sp2hari@web log :)

Home... Sweet Home...

2007-11-05T03:40:00.000-08:00

Finally got a new home for myself. Many many thanks to manas for this nice gift. :-)

URL: http://sp2hari.com/

Feed URL: http://sp2hari.com/feed/

Update your links and feed url.

Blue... ;-) ;-)

2007-10-15T03:32:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia says
"The term blue may refer to any of a number of similar colors. The sensation of blue is made by light having a spectrum dominated by energy in the wavelength range of about 440–490 nm.
Blue is considered to be one of the three primary additive colors in the RGB system; blue light has the shortest wavelength range of the three additive primary colors. The English language commonly uses "blue" to refer to any color from navy blue to cyan."

Some strange facts ( of course i googled for them :P )

Blue eyes are the most sensitive to light, brown eyes the least sensitive!
Owls are the only birds who can see the color blue!
80 percent of Americans love blue color!
Blue and white are the most common school colors!
Animal breeders in Russia once claimed to have bred sheep with blue wool!
A scallop has 35 blue eyes!
Mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue twice as much as any other!
Maine produces about 98-99% of all wild blueberries in the US!
The red traffic light contains some orange color and the green traffic light contains some blue color making it easier for people with red-green color blindness!
More people use blue toothbrushes, than red ones!
Other than humans, black lemurs are the only primates that may have blue eyes!
There are only two animals with blue tongues, the Black Bear and the Chow dog!
The blue whale can produce sounds up to about 188 decibels!
A blue whales heart beats nine times per minute!
Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of the blue whale!
Blue whales weigh as much as 30 elephants and are as long as 3 Greyhound buses!
The blood vessels of a blue whale are wide enough for an adult trout to swim through!

Well enough of facts, I'll tell you some more nice facts :P :P

Sudden change to blue color makes people shout "Blue Blue Blue" all the time. This syndrome can be observed around one week even before the color change occurs.
Any girl who works in front of computer most of the time loves blue color than anything else.
Though blue color wavelength is 440-490 nm, the lower bound for blue color is 1200 and the upper bound is 1500.
Though the hexadecimal triplet for blue is #0000FF, the actual blue you see in the websites is #6666FF. This can be checked in the css file. For example

.coderTextBlue, .coderTextBlue:link, .coderTextBlue:visited, .coderTextBlue:hover, .coderTextBlue:active 
{ color: #6666FF; }

Hmmmm, i wish i could write more but have to stop here :-) :-)

Slice...

2007-09-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

Slice notation is one of the powerful feature in python using which can be used for operations like substr, str_reverse etc etc.

The slice notation is really powerful for strings. I'm not very sure whether it can be used for other data types.

For a string, it can be used as variable_name[start:end:step]

If the start and end are equal, then a null string is returned.
If step is positive and start is greater than the end, then a null string is returned.
If step is negative and start is lesser than the end, then a null string is returned.

Ok. If you are confused about start, end, step, equal, greater. lesser, positive and negative, don't worry. Things are explained very clearly after this. :-)

First few lines about the step. If the step is positive, then the direction in which the input string is scanned is forward direction. If the step is negative, then the string is scanned in reverse direction. So now i hope you understand why start must be less than end if step is positive. For the same reason, start must be less than end if the step is negative.

Let us see a simple slice example.

>>> i = "Hello World"
>>> i[2:10:1]
'llo Worl'

So it's very clear that the basic action of the slice notation is to return a sub string.
In the above example, it returns the characters from the string whose position are equal to and greater than start and less than end.

Note :: The character at position end is not returned.
In the above example i[10] = "d" is not returned.

If the start is not specified and step is positive, then the default value is 0
If the end is not specified and step is positive, then the default value is len(string).
If the start is not specified and step is negative then the default value is len(string).
If the end is not specified and step is negative, then the default value is NOT 0, coz in this case even 0th character is returned.
If the step is not specified, then the default value is 1

So i[::] prints the entire string. In fact, in most cases the step is not specified. So i[:] returns the entire string.

>>> i = "Hello World"
>>> i[::]
'Hello World'
>>> i[:]
'Hello World'
>>>

Slice notation can also take negative values.
If the start value is negative, then the last start characters are returned.
If the end value is negative, then the last end characters are not returned.

So if both start and end values are negative, then the absolute value of start must be greater than the absolute value of end. Else a null string will be returned.

>>> i = "Hello World"
>>> i[-5:] #Start is -ve. So last 5 characters
'World'
>>> i[:-5] #End is -ve. So everything except last 5 characters
'Hello '
>>> i[-8:-3] #Start is -8. =>"lo World". In this don't include last 3 characters => "lo Wo"
'lo Wo'
>>>

The real fun is when even step is negative.
If the start is greater than the end, then the step must be -ve, which makes the string to be returned as reverse.

So consider this example.
>>> i = "Hello World"
>>> i[8:4:-1]
'roW '
>>>

In the above example, i[8:4] part refers to i[8] and i[4] positions and since the step is negative, now it returns characters at i[8], i[7], i[6], i[5]. Note that even here i[4] is not returned.

Finally, if step is something other than 1, then every stepth character is returned. For example
>>> i = "Hello World"
>>> i[::2]
'HloWrd'
>>> i[::-2]
'drWolH'
>>>

Any idea why i wrote this post.

Saw this small snippet for string reverse in python

>>> a = "Hello World"
>>> print a[::-1]
dlroW olleH
>>>

Sweet and cute na. ;-)

To know more about slice notation you refer to the python python doc.

Potato Guy ...

2007-09-09T03:38:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure why people celebrate shutdown day and all. The whole idea looked stupid. :P But it was not so.

Our college network was shutdown yesterday. No Gmail. No Orkut. No Spider. No Delta. Nothing :P
All i had was 2 or 3 computers with Linux and Windows :). Many many thanks to all the Gnome and KDE games, the day wasn't that boring. In fact, i don't mind having shutdown day once in a week :) :) :)

The good thing about shutdown day is that even if you want to work, you can't. :-). So you don't feel bad or guilty about not working for one whole day. :-) :-) :-)

Some of the nice games which are worth playing are
1. Attax
2. KAtomic (Even those who don't like chemistry might end up playing this for hours :) )
3. Kolf
4. Potato Guy
5. Iagno

Firefox 3 is amazing :)

2007-08-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

Working on any product which is not yet released and developed by hackers all over the world ;) gives you sweet surprises every now and then ;).

I have already mentioned how the form elements are made better in FF3.0 in http://sp2hari.blogspot.com/2007/06/firefox-3-ui-rocks.html

The next surprise is Bookmarks ,FTP browsing and Downloads window :-) :).

Check out the screenshot for yourself

The favicon for the ftp is cute :-).

Next one is the way bookmarks are added. Just like starring a mail in Gmail.
Check this screenshot. You can see a star there right in the Location bar right?

Click that once and the link is bookmarked :).

Next time you click it, you get bookmark options :)

Finally, the downloads window is more colorful now, with some new images :)

The search in the downloads is a cool feature :)

Hmmm, these are some of the features which i could notice while testing firefox. Not sure how much more is there :-). Really firefox 3 is going to rock :)

Recording your screen in solaris :)

2007-08-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

Recording your screen in Solaris works right out of the box. All you need to install is vncserver and vnc2swf.

A simple HOW TO about recording your screen in Solaris. :)

First you need to install Vncserver. Solaris by default doesn't come with a VNC. The easiest way to install VNC is through pkg-get

root@home# pkg-get -i vncserver

Before running that command, configure your pkg-get to get the packages from blastwave.org. Check http://www.blastwave.org/howto.html to get more details about setting up the repo.

That should install vncserver. :)

Next step it to install vnc2swf.
Download the C version of vnc2swf from http://www.unixuser.org/%7Eeuske/vnc2swf/index.html.
Extract the tar ball

hari@home:~$cd vnc2swf
hari@home:~$./configure
hari@home:~$make
root@home#make install

The commands mentioned above will install vnc2swf . :)

All you need to do to use vnc2swf is to start a vncserver. vnc2swf just needs the output file name to be passed as command line argument when started. Pressing F8 gives the options to start, stop, pause and clear the reocrding.

Some of the issues i faced are :)

1. When the same user tries to start a gnome-session in the vnc, an error message saying gnome-session is already running is given. So the best bet is to create a new user and start the vncserver of that user.

2. The icons are not displayed properly if you login into the new user's account using GNOME. Use Common Desktop Environment (CDE) to login and start a vncserver.

3. By default, the new user won't have a .vnc folder. So start a vnc and kill that. Now you will have .vnc folder with a xstartup file. Modify the file so that gnome-session runs in the vnc instead of the default twm. The xstartup file should look like

#!/bin/sh

/usr/openwin/bin/xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
/usr/openwin/bin/xsetroot -solid grey
/usr/openwin/bin/xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
#/usr/openwin/bin/twm &
gnome-session &

And yeah, what i recorded can be viewed at http://download.freedesktop.org/ldtp/movies/screen2.html. Nice right ;-)

My Tinderbox is working...

2007-08-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Yes, you heard it right. My tinderbox is working. Even now i don't know why i was trying to setup a tinderbox after both Emily and Nags asked me to concentrate on Firefox automation. I felt it was almost done and just few more steps, i will be able to set it up. And that's what finally happened :)

So in this post, i am going to mention about all issues i faced in setting up a tinderbox and steps to fix them.

Note :: If you are ever setting up a tinderbox, be prepared to see huge log files. Like once my compilation ran for few hours and produced a log file of size 15MB. And if you are stuck up, DON'T send the entire file. A tail of that file should do. In fact, you should be in a position to find out from while line the exact error starts.

Yeah before you start reading this
http://sp2hari.blogspot.com/2007/06/conquered-solaris.html and
http://sp2hari.blogspot.com/2007/06/tinderbox.html has instructions about how to setup Tinderbox in Solaris environment.

Ok the first error i got was

Building deps for jsinterp.c
cc -o jsinterp.o -c -DOSTYPE=\"SunOS5\" -DOSARCH=SunOS -DEXPORT_JS_API -DJS_USE_SAFE_ARENA -I../../dist/include -I../../dist/include/js -I../../dist/include/nspr -DMOZ_PNG_READ -DMOZ_PNG_WRITE -I../../dist/sdk/include -I. -KPIC -xlibmil -xstrconst -xbuiltin=%all -mt -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -xO4 -DMOZILLA_VERSION=\"1.9a7pre\" -DMOZILLA_VERSION_U=1.9a7pre -DSOLARIS=1 -DNSCAP_DISABLE_DEBUG_PTR_TYPES=1 -DD_INO=d_ino -DSTDC_HEADERS=1 -DHAVE_ST_BLKSIZE=1 -DHAVE_SIGINFO_T=1 -DHAVE_INT16_T=1 -DHAVE_INT32_T=1 -DHAVE_INT64_T=1 -DHAVE_UINT=1 -DHAVE_UINT_T=1 -DHAVE_UINT16_T=1 -DHAVE_DIRENT_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_BYTEORDER_H=1 -DHAVE_GETOPT_H=1 -DHAVE_MEMORY_H=1 -DHAVE_UNISTD_H=1 -DHAVE_NL_TYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_MALLOC_H=1 -DHAVE_X11_XKBLIB_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_STATVFS_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_STATFS_H=1 -DHAVE_LIBM=1 -DHAVE_LIBDL=1 -DHAVE_LIBSOCKET=1 -DFUNCPROTO=15 -DHAVE_XSHM=1 -D_REENTRANT=1 -DHAVE_RANDOM=1 -DHAVE_STRERROR=1 -DHAVE_LCHOWN=1 -DHAVE_FCHMOD=1 -DHAVE_SNPRINTF=1 -DHAVE_MEMMOVE=1 -DHAVE_RINT=1 -DHAVE_STAT64=1 -DHAVE_LSTAT64=1 -DHAVE_FLOCKFILE=1 -DHAVE_LOCALTIME_R=1 -DHAVE_STRTOK_R=1 -DHAVE_LANGINFO_CODESET=1 -DVA_COPY=va_copy -DHAVE_VA_COPY=1 -DHAVE_I18N_LC_MESSAGES=1 -DMOZ_EMBEDDING_LEVEL_DEFAULT=1 -DMOZ_EMBEDDING_LEVEL_BASIC=1 -DMOZ_EMBEDDING_LEVEL_MINIMAL=1 -DMOZ_PHOENIX=1 -DMOZ_BUILD_APP=browser -DMOZ_XUL_APP=1 -DMOZ_DEFAULT_TOOLKIT=\"cairo-gtk2\" -DMOZ_WIDGET_GTK2=1 -DMOZ_ENABLE_XREMOTE=1 -DMOZ_THEBES=1 -DMOZ_CAIRO_GFX=1 -DMOZ_X11=1 -DMOZ_DISTRIBUTION_ID=\"org.mozilla\" -DMOZ_ENABLE_XFT=1 -DMOZ_ENABLE_PANGO=1 -DMOZ_ENABLE_COREXFONTS=1 -DMOZ_ENABLE_GNOMEUI=1 -DMOZ_EXTRA_X11CONVERTERS=1 -DOJI=1 -DIBMBIDI=1 -DMOZ_VIEW_SOURCE=1 -DACCESSIBILITY=1 -DMOZ_XPINSTALL=1 -DMOZ_JSLOADER=1 -DNS_PRINTING=1 -DNS_PRINT_PREVIEW=1 -DMOZ_NO_XPCOM_OBSOLETE=1 -DMOZ_XTF=1 -DMOZ_MATHML=1 -DMOZ_ENABLE_CANVAS=1 -DMOZ_SVG=1 -DMOZ_SVG_FOREIGNOBJECT=1 -DMOZ_UPDATE_CHANNEL=default -DMOZ_PLACES=1 -DMOZ_PLACES_BOOKMARKS=1 -DMOZ_FEEDS=1 -DMOZ_STORAGE=1 -DMOZ_SAFE_BROWSING=1 -DMOZ_URL_CLASSIFIER=1 -DMOZ_LOGGING=1 -DMOZ_USER_DIR=\".mozilla\" -DMOZ_ENABLE_LIBXUL=1 -DHAVE_STDINT_H=1 -DHAVE_INTTYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_INT_TYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_UINT64_T=1 -DMOZ_XUL=1 -DMOZ_PROFILELOCKING=1 -DMOZ_RDF=1 -DMOZ_MORKREADER=1 -DMOZ_DLL_SUFFIX=\".so\" -DXP_UNIX=1 -DUNIX_ASYNC_DNS=1 -DJS_THREADSAFE=1 -DMOZ_ACCESSIBILITY_ATK=1 -DATK_MAJOR_VERSION=1 -DATK_MINOR_VERSION=12 -DATK_REV_VERSION=3 -DMOZILLA_LOCALE_VERSION=\"1.9a1\" -DMOZILLA_REGION_VERSION=\"1.9a1\" -DMOZILLA_SKIN_VERSION=\"1.8\" -D_MOZILLA_CONFIG_H_ -DMOZILLA_CLIENT jsinterp.c
ube: error: Assert has been violated at '/set/venus/builds.intel-S2/nightly.Thu/intel-S2/lang/ube/graphs/src/scregion.c 305'.
cc: ube failed for jsinterp.c
gmake[4]: *** [jsinterp.o] Error 2

Dave from Sun china asked me use a patch for Sun Studio 11 Compiler C. I don't have the link to the patch now but the patch id is 121016-05. I remember getting it from the sun website. So searching there should give you the link. The above patch was dependent on patch 120759-06. So installed patch 120759-06 first and then install the patch 121016-05.

Steps to add a patch in Solaris are given below. The commands are for patch 121016-05. Change the id according to the patch you are installing.

