/dev/random

Tamil and English books

2012-01-20T00:35:00.003+05:30

சமீபத்தில் இரண்டு நூல்கள் படித்து முடித்தேன். ஒன்று முப்பது வயதான ஒரு நகர நாகரீக மங்கையின் முதல் நூல், ஆங்கிலத்தில் எழுதியது. நகரத்தில் வாழும் ஒரு இளம் தம்பதியைப் பற்றியது. சுலபமான வார்த்தைகள், எளிய சொற்றொடர்கள், புத்தகம் முழுதும் மிக மெலிதாய் இழையோடும் நகைச்சுவை என்று சில நல்ல சேதிகள் நிறைந்திருந்தன. இரண்டாவது, அறுபது வயதுக்கும் மேலான ஒரு முதியவர் தமிழில் எழுதியது. எனக்கு நினைவு தெரிந்த நாளில் இருந்து இவர் கதைகள் எழுதி வருகிறார். எப்படியும் ஒரு ஆயிரம் கதைகள் எழுதி இருப்பார். சில திரைப்படங்களிலும் பணியாற்றி இருக்கிறார். செல்வராகவன், சங்கர் போன்ற பல பெரிய இயக்குனர்களின் திரைப்படங்களுக்கு உரையாடல் எழுதி இருக்கிறார்.

தமிழகத்தின் சிறுநகரங்களில் இருக்கும் வயதான பெண்கள் எப்படி நம் சன் டிவி நாடகங்களில் மாமியார்-மருமகள், உறவுகள் பற்றி பார்த்து பார்த்து மூளையை மழுங்கடித்துக் கொள்கிறார்களோ, அதைப் போல நகரத்தில் வாழும் பெண்களும், பணக்காரப் பெண்களும் (சில ஆண்களும்) ஆங்கில தொலைகாட்சித் தொடர்களுக்கு அடிமைகள். பிரெண்ட்ஸ் , ஹவ் ஐ மெட் யுவர் மதர் போன்றவை இவ்வாறு உணர்வுகளை அதிகப்படியாய் சித்தரிக்கும் தொடர்கள்.

என் மேற்கத்திய நண்பர் ஒருமுறை சொன்னார், "ப்ரேண்ட்சில் வரும் காட்சிகளை வைத்து இப்படித்தான் எங்கள் சமுதாயம் இருக்கும் என்று நினைத்துக் கொள்ளாதே, அது சூப்பர்மேன் படத்தைப் பார்த்து விட்டு அமெரிக்க ஆடவர்கள் உள்ளாடையை ஆடைக்கு வெளியேதான் அணிவார்கள் என்று நினைத்துக் கொள்வதைப் போல". நம்மூரில் இருக்கும் மேட்டுக்குடி பெண்கள் இந்த நாடகங்களை உண்மை என்று நம்பி பார்த்து விட்டு, தன் வாழ்வை இந்த மிகைப்படுத்தப் பட்ட மாயையால் கொஞ்சம் சீரழித்துக் கொள்கிறார்களோ என்று அவ்வப்போது நான் யோசிப்பேன்.

