Hell Oh World!

I finally shelled out some money for web hosting and I already feel like I've wasted it. My web hosts seem to have outgoing connections blocked, due to which this journal feed is still not visible on the site.

I looked around and figured that I could do the RSS in JavaScript as well. Should have looked harder before I shelled out 2500 Rs :(

Yes, I can now work on ayttm at my workplace as well. I joined Red Hat last month :D

I had to replace gtk_tool_item_set_tooltips() function in various places since it is broken in the latest libgtk. Anyways, it has been deprecated since some time now, so no harm in that. The only big effect is that I had to bump up required gtk version to 2.12.

Anyways, once I get my bearings right at work, I should be able to contribute more regularly :)

Also, we need to push ayttm into Fedora.

A great event to go to if you want to know exactly how many and how much Indians are contributing to FOSS. Major contribution seems to be coming on the KDE and the Linux kernel front.

Workouts must have been great -- didn't get a chance (nor was I adequately prepared) to go to any of them since I was busy with my own little workout -- trying to get asynchronous connection going on ayttm. It's almost working now, except for SSL stuff. It has nothing to do with connection management really. It has something to do with threads, callbacks and the main loop. If you look into the implementation of eb_do_no_callback_dialog () and imagine it to be in a different thread than that in the main loop, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about. I hope I'll have it fixed before I leave for Mumbai on Monday.

Oh, and met Philip for the first time in person. We had an ayttm BoF session today, in which I struggled with the SSL stuff and Philip and Pradeep tried to get ayttm to compile on Pradeep's laptop.

I'm at FOSS.in right now, listening to Rahul Bhalerao and hacking at ayttm till my laptop charge lasts (which is another 40 minutes now... must learn to conserve better).

Right now I'm trying to do fully asynchronous connects for ayttm. Currently, DNS lookups are synchronous and will hang up whenever there's no network and no cached DNS. It's worse with proxy -- the whole thing is synchronous.

That's my new weapon, which I've finally got working amidst the usual Diwali fever; shuttling between Kharghar and Mira Road and generally trying to get my home in shape for our first Diwali. Anyways, on to the weapon in question:

• Processor: Intel Dual core 1.86 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB
• HDD: 160 GB
• Network: Ethernet, Wireless, Bluetooth
• Looks: Boxy, the kind most think looks ugly. Works for me though as long as it does what I want it to do.

The entire package cost only 29000 INR from Croma and I slapped on 999 INR for an HP PSC. A discount on being a Tata employee meant that the PSC was effectively free :)

Tried Mandriva, Fedora and then finally went back to Debian because I didn't want to waste time trying to stumble around another distro. Yes, I've been too long on Debian (6 years) and every other distro seems to me as being deficient in some way or the other. Mandriva is too much GUI; it's almost as if it doesn't care about anything else. Fedora is really good, but just not Debian. It puts too much into the default install and seemed to want to connect to the internet each time I search for package descriptions on the package manager. Anyways, my opinion in this case is probably slanted because I tried Fedora only for a couple of hours, enough to download a Debian Netinstall CD image ;)

It's been (and continues to be) an exhausting week at work. I've been away from home from 6:00 AM to around 11:00 PM everyday and been buried upto my my brow in production problems, UAT releases and the "Why the hell is this written like this". Yahoo, MSN File Transfer have taken a reluctant back seat.

Between all this I got a response (two actually) to my request to my employers to sponsor my trip to Bangalore for FOSS.in if I get a chance to talk on Ayttm. I had made the request two weeks ago and finally got an encouraging response. Turns out that we have an "Open Source Group" and their Head seemed to be all for it.

Now waiting for FOSS.in/2008 to open up registrations so that we can propose a Project Day for Ayttm.

This might sound strange but we have only recently, at my insistence started using pointers in our C++ code at work. The reason cited was that pointers are difficult for the average dev to understand. My experience in watching people struggling with them in the past few weeks led me to realize why this is so.

People look for "rules" when they are using pointers, like "if this is the case then use &" and "if that is the case then use *" instead of actually understanding how it would work.

It’s finally done.

There seem to be two ways to do file transfer in Yahoo, as I found out from wireshark today. One is by POSTing the entire stuff, the Yahoo File Transfer packet as well as the file to the file transfer server (Kopete does this) and the other by first sending a file transfer packet to the server and when the receiver accepts, send the file (Pidgin does this).

We do the former in Ayttm, but botch up the sending. As a result, our file sending is broken with both messengers whereas file receiving works with Kopete.

I've enjoyed ripping code apart and fixing things myself for the past couple of years, in my day job as well as while hacking on ayttm/antidialer. But now there's a new challenge that has been facing me at work for the past few weeks.

For the past weeks I've had to monitor and mentor programmers. Which means that I have to watch 'trained' Computer Engineers struggle with basic programming -- like refactoring code (renaming a variable, for the uninitiated) or even reading and trying to understand the code. Someone with just under 2 years of experience in my project doesn't know how the programs he/she writes is built. Ask him/her what compiler is used and they'll tell you the name of the wrapping build script. We intentionally slow down our code so that the dealers can get the satisfaction of defeating a computer in computations -- we call these speed breakers as coding standards.

We use VSS for SCM... no, that's not the worst. We don't even know how to use it. We create a new folder (a branch for us CVSers) for every new revision and then embark on an hour long 'configuration' activity which includes creating configuration files and copying our code on to another server which ultimately acts as our repository. Heh, when one checks out and checks in code, it is termed as malpractice ;)

In short, we have our own little brain-dead SCM on top of another SCM. Why? Well that's because someone told our boss that VSS corrupts itself after some 2-3 GB of data. So to keep things trim, we delete old versions of code (so much for configuration management eh) to ensure that code doesn't become corrupt. So why don't we use CVS/SVN/Git instead? Well it's because the team of computer engineers would find it difficult to use, as opposed to an hour long, error prone, and absolutely mundane configuration activity. Give me 'cvs commit' anytime.

Also, I've been wondering what would best describe the code that I have been working on for the past few years at work. Here's a try at it:

The code is not really difficult, just a lot of Hell-Oh-World-like snippets written in an illegible 'programming standard' to make it difficult to read (someone called it code security once) and then built together into completely unrelated modules so that adding another component would mean ripping ones arm off.

I think I've digressed...