1. Download 121016-05.zip and extract the contents in your current directory
2. Login as root
3. root@home# patchadd 121016-05
Note :: If the above command doesn't work, then try
root@home# patchadd . 121016-05

The above steps should install the patch in your system. To check whether the patch is installed properly, check the folder /var/sadm/patch/. You should see seperate directories for each patch you have installed. In my system here, the /var/sdm/patch is like

# cd /var/sadm/patch/
# ls
120759-06  121016-05

That fixed the above problem :).

The next error i got was

jsinterp.c
ir2hf: error: Ran out of memory
cc: ir2hf failed for jsinterp.c

Now this is a strange problem and which can be fixed without much issue. You need more RAM. My system had 768MB (512+256) RAM, but you need 1GB RAM to fix this issue. So next day i got 1GB RAM and never got this error back.

After that, i got many compilation errors. This happened because of some issue in the mozilla code. This generally never happens. I got errors in lines having inline. Anyway now i am not getting the error anymore. So i think the mozilla code is fixed now. :)

Finally i got an error saying,

gmake[3]: Leaving directory `/export/home/hari/tinderbox

/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla'
gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/export/home/hari/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/export/home/hari/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla'
firefox-bin built successfully.
firefox-bin built successfully.
firefox-bin binary exists, build successful.
Unable to find path to Talkback client. Proceeding as if Talkback was not installed.


Running regxpcom test ...
Timeout = 120 seconds.
Begin: Fri Aug 24 08:08:37 2007
cmd = /export/home/hari/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin/firefox-bin -register
End:   Fri Aug 24 08:08:38 2007
----------- Output from regxpcom -------------
----------- End Output from regxpcom ---------
regxpcom: test failed
No profile found, creating profile.
Begin: Fri Aug 24 08:08:38 2007
cmd = /export/home/hari/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin/firefox-bin -CreateProfile default
End:   Fri Aug 24 08:08:39 2007
----------- Output from Profile Creation -------------
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: No protocol specified


(firefox-bin:6432): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:
----------- End Output from Profile Creation ---------
ERROR: profile /export/home/hari/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/.mozilla/firefox/ does not exist
no pref file found

The solution for the above bug was to allow connections to X server. This is done by executing the following command before starting a tinderbox compilation. Remember the user who is running the tinderbox should execute the command.

hari@home:~$/usr/openwin/bin/xhost +
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host

Few other things to note while trying to compile firefox under tinderbox are
1. Never ever run two instances of tinderbox at the same time. Make sure the first one is killed before starting a new one.
2. Delete the SunOS_5.11_Depend folder when you are facing any compilation errors.
3. Use -XO3 for CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS
4. Make sure your mozconfig file has these lines
ac_add_options --disable-freetype2
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-tests

SOC ....

2007-08-22T05:53:00.000-07:00

Updates about SOC.
30 test scripts are working fine without any issue :). My target is to write 50 test cases and i will try to reach that this weekend :) :).

The scripts can be downloaded from here.

Things to be modified when you run your script in your environment are.
1. In the file firefox.xml, change the value of <filepath> for so that it points the file called index.html in the folder called data in your scripts directory.

Let me give a detailed HOW TO for running these scripts.

1. First, LDTP must be installed in your system.
The CVS page in ldtp.freedesktop.org provides the instructions for getting the LDTP code through CVS.

Note : I had a small issue compiling the code which i got from CVS.
While using ./configure it gave me an error saying

./configure: line 3998: syntax error near unexpected token `LIBXML2,'
./configure: line 3998: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(LIBXML2, libxml-2.0 >= 2.0.0)'

The above error is because autoconf and pkg-conf are installed at two different locations. For more details check http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xserver/2003-December/000573.html

So i used this package which compiled without any issue :).
For more details on how to install, check here.

2. Enable Accessibility from gnome-control-center

3. Download and start Firefox3.0a*pre from here ( Any FF3.0 alpha release should work, though with FF3.0a8pre, it is tested throughly.
Note :: When you start firefox, make sure you don't have any other instance of firefox running.

4.Run the command

hari@home:~/soc/tinderbox$ ldtprunner run.xml

If you have set LDTP_DEBUG=1 in your shell, then it will show lots of output. Don't get scared. It only means things are working fine :)
Note :: You can also work with LDTP_DEBUG unset, if you want a "clean" output.

Once that command is executed, then it will run the test cases provided in the run.xml.

A file called log.xml gives the details about the test cases run. The last three lines in the log file should be like this if the test case ran properly for all the 30 test cases provided.

<groupsstatus total="30" pass="30" fail="0"/>
</group>
</ldtp>

The screen record video on Solaris 11 is given can be viewed from here.
http://download.freedesktop.org/ldtp/movies/screen2.html

The current status of the test cases can be viewed from here.
http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/wiki/Firefox_Test_Cases

Solaris Firefox Automation :)

2007-08-17T01:31:00.000-07:00

Check out this for the video :). Nice right ;)

Life is beautiful :)

2007-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not updating the blog for a long time :(. Even now i am not going to write much. Just a list of arbit words which comes to my mind :-).

Helloooooooo
Delta Inductions
Spider Inductions
Idiot
Brave
Olarify
Promise
Psycho
***aloooooooooooooooo
Fli.......
mummyyyyyy
hmmmmmmmm

If you have no clue what these mean, then just think that i was not sane while i was typing this. ;)
"Don't Panic". I am still sane. ;-)

file-roller ...

2007-07-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

When i saw the mail from nags saying
" Can somebody evaluate it and send me back the results. It was done by Yazhini, long time back, but I could not check them."

even i didn't think i will write the test cases for file-roller that night. I just wanted to see the code and maybe make a comment. After seeing the code, i felt really sorry for file-roller :P . Yeah now it looks crazy, but not at that time. When evolution, gedit and other applications have new new scripts, why should file-roller have the old test scripts. :-)

So wrote the test cases for file-roller according to the new file-roller and new LDTP.

I will write about what all changes should be made while changing the scripts, so that it will be useful for someone who might change the code for other applications like gcalctool, bugbuddy, gnome-font, gnome-search-tool, gdf etc.

The files can be downloaded from here. Just take care that you don't have a file called ldtptestarchive.tar.gz in your home folder. Apart from that, you need to change the run.xml . I tried the scripts in solaris but setcontext didn't work properly there :(. Have to check that soon.

1. Names of objects in applications.
This has changed a lot, especially in the frame names. In the old scripts for file roller, it will be like
selectmenuitem ('ArchiveManager','mnuHelp;mnuAbout')
But according to the new LDTP, it is better to have
selectmenuitem ('frmArchiveManager','mnuHelp;mnuAbout')

Note the way the window name is mentioned in the new version. If has the prefix frm in that. The older one might still work but it is better to change soon. The prefix for each and every object can be seen in a file called remap.c in src folder. The function get_object_info (Accessible *accessible) in that file is the one which can give information about the prefix for each object type.

Apart from this, a ldtp function called getobjectlist () is also useful. Another utility called appmap is also useful in this case, but it is better not to use it, since the appmap is obsolete and latest changes are not incorporated into that. I think getobjectlist is the best solution. A tool called at-poke is also very useful to find the objects and object types inside an application.

2. Runner XML.

In the old scripts a python file used to call each and every other test case files using exec(). In many cases this main python file will be the name of the application. For example, check the file-roller.py

#To create a new archive
log ('Create New Archive', 'teststart')
execfile ('create-archive.py')
log ('Create New Archive', 'testend')

time.sleep(2)
#To open an existing archive and extracing them.
log ('Open Extract Archive ', 'teststart')
execfile ('open-extract.py')
log ('Open Extract Archive', 'testend')

So this way many scripts are tested from the a single python file. In the new test files, the concept of ldtprunner and runner xml is introduced. The links mentioned there are the best place to learn about runner XML. Just for the sake of completion let me add a sample runner xml for the above code here

<ldtp>
<logfileoverwrite>1</logfileoverwrite>
<logfile>log.xml</logfile>
<group>
<script>
<name>create-archive.py</name>
<data>fileroller.xml</data>
</script>
<script>
<name>open-extract.py</name>
<data>fileroller.xml</data>
</script>
</group>
</ldtp>

Scripts can be easily added, removed and grouped using the runner.xml .

3. waittillguiexist() and waittillguinotexist().

The two functions are really useful if you want your code till an object appears or disappears. The docs for these two functions explains the usage clearly. The old test code will have an approximate time.sleep() in their code. A better and proper solution is to incorporate waittillguiexist() and waittillguinotexist() and remove the unwanted time.sleep()

4. LDTPExecutionError :

The old code just has an except block which can catch any exception that occurs. It is better to handle the LDTPExecutionError separately and other errors in a different manner. A typical except block in the new script will be like

except LdtpExecutionError, msg:
  msg = 'open-extract test case failed'
  log (msg, 'error')
  raise LdtpExecutionError (msg)

5. Data XML.

One of the most important thing in LDTP, which adds great flexibility to the test cases. The filenames and other variables need not be hard coded. A single XML (generally called the data XML) can have all the details like the filenames, paths used in a test case and these value can be extracted from the XML file. Thus even the arguments passed to the test cases can be changed using a data XML.

6. Appmap file.

Since now in LDTP , the remapping of the objects in application is done automatically, there is no need to use initappmap() or remap() anymore. So there is no need to have a default map file for each application.
Therefore you can remove the following piece of code if you find it in your test case.

if len (sys.argv) == 1:
  if os.access ('./file-roller.map', os.F_OK | os.R_OK) == 0:
    print 'Appmap path missing'
    sys.exit(0);
  else:
    appmap_path = '.'
else:
  appmap_path = sys.argv[1]
initappmap (appmap_path + '/file-roller.map')

Tinderbox ....

2007-06-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

You never know when things will work and but if you believe that they will work ,they will. Ha, finally my own quote :P .

The Solaris download which i asked my friend to do failed :-( . Crap . I waited for that for more than 2 days and finally it failed. Now i can't to afford to wait more. I have to proceed with Tinderbox, that too with real pace. With Emily's trip to GUADEC and college reopening soon, i really have to do some magic.

Emily wanted me to update from Solaris Nevada snv_55 to Solaris Nevada snv_64. Even i wanted to see what's new in next version but looks like fate was against me.

As such i had to reinstall my Solaris Nevada snv_55 because while installing i made a stupid mistake of selecting the default options. If you are ever planning to install Solaris, never ever do that. Do choose the custom install . After some two steps it will ask you which hard disk to choose and after that you can edit the partition size. If you fail to do this, Solaris by default allocates only required space to / and rest all to /export/home. For me it ended up having only 400MB free space in / while my /export/home had around 15GB free space :-(. I never wanted to try gparted and other things. A reinstall will fix all the problems and it did.

So finally my partition size fixed and i am ready to start Tinderbox, when the postman gave a parcel for me. It was Solaris Nevada snv_64 from SUN, which i had registered few days back. I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. Felt like banging my head on the monitor. Murphy is GOD . :-)

So made another install of Solaris Nevada snv_64 and finally was ready to start with Tinderbox. Now i had Solaris Nevada snv_64 and all the softwares required. A new and nice thing about this version is a Shutdown button in the start menu. I really missed that in the previous version.

Another small thing about networking in Solaris. If you want your Solaris box to work with dns entries provided, then you should edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf as follows .

A line in /etc/nsswitch.conf will be as follows
hosts: files
Change that line to
hosts: files dns
This will make sure that first /etc/hosts and then dns entires are looked during networking.

The mail from Emily had the following details with this attachment.

Pre-steps
1. Install the latest Solaris Express(s11)
2. Install SunOne Studio compiler
3. Install JDS CBE

1. Set up environment var. (See myenv.sh attached)
2. Check out tinderbox client from community
$ . /path/to/myenv.sh
$ cvs co -d tinderbox mozilla/tools/tinderbox
3. Some modification to be done in the tinderbox source code
1) post-mozilla.pl
$ cd tinderbox; mv post-mozilla.pl post-mozilla.pl.bak
2) tinder-confg.pl (modify the one attached and use it)
$BuildAdministrator = "%YOUR_ALIAS"
$CVS = 'runsocks cvs -q': (only necessary if you use proxy to access Internet)
3) mozconfig (use the one attached)

4, this step is necessary only if you access Internet via proxy
1) build-seamonkey-util.pl(see the patch file build-seamonkey-util.pl.diff)
2) set http_proxy and ftp_proxy in $HOME/.wgetrc since tinderbox client uses wget to send test result to server

5, let's go -- start up your tinderbox client
$ . /path/to/myenv.sh
$ cd /path/to/tinderbox && ./build-firefox.pl --depend -t MozillaTest > ~/build-firefox.log 2>&1 &

So things were really were clear in her mail.
As of now, i was in pre-steps with just Solaris 11 and neither a Solaris studio nor a CBE . So i started with Solaris studio.

The nice thing about Solaris is that the installing a new software is a matter of few clicks. Almost all the installers in Solaris works right out of the box. So with a few seconds i had Solaris studio installed . I had to change my PATH variables like

export PATH=/opt/SUNWspro/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/SUNWspro/man:$MANPATH

So after this, you will have to run sunstudio, but i got the following error saying "java 2 SDK not found"
Omg, so now i had to install j2sdk. Downloaded the file "j2sdk-1_4_2_15-solaris-i586.sh" and when i ran that shell script, it created a folder in the current directory with quite a few files.

No i had no clue what to do that. Finally pinging a few of my friends, came to know that i had to set JAVA_HOME and change PATH variable again. I copied the folder that shell script created (j2sdk1.4.2_15) to /opt and had to modify the environment variables as shown below.

export JAVA_HOME=/opt/j2sdk1.4.2_15
export PATH=/opt/j2sdk1.4.2_15/bin:$PATH

Now if you run sunstudio, things work fine :-) . So now 2/3 pre-steps done. The only step remaining is Common Build Environment (CBE).

Now this again wasn't that difficult. The only catch is to give the proper C compiler. As such, i was supposed to use the Solaris compiler that comes along with Sun studio and not gcc. So first time i made a mistake of giving the path to gcc but next time did that fine.

Phew, all pre-steps done. Now to setup tinderbox. All the steps mentioned there worked right out of box. In step 2, it needed the environment variable $CVSROOT. As such $CVS_ROOT was configured in Emily's script. So just changed that to $CVSROOT and things worked fine :-)

Now finally i ran tinderbox and i am not quite sure about the ouput it produced . It surely generates a lot of output . I had no clue what the output meant and what i am supposed to do with that.