சரி, சொல்ல வந்த சேதிக்கு வருகிறேன். நான் குறிப்பிட்ட அந்த ஆங்கில நூல், மேலே சொன்ன தொலைகாட்சி தொடர்களின் பாதிப்பினால் எழுதப்பட்டது. நடிகர் விசய், தன்னுடைய எல்லா படங்களிலும் ஒரு குத்துப் பாட்டு வைப்பதைப் போல, இக்கால ஆங்கில எழுத்தாளர்கள் எல்லோரும் எப்பாடுபட்டாவது தங்கள் கதையில் ஐஐடியை செருகி விடுகின்றனர். இந்த கதையின் நாயகனும் அப்படி ஐஐடியில் படித்தவர்தான். அவரும் அவருடைய மனைவியும் பிரிய முயற்சிக்கின்றனர். ஆனால் இந்திய குடும்ப சூழ்நிலைகள் அவர்களை பிரிய விடுகின்றனவா என்பதுதான் கதை. இதை மிக நகைச்சுவையாக எழுதி இருக்கிறார். ஆனால் மிக மிகப் போலியான காட்சி அமைப்புகள், கொஞ்சம் கூட நடைமுறைக்கு சாத்தியமில்லாத பணக்காரத்தனம், ஆடம்பரம், வெளிநாடு பயணம் என்று கதை கொஞ்சம் தத்தளிக்கிறது. எழுத்தாளரின் லாவகமான நடைதான் இந்த நூலை பிழைக்க வைக்கும் ஒரே காரணம். 200 பக்கங்கள் கொண்ட இந்த நூல் 200 ரூபாய்க்கு விற்கிறது. முதல் பதிப்பில் வெளிவந்த அத்தனை பிரதிகளும் விற்றுத் தீர்ந்து மறுபதிப்பிற்கு சென்றிருக்கிறது.

இரண்டாவதாக நான் சொன்ன தமிழ் புத்தகம், இரு பெண்களின் போட்டி பற்றி ஆரம்பித்து, அதில் எப்படி ஒரு பெண் இன்னொரு பெண்ணின் மகளை அவளிடம் இருந்து களவாடி, சினிமாவில் இறக்குகிறார் என்றும், அந்த பெண் சினிமாவில் சேர்ந்த பின் என்ன செய்கிறார் என்றும் செல்கிறது. எத்தனையோ பாத்திரங்கள் வந்தாலும் அத்தனையும் மனத்தில் நிற்கின்றது, அழுத்தம் திருத்தமான கதை, அதிர வைக்கும் வசனங்கள், அத்தனை அழகாய் உலக வாழ்க்கையோடு தொடர்பு படுத்தி பார்க்க வைக்கும் கதையோட்டம். எழுதியவர் முதியவர் என்பதால் அத்துணை (சரியா சொக்கன் ஐயா ?) அனுபவப் பகிர்வுகள். இந்தக் கதையை படித்து முடித்தவுடன், ஒவ்வொரு கதாபாத்திரமும் ஏதோ நமக்கு தெரிந்த நபர் என்பது போல் பிரமை ஏற்படும் அளவு உன்னதமான எழுத்து நடை. இந்த நூல் இரண்டு பாகங்களாக வெளி வந்துள்ளது. ஒவ்வொரு பாகமும் சுமார் 150 பக்கங்கள். ஆனால் விலை வெறும் 20 ரூபாய் தான்.

ஆங்கிலத்தில் எழுதியது என்ற ஒரே காரணத்தினால், ஒரு அறிமுக எழுத்தாளரின் சுமாரான நூல் இத்தனை அதிக விலையில் விற்றாலும் மக்கள் வாங்குகிறார்கள். ஆனால் அத்துணை நல்ல எழுத்தாளரின் நூல், தமிழில் எழுதப்பட்டது என்ற ஒரே காரணத்தால் விற்க சிரமப்படுகிறது. அண்மையில் நண்பர் கண்ணபிரான் அவர்களை, நீங்கள் ஏன் உங்கள் திருப்புகழ் உரையை நூலாக வெளியிடக் கூடாது என்று கேட்டேன். அதற்கு அவர், பெரிய பெரிய தமிழ் எழுத்தாளர்களின் நூல்களே வெறும் சில நூறுகள் தான் விற்கின்றன, அதனால் வலைப்பதிவாகவே எழுதி விடுவது உத்தமம் என்றார்.

