves everything in lowercase, but when gallery2 tries to access them, it also uses upper case. So, the answer was simple, I went through the code. It was using adodb, found the Execute function, use the strtolower() function to convert all the sql commands to lowercase and it worked perfectly. After all my albums are there.

After upgrading, I changed the theme and uploaded some more photos. Then, I wanted to delete an unwanted album; So, I deleted that.. after the next refresh I realized I have mistakenly deleted all the albums

Well! Well! This is the begining. The main purpose of this blog is to share my experience with you. Yeah! probally it will be about programming, open source, may be some electornics, etc.

Yesterday (rather today morning, around 2 AM), I managed to install wordpress blog on our server. As they always say, it is five minutes install proccess. It was even less than five minutes. Really simple bloging software.

Then the next step was to download a new theme for it. It was also really simple. Just running a wget and unzip. It installs the theme automatically. Then It came to configuring. As you know, a usuall content management system/blog have a admin section to add and remove portlets/menues, edit navigation bar. I was looking all over the place, but the wordpress doesn’t have a section like that. You can create pages, but there is no way to add those into the navigation bar. So, I had to go through
the php code to edit the navigation bar. And then the portlets, I had to edit the code to remove portlets. But anyway, the code is nicely written, so that it is very easy to edit. It will only take few minutes to change the code. Yeah! of course after spending several minutes to find out there are no options for those features.

Except that, the wordpress blog seems to be nice. The main advantage is, it is very simple, so that you can easily customize it. The point is if you have experince with php and html, I think wordpress blog will be a great tool for you.

That’s about installing, and configuring. After configured it, it was too late in the night and i went to sleep. Then the next day, or same day, I had a big problem. WHAT TO WRITE! So, after thinking several HOURS, i decided to write about this wordpress it self.

Anyway, i’ll be writing about my experince about open source products like wordpress, various programming tricks, libaries, etc. So, If you are interested about those, just drop in here once a day(may be once a month ;-)) and check wether there is something new.

All comments are welcome!