The output i got was like

Name "TreeSpecific::clobber_target" used only once: possible typo at ./build-firefox.pl line 33.
Name "TreeSpecific::build_target" used only once: possible typo at ./build-firefox.pl line 31.
Name "TreeSpecific::checkout_clobber_target" used only once: possible typo at ./build-firefox.pl line 13.
Name "TreeSpecific::extrafiles" used only once: possible typo at ./build-firefox.pl line 34.
Possible unintended interpolation of @gmail in string at (eval 318) line 23.
Starting dir is : /root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend

tinderbox: tree: MozillaTest
tinderbox: builddate: 1183129260
tinderbox: status: building
tinderbox: build: SunOS/i386 5.11 home Depend trunk
tinderbox: errorparser: unix
tinderbox: buildfamily: unix
tinderbox: version: $Revision: 1.1 $
tinderbox: END

Opening SunOS_5.11_Depend.log
current dir is -- home:/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend
Build Administrator is sp2hari.com
uname -a = SunOS home 5.11 snv_64a i86pc i386 i86pc
AB_CARDCATALOG=/usr/dt/share/answerbooks/C/ab_cardcatalog
ADDON_PATH=/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin:
COLORTERM=gnome-terminal
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
CVS_ROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-zAaS6sa66Z,guid=9c8119a191db027be12633004684e7cc
DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID=
DISPLAY=:0.0
DTAPPSEARCHPATH=/root/.dt/appmanager:/usr/dt/appconfig/appmanager/%L:/usr/dt/appconfig/appmanager/C
DTDATABASESEARCHPATH=/root/.dt/types,/usr/dt/appconfig/types/%L,/usr/dt/appconfig/types/C
DTDEVROOT=
DTHELPSEARCHPATH=/root/.dt/help/root-home-0/%H:/root/.dt/help/root-home-0/%H.sdl:/root/.dt/help/root-home-0/%H.hv:/root/.dt/help/%H:/root/.dt/help/%H.sdl:/root/.dt/help/%H.hv:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/%L/%H:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/%L/%H.sdl:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/%L/%H.hv:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/C/%H:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/C/%H.sdl:/usr/dt/appconfig/help/C/%H.hv
DTSCREENSAVERLIST=StartDtscreenSwarm StartDtscreenQix StartDtscreenFlame StartDtscreenHop StartDtscreenImage StartDtscreenLife StartDtscreenRotor StartDtscreenPyro StartDtscreenWorm StartDtscreenBlank
DTSOURCEPROFILE=true
DTUSERSESSION=root-home-0
DTXSERVERLOCATION=local
EDITOR=/usr/dt/bin/dtpad
GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=Default
GNOME_KEYRING_SOCKET=/var/tmp/keyring-a1aGab/socket
GTK_RC_FILES=/etc/gtk/gtkrc:/root/.gtkrc-1.2-gnome2
G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=yes
G_FILENAME_ENCODING=@locale,UTF-8
HELPPATH=/usr/openwin/lib/locale:/usr/openwin/lib/help
HOME=/root
JAVA_HOME=/opt/j2sdk1.4.2_15
LANG=C
LC_ALL=C
LC_CTYPE=C
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla/dist/bin:
LIBPATH=/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin:
LIBRARY_PATH=/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin:/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin/components:
LOGNAME=root
MAIL=/var/mail/root
MANPATH=/opt/SUNWspro/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/man:/usr/openwin/share/man
MOZCONFIG=/root/tinderbox/mozconfig
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin
MOZ_BYPASS_PROFILE_AT_STARTUP=1
MOZ_CO_DATE=06/29/2007 15:01 +0000
MOZ_PACKAGE_MSI=0
MOZ_SYMBOLS_TRANSFER_TYPE=scp
NLSPATH=/usr/dt/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N.cat:/usr/dt/lib/nls/msg/C/%N.cat
NO_EM_RESTART=1
OLDPWD=/root
OPENWINHOME=/usr/openwin
PATH=/opt/csw/bin:/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/opt/j2sdk1.4.2_15/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/dt/bin:/usr/openwin/bin:/usr/ucb:/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin
PWD=/root/tinderbox
SDT_NO_DTDBCACHE=1
SDT_NO_TOOLTALK=1
SESSIONTYPE=altDt
SESSION_MANAGER=local/home:/tmp/.ICE-unix/316,inet6/home:35165,inet/home:60138
SESSION_SVR=home
SHELL=/bin/bash
SHLVL=2
SSH_AGENT_PID=321
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-XXXAaGNa/agent.316
START_SPECKEYSD=no
TERM=xterm
TZ=Asia/Calcutta
USER=root
WINDOWID=41943093
XFILESEARCHPATH=/etc/dt/app-defaults/%L/%N:/etc/dt/app-defaults/C/%N:/usr/dt/app-defaults/%L/%N:/usr/dt/app-defaults/C/%N:/usr/openwin/lib/locale/%L/%T/%N%S:/usr/openwin/lib/%T/%N%S
XMBINDDIR=/usr/dt/lib/bindings
XMICONBMSEARCHPATH=/root/.dt/icons/%B%M.bm:/root/.dt/icons/%B%M.pm:/root/.dt/icons/%B:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B%M.bm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B%M.pm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B%M.bm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B%M.pm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B
XMICONSEARCHPATH=/root/.dt/icons/%B%M.pm:/root/.dt/icons/%B%M.bm:/root/.dt/icons/%B:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B%M.pm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B%M.bm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/%L/%B:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B%M.pm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B%M.bm:/usr/dt/appconfig/icons/C/%B
XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK=warn
_=./build-firefox.pl
dtstart_sessionlogfile=/dev/null
-->mozconfig<----------------------------------------
# Make flags
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_MODULE="mozilla/tools/codesighs"

# Configure flags
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-codesighs
ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-svg
ac_add_options --enable-canvas
ac_add_options --disable-freetype2
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-tests
-->end mozconfig<----------------------------------------
Didn't find /root/tinderbox/post-mozilla.pl
===============================
Compiler is -- CC
===============================
Begin: Fri Jun 29 20:32:28 2007
cvs -q checkout -P -D "06/29/2007 15:01 +0000" mozilla/client.mk mozilla/browser/config
End: Fri Jun 29 20:32:31 2007
/root/tinderbox/SunOS_5.11_Depend/mozilla//dist/bin/firefox-bin does not exist.
No binary detected; none deleted.
Begin: Fri Jun 29 20:32:31 2007
make -f client.mk checkout
make: Fatal error in reader: client.mk, line 126: Unexpected end of line seen
End: Fri Jun 29 20:32:32 2007
Error: CVS checkout failed.

The last line is scary :-(. Have to ask about that to emily or nags soon. And oh yeah, now that i have setup a Tinderbox in Solaris, i want to setup one in Linux. Just want to see whether it is so easy in Linux. ;). Now i got my confidence back :). I can now really finish lots in integration of Firefox Test cases into Tinderbox before i go back to college. And now i am no more scared of Solaris :-) .

Have to figure out something about the Tinderbox log.
Bye for now.

Projects ...

2007-06-21T16:03:00.000-07:00

"The word "project" originally meant "something that comes before anything else is done". When the word was initially adopted, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project was called an object. This use of "project" changed in the 1950s when several techniques for project management were introduced" -- Wikipedia

Now that holidays are about to get over, now i realized :P a few strange things about projects. Most of them are from personal experiences.

1. Whatever happens, you will finish the project on time. On time, meaning the last day when you have to submit your project (this includes quite a few a night outs before that day).

2. If you finish the project one/two weeks before time, either the project is very very simple for you or you didn't do your project at all :P

3. The first few weeks of the project will be really frustrating as you will be reading and chatting more than you code. Actually for the first few weeks, if your LOC is around 3-4 it is really great.

4. The last two-three days of your project, the LOC will shoot up to few hundreds :-)

5. Even if you chat 24*7 during the project time, somehow you will complete the project on time. You won't even realize how the code actually came there, but at the end of the day, it will be there.Though even if you work really hard 24*7, you will have the same output.

6. If you are geek and you are doing a project in Bangalore, don't try to go to a pub.

7. You will be really satisfied about completing the project on the last day.

8. You will feel bad that you could have done lots more in the project only on the last day. You will realize you have taken more time to understand the old code :P Only on that day you will start loving your project and you will feel like working more on that.

9. Only if you have project review, you will feel really really sleepy that you might end up not coming for the review.

10 . Your friend's project will always look easier.

11. The last three days, you will be cursing your project like anything. You will hate it to the core. But after that, you will think that your project is not so bad.

12. Only for the first one week, you will report for your project work on time. After that it will be late from 2-4 hours. Though this will be compensated by the night outs you do for your project.

Love story of a topper ...

2007-06-21T05:16:00.000-07:00

Well, i am kind of not sure whether i should write this or not. I have never written a blog describing about someone else ,his second girl friend and about their deep love and how she became my girl friend after that. But recently, the tech level of my blog has increased so much that my normal friends don't even bother to read my blog. Looks like it is too techie for them. So this might be something for them. And yes, if i get a chance to shoot a movie, i will do this one.

Ok , the hero (or rather the villain :P ) of the story of is Manas Garg. He is the topper of Computer Science Dept and now is happily working in M$.

First i should tell you that all i am going to tell you is true and only true. I have not modified anything to make the story interesting. It's just plain facts. I have proof for that which i have added to this post. To make the story more interesting first the proof and then the story.

The following is the chat log between me and manas garg. Not even a single word in that chat log is modified. To make things clear, i have removed what i spoke in between.

Manas: that would be soo cool
i was crazy about her
spent nights with her

Manas: took care of her more than myself then

me: lol :-)

Manas: i had to leave her gave her to others coz i had to go
i still love her

Manas: i always will

me: ha ha

Manas: one day we will unite again and the world will salute our love

So that's what he confessed to me today.

Since that girl might feel bad if i tell her name ( actually too many people in our college love her. :P In fact i am one in the list . ) . So let us name her X. Hmmm no why X ?? X is for unknown values. I know her and you know her too. So let us name her S.

Now our hero manas, met this girl in second year and he didn't like her much. She used to give boring work to our villain ( ???? ). So manas never liked her. In fact he hated her so much, that he never wanted seeing her again. But manas, when he first met that girl felt that he could change her and make her better. But this girl was so bad that manas had almost lost hopes :-(

// If you want you add a sad song here where just the hero sings something in sad tone all alone. Like

dil ke raste me aisi thokar maine khayi
tute khawab sare aisi mayusi hai chhayi
har khusi ko gaye,jindagi so gaye
tumko jo pyar kiya maine to saja me paye
tanhayee,tanhayee,tanhayee......
from Dil Chahta Hai

If you don't know Hindi, you can imagine this song

kaN paesum vaarthaigaL purivadhillai
kaathirundhaal peN kanivadhillai
oru mugam maRu mugam theriya
kaNNaadi idhayam illai, kadal kai koodi maRaivadhillai
from 7G Rainbow colony

Then suddenly S and manas met more often. Manas also got some people (including me) to help him. Soon he changed S. It was magic. This stupid girl who is not useful for anything suddenly became the hot topic in college.

// A duet song here will be fine. Don't worry we will make manas dance when i shoot this movie ;) . Songs like the following will be fine

jise dhundata hoon main har kahin
jo nahi mili mujhe thi kahin
mujhe jiske pyar par ho yakin
wo ladki hai kahan
jise sirf mujhse hi pyar ho
jo ye kehne ko bhi taiyaar ho
suno tumhi mere dildaar ho
wo ladki hai kahan
From Dil Chahta Hai

or

Sutrum vizhi sudare
Sutrum vizhi sudare
En lagam unnai sutruthe
Sattai payyil un panam
Thottu thottu urasa
En idhayam patri kolluthey
Un vizhiyil vizhunden
Vinveliyil paranthen
Kanvizhithu soppanam kanden
Unnale kanvizhithu soppanam kanden
From Ghajini

After she changed, manas loved her more and more. He forgot about his studies. He forgot about his room, friends and almost everything. All cared only about her and sometimes was ready to do anything for her.

But a sad thing happened. I was a good friend of both manas (thanks to Spider) and her. I knew manas was in love with her, but even i started liking her. So much that sometimes i was ready to give anything for her. :-). Now i don't know who loved her more since it is not possible to compare. Soon manas came to know that i had a crush over her. I though he will be angry with me :P but he didn't say anything.

Though me and manas were good friends, last semester we were really fighting for her. We gave her so much importance but we forgot about everything else.

And on Spider's Farewell day, just some few minutes before the end of the party, she proposed me :P . It was kind of strange, coz others started clapping and all when she did that. I was actually blushing. I knew that was going to happen but i never that it will happen during the farewell. And actually even manas was there when she proposed me. He was very sad that day. :P Anyway the party mood made him forget about that. :P

Now that manas is gone, she is all mine.Unfortunately, now more and more people are getting really really interested in her, though as of now, i think i am the only person mad about her.

Note ::
If you have found out who she is, just say that so. You need not tell her name. :P
Also there is another interesting story :P by suren . Check it here

I'm interested

2007-06-21T04:42:00.000-07:00

Do you know that when you use caps or large font while chatting or in mail, it implies that you are shouting.

I generally get irritated when people shout, but this one is an exception. I was really glad that he shouted. In fact, i was waiting for him to shout. Now that he is with us, nothing can stop us. :-)

Disclaimer :: Sorry. This blog post is only for me. If you don't get anything, just forget about this and move to the next post.
If you are still curious about this post, hack my gmail ;-)

Conquered solaris ....

2007-06-20T18:13:00.000-07:00

Got up at 4 PM :-). Yes 4 PM. Yesterday after finding out that my Ethernet card had some arbit problem, planned to buy a new one. But felt like checking my Ethernet card for the last time. Went to my friend's place and checked my Ethernet and it worked there :-(. I was both happy and sad. Happy because my Ethernet is working, no need to buy another one and sad because now i don't even know what is the problem with my computer. Anyway i got another Ethernet card from my friend's computer (of course after promising her a treat).

First checked the computer with her Ethernet card. Internet worked both in Solaris and Windows. WOW :) . Now again, i checked again with my Ethernet card and WOW WOW WOW, it connected to Internet from all three OS. Now what is happening here ??? Yesterday i spent more than 7 hours trying to make this card work and now this is working out of box within 5 mins. And as such i did the same thing what i did previous night. Looks like you can never try to reason out few things.

Anyway now i am in Solaris and it is cool. First had to install new softwares. Taggy gave me the this link. And this one was also very useful. So within a matter of 5 mins, i installed most of the softwares i might need.

As such i had three main things to do in Solaris according to the mail Emily Chen sent me. They are

1. Read about tinderbox setup from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tinderbox/ .

2. Sun Studio 11
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/products/previous/11/index.jsp
On Solaris, Sun Studio is used to build Firefox, not gcc, so have to install Sun Studio.

3. Set up CBE (Common Build Environment)
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/jds/contributing/building/

Now my goals were very clear. And internet from Solaris was working cool, just thought of downloading everything then, but Sun Studio was around 300 MB and already my internet bills have reached peak. So had to wait till 11 PM ( 11PM to 9 AM free internet :P) .

Started downloading at 11. 15 . OMG. It started at 7KBs and said it is gonna take 24 hrs :-(. Now i can't do anything to this. Have to sit and wait :P . When i am writing this blog (ie 8 AM), it says only 5 hrs left.

Still network configuration has few glitches. I have to enter the DNS entries every time i reboot the system. And even though i have configured it to activate on boot, the Ethernet card has to manually activated after every time. This is strange since, i have a file called hostname.rtls0 in / (which should activate the Ethernet card on boot )

Yesterday Solaris had me. It made me frust to the core. It made me raise doubts about whether i will be able to finish SOC on time. But today is my day. I conquered :P solaris. In fact now that Solaris phobia is slowly disappearing. Now it is time to say Hello World to Tinderbox :P.

networking not working :P...

2007-06-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

I have got a new phobia. Solaris phobia :P. lol.
Well how easy solaris can ruin one whole night. Though i shouldn't blame Solaris completely but at least it deserves something for troubling me with DNS thing sometime back .

Anyway here comes the story. After discussing with Casanova about tinderbox i realized that setting up tinderbox is an important issue. So i was all set to start with tinderbox setup. But looks like fate had other plans. Anyway after discussing with Casanova ( at around 10 pm ), soon started working into tinderbox.

But once i booted into Solaris and went to Google.com, it said "Could Not Connect". Since i have seen this error many a times already, i just went to the network manager and found all my previous entries missing there :P. Nothing unusual actually. So entered the values again and restarted networking. Now again the same old error. Since i have already configured DNS once and connected to internet from solaris, i thought the same settings will work this time also.

But noticed something strange. This time it won't even ping to my DNS or Gateway. Well this is certainly strange. I called taggy (solaris club head :P) and explained him the situation. He gave a few solutions and i tried some other things which i found in internet. The bad part about networking not working is that even to Google or download something, you need to reboot :-( "Life is too short for reboots" they used to say.

Anyway now the time was 12 . Shit. Two hours gone and still no progress. Had a idea of going back to Firefox test cases but NO. I have to work with Tinderbox and i will do it tonight. So read manuals from here and there about configuration and tried everything given there :(. No luck. Though internet seems to work from windows and Linux.