சேத்தன் பகத் போன்ற எழுத்தாளர்களால் உந்தப்பட்டு, மிகக் குப்பையான எழுத்தாளர்கள் பெருகி, நம் இலக்கியத் தரம் குறைந்து கொண்டே வருகிறதோ !? ஆங்கில மோகத்தில் சிக்குண்ட நாம், நாம் ஆதரவளிக்க வேண்டிய தமிழ் நூல்களையும், எழுத்தாளர்களையும் கண்டு கொள்ளாமல் இருக்கிறோமா !? கல்கி, சாண்டில்யன் என்று ஒரு தலைமுறையிலும், சுசாதா, இராஜேஷ்குமார், சுபா, பட்டுக்கோட்டை பிரபாகர், பாலகுமாரன் என்று அடுத்த தலைமுறையிலும் (இலக்கியவாதிகளை சேர்க்கவில்லை, பெரும்பான்மை மக்களை தமிழ் படிக்க வைக்கும் எழுத்தாளர்களைப் பற்றி மட்டும் பேசுகிறேன்) உருவான எழுத்தாளர்களைத் தாண்டி, அடுத்த தலைமுறையில் அனைவரையும் கவரும் வகையில் எழுதும் எழுத்தாளர் சமூகத்தையும், அதனினும், தமிழ் படிக்கும் வாசகர் சமூகத்தையும் இழந்து வருகிறோமா !?

மேலாண்மை II

2011-12-05T20:25:00.001+05:30

இது மேலாண்மை இரண்டாம் பாகம். மேலாண்மை முதல் பாகம் இங்கே . ஆனால் இரண்டுக்கும் எந்த தொடர்பும் இல்லை. தனித் தனியாவே படிக்கலாம்.

பதிவு
முன்பு வழக்கமாக சாப்பிட்டுக் கொண்டிருந்த கடையின் முதலாளியம்மாள், தினமும் சாம்பார் சட்னி விநியோகத்துக்கு வந்து, தன் கஞ்சத்தனத்தை காட்ட ஆரம்பித்து விட்டார். பக்கத்தில் உள்ள கடைகளின் அளவுக்கு விலையை (தரத்தையோ, அளவையோ அல்ல) ஏற்றி விட்டார். அத்தோடு என் நண்பனும் உடல் எடையை குறைக்க வேண்டும் அதனால் சப்பாத்தி சாப்பிட வேண்டும் என்று சொல்லிக் கொண்டிருந்தான். அதனால் அருகில் உள்ள வேறு ஒரு கடைக்கு, நானும் என் நண்பனும் செல்ல ஆரம்பித்தோம்.

"தையல் சொல் கேளாதே" என்பது ஆணாதிக்க கருத்து என்று நண்பர் சொக்கன் ஒரு நாள் ட்விட்டரில் சொல்லப் போக, நான் இந்த முதல் கடையின் கதையை கொஞ்சம் நீளமாக ட்வீட்டி இருந்தேன். அந்த கிளைக் கதை (பதிவுக்குள் பதிவு) கீழே.

பதிவுக்குள் பதிவு
நான் திருமணமாகாத கன்னிப் பையன் (இதுக்கு ஏதாவது தமிழ் வார்த்தை இருக்கா ? பெண்களுக்கு மங்கை, மடந்தை என்று இருப்பதைப் போல) என்பதால் தினமும் ஏதாவது ரோட்டோரக் கடையில் தான் சாப்பிட்டு வருகிறேன். இந்த கடைகளில் பெரும்பாலும் கணவன் மனைவி இருவரும் சேர்ந்து தான் வேலை செய்வார்கள். எல்லா கடைகளிலும், என்றெல்லாம் பெண்கள் கல்லாவை கவனித்துக் கொள்கிறார்களோ, அவர்கள் தான் பரிமாறுவதையும் பார்த்துக் கொள்வார்கள். எல்லா கடைகளிலும் நான் கவனித்த சேதி, பெண்கள் நிரொம்ப கருமித்தனமாய், கொஞ்சூண்டு சாம்பார் மட்டுமே ஊற்றுவார்கள். சட்னி வேணுமா என்று கேட்பார்கள், அவர்களாக வைக்க மாட்டார்கள். எப்போதுமே கொஞ்சம் குறைவாகவே சமைப்பதால் அவர்களுக்கு மீந்து போவதும் கிடையாது. ஆனால் எப்படியாவது நிறைய பேருக்கு விற்பனை செய்து நிறைய சம்பாதிக்க வேண்டும் என்ற ஆர்வம், அவர்கள் செய்கையில் தெரியும். நாம் இன்னும் கொஞ்சம் சாம்பார் போடுங்க என்று கேட்டால், ஏதோ பேருக்கு கரண்டியிலிருந்து ஓரிரு சொட்டு மட்டும் போடுவார்கள். ஆண்கள் பரிமாறும் போது, போதுமான அளவு பரிமாறுவார்கள். அதே போல பெண்கள் சமைக்கும் போது (அதே கடைகளில்), அளவை வேண்டுமென்றே குறைவாக செய்வார்கள். உதாரணத்துக்கு, பூரி செய்கிறார்கள் என்றால் சிறிய அளவு மாவை கிள்ளி, மிக மெல்லியதாக தேய்ப்பார்கள். லாப்டாப்போடு நிற்கும் நான் சாப்பிட்ட உணவுகளுக்கு நானே கணக்குப் போட்டு, இவ்வளவு விலை என்று கூறி பணத்தைக் கொடுத்தால், ஆண்கள் சரி என்று வாங்கிக் கொள்வார்கள். ஆனால் பெண்களோ என்னை வாரம் முழுக்கப் பார்த்தாலும் ஒவ்வொரு ஐட்டமாகக் கேட்டு அவர்களே கணக்கு போடுவார்கள். "யாரையும் நம்பாமை, முடிந்தவரை எல்லா காசையும் தானே வைத்துக் கொள்வது, நிறைய சம்பாதிக்க நினைப்பது, தொலைநோக்குப் பார்வை இன்றி குறுகிய கால இலாப மனப்பான்மையோடு செயல்படுவது" என்று பெண்களிடம் பல குணங்களை இந்த ரோட்டோர உணவகங்களில் காணலாம். ஏதோ ஒரே ஒரு கடையில் பார்த்து விட்டு இதை நான் சொல்லவில்லை. பல கடைகளில் இவற்றை நான் கவனித்திருக்கிறேன். தன்னுடைய குடும்பத்தை காப்பாற்ற வேண்டும் என்ற தீவிர உந்துதலில் அவர்கள் இதைப் போல எமோஷனலாக நிறைய செய்வார்கள். அதனால் "தையல் சொல் கேளாதே" என்பது பல நேரங்களில் பொருத்தமானது என்பது என் தாழ்மையான கருத்து. ஆனால் எல்லா பெண்களுக்கும் இது பொருந்தாது. பெண்கள் கல்வி பெற்று விட்ட இந்த காலத்தில் இது பெருமளவு முன்னேறி விட்டது. "ட்விட்டரில் இருக்கும் எந்த பெண் பேச்சையும் கேள்" என்று நாம் புதுமொழியே வைக்கலாம் :-)

உள்கதை முடிந்தது. இப்போது வெளிப் பதிவுக்கு வருவோம்.

பதிவு தொடர்ச்சி

இப்போது புதிதாக சாப்பிடத் தொடங்கி இருக்கும் கடையில் எப்போதும் கலகலப்பாக பேசும் புரோட்டா மாஸ்டர் ஒருவர் இருப்பார். இன்று சாப்பிட சென்ற போது, முதலாளி நின்று தோசை போட்டுக் கொண்டிருந்தார். மாஸ்டரைக் காணவில்லை. எனக்கு இரண்டு சப்பாத்தி சொல்லி சாப்பிட்டுக் கொண்டிருக்கும் போது, இன்னும் இரு ரெகுலர் வாடிக்கையாளர்கள் வந்து புரோட்டா இருக்கிறதா என்று வினவினர். "மாஸ்டர் வரலை, எனக்கும் வயசாயிடுச்சு அதனால புரோட்டா போடலை" என்று அந்த முதலாளி கூறினார்.