Now one unfortunate thing is i have two Ethernet cards ( Realtek and VIA). Solaris detects only Realtek , so i use that for Solaris while i use VIA for Linux and Windows. Just then it realized. Is the Realtek Ethernet card working ??? What if that has the problem ??

So one more reboot. Configured the Realtek card to connect to internet. Widows detected the card, LAN enabled but internet was not working. Same problem as i had in solaris. SHIT SHIT SHIT. So finally my Ethernet card has some problem :-(. The strange thing is, it detects my card and all, but just that it wont send/receive anything through the card. Strange problem, but why to me :-( :-(

After realizing the problem (well time is 3 am now), i thought of finding the driver for the VIA Ethernet card, and managed to download a driver. A reboot back to Solaris, i realized that i don't even have a gcc to compile the driver. Downloaded gcc and finally now it is 5 am :-(

I am NOT going to try installing the driver for VIA Ethernet card. I am getting frustrated , irritated and what not,when i see a reboot. A 60-75 reboots in a span of 7 hours is not something really exciting and motivating :(. So all i am gonna do is to check this Ethernet card in friends place and get a new one.

Finally when i wrote this blog it is 5 AM. From 10 PM to 5 AM, no progress at all. All i found out is my Ethernet card might not be working :( :( . Not even a single line of Code in 7 hrs of real hard working :-(, actually not even a single word of code :P .
A nightout is nothing new for me, but this time i really felt the pain of one whole night completely wasted :(.

Now all i hope is my Ethernet card should have a problem, so that i can get another one soon and start with my work. Only God can save me if it was not an Ethernet problem :P.

Firefox 3 UI rocks...

2007-06-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

Really , the user interface of Firefox 3 rocks. Text boxes and other form fields have a nice smooth corners and select menu item is similar to the one you find in gnome :) .

The old form elements are shown in this image.

Click image for a clear view

New here comes the new interface of the same webpage in Firefox 3 :-)

Click image for a clear view

Wow, looks like any web developer can make web pages which will look really cool in Firefox 3.

Finally 10....

2007-06-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Ok, i am certainly not talking anything about my GPA. After fighting (fighting is an understatement i suppose) with Firefox and LDTP for 3 hours (well this is actually few days), finally managed to get 10 test cases work properly.

At least these 10 test cases will work properly for integration with Tinderbox. Have to send these test cases to emily soon and get them integrated with tinderbox.

The output log is
<ldtp>
<group name="group1">
<script name="verifyaddressfield.py">
<test name="address field and go button">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifybackforward.py">
<test name="Back and Forward buttons">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifyhome.py">
<test name="verify home button">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifynewtab.py">
<test name="Open a new tab ">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifyyahoo.py">
<test name="topsite - yahoo">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifymsn.py">
<test name="topsite - msn test">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifyamazon.py">
<test name="topsite - amazon">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifyftp.py">
<test name="navigate ftp">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifysearch.py">
<test name="Open search by keyboard shortcuts">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<script name="verifyfindinpage.py">
<test name="Find in Page">
<pass>1</pass>
</test>
</script>
<timeinfo start="03:23:00 AM on 18-Jun-2007" elapsed="0:1:8"></timeinfo>
<groupsstatus total="10" pass="10" fail="0"></groupsstatus>
</group>
</ldtp>

Well looks like i have underestimated how bugs can trouble a poor coder like me :P.

Each test case has its unique problem :P.
The major problem is the Firefox crash :(. Though the test case work individually, Firefox crashes if all the test cases were run under a single runner xml :-(. I have downloaded Firefox firefox-3.0a6pre now ( was using firefox-3.0a5pre all these days). Hopefully Firefox 6 is stable against the test cases :-).

Anyway the 10 is not the final list. I am supposed to test 30 test cases properly for the Functionality subgroup of smoketests testgroup for Firefox 3.0. Not to mention about the lots and lots of test cases from other test groups.

Let me post the issues i am facing with the other test cases, so that it is easier for me to fix them later.

Before that, the 10 test cases which worked in my favour are :)

3954: Address Field and Go button
4032: Back and Forward buttons
4031: Home button
4086: Open a new tab
3955: Top Site - Yahoo
3956: Top Site - MSN
3957: Top Site - Amazon
3959: Navigate FTP
4245: Open search by keyboard shortcuts
3967: Find in Page

The test cases having issues are
1. 4137: Add an RSS feed/Livemark
This is the strangest test case i have ever found :(. This doesn't work for the first time. Next time without any modification, if i run the test case it works like properly. Third time it is not working and fourth time it again works properly . Well, that is more than enough for me, i either end up banging the computer monitor or beating myself that there is no 5 th time :-(. Should check this test case properly.

Looks like this is the only test case which troubles me as of now. Have the rest of the code ready but looks like new problems are starting soon. For the same runner xml, same files , same Firefox, test case 2 shows come error. Have to check that soon. Got firefox-3.0a6pre few mins back. Have to run the test cases with that.

And yes, tried something with the list not getting selected problem. Even nags confirmed this problem some time back and finally able to find out the exact line where the error occurs .

if (AccessibleSelection_selectChild (selection, text_index)) { }
That is line 110 from list.c. The if statement is returning false ending up in "LDTP_ERROR_UNABLE_TO_SELECT_CHILD" . Hoping to fix this soon. Will be really happy if i fix this one as i will be able to add something to the ldtp source code. Been a long time since my name appeared in the Changelog ;-) ;-)

Only thing i am happy about is both Ubuntu Linux and Solaris responds similarly for the test cases. So no separate Firefox issues and Solaris issues as of now. Let us see how this proceeds.

Another small issue.
Whenever i get any error in any of the test cases, i get the following error
<script name="verifyamazon.py">
<test name="topsite - amazon">
<ERROR>Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/ldtprunner", line 407, in executescript
execfile (scriptname, scriptglobal)
File "verifyamazon.py", line 52, in <module>
log (msg, 'error')
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldtp.py", line 2500, in log
logger.error (message)
File "logging/__init__.py", line 1015, in error
File "logging/__init__.py", line 1100, in _log
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldtp.py", line 2421, in makeRecord
return LdtpLogRecord (name, level, fn, lno, msg, args, exc_info)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ldtp.py", line 2394, in __init__
msg = '<' + logging.getLevelName (level) +'>' + saxutils.escape (msg) + '</' + logging.getLevelName (level) + '>'
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/_xmlplus/sax/saxutils.py", line 31, in escape
data = data.replace("&", "&")
AttributeError: 'LdtpExecutionError' object has no attribute 'replace'
</ERROR>
</script>

I am giving the error message properly in the try block, but not in the except block. When i give the error in the except block then i get the error message in the log file properly. But i am supposed to pass the error message from the try block to the except block. Should learn a bit of python exceptions to know more about this

Anyway the files for the test cases which are working can be obtained from here

Note :: Have added many more test cases to the above file now, but didn't like to change the title.

Meet GNU/Linux 07

2007-06-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

After 2 successful editions of Meet GNU/Linux, which is conducted by
GLUG-T every year for beginners, the third edition of MGL is starting
on 27th July, at NITT.

A few updates about MGL'07 :

1. Guys are planning to release a beginner handbook, which would be
given out to them. The content is being edited in a wiki :
http://glugt-mgl.pbwiki.com/ Go ahead and edit when you are free.

2. This is GNU/Linux for dummies. So, if you have any of your
friend/relative interested in learning about it(in trichy), you can
ask them to contact suren who is co-ordinating
the event.

3. The co-ords are planning to release podcasts of the events, which
will be helpful.

Ideas, suggestion about how to organise the classes are welcome!

Comments :)

2007-06-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

How many comments have you seen for a single blog ?

Well, when i asked taggy (the internet guru of NITT) he replied around 10-20. Suren has seen around 50 for a he-she blog.

But this one is amazing. A single blog (in fact a single line blog) getting around 268 comments (and still counting).

Reminds me that "What you say is more important than how much you say".

Topping google search

2007-06-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

I attended the podworks.in last weekend. For those who don't know what podworks is , PodWorks.in is a 2-day workshop styled unconference dedicated to the sharing of knowledge around audio and video podcasting. It's a successor to the extremely successful BlogCamp that was held last year.

Though i have lots and lots to say about the event, one strange and nice thing is that if you google for podworks.in my blog tops the list :-) :-)

Internet from solaris ...

2007-06-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

DNS makes our life real easy. Without that, i don't think people will say check out http://google.com but check out http://64.233.187.99. I realized how important DNS is to us and without DNS how one can go mad.

I installed Solaris (Neveda ) two weeks back and it was good. :-) . Though i was a bit scared in the initial stages, i didn't find much difference between Linux and Solaris as far as LDTP is concerned. Anyway i had Emily Chen from Sun China (my Soc Mentor ) to help me with the issues and many thanks to her, she was always willing to help me in any issue. In fact almost all her mails had something saying
" I am on Gtalk almost every workday, feel free to ping me when you have problems. " or something similar to that :-) :-)

But there was one issue which really troubled me in Solaris and that was DNS wasn't working. Instead of typing http://www.google.com, i had to type http://64.233.187.99/ :(

I had a huge list of servers which i might use and their ip's . (Many thanks to dnsstuff.com). I was getting more and more frust typing IP's instead of url's and browsing only the cached page instead of the actual pages. I tried many a things and even Emily also helped me with few tips and tricks. But things never worked. I was really getting irritated as this was delaying my progress in SOC.

Determined to solve the issue somehow, i started trying all the options in the Network Settings. One strange thing i noted is that, whenever i add a DNS server and close it, next time i open Network Settings, the entries won't be there. Simply disappeared from there :-(.

I noticed an option called Location in the Network Settings. It was empty and i wasn't sure whether i have seen anything like this in Linux.

Not sure of what to do with that Location, i gave "home" there. I wasn't sure whether this will solve my problem, but no harm in trying. But once i restarted network, www.google.com worked.
YES. IT WORKED. IT WORKED .IT WORKED. IT WORKED .IT WORKED. IT WORKED

I am pretty sure anyone who had seen me at that time would have thought that i am mad. Even i wont blame them . I accept, suddenly jumping out of the chair and shouting "IT WORKED" at 3 in the morning is quite odd. :P

Anyways, now that things have started working, will be saying my "Hello World" to tinderbox soon :-)

Running a test case ...

2007-06-10T15:28:00.000-07:00

Having written the test scripts for Firefox, this time going to tell how to test Firefox with these scripts. The test scripts can be found here

There is a wiki page in LDTP website which gives quick tips about how to run LDTP test cases.

First quick steps to get LDTP installed . If you have LDTP already installed, then you can skip this.

Installation
Get the source/binary from the downloads section of LDTP web page. Any other dependencies which LDTP might need while installation is libxml2 and libat-spi. (I generally install the debug and dev packages of the above two). After this installation of LDTP shouldn't have any issues :-)

Runner XML
Runner XML files makes testing many test cases one after another in a batch mode easy. A sample runner XML can be found here. A very simple runner XML needed to run a single test case will be like

<ldtp>
<logfileoverwrite>1</logfileoverwrite>
<logfile>log.xml</logfile>
<group>
<script>
<name>verifyaddress-autocomplete.py</name>
<data>firefox.xml</data>
</script>
</group>
</ldtp>

The tags are self explanatory.
You can have any number of script blocks and thereby test any number of test cases one after another. The data tag is not necessary but it is better to have a separate data file.

Test
Well, that's all you have to do. Start Firefox and then

hari@home:~$ ldtprunner run.xml

The above command starts testing the application with the test case provided in the run.xml .

Note :: It is also possible to test simply by giving

hari@home:~$ python verifyaddress-autocomplete.py

But i prefer doing it using runner XML, as that has more features.

There is a complete tutorial for LDTP here. This explains everything needed to write a test script clearly and is worth reading :)

SOC report ...

2007-06-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

My SoC is going fine and great. Hoping to finish this well ahead of time:) This is a blog + report :)

So i have started with Automation of Firefox.
For the current status of all the test cases i have mentioned here, check this link

The categories under which i have written test cases till now are
1. Firefox 3.0 :: SmokeTests :: Functionality
Most of the test cases in this category are done. certain test cases which are yet to be done are marked as TODO in the status page.

2. Firefox 2.0 :: Basic Functional Tests :: Help
This is a really small category, with just two cases. Both of them working fine, but have to check the closewindow() function which didn't close the help window.

3. Firefox 2.0 :: Basic Functional Tests :: Options (Preferences)
Have done almost all the test cases. There is again a small issue in this. The objects shown in the preferences window are list-items whose parent is a list. We tried to copy the code for combobox for list but it didn't work. Have to add functions specific for list in list.c

4. Firefox 2.0 :: Basic Functional Tests :: Printing
This had bug in the print preview option. The CPU just hangs and processor takes 100% load . This bug is already reported in bugzilla.mozilla.org .

5. Firefox 2.0 :: Basic Functional Tests :: Location bar
Works perfectly. Had to use LTFX functions activatewin and typekey .

6. Firefox 2.0 :: Basic Functional Tests :: Popup and Annoyance Blocking
Most of the test cases have been automated. Testing Java and Javascript is a small issue in this.

Some of the important categories which i have started tesing and is in near completion are
1. Bookmarks
2. MenuBar
3. RSS
4. Downloading
5. Addons Manager

Finally, the code for the above tests can be found here.
Finally one small and interesting thing ;-). The icon which shows that the loading of a page ( the circular thing which rotates while a page is loading) is a push button :-) . Was really surprised when i noticed it :P. No clue why is it that way ;)

I got my copy :-)

2007-06-06T08:53:00.000-07:00

This is my first post related to my SoC.
So let me just introduce things.
I am doing Google Summer Of Code under Mozilla Foundation . My mentors are Nagappan from Novell, Bangalore and Emily Chen from Sun, China.

When i started working for my SoC, i got a mail from Google SoC team saying
"Hello everyone,

In keeping with last year's tradition, we will be sending a surprise
to all students. Last year we sent a cool Google notebook (complete
with paper legacy interface), and this year we have something even
cooler in the works.

If you really feel you must, go ahead and start a barrage of "I wonder
what it could be" posts to the list. But please don't. You'll have
the ultra-cool surprise in hand soon.

One final reminder, when you get your surprise, please don't tell the
rest of the world until June 4, 2007. We'd like to keep it a surprise
for as many folks as possible.

After that, by all means blog, post, etc. :)

Cheers,
LH "

The moment someone tells you that you are going to get a surprise, you start thinking only about it and nothing else. :-) . And of course i am no exception. All i knew was it is a book signed by its author. There is long discussion in the Google soc group guessing whether it can be Linus or someone else.

Finally i got the book few days back. It is Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by karl fogel.

Wow :) i never thought just a book will make me so happy. This is the first book i have ever got which is signed by its author :) and i felt so happy that i can't describe it here :-)

I really can't wait to get back to college so that i can scan the first page ;-) and put it up here. Man, just a simple signature with a text saying "Happy Hacking" but whenever i see it ,makes me feel happy and proud :-).

And yes, the best part was that the author was kind enough to post a blog about it. So if you don't believe what i am telling you, check out his blog about the book here.

The review about the book in one line. "The more i read it, the more i love it." There are many places where the author has taken care to give appropriate examples, funny incidents, etc.

Finally
Thanks a ton for Google for such a nice idea. :-)

Oath for Software Engineers

2007-06-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Never write a line of code that someone else can understand.

Make the simplest line of code appear complex. Use long counter intuitive names. Don't ever code "a=b", rather do something like:

AlphaNodeSemaphore=*(int)(&(unsigned long)(BetaFrameNodeFarm));

Type fast, think slow.

Never use direct references to anything ever. Bury everything in macros. Bury the macros in include files. Reference those include files indirectly from other include files. Use macros to reference those include files.