தோசைக்கல் பக்கத்தில் இருந்த சட்டியில் ஒரு ஏழெட்டு புரோட்டாக்கள் இருந்தன. "அதுதான் கொஞ்சம் இருக்கே, ஏன் இல்லைன்னு சொன்னீங்க ?" என்று அவர்கள் போன பிறகு முதலாளியிடம் கேட்டேன். அதற்கு அவர், "இவுங்க ரெகுலர் கஸ்டமருங்க. அது மதியம் போட்ட புரோட்டா. இதை சூடாக்கி கொடுத்து அவுங்களுக்கு ஏதாவது பிரச்சினை வந்துட்டா கடைக்கு வரமாட்டாங்க. ரெகுலர் கஸ்டமர்களிடம் சில்லறை லாபம் பாக்க நெனைக்கக் கூடாது. அதான் தரலை. அவுங்க திருப்திதான் நமக்கு முக்கியம்" என்றார்.

மத்தியானம் வந்த மாஸ்டர் என்ன திடிர்னு சாயந்தரத்துக்குள்ள கெளம்பிட்டாரு என்று விசாரித்தேன். அதுக்கு அவர், "எங்க! நேத்து ராத்திரி ஐநூறு ருபாய் சம்பளம் வாங்கினான். உடனே கையோட இதோ பக்கத்துல இருக்க சாராயக் கடையில இருநூறு ரூவாக்கு சரக்கு வாங்கினான். இன்னைக்கு மதியம் இந்த இந்திக்காரன் (இன்னொரு வேலையாள், தட்டு கழுவும் வடகிழக்கு இந்திய இளைஞன்) கிட்ட இருநூறு ரூபா கடன் வாங்க வந்தான். நான் கொஞ்சம் பேசி புரோட்டா போடச் சொன்னேன். சரின்னு மத்தியானம் வேலை செஞ்சுட்டு, இருநூறு ருபாய் வாங்கிட்டு கெளம்பிட்டான். இனிமே நாளைக்குதான் வருவான். எப்ப பாத்தாலும் குடி. இந்த மாச்டருங்க எல்லாத்துக்கும் குடி ஒரு சாபம். அந்த காலத்துல, நான் 1960 ல பெங்களூருக்கு வந்தேன். [கேயார்] மார்கெட்டில வெங்காயம் வாங்கிட்டு அங்கேயிருந்து வண்டியை திப்பஸந்திரா மார்க்கெட் வரைக்கும் தள்ளிகிட்டே வருவேன். ரிங் ரோடு கூட அப்போ கிடையாது. வந்து வெங்காயம் வித்துட்டு ராத்திரி வண்டியிலேயே படுத்து தூங்கிடுவேன். வெங்காயம் போடுற சாக்கு தான் போர்வை. இங்க முத முதல்ல ஓட்டல் திறந்தவுடனே இந்த அலையுற வேலை வேண்டாம்னு சர்வரா சேர்ந்தேன். அங்கதான் சமையல் கத்துகிட்டேன். மாச சம்பளம் பதினாலு ரூபா தான். ஆனால் ஓட்டல் சாப்பாடு இருக்கறதுனால வேற எந்த செலவும் இல்லை. வெளியிலதான் படுத்து தூங்கினேன். கொஞ்சம் கொஞ்சமா காசு செத்து இன்னைக்கு பெங்களூர்ல வீடு வெச்சிருக்கேன். ரெண்டு பசங்களையும் ஒரு பெண்ணையும், மினிஸ்டர் பசங்க படிக்கிற காலேஜில படிக்க வெச்சேன். (கார்மெல் ) இந்த காலத்து மாச்டருங்களுக்கு பொறுப்பே இல்லை. கால காலத்தில் கல்யாணம் பண்ணி இருந்தா இப்படி எல்லாம் ஊதாரித்தனமா குடிச்சிட்டு ஊர் சுத்தாதுங்க." என்றார்.