Never include a comment that will help someone else understand your code. If they understand it, they don't need you.

Never generate new sources. Always ifdef the old ones. Every binary in the world should be generated from the same sources.

Never archive all the sources necessary to build a binary. Always hide on your own disk. If they can build your binary, they don't need you.

Never code a function to return a value. All functions must return a pointer to a structure which contains a pointer to a value.

Never discuss things in concrete terms. Always speak in abstract. If they can understand you, they don't need you.

Never complete a project on time. If you do, they will think it was easy and anyone can do it and they don't need you.

When someone stops by your office to ask a question, talk forever but don't answer the question. If they get their questions answered they don't need you.

Load all sentences either written or spoken with alphabet soup. When someone asks you out to lunch, reply:

"I can't because I've almost got my RISC-based OSI/TCP/IP client connected by BIBUS VMS VAX using SMTP over TCP sending SNMP inquiry results to be encapsulated in UDP packets for transmission to a SUN 4/280 NFS 4.3 BSD with release 3.6 of RPC/XDR supporting our ONC effort working."

Never clean your office. Absolutely never throw away an old listing.

Never say hello to someone in hallway. Absolutely never address someone by name. If you must address someone by name, mumble or use the wrong name. Always maintain the mystique of being spaced out from concentrating on complex logic.

Never wear a shirt that matches your pants. Wear a wrinkled shirt whenever possible. Your shirt must never be tucked in completely. Button the top button without wearing a tie. This will maximize your mystique.

Hols are bad for health

2007-06-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

Well, i never thought i will ever say this but really
"Hols @home sucks".
This is the first time i am actually staying at home after joining college (was lucky enough to keep myself busy with something or other during hols :-) ) and i never realized it will be so boring :(.

Not that i don't like my home but i simply miss college.
Even though i chat with my friends 24*7 , i simply miss people . The best part about being with a group is that you don't have to do everything alone. You're with your friends. Working alone is really not the kind of thing which i would like to do and now i have to work all alone. Wish college reopens soon ( even if reopens tomorrow, it is fine with me :-) :-) )

This quote is so true

Just as a puppy can be more of a challenge than a gift, so too can the holidays.
John Clayton

Coding Style ...

2007-05-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

I have never thought much about coding style before i did my NOSIP in Novell. But once i started coding for ldtprecord, according to the coding style suggested to me by nags, i was surprised to see how nice and neat the final code looks.

Some tips/tricks for nice coding skills are,

1. Do spend some time to think about the variable names and the function names. This sometimes might be bit boring, especially when you want to concentrate much on the program logic and performance. But this is Rule 0 for coding conventions. A variable name "k" can imply anything like "kappa, kozhukattai, katthu, kaadhal, kerala, kozhuppu..." to someone who might have to read your code later. This is again mentioned here clearly. Many thanks to emacs, you can always use the auto complete, if your variable name is too long. :-) .

2. The actual coding convention depends much on the language and the standards your team is using already. The following style won't work for someone, whose team is already using a totally different style.

A few examples for C is posted here .

Sample Code 1 :

if (a == 5) {

b = 10;

}
else {
b = 20;
}

Things to be noticed in the above snippet are.

1. A space between if and "(" .
2. Space in both the sides of the comparison operator.
3. Space between ")" and "{"
4. Space between both the sides of assignment operator (line 2 & 5) . This is true for almost all the operators.
5. Proper indentation of lines 2 & 5. If you are using emacs or vi, check here for your .emacs or .vimrc file .

Well, your code will compile and run even if you don't give these spaces, but a program coded with a bad coding style is equivalent to an inefficient code.

Sample Code 2

Let us have a function which takes two integers and returns their sum .
The code should be like

int add_numbers (int num1, int num2) {
return (num1 + num2);
}

The function call will be something like,

int sum;
sum = add_numbers (10, 20);

Things to be noticed in the above snippet is

In the first line in the function declaration,

1. The function name should be as clear as possible.
2. A space between the end of function name and "(" .
3. Spaces are given after every "," in the function argument list.
4. A space is given between ")" and "{".

In the second line in the function declaration,

1. A space before "(". [ This rule is almost global. Apply it everywhere whenever you use "(" ] .

2. There is a space on both the sides of the addition operator. This is again almost global. A space between both the sides of operator makes the code look real neat.

3. The indentation about which was mentioned earlier.

But yes, if your girl friend is a geek or a nerd or a psycho or a fundoo, then you better go for this. ;-)

#define MAGIC "eilouvy43605321"
#define _(p,o,q) (t o#p[0])?(q)
#define __(p,o,q) _(p,o,t-q)
int main(){int t, i; for(i=8;i>0;i--)printf("%c", MAGIC[(((t=(MAGIC+7)[i-1])=='_')?62:_(.,==,63):_(@,==,64):__(a,>=,'a'+36):__(A,>=,'A'+10):(t-'0'))]);}

Note :: I wont say the coding style i use is the perfect one. It always depends upon what your team was using till now and how easy it is to read, debug and maintain the code.

Useful Links :

The guide coding standards in GNOME is really a nice one.
Even better was this one i found recently. Though i didn't read it completely, it was quite interesting.
This article was short and sweet.

Feel My Pain...

2007-05-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

One day in heaven, the Lord decided He would visit the earth and take a stroll. Walking down the road, He encountered a man who was crying.

The Lord asked the man, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man said that he was blind and had never seen a sunset. The Lord touched the man who could then see and was happy.

As the Lord walked further, He met another man crying and asked, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man was born a cripple and was never able to walk. The Lord touched him and he could walk and he was happy.

Farther down the road, the Lord met another man who was crying and asked, "Why are you crying, my son?" The man said, "Lord, I am an engineer."

...and the Lord sat down and cried with him.

PODWORKS.in

2007-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

India's Biggest Event on Audio & Video Podcasting

Date: June 9 & 10 (Saturday & Sunday)

Venue: Tidel Park Auditorium, Chennai.

Cost: Rs.200

Alagappan designed banners saying I'm Attending Podworks.in and I'm speaking at Podworks.in. You can grab those here.

PodWorks is an ideal place to learn how to start your own podcast or to discover the latest tips and tricks for taking your show to the next level. The presentations offered will cover the whole spectrum from content production, technical how-to, business podcasting, marketing and monetization. Each session is an exchange of ideas.

I am really looking forward for this event, coz apart from the podcasting , it will be a re-union kind , where i will be meeting alagappan :) :) . Infact that's the main reason why i am attending this ;-)

You can register here and make the event a big success :)

Hello World ...

2007-05-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

I love Hello World programs.
The reason is simple. Whenever i code a hello world, it means i am learning something new. I once found a huge collection of hello world programs here.

And yes, i did a hello world program today. It is related cluster programming using MPI . :-) .

The code for the hello world

#include <stdio.h>
#include <mpi/mpi.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int err;
err = MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);
printf ("Hello World\n");
err = MPI_Finalize();
}

Since i dont have a cluster at home, i had to simulate a cluster. That can be done using the mpirun command .

hari@home:~/spider/cluster$ mpirun -np 3 a.out
Hello World
Hello World
Hello World
hari@home:~/spider/cluster$

For the first time, this asked for my password 3 times ( the number of process i mentioned ) . After that i created a keygen for myself and then things went fine . But it took a long time when i gave the number of processes as 100 .

Planning to code for a fractal using MPI in my free time :) .

Life ...

2007-05-09T00:03:00.000-07:00

Life is a beautiful poem with so many pages of lyrics written on every page. It depends on whether you sing a song with it or think it as a greek stupid probability junk and leave it .
I am gonna sing :-) :-)

Seg Fault

2007-05-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia says,
A segmentation fault (often shortened to segfault) is a particular error condition that can occur during the operation of computer software. A segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way that is not allowed (for example, attempting to write to a read-only location, or to overwrite part of the operating system)."

I have seen hundreds and hundreds of seg faults ;-) while coding for record module of LDTP and Spider SMS. But the one i saw yesterday was new, strange and fascinating. I am not sure whether i will be able to reproduce it again. The screenshot says why it is strange and fascinating :-) .

-bash-3.1$ man su
says

AUTHOR
Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS
Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.

Maybe i should consider reporting this :P .

Kelaaaaaaaa

2007-04-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

Few days back got a message from one of my friend saying ,

Hey i sent you many messages but i have not received even a single message from you . So i will delete your number ... gud bye ...

Well i was kind of shocked and surprised to get such a message since she was one of my best friend . I checked my inbox after i got this message and found no new messages . Cursing my bsnl network n times and the ECE enginner who would have desinged my mob another n times , i decided to call her and explain what happened .

I called her and was kind of surprised to see her laughing. I asked her ¨What happened ?¨
She asked me to read the message. I was about to explain her what happened, but something sounded fishy. So i told her that i will do that and this time the message said

Hey i sent you many messages but i have not received even a single message from you . So i will delete your number ... gud bye ...

Sardar sends this message to customer care ;-) Be cool Good evening .

Note :: A big time Kela but seems even she got it when she got the message ;)
So no probs :) :) . "Memories saved" :) :)

Gift time :) :)

2007-04-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Gifts are always fun :)
Finally i managed to give a nice senti gift for alagu.
It was a small painting, but a nice one :)
But better than the painting is the small C snippet which we wrote for alagu

It goes like this

#include <lrsl.h>
#include <kadalai.h>
using namespace freenet;
#define work fun
#define alagu YAHOO MAN
int main () {
int gujjala, gujjalambal, lab :)
string alagu[] = { "deltaman",
"npiuman",
"Yahoo !! man ",
"dealboy"
};
cout << "It is fun to have you in sunlab !! ";
cout << "We will miss you !!! " << endl;
}

That says it all :) .
I will surely miss him next sem :-( :-( :-( :-( :- ( .....

The meeting starts at 8 ....

2007-04-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

"Punctuality is the art of guessing how late the other fellow is going to be "
I have admired this quote many a times . :-) :-) . Infact it is one of my fav .

Today i got a message saying
"Hey..Dulta meeting today.. At 8pm .. Sun Lab ..Every1 must come.. So be there.. !

Being confused about whether i am a dulta member or not, i finally decided to attend this meeting . Not because i decided to work dulta, neither i am afraid about chucked out of dulta , but i was jobless and anyway i will be in SUN lab working for my SOC. So i did not mind attending the meeting .

But things went really great . I never realised that the 8 PM is "dulta's 8 PM" . And just today i came to know that there is a timezone difference of 30 minutes between IST and Dulta's Time :) :)

I went to sun lab at around 7.45 (foolish me) and started coding for LDTP in the SUN systems. Yazhini,
Padmini and Deepak Kumar Jha came there on time (all three compsci's ) . Some 10 mins after that , Nitin (a prod guy ) came to me asking whether there was a dulta meeting there or not ? .

I was really really curious to know who sent that message. I really hoped that DK sent that message ( he was the only senior present there ) . But seems he did not send that message . Finally i asked yazhini and padmini not to waste their time and they went back to their hostel by 8.30 . DK also went to room saying that he has to finish his English report.

Finally "the man" who sent that message came exactly at 8.35 :) :) . I expected him to say a sorry to the members waiting there . But again i was surprised to see him to start directly as
"Ok everyone check http://dulta/info and i want it to be nitt.edu by tonight . Think we have to work tonight blah blah blah blah ...".

I also like this quote
If I have made an appointment with you, I owe you punctuality, I have no right to throw away your time, if I do my own.
Richard Cecil

I really wish these people learn this someday soon .
But yes , i learnt some new stuff from this strange experience .
1. Dulta is always waste of time.
2. Never ever make anyone wait for you.

Two stories :)

2007-04-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

This is my blog and i have all rights to crap here . This blog may appear as total crap for few, may mean more to few . I really don't care what you are gonna think about me after you read this .

Read the following two stories

Story 1
Once upon a time , there was a crow and a fox . Both of them were hungry and the crow somehow managed to steal a vada from a paatti . It flew to a near by tree and planned to eat it there . This fox was very cunning and planned to steal the vada from the crow . It said all nice nice things about the crow and asked it to sing a song . The crow started singing kaka and the vada fell down . Fox ate the vada and ran away .

Moral of the story
Dont bring the vada outside the canteen and don't sing while eating a vada.

Story 2
Once upon a time there lived a crow . It was very thirsty . It searched for a water everywhere but could not find water anywhere . Finally it found a pot with very little water . But the water level was too low for it to reach . But this was a clever crow and saw pebbles lying around the pot. It dropped these pebbles into the pot one by one and slowly the water level rose. The crow drank water and flew away happily

Moral of the story
Dont know :)

My Seniors :) :)

2007-04-13T01:32:00.000-07:00

Again i was jobless :P googling something arbit , when i saw the "I am Feeling Lucky" button in google.
It is one of the features in google which i have never used. I always prefer seeing the list of search results and click atleast 10 of them :P

But it made me think for a moment . Am i lucky. And the answer is "YES" .

Why should i be feeling lucky ???

I think i have got the best seniors one could ever have . They are friendly, simple and spending time with them , anyone will have loads and loads of fun :) :) :) . And yes they are real "fundoos" who has done amazing things during their college life :) :) :)

And the best part is i never felt anyone as my senior. They are actually my "best friends".
The list goes like this .

Satya Madhav Kompella (Madhav)
Met him in my first year . Taught me C and C++ in the cry classes :) . A real fundoo but simple down to earth . Wish i could meet him sometime
Shankar Ganesh (Shagan)
My LDTP senior :P . OMG . This guy surely rocks . FUN FUN FUN . That's all i had when i spend time with this guy.
Manu (Manu)
Learnt a lot from him . An ideal senior :) . Mr . Perfect in everything. Only kandu without a GF in college :)
Allagappan Muthuraman (Alagu)
Helped me learn lots and lots during my second year in lrsl . :) He is really an amazing guy
Manas Garg (Manas)
My Spider senior . God . That explains everything :)

Note :: Sorry for few mistakes in the blog :P . I wrote this one in prasanna's algorithmic tricks class and obviously you tend to make mistakes when someone is disturbing you with dfs , bfs , dp etc :) :) .
So got confused betweeen a mallu and a kandu :) :)
And yes , i should have put "AJAX alagu" there , that would have made things clear :P

Shutdownday :O

2007-03-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

This is what www.shutdownday.org says
--
It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?
Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?
International Shutdown Day
--

I voted for "I Can" , though i have no clue what i am gonna do on that day.

Hmmm , maybe sleep , spend time chaating with friends. I just hope i dont go mad after few hours without computers :P . Cha without computers no movies, no coding , no songs , no games , no browsing :( :(

I am planning to shutdown few servers under my control . Let us see how it goes :) :)

I hate CT's :(

2007-02-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

In examinations, the foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer
---Oscar Wilde

Wow , this suits my college cycle tests also . The one and only thing which i hate in my college is CT's :( :(.
Those 3 days ,
I try to read something and end up sleeping the whole day.
I think that i wont go to octa, end up making a night out there.
At the end i always find that i have never read the syllabus even once and wont be able to finish the full portions :)

And this time i noticed that some of my friends who are real padipps were also getting frust coz of CT's

Some of the messages or quotes which they mentioned during their peak of frustration .

1. Dude , tell me one thing . Why do i feel so sleepy when i try to study and never when i'm in lab ?

2. It is study time :( i mean sleepy time ;)

3. Aah i never disliked studies so much

4. Cycles prep Aa? It sucks !

5. :( :( I'm going to himalayas. No more CT's in my life.I will take lots of food stuff, eat and roam aroud there.

6. CT SUCKS

7. If there were one more CT, i would have killed one of these prof and gone to jail..

8. Lets kill mala, then they will postpone the CT's

9. Lets mail Bush that Osama is hiding in CSE dept . He will bomb the dept and they will cancel the CT's :)

The list is long and i cant post everything here . God save these frust people. Save me from my dept :) :)

The end of internet

2007-02-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

Was checking out the settings of google reader and found this quite interesting .

The next bookmark is an innovative way to read your subscriptions. It allows you to use Google Reader through just one link - clicking on it takes you to the next unread item, marking it as read in the process. It is particularly useful for subscriptions which only include snippets or when you want to read an article in context.

But when i clicked the tab i got a page saying
I myself dont believe in end of internet and the page was not the end of the internet , since that page still had a link to some other page . The links said it all
http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm

The contents of the page (for those who dont want to go to end of the internet )
The End of the Internet
Congratulations! This is the last page.
Thank you for visiting the End of the Internet. There are no more links.
You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive.
Go read a book, for pete's sake.

Forgot mysql root pass ?

2007-01-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

Recently forgot mysql root password for one of the servers i maintain . Little bit googling helped me to reset the password .
Just copy pasted the tutorials i saw so that i need not google again .

If you have set a root password, but forgot what it was, you can set a new password with the following procedure:

Take down the mysqld server by sending a kill (not kill -9) to the mysqld server. The pid is stored in a `.pid' file, which is normally in the MySQL database directory:
```
shell> kill `cat /mysql-data-directory/hostname.pid`
```
You must be either the Unix root user or the same user mysqld runs as to do this.
Restart mysqld with the --skip-grant-tables option.
Set a new password with the mysqladmin password command:
```
shell> mysqladmin -u root password 'mynewpassword'
```
Now you can either stop mysqld and restart it normally, or just load the privilege tables with:
```
shell> mysqladmin -h hostname flush-privileges
```
After this, you should be able to connect using the new password.

Alternatively, you can set the new password using the mysql client:

Take down and restart mysqld with the --skip-grant-tables option as described above.
Connect to the mysqld server with:
```
shell> mysql -u root mysql
```

Issue the following commands in the mysql client:

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('mynewpassword')
   ->             WHERE User='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

After this, you should be able to connect using the new password.
You can now stop mysqld and restart it normally.

Quiz is finally over :) :)

2007-01-19T09:31:00.001-08:00

If at all if someone gives me the right to scrap three events from pragyan i will surely opt for junkyard wars, technical quiz and udaaan . These three are actually very good events when you are a participant. But when if you are the one who is responsible for the quiz software for these events, that too with all three events starting one after another , surely you will go mad.

Everything started when i made a foolish decision to attend a delta meeting . The meeting is to discuss about delta induction. I was trying to make a quiz manager at that time ( inspired from manu's quiz manager ) and thought i will do one for delta induction, which can be used for pragyan also . ( never realized this was such a big blunder ) . Somehow managed to changed few things in manu's code and finished the delta inductions.

The whole headache started few days before pragyan . All three event manager contacted us few days before their events. Actually i was kind of shocked by what they asked me . One wants a timer while the other says i dont need a timer :( :( . Err what is your fscking problem if there is a timer :(.

The worst part i did not code a single line in the pragyan quiz manager :( . It is coded by one of my junior and i saw the code just 3 hrs before the event. Of course i went mad , called up my junior every now and then asking to explain about what the code actually does.

Finally junkyard wars started 4 hrs late , udaan 5 hrs late and tq some 14 hrs late :P

Took a resolution that will never take up any more work in pragyan :( .

Pragyan '07

2007-01-16T04:55:00.000-08:00

The big event is gonna start soon !!!

"So where will you be from

February 1 - 4 ?" .

Thats what the website says :).

I am doing bytecode and quiz management this time :) . Bad that i could not do anything for dalal this time :( .

Allergic to Allergy test :(

2007-01-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

Met a doctor for my sinus problem few days back. He said that a small surgery has to be done, but even before that he wanted to me to take an allergy test so that he can find what all things i am allergic too.

All he said was that they will do something to your hand . With my very little biology knowledge ( actually i managed to pass my 12th bio ), i assumed that they will test whether dust is allergic to me ( coz that's the only allergic agent i could remember at that time ) . I assumed that they are gonna put some dust in my hand and somehow test whether i am allergic to that .

But the lady in the lab had different plans . She took 5 syringes . I was really sorry for the person who is gonna have those injected . I never liked injections , just because you know it is gonna pain and no way you can stop that :( .

That lady took a box which had around 50 small small bottles and asked me to show my hand. Now i realised that one of the injections among the 5 she had was for me . Ok i had no other option now . I cant run away from the lab saying i hate them . Anyway they looked small , so i was OK with them :)

34 bottles in the box she had were arranged properly as 8 , 8, 5, 5, 8 in each row . The rest of them were scattered . There was strange feeling that she is gonna inject them all to me , but thought she will mix everthing and give it in one single injection.

To my horror, she used the first syringe to inject medicines from the 8 bottles from the first row one by one . At the end of 8 injections ( within 45 seconds ) i thought it is going to be over and i can leave.

But no , she opened the next syringe and started with the next row. I was kind of shocked now and the slightest thought of all 5 syringes injected to me almost gave me an heart attack . But i thought no one will be cruel enough to do that and after the second row ( that makes 16 injections ) , she will let me go.

I almost fainted when she opened the third syringe. I stopped her and asked whether she is going to inject all these . She said "YES".

Finally she was kind of enough to reduce the number of injections by 2 ( thank god i did not have dog in my house , so those test is not required it seems )

Within 3 minutes , 32 injections. That is really a record for me . Finally realised what an allergy test is ( my bio knowledge atleast improved ) . :(

Note :: It might be funny when you read this , but if you are gonna take an allergy test , certainly it wont be that much fun . So stop laughing and get back to work :-) .

MY FC5 Crashed

2006-12-21T15:46:00.000-08:00

Well , seems this is the first time linux hates me. I have seen lots of problems with linux but most of them are generally a software not installing coz of failed dependencies or some file system error which a fsck will solve without any major issue . But this time it really screwed me .

The reason why it crashed is simple . "Improper Shutdown". Was in a hurry when mom shouted the n th time to have breakfast that instead off the normal shutdown , switched off the power button . But never realized that will lead to the tragedy. Next time the comp never booted and even when i tried to boot in single mode , it just displayed two linesof error ( which i donn remember now , one of those lines had something about journal ) .

Tried hard to rescue my files but in vain .

Lost lots of work coz of this crash :( :( , like

1. Files related to the hacking contest i planned to conduct. Though i have the files uploaded in website , they are not the latest and anyway lost the mysql db )
2. Spider SMS ( not exactly. The prev night sent the code to prasanna , so almost got the files except for the todo and some other files )
3. ByteCode . A single web page which i managed to design for bytecode . Had to start again
4. Glug-t site . Set of web pages designed for the Gnu Linux User Group- Trichy :(
5. Spider site . A few extra features for the Spider site .
And ya all the downloads i did :( .
6. A patch written for ldtp as an extra option for ldtprecord

So learnt a few lessons from this crash

1. Always shutdown the comp.
2. It is better to have your /home and /var in a seperate partition
3. Backup the files every now and then in a seperate partition
4. Backup myqsl regularly

So one good thing about the crash is that now i have installed Ubuntu and recording can be done in that even if it is gnome 2.14. And i certainly like apt-get than yum . Hoping the get the repo's soon :)

ACM Regionals @ Coimbatore

2006-12-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

The ACM ICPC 2006 Regional Contest was held on December 16th & 17th , 2006 at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, coimbatore, and our team ( me , evo and vasu ) was one of the top 50 teams selected for the onsite contest .

The travel to coimbatore was really weird this time. This is the second time i am going to coimbatore (last time with Manas ) and never knew where amrita is :( . To make things worse , the train stopped at thirupur coz of some technical fault . Had to travel from thirupur to coimbatore by bus and then from there to amrita . As usual was late by a few hours and missed the tour of the contest :( ( actually it does not matter since it was Day1 ).

Then after meeting evo and vasu there ( OMG , they were discussing some problem already ) , we went for the "grand" campus tour . The cook book said "Campus Tour - Teams and coaches tour the plush greenery Amrita University Campus, campus facilities" . But it turned out to be one of the worst tour . The guys who came with us for the tour were so "dumb". They used to show us a basketball court and say "This is our basketball court " . As if we all thought it is a football court. Anyway another sad part is that the "greenery" we expected in amrita is nowhere to be found . Bad that this time the contest is during hols :( :(

After lunch had the first practice session . We were able to solve all three ( though presentation error rapped us and the guy who seems to answer our doubts is one of the dumbest i can ever find. We used to ask him , what is the presentation error . Our output seems to be fine and he used to reply "Yes, there is a presentation error." ) . And anytime our Codelabs is far better than mooshak. Our Codelabs has a better interface than the mooshak , since codelabs is not a single web page and hence one can predict what will happen if the page is refreshed ( unlike in mooshak you have to remeber your last action )

After dinner , had the second practice session and this time we did not get one question :( . Anyway it was total fun being with vasu and evo around . Especailly vasu always had some funny stuff to tell us.

Day II
Break fast at 6.30 :-( and i got up at 6.40 ( One of the difficult thing for me to do :( ) . Contest started at around 8.00 PM and ended at 1.00 PM. We were able to solve three problems and ended up 23 rd . The final standings can be viewed here . Planned to start early but had to wait for the certificates .

The problem set can be found here

Came back to chennai the next day.

Phobia

2006-12-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

As usual, was jobless at home with a new broadband connection , so chumma timepassing when i found this site

So some of them which i might have now or can develop any time is .

Agliophobia- Fear of pain.
Agrizoophobia- Fear of wild animals.
Altophobia- Fear of heights.
Decidophobia- Fear of making decisions. //Err , cant decide :)
Didaskaleinophobia- Fear of going to school. //Very rarely , on bio pracs days, not now
Dystychiphobia- Fear of accidents.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words. // this word itself makes me scary
Iophobia- Fear of poison. //ofcourse who is not
Nosocomephobia- Fear of hospitals.
Ochlophobia- Fear of crowds or mobs.
Ophidiophobia- Fear of snakes. (Snakephobia) //who is not afraid of snakes
Papyrophobia- Fear of paper. //Just the exam papers , nothing else
Parasitophobia- Fear of parasites.
Pathophobia- Fear of disease.
Peladophobia- Fear of bald people. //yeah all my profs are bald
Philosophobia- Fear of philosophy.
Polyphobia- Fear of many things. // ???
Scolionophobia- Fear of school. // not now but 3 years before "yes"
Phobophobia- Fear of phobias. //After seeing the long list certainly "yes"

Hey come on, what happened to all those important stuff ,
Phobia of exams
Phobia of attendance
Phobia of getting caught in class
Phobia of teachers

Seems a lots is still missing in the list :)

Geek Toons

2006-12-09T04:01:00.000-08:00

Checked out some of the geek toons in geek.com ,
Some of my fav here ;)

Foss.in 2006 at Blore

2006-12-04T01:06:00.000-08:00

Date :: 23 Dec 06 Time :: 4.00 PMPlace :: Cisco Blore

Shagan and evo has already mentioned to me about the great speed at which you can access net at cisco , but i have never taken them that much seriously . But when i sat in shagan's comp to surf net , MY GOODNESS , was really amazed by the network speed there . Just to test the download speed , started a fc6 download and it downloaded around 7-10 MB in 15 seconds . Shagan later told me that this speed is bit slow and i could have got better speed if i had used wget for downloads :O. Then shagan went to play tt with his friend ( no need to mention that the friend is a female and tt was just a lame reason for kadalai ) , while i went blore central (just to kill time, had no intention of purchasing anything there).

Date :: 24 Dec 06Time :: 10 AMPlace :: IISc Blore

Somehow i got up early ( 8.30 ) , managed to catch a bus to IISc and reached there at 10.00 AM. Taggy was already waiting for me there .The event is supposed to start at 10.00 AM with an opening ceremony by Atul Chitnis. This guy though never spoke tech , spoke really well . With few do's and dont's like switching of mobile, asking questions etc etc , he finished his speech at 11.00 AM ( remember he started at 10.30 AM )

Next was the speech on Linux and the art of minimalist development by Suparna from IBM. One of the topics which we wont understand anything is the kernel and unfortunately she is a kernel developer. But topic on what she spoke is simple. It is actually about keeping things simple, solving problems in a clever way etc etc . Though we could grasp these concepts , the examples she gave went wrt kernel over our heads :(

Next speech is by Noor from Wipro . He spoke about something called sUSBix. Though i dont remember much about his speech now few points which i noted down in my notebook says suspend2 JFFS - Journaling Flash File SystemHis speech is about working from the OS booted from a pen drive and then we can carry the pendrive to anywhere and using the pendrive there so that all you need to carry when you want to port your work from office to home or home to office is just a pen drive. The advantage he mentioned is that since the root and swap are present in the pendrive itself , you need not reopen your applications and other stuff once we put it in standbymode. Say if i had opened gedit at home , when i use sUSBix and boot the comp at office , i will have the gedit opened . This is really a big advantage . Some of the todo's of this project are like increasing the portablity between two comps of totally different type , etc etc

Then was the speech about "Writing as SMS Service with Free Software". Actually i was a bit interested in this because i thought something from this can be useful for spider sms, but it turned out that he spoke about something very basic which smsd already uses for sending sms. He showed a demo of sending a message if the delivery is success and getting a web page in sms.

Next was the OpenJDK - Opensource Java . I actually slept in this session . So you could guess how boring it will be for me. Then next lecture was also not interesting ( atleast their topics were not intersting ) that we went for a small walk outside IISc . We planned to bunk the next hour ;) though we decided to stay just for the Secure Linux programming

It was 5.00 PM now , the topic was "Secure Linux Programming" , by Jaimon Jose from Novell. The slides he showed us was good and had nice content , though it would have been better if he had got more examples on them or atleast explained about them in depth.He actually spoke about (rather showed slides for )Buffer OverflowInteger Overflow Race ConditionTemp filesDynamic Memory etc etc He gave a nice link for Linux Secure Programming ( http://dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programming-HOWTO/)
Thats it for the day . We could not take more . We bunked the next hour about "Solving the fundamental structural problem of the free software movement" and i came home ) .

I was actually tired after those long long lectures . Since it was a long time since i have listened to a lecture properly (classes are either for sleeping or sending messages , infact anything other than listening) . So slept early .

Date :: 25 Dec 06Time :: 8.30 AmPlace :: Shagan's Home

Just now got up . This means i am going to miss the first speech . Actually i wanted to attend the first one ( coz it is about KDE and not kerenel ) but now it seems impossible. Finally managed to get a bus and reach shivajinagar bus stand at 10.00 . Given some one hour to travel from shivajinagar to IISc , i can reach there by 11 and atleast attend the PHP5 Rasmus ( the guy who wrote PHP ) .

But seems Murphy's laws never fail .
What i did from 10.00 to 12.30 in shivajinagar can be explained as

for (count=0; ; count++) {
Ask someone which bus goes to IISc .
If that @$$ does not know which/what IISc is curse him 100 times and wait for someone else
If he says to wait in some lane , go to that lane and wait there
After 10 mins , ask someone there and surely he will point me to some other lane.
Go to the new lane.
if ( count > 50 ) {
for every 5 people you ask hereafter , say "fsck" and proceed }
if (count >100 ) {
for every 2 people you ask hereafter sak "fsck" and proceed
}
}

Inbetween this one of the drivers who told me that the bus will go to Indian Institute of Science , droppd me at Indian Express .
All i could is curse more and more and somehow went to IISc at 12.50 .
Then attended the speech about "Hacking the Slug" by Sudhakar from Google .Actually we never knew anything about what he is going to say before the speech . He showed us the Slug , a device which can be used as a firewall , proxy server etc etc . He showed a demo how it can be used .

Next was "Makefiles" by Sulamita from Brazil. She was really tensed when she spoke about makefiles ;) . Taggy was feeling bored coz one could not talk anything interesting with makefiles. I knew Makefiles was really a vast topic and she did cover something which will make one write Makefiles upto a decent size. All i have explored with Makefiles is to add a new file to be compiled in ldtp and that was simple . Search for any one of the files already present and add the new file to the list you see. But writing make files from the scratch is something i just hope i never have to do .

The topics after this were a bit boring or something which we have never heard at all . So we decided to bunk the next two hours ( bunking the last speech has become a habit and we did this the next day too ;) ) . Taggy came home to shagan's home today and we went out for dinner. Went to garuda mall, had dinner there [ ofcourse shagan payed ;) ] came back to home late.

Date :: 26 Dec 06Time :: 10.00 AMPlace :: IISc Blore

Atleast today reached IISc on time .
First one was "Impact of Indian Copyright and Patent Law on FOSS" by Sunil Abraham . We actually thought that the speech will be boring and no tech , but the interactive session was really good . People actually came up with various doubts which this guy was able to answer properly.

Next one was the Webmarker by Natarajan from Yahoo . This one was also good and interesting .He explained to us how the webmarker was done , algorithms was used in that , the webmarkers that were present before this one was released , the problems with this webmarker etc . This one was really interesting , coz the way he showed us the demo and discussed the problems in the webmarker was good. Actually people who were listening suggested some nice ideas and hacks which can be incorporated into the Webmarker to make it better.

Next one was "Ten Tips To Turbocharge The Team: Getting Smaller User-Groups Moving". I attended this just to get some nice ideas for GLUG-T. The speaker gave some good links and also answered properly during the interactive session.
Some of the key points which i got from his speech are.1. Maintain a proper mailing list . The more active the mailing list is , the more active the glug is .2. Have a proper FAQ page somewhere so that the topics/problems which were discussed earlier need not be discussed again for the newbies again.3. More number of glugs is always better.

After lunch , had a two hour session on "Writing KDE Applications" by Aaron Seigo. This guy was really cool who explained us about how to write applications in KDE4. Actually it was very similar to GTK except that here you have OOPS concepts, so you have classes for everything. He explained about the filedialog and other classes.

Then was the Tutorial Session on LDTP . Met nags and Casanova here . Here was one session where i knew almost everything what the speaker is going to speak. Casanova spoke for an hour or so. He explained about from the basics, i.e what library ldtp uses , how it works . He showed a demo of ldtp with gedit and a demo recording too. Maybe he could have shown more demos and extended the session a bit.
Even today we bunked the Closing Keynote and the Closing cermony and came home early.

foss.in

2006-11-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

FOSS.IN is one of the world's largest and most focussed FOSS events, held annually India. Over the years, it has attracted thousands of participants, and the speaker roster reads like a "Who is Who" of FOSS contributors from across the world.

FOSS.IN/2006 will be held on November 24-26, 2006, at National Science Symposium Centre of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.

Do check out the other details at foss.in

World Diabetes Day

2006-11-14T23:28:00.001-08:00

Fscked up coz of coding :P

2006-11-11T01:37:00.000-08:00

Sometime back, taggy showed me Google code search where one can search inside the source code.
And not surprisingly , the first thing he searched in source code was for "fsck" , "bitch", and "porn" .
Actually both of us were not surprised with the results. Taggy infact went to the extent of creating a graph to compare the occurence of these words in the source code. :)

Seems the coders and getting more and more frust when there code does not work and they show all their frust in their source code . Maybe a grep for "fsck" will give more shocking results :P.

If you wann to see the stats of the occurence , check out taggy's blog here

Some of the strange and nice things which i saw in the search were

1. sofia-sip-1.11.8/libsofia-sip-ua/su/sofia-sip/su_wait.h
88: #define SU_WAIT_CONNECT (FD_CONNECT)
#define SU_WAIT_ERR (0) /* fuck this shit */
#define SU_WAIT_HUP (FD_CLOSE)

2. linux-2.4.33.3/lib/vsprintf.c
8: /*
* Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up :-)
*/

3. CGI.pm-3.23/t/lib/Test/More.pm
381: else {
# Can't use fail() here, the call stack will be fucked.
my $ok = @_ == 3 ? ok(0, $name )

4. twisted/names/authority.py
239: ORIGIN = line[1]
elif line[0] == '$INCLUDE': # XXX - oh, fuck me
raise NotImplementedError('$INCLUDE directive not implemented')

5. includes/htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker/spell-check-ui.js
36: }
// we should use innerHTML here, but IE6's implementation fucks up the
// HTML to such extent that our poor Perl parser doesn't understand it

6.HTTP/Request.php
613: // magic quotes may fuck up file uploads and chunked response processing
$magicQuotes = ini_get('magic_quotes_runtime');

7. Guppi-0.40.3/src/libguppidata/guppi-data-tree.h
40: should be treated as *read-only*. If you change them, you could
really fuck things up. */
typedef struct _GuppiDataTreeNode GuppiDataTreeNode;

8. Acme-Scurvy-Whoreson-BilgeRat-1.1/lib/Acme/Scurvy/Whoreson/BilgeRat.pm
59: ($backend && $backend->isa("Acme::Scurvy::Whoreson::BilgeRat::Backend::$params{language}")) ||
die("For fuck's sake, the fucking backend's fucked");

48: die("Read the fucking manual you shitwit and at least use the constructor right!")
if(!$class || join('', keys %params) !~ /^(language)?$/);

9. directory_administrator-1.4/src/main.c
48: // diradmin_user * fuck = NULL;
83: gtk_widget_show (mainwindow);
// fuckyou ();

10. src/libstdc++-v3/testsuite/27_io/ofstream_members.cc
88: bool test = true;
const char* strlit01 = "fuck war";
const char* strlit02 = "two less cars abstract riot crew, critical mass/SF";

Ofcourse i cannot copy paste all the 32,600 search results here :)

So do i swear when i write code ??
Of course i do , even i am a programmer right. While testing the sms code for the spider server, it used to creash often. Though i found out that i have not read the mysql manual properly , this is the source code i wrote to find the error.

cout << "Mysql Connected Successfully\n ";
update_query = Query("INSERT INTO hari_feedback VALUES ('','a','b','c','d','e','f')");
cout << "INSERT INTO hari_feedback VALUES ('','a','b','c','d','e','f')";
cout << "Query Returned " << update_query << endl;
if (update_query == NULL ) {
cout << "Fuck\n";
}

mysql_affected_rows (&sqlHandle);
if (pid == -1)
{ cout << "Query Failed\n";}
else
{ cout << "Success\n";}

And ofcourse a ls in the /tmp folder in the nosip folder shows this

fileXo1MAJ
fucku.py
fucku.xml
fuckyouman.py
fuckyouman.xml
fuckyou.py
fuckyou.xml
gcalc.py
gcalctool_log.xml
gcalctool.py
gcalctool.py~
gcalctool_run.xml
gcalctooltemp_log.xml
gcalctooltemp.

Seems even i am fscked up sometimes when it comes to coding :P

Bug in blogspot.com ;)

2006-11-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Check out this image :)

Dont you find something strange with the edit buttons over there ????

Ubuntu vs FC

2006-11-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

I think the fight is never going to end . The only topic the whole glugt seems to discuss for the past one month ( or even more than that ) is UBUNTU or FEDORA.

Fedora Supporters :
Gcdart, Sahil , Verma
Ubuntu Supporters
Evo, Donatello and me ,

I have no clue why i support ubuntu. I have never had any big problem with FC , though the only feature which attracted me towards ubuntu is
apt-get dist-upgrade
I had a chance to use ubuntu ( for the first time ) when i was in Novell, Blore. There internet was never the problem . So installed the breezy base and a simple apt-get distupgrade upgraded my system from breezy to dapper. I cant think of something like this for fedora. Though the installation cd always comes with an upgrade option people do go for a fresh install .

Had a small chat with gc regarding the bootup time comparision of ubuntu and FC, finally googled for the comparison , Though i did not get that i got a better one from here.
Some of the details i got from there is

	Fedora	Ubuntu
GENERAL FEATURES	Fedora Core is a community distribution sponsored by Redhat. Fedora Core is a general purpose system - it does not concentrate on one specific market. Fedora Core is innovative (adopts a lot of bleeding-edge software) and secure (includes great security tools like SELinux). It is suitable both for home users, programmers and the corporate server.	Ubuntu is usually described as Debian for newbies. It is based on Debian Unstable and offers some Debian compatibility, adding a lot of features to make the system more friendly for new Linux users. Ubuntu installer is very automatic. After the successful installation, the system is mostly confugured. Ubuntu package selection is very wise and non-redundant, providing one app for a single task. The desktop is very clean and looks consistent. Installing Ubuntu is a great way to have a Debian system with minimal knowledge required.
Random screenshot
TECHNICAL INFO
Supported architectures	i386, ppc, x86_64, sparc (via Aurora Project), alpha (via AlphaCore)	amd64, i386, ppc
Minimal hardware requirements	For text mode: 200 MHz Pentium-class, 64MB RAM, 620MB HDD For graphical mode: 400 MHz Pentium-class, 192MB RAM, 620MB HDD	For text-mode: 24MB RAM, 450MB hard drive For graphical-mode: 64MB RAM, 1GB HDD
Software freedom status	Free as in freedom. The distribution is not officially recommended by FSF probably only due to not enough vocal declarations about the free software (Fedora tends to prefer the term “open-source”).	Mostly free, but includes some proprietary drivers
INSTALLATION
Installer - overall	(8) Very mature installer, offering features both for beginner and expert users. Contains most of the features a modern OS installer should have. The only flaw can be install speed and no separate expert mode.	(8) Since Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), a graphcal installer is available with the Live-CD edition. The installer is fast and asks a minimal number of questions. It’s one of the easiest Linux distros to set up for a newbie user. Ubuntu alternative text-based installer is based on the Debian Sarge installer. It adds a few new screens in expert mode, and removes a few in novice mode, to make it even simpler to install the system with default setting. And the defaults is: latest Gnome with a selection of GTK software.
Package selection	(9) Present. Single packages can be selected (ald dependencies resolved)	(2) Not available. You can however install additional packages before running the Live-CD installer (graphically or using apt-get). Every package you install before running the main installer will appear in your final installation.
Predefined package groups	(9) Very well-thought package grouping. All package groups incude packaes installed by default and optional ones. The default installation is a desktop system with GNOME.	(2) Desktop or server installations are available. No package group selection.
Expert mode install	(7) No special “expert mode”. Most of the screens (e.g. partitioning) include “advanced” options for non-standard configuration.	(8) Expert/Beginner and kernel 2.4/2.6 choices.
Graphical installer	(9) Graphical (anaconda) or console based installation.	(6) Available since Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). The older text (dialog-based) installer is also very simple and suitable for most cases as well.
Installer speed	(6) Reasonable speed of the installer.	(6) The Live-CD installation is pretty fast. The installer only asks a few questions and then copies the entire Live-CD image to the disk, configuring the hardware and the boot-up menu. The legacy (alternative) installation process is rather slow. Default installation took 35 minutes on 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM laptop. On the same machine, Yoper has been installed in 13 minutes.
CONFIGURATION
Graphical system management	(7) Many graphical configuration tools (mostly GNOME-based). Most system-wide operations can be performed without the need to open the terminal window.	(5) Ubuntu does not provide a disto-specific Control Panel app (like in SuSE or Mandriva). Still, a few Ubuntu-specific tools has been added to the default Gnome desktop: the update notifier, update and installation manager (similar to Windows’ Add/Remove Software app), an applet to mount disks, a NetworkManager for wifi support, Beagle Search integration and more.
Console-based system management	(5) Some console tools provided, including network card configuration (netcard-config), etc.	(8) Very good package configuration tool - debconf - from Debian project.
PACKAGE SYSTEM
Number of packages	(7) Package numer is better than openSUSE, but not as big as Mandriva or Debian. There are however lots of alternative sources of packages, like Freshrpms.net, etc. Recently, with versions Fedora Core 4 and 5 and the arrival of Fedora Extras project, the number of alternative software repositories grew considerably.	(8) Except for base Ubuntu packages (built and supported by the Ubuntu team), there are official but unsupported repositories: universe and multiverse. It all sums up to over 10,000 of Ubuntu specific packages. Using alternative sources from Debian or its derivatives is not recommended (and usually not useflu).
Package management, automatic dependency resolving	(6) The famous Redhat dependency hell is almost over with the arrival of yum (the default package manager) and apt-rpm (the alternative one).	(8) Dpkg, APT and aptitude - Debian package management tools are among the leading GNU/Linux tools for software management. Installing software in Ubuntu is simple and troubleless, and certainly much more pleasurable than in most distros using the RPM format. Only Smart package manager is considered superior to APT (however, it can be used in Ubuntu as well).
Graphical package management tools	(7) Fedora Core 5 provides yum based graphical tools such as Pirut for package management and Pup as the updater. Fedora Core 6 provides an update notifier called Puplet. There is Synaptic (a frontend to APT) and other similar tools available as the alternatives. Previous Fedora Core releases (FC4 and earlier) included the old up2date application for package management and a desktop Alert Icon.	(8) Synaptic - a graphical frontend to APT - a software installation and update tool, very useful if someone likes to click rather than type. Also, an “Add/Remove applications” program is delivered, which is much simpler and more straightforward than Synaptic, but allows to install only the most typical desktop apps.
EFFICIENCY
System boot-up speed	(5) Average boot-up speed. The boot-up scripts written properly.	(6) Thoughtful services selection and default configuration make Ubuntu boot faster than Debian. It’s getting better with each release, but there is still some room for improvements.
System responsiveness	(5) Acceptable speed and responsiveness, although there are no special optimizations for either desktop or server use.	(7) Quite responsive system. Working with Ubuntu is fast and effective. Much better than default Debian installation. Technically, packages (except for the kernel and libc) are compiled for 486, but with Pentium III (or higher) optimizations.
STABILITY/SECURITY
Popularity	(7) Very popular distro. For many months locates around 1-5 place on the DistroWatch rank.	(8) Ubuntu got extremely popular during the previous year and places currently takes the first place in the DistroWatch rank.
Security focus	(8) SELinux is included in the default install. Fedora Core offers a whole bunch of extra security features like Exec-Shield, Compile Time Buffer Checks, ELF, Data Hardening, Restricted Kernel Memory access and more.	(8) All of the key security packages (including kernel package) are being updated daily, so if someone updates the system regularily, he/she should not worry about security much.
Stability and maturity	(6) Fedora Core stability is comparable to similar distros like Ubuntu or openSUSE. There are many efforts to make the software testing within Fedora Core even better by implementing an automated test system. Will Woods is currently leading this project.	(7) Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is one of the most stable and mature distros available. Still, Ubuntu comes with fresh software and instabilities may occur.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
Does the installer support multiple languages?	(8) Fedora installer is pretty well localized.	(8) Ubuntu installer is translated into 40 languages which makes it one of the leaders in this area. Internationalization is one of the Ubuntu project priorities.
Is the system localized after installation?	(7) System speaks the language selected during the installation process. Of course not all apps are well-translated, but Fedora-specific ones usually are.	(7) The installed system is localized. The only problems may occur with QT-based apps. QtConfig app can fix this problem when installed.
Is manual system localization easy?	(8) Additional localization procedures are easily available (docs, FAQ-s)	(5) If something does not work, we should make friends with dpkg-reconfigure tool which makes it easier to change the package configuration without the need to mess up with the configuration files.
APPLICATIONS/NETWORK
Support for restricted formats	(4) Fedora is a community distro devoted to Free Software thing. No support for non-free formats is available by default. Fedora Wiki entry Forbidden Items explains the reasons for this and offers possible solutions. If you need restricted formats for some reason or don’t care for the FSF philosophy, don’t worry. You can still install all the packages from third-party repositories like rpm.livna.org.	(5) Ubuntu is a community distro devoted to Free Software thing. Almost no support for non-free formats is available by default. If you need restricted formats for some reason or don’t care for the FSF philosophy, don’t worry. You can still install all the packages from the multiverse repository (no officially supported but hosted at ubuntu.com). The Restricted Formats wiki entry describes the Ubuntu policy and the multiple ways of getting support for non-free packages. Using EasyUbuntu - a graphical non-free software installer is another good option here.
Sagem DSL modem support	(4) No eagle-usb packages. Kernel source and manual module compilation is necessary.	(4) Eagle-USB has been available as a Debian package since version 4.11 (Warty Warthhog). Unfortunately, the support for Thompson modems got worse and worse with every release. Now, it’s not posiible to install the modem without kernel recompilation…
Alcatel DSL modem support	(4) Like in Sagem, installation process is totally manual. A speedtouch.conf script (tested with FC2 and FC3) can be also downloaded from http://speedtouchconf.sf.net/ to make the process automatic.	(5) Speedtouch modem installation is not fully automatic. Package “speedtouch” is responsible for firmware loading. Still, we have to copy the driver manually. Manual configuration is also a must.
Wireless support	(7) Good WiFi support. Native drivers are well supported (clickable installation). Ndsiwrapper is available for Windows-only cards.	(8) System automatically detects wireless connections (adequate icon appears on the desktop). Of course, other debian tools for handling wireless cards are also available.

Each system gets a mark from 0 (min) to 9 (max). In most cases the description precises the mark. A question mark (?) means that we do not have any information about certain feature.

Note :: Have edited the post from FC5 to FC after reading the first comment. Think comment is posted by a FC supporter . :) . Anyway i have not seen Edgy till now, still downloading the repos (seems it is some 14 GB for i386 ) . And not yet explored FC6. I just hope i find enough time to explore both FC6 and Edgy .

rm -rf * :-O

2006-10-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

Went home for diwali hols and the moment i entered my room , the first thing i did is to switch on the comp. I have already taken a resolution that no tech , no php , no linux for the next 5 days [ resolutions are meant be broken , you know :) ] . So instead of booting the comp in linux , i booted the comp in windows ( i had no clue what i was going to do in windows ) .

My sister had stored a few harry potter movies which i was in no mood to see.After some 5-10 minutes of arbit clicking , i decided windows is not for me :-). I noticed a folder called books which was the only useful thing for me in my comp apart from the linux. But reading a book will make me break the resolution. Though reluctant , i started with the "Unix Haters Book". When i started , i never had an idea how great the book will be .

The book will make anyone hate unix ( this includes linux also ) and i am not an exception. That too even after the first chapter , i started to realize the drawbacks [this is a better way to say hate :-) ] of shell , the most powerful and the tool which i liked the most in Unix or Linux.

So here is the details of the first chapter in short. It mostly blasted a singlr command "rm". Now i realise the deadliest command one can ever type is "rm".

The first thing i liked in the book is the way they described unix.
“ Who would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.”
I have no clue why the author mentioned Unix as hacker's pornography , but i seriously liked the guts of the author to say something like this . I did realize that this book is good after reading the foreword ( very few books can do this ) . After reading the first chapter , the author made sure that whenever i type rm , i will surely remember this book.

The first chapter started with the quote saying
“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I
don’t think that this is a coincidence.”
—Anonymous

Another chapter said this
The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many
times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage
to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on.
—Patrick Sobalvarro
The attack on “rm” gave many real life-horror stories .
“rm” Is Forever
A series of exchanges on the Usenet news group alt.folklore.computers illustrates our case:
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90
From: djones@megatest.uucp (Dave Jones)
Subject: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers2
Anybody else ever intend to type:
% rm *.o
And type this by accident:
% rm *>o
Now you’ve got one new empty file called “o”, but plenty of room
for it!
Actually, you might not even get a file named “o” since the shell documen-
tation doesn’t specify if the output file “o” gets created before or after the
wildcard expansion takes place. The shell may be a programming lan-
guage, but it isn’t a very precise one.

In my comp i got a file named o , seems the output file gets created after the wild card expansion takes place.

Here is the next real life story
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST
From: ram@attcan.uucp
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
I too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file
system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in /
usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:
% rm -r ./etc
% rm -r ./adm
…and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period.
System didn’t like that too much.
Unix wasn’t designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin direc-
tory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to
recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operat-
ing system inoperable).
The third case is really really important and a dangerous one .
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 10:40 CST
From: kgg@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Kees Goossens)
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Then there’s the story of the poor student who happened to have a
file called “-r” in his home directory. As he wanted to remove all his
non directory files (I presume) he typed:
% rm *
… And yes, it does remove everything except the beloved “-r” file…
Luckily our backup system was fairly good.

Now i stopped reading the book. I realised that i will surely start a Windows User Group , Trichy if i complete the book. :P .

Waiting for FC6 . : -(

2006-10-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

The whole sun lab is waiting for FC6 . People even wann to add a cron so that the download starts at tomorrow 6 pm automatically . I saw the pre release version in balli's comp and MY GOD !!! . FC surely rocks . Some of the nice features which my friends told me are .

1. In built XGL features with no need for drivers and other requirements . The first thing balli showed me in his comp is XGL. So FC6 is surely going to rock .

2. Yum speed increased. Seems the whole yum in re written in C. Though i donn know whether this is true or not , but this will be a great feature if implemented . Currently yum in fully in python and it is a bit slow :-( .

3. Faster boot up . Seems they have made the readahead early process better. So this maybe the reason for faster boot.

Here is the techinical details of the new features of FC6 which i read in a article from fedorasite.

Installer improvements

Fedora Installer in Fedora Core 5 started using the Yum API, and now in this release we have an easy way to access Fedora Extras and connect to custom repositories--even during installation. This makes it much easier for users to access a larger base of useful software packages. Plus, system administrations can now heavily customize their deployments of Fedora using their own custom yum repository using Anaconda or kickstart. Anaconda now uses the Squashfs filesystem to compress and store more software in the images. It also supports IPV6-based networks better, and you can install from Firewire and USB storages devices. Fedora Core 6 is also the first mainstream distribution to add support for Intel-based Macintoshes

Performance boosts

If there is a single major "feature" in Fedora, it would be the extensive performance improvements that this release carries throughout the distribution. Fedora Core and Fedora Extras have been entirely rebuilt on a new glibc that takes advantage of precomputed hash values to boost the performance of dynamic linking very heavily. GNOME 2.16 has a number of performance improvements, including better login time, bonobo speedups, and faster rendering of non-Latin scripts and Cairo graphics. Plus, Nautilus and file chooser saw some improvements, and Evolution IMAP underwent some backend changes. KDE 3.5.4 has a number of new optimizations, as do system-level libraries such as the CUPS printing service and the fontconfig library.

Yum 3.0 increases the performance of the package manager drastically with a new metadata parser written in C. The codebase has gone through a major revamp with a large number of API changes to make yum a better foundation for building applications. These speed improvements reflect on Pirut and Pup, as well.

Desktop effects

Red Hat has been working on AIGLX through the Fedora Rendering Project, and while we did have it as an optional experimental repository for Fedora Core 5, it has now gone through a number of changes to provide easily enabled desktop effects in your Fedora Core 6 desktop. What have Fedora Core 6 development teams been up to? Here's a few of the things they accomplished:

Unveiled AIGLX as a community-oriented incremental approach to providing a framework for compositing desktops.
Merged AIGLX framework into Xorg. It is now available as part of Xorg 7.1 release and will be included in Fedora Core 6.
Xorg has an improved dynamic configuration mechanism and compositing extension is now enabled by default.
Changed the OpenGL-based compositing window manager Compiz. It will now work on top of AIGLX and has been tweaked to work better with Fedora.
Installation of Compiz by default in Fedora Core 6. You can enable it by clicking on the appropriate checkboxes in System=> Preferences => Desktop Effects. With capable hardware it will just work without having to configure anything or even logout of the system.

The results are pretty impressive. While some of these effects are pure eye-candy, others have a more practical value--providing a more physical and tangible feel over application windows and virtual desktops. Not to mention the fresh DNA-themed desktop background and the new, more welcoming Firefox browser splash page.

Here are some of the nice backgrounds for FC6. They are really great .

Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu !!!

2006-10-16T04:34:00.000-07:00

This HOW-TO covers up the whole process of installing Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Ubuntu box in a few simple steps. This method has been tested only on Ubuntu, but it should work on any other linux flavor.
-What you need?

* A fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper + all the updates
* A Windows box with a fully installed and activated version of Adobe Photoshop CS2

- Fire up a terminal session and type the next commands;

TIP: Instead of using apt-get, you can install them with the Synaptic Package Manager located in the System/Administration menu

1. $ apt-get update

2. $ apt-get install wine and then type “yes”

3. $ wine /*To create the wine file structure*/

4. $ apt-get install recode and then type “yes”

- Then you need to copy all the necessary files from the Windows box;
5. Copy the whole Adobe folder from “c:\Program Files\” to “/home/YOURNAME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/”

- Now you need to export the registry keys of the Adone Photoshop CS2;
6. In your Windows box, type “regedit” in the command-line and export the whole “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Adobe/” to “adobe.reg”, then copy it to your your Ubuntu, convert it to ascii with “$ recode ucs-2..ascii adobe.reg”. Afterwards, type “$ wine regedit adobe.reg” to run it with wine.

7. That’s it! Type “$ ./wine –winver winxp “[path to Photoshop]/photoshop.exe” or create a launcher and enjoy Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu ;)

Spider SMS up and running

2006-10-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

Hope the banner speaks the whole stuff. The spider sms is up and running .

When i started the work , thought the work will be easy and will be done in a two or three days but :-( so many seg faults ( though i have seen more seg faults in my ldtp work ) and handling mysql queries from C literally rapped me . :-( . The work took a long time more than i expected that i had to give the work to spider juniors also . Finally the work is done now . Hereafter we will have a few modifications here and there to make the system work better.

So how does the spider sms work . Hope the following explains everything

Well , now that spider sms server is working fine , ( with a few glitches here and there ) , one can access the time tables , his/her bunk scores and many other nice features using their mob ( for free of course ).

I am happy that i took up this work and finished it ( though is was manas's idea ) . Had a good experience working with juniors . Had to make sure that they are happy with the work they do , that the work is being done , that they get to learn new stuff and of course that they feel that the work is fun etc etc . This is the first work in spider done as a team . All other work are individual efforts . Working in a spider team is as usual FUN .

Now no need to run to the bit room ( next roomie ) to find out the first class. I can as well use spider for this job ;-).

Linux Users on the Rise :-)

2006-10-08T03:46:00.001-07:00

The graph shows the details clearly . :-) Hope i dont have to fight again with my frds saying linux is best .

Check this out ;)

2006-08-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

#define MAGIC "2acghilmoprs.@782C65173D5A1409B"
#define _(p,o,q) (t o#p[0])?(q)
#define __(p,o,q) _(p,o,t-q)
int main(){int t, i; for(i=17;i>0;i--)printf("%c", MAGIC[(((t=(MAGIC+14)[i-1])=='_')?62:_(.,==,63):_(@,==,64):__(a,>=,'a'+36):__(A,>=,'A'+10):(t-'0'))]);}

Meet GNU/Linux Week

2006-07-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Was pretty busy last week . Infact i was so busy that for the whole week that during this whole week i
1. Never called home .
2. Never entered ldtp channel .
3. Never did the work which made recording module wait for one week.
4. Never had a good sleep ( used to go to bed at around 2 .00 AM )

The reason is Meet GNU/Linux.

The response for the event is pretty good though a few people felt that we should have taken in a better manner . Few people wanted the course duration to be two weeks :O

Some of the feedback worth putting here are

the classes were awesome...

thu class good...
linux seems to be a really good OS...
wud surely like to use it in future too..

The class is too good,.....
i am afraid of PYTHON for last one year ...
i thought its some big language,.. but now i feel its too easy ,.......

u guys teach pretty well.. hats off to that..!

Well there was lots which said that the classes are good and i donn wann to paste everything here :P
Planned to organise one more week of the classes . No idea how i am going to manage that , that too with evening classes started :( .

Hoping to do better next week :)

My Final Demo

2006-07-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Well , this is something which i should have blogged the moment after we finished the demo to parag but that day i have been quite busy packing things , travelling from blore to chennai and then to trichy

The demo went fine , and all the details can be read from taggy's blog. I am not going to write how the demo went , rather what i felt during that time.

Well , as usual i came late that day at around 11 , and taggy told me that parag already came twice asking for a demo .
All i could think Oh My GOD, what a start !!! :P
Then we called parag for the demo and he asked us to show compose mail with an attachement. Of course taggy was showing the demo and i was explaning . I never knew i had a demo phobia but after the "WONDERFUL" first demo , certainly i realised that i am bad (in fact too bad ) in demos.

To make things worse , parag edited the python file and made the file attachement choose a different file . All i was thinking is about varadhan's warning about 200% ( he made a math mistake there , there is nothing like 200% :P) sure about the thing to work , threatened to throw us out of window if record did not work ( though he was not serious or was he? ) , and what not .

Somehow we recorded and had the script in front of us in the shell while discussing things with parag. I checked the script line by line and did a small playback in my mind. I was not able to do this and answer parag at the same time. Then parag asked us about the playback :O

Well it did take sometime for the log and and otherstuff , and since we had a time delay of 1 in our shell , things were a bit slow , it took some 5 seconds to open the compose box and i think i almost skipped my beat at that time :O. But the playback was perfect and parag mentioned that looked real neat :).

Then he asked us a few questions and gave us a few pointers to work upon :) . The same day we got a evolution jacket from parag and were working on improvements in the recording.

The old saying goes "All is well that ends well ". So a great demo , a nice jacket and above all , a working record script -- certainly i cannot ask for more :)

RECORD is WORKING :D

2006-06-29T00:52:00.000-07:00

Ask me one question
Will RECORD work perfectly ???
I will never say YES :)
The milestones in development of record are
=>Totally screwed up first demo .
=>Blasting review by varadhan after the first demo :( where we had no answer for any of his questions :(
=>Partial output in the next demo .

And finally there is one soul which says record is working fine and in fact mentioned that it is a great job :P

""" nags, sp2hari, taggy: till now, the record works very perfect! what a great job! """

I still think lavi is lying :)

We have no clue how it worked .
We were expecting a lot of feedback like this :P
1. Hey it gave a seg fault
2. My comp hanged , i had to reboot again
3. I had to kill at-spi-registry (varadhan wont accept this i suppose ) to stop recording
4. Hey i got a empty python file ,
and lots and lots

All the above things happened when we showed a demo to Dr. Harinath . Surely that might have been one of the worst demo in NOVELL history :P

But varadhan said a first demo is always likely to fail and asked us to make lots of changes within two days .

Second demo went fine with no major issues . except for the compose message :( .

We know where the bugs are in the current record script . Luckily lavi did not notice them now i think .
I am sure soon he will file a bug against the recording :) .

Ok hope this is enough for now . Have to get ready for the bugs :P. Got to check it in ubuntu :)
Here taggy is asking me how record worked fine ??? . He is pretty sure that it will fail and he is surprised to see the record work fine :P

about:mozilla

2006-04-11T15:05:00.001-07:00

Type about:mozilla in your url bar.

Your will see this

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Dont know why but i liked this one.It symbolises many things in life and it all depends how you interpret it :).

Now dont think i am talking about the funda about the life blah blah blah .......
I was just mentioning about how firefox has conquered ( yes it has ) IE .
IE is one of the worst products from windows . As such windows sucks but IE is worse :).

Tomm have sem pracs so will see later . Bye Bye