நீங்கள் வேலை செய்த காலத்தில் விஜய் மல்லையா மலிவா சாராயம் வித்துருக்க மாட்டார் என மனதுக்குள் நினைத்துக் கொண்டேன். அவர் சொன்னதில் கொஞ்சம் நியாயம் இருக்கிறது. ஆனால் முன்தினம் மாஸ்டரிடம் பேசிக் கொண்டிருந்தபோது, "தினம் அடுப்பு முன்னால நிக்குறதுனால உடம்பு சூடாயிடுது, தண்ணி போடாம தூங்க முடியல" என்று அவர் சொன்னது நினைவுக்கு வந்தது. மாஸ்டர்கள் எல்லாம் குடிகாரகள் ஆயிட்டாங்க என்று அந்த முதலாளி சொன்னது உண்மையாய் இருந்தாலும், அதுக்கு பின்னால எத்தனையோ காரணங்கள் இருக்கின்றன.

பதிவு முடிஞ்சு போச்சு. உங்களுக்கு என்ன மேலாண்மை பாடங்கள் தோணுதோ எடுத்துக்கோங்க. இந்த மாதிரி பிரச்சினைகளை நீக்க ஏதாவது வழி தெரிஞ்சா சொல்லுங்க. சற்றே நீளமான மொக்கை பதிவுக்கு மன்னிக்கவும். இதுவரை பொறுமையா படிச்சிருந்தா உங்களுக்கு ஒரு பாராட்டு :-)

Smartphones - Acquired Necessity

2011-11-10T16:50:00.001+05:30

Smartphones - An acquired necessity

I have used a Motorola E398 mobile phone for the last 6 years. For the last one month, I tried using a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. I have concluded that Smartphones are an acquired necessity and is not needed for most of my workflows. I will not buy a smartphone in the near foreseeable future.

Smartphones gives an impeccable improvement for one workflow - Email. If your work involves time-sensitive emailing, a smartphone is a crucial tool. However, if it doesn't, then you are better off buying a good desktop/laptop and a normal mobile phone, imho. A shortlog of things observed in this one month are:

Observations:

Vibration: Smartphones are too thin and don't have enough vibration, if you are used to thick phones (Not a big problem)
Poor signal reception: A biiiig problem. In the quest to slim the phone, the signal reception abilities of the phone are heavily hampered. While we were travelling in a car (from Bangalore to Chennai), A cheap Samsung GURU E1081 consistently beat Galaxy S2 in terms of signal strength. Most of the times the Galaxy S2 was showing "Emergency calls only" only. May be a phone from a real phone-maker like Motorola/Nokia may not have this problem. We had to keep the phone upright near the car window too.
Typing: Even with the on-screen-keyboard, swype etc. the phone is totally unsuitable for typing long text. We can do only twitter/facebook updates and not do any serious document editing or long blogpost(s). The requirement for Siri (Voice Control) is just a natural demand. I wonder how the folks at Google missed this big requirement. They should have introduced this with a big bang and not play catch-up to Siri. Probably they missed it as they were busy tomato-saucing Google+ to all their applications ;-)
Screen Estate: The screen size is totally unsuitable for reading books, blogs. It is okay for occasional blog reading, but it is straining. There are people who read blogs using their phone primarily. But I am spoiled by my employer who gave me an iPad, a Samsung GalaxyTab and a Thinkpad to play with, for some mobile related coding. I did not prefer the smartphone even once when I had my good old Thinkpad. Tablets and laptops provide far better reading experience and are equally handy. The GalaxyTab can act as a phone too for all your needs.
Fragile: Smartphones need extreme care. Not ideal for rough use, unless you are using a rugged phone like Motorola Defy+ (which has its own set of problems). A friend once dropped a Google phone from his hands while taking from pant pocket (~3 Feet) and the glass shattered into pieces. I have thrown my E398 numerous times (atleast few dozen times from ~5.6 feet) and nothing has happened except an automatic restart.
A Patentable Idea: The unlock pattern (of Android) leaves fingerprints and so your phone is not really secure. If you look at the phone, by keeping the screen flat in front of your nose, you can easily detect the unlock pattern finger prints. This may be fixed soon with the advent of touchscreens that do not leave a finger print. I wonder why can't we just authenticate based on the fingerprint in a smartphone !? That may be cool. I should probably patent it, as it seems in mobile phones any stupid thing can be patented. Think: SYSTEM and METHOD for RECORDING and AUTHENTICATION of users to mobile phones via fingerprints, by letting them swipe on either the surface/camera/etc.
Battery Life: Even after switching off the wireless, due to the rich display, the battery life of all the smartphones is very less. My phone battery did not last more than 3 days. With wireless on and just GMail app running, the battery lasted for just about 1 day. Some of the non-smart phones these days have close to 2 weeks battery life. If battery life is your criteria or travel a lot, you must order a extra battery if you are buying a smartphone.
Muscle Memory: After laying in my bed for sleep, many times, I have taken my motorola phone, unlocked it, launch the alarm application, set alarm for a specific time, exited the application, locked the phone again. I do all this while keeping my eyes closed. The normal phones with keypad are easily operable in one hand. I can take a call in one hand, while the other hand is balancing my body in a bus moving through the high-traffic streets of India. Contrary to what you hear, smartphones require both hands to be used and is not so easily adaptive for muscle memory. For a basic operation like calling a recently called number, you will take more time in a smartphone than a phone with a dedicated CALL button.
COST: The single biggest reason why I won't buy a smartphone is Cost. Smartphones from any decent hardware maker are very costly. Personally, with my Indian mentality that takes pride in being cheap, I find it stupid to spend 30,000 INR (600 USD) on a phone which will be valued at 1,000 INR (20 USD) after may be 3 years. This inference is based on the Motorola Razor handset pricing in India. Compare this to a new Samsung GURU phone with color-display, USB charging capacity etc. that costs a mere 1000 INR (20 USD) and has battery life of about 1 week with normal usage. However, there is a big demand for cheap smartphones in markets like India. If and when Nokia releases their cheap smartphones in India, they are sure to repeat their success story in India, just like they did with their Torchlight series phones.

Samsung-specific-observations:

The default alarm application does not have snooze option. There is no excuse for this.
Samsung Kies - Ahem :/
Also, it is not available on Linux. Good news is that with the recent versions, the software update can be done within the phone itself without Kies.
The indic support patch is not upstreamed yet. But kudos to Samsung as they are the only Android handset makers who support Indic fonts native as of today, afaik. A few of my Tamil friends bought Samsung phones just for this reason.
OLED - Amazingly rich screen, especially while displaying black color.
The front camera in S2 is just a joke. Totally useless for my needs.

Android:

"Android" brand has a better image than "Linux" in the consumer market. It is not without reasons. There are a lot of positive things about Android. I have not mentioned any of them because you can find them easily.
However, To be honest, the usability of Android phones is *not* jaw-droppingly-awesome, imho. They are just as normal (good ?) as say Meego UI or GNOME 3. But consumers love them. If enough money is spent on marketing, pigs really can fly. I wish some of the earlier projects like openmoko/maemo/meego had rich companies that were as committed as Google is to Android.
I hope ChromeOS opens a door for Linux on Desktops, just as how Android made Linux the most dominant operating system on mobiles. That may help PC OEM vendors to think a little instead of their current act of blindly worshipping Microsoft.
The biggest positive impact of Android imho is: Android made companies which usually don't bother about Linux users (like Evernote) to write applications for Linux.

Conclusion:

I will happily use my Motorola E398 until it lasts and then will buy a normal non-smart mobile phone when it no longer can run. Even though I may take up a job with a mobile phone company, I don't think I will buy a smartphone for my needs.

Telepathic Flirt With Chromium

2011-10-04T11:54:00.000+05:30

Hackweek is an event in SUSE where developers can work on any pet project for a week (like Google's 20%) This year's edition happened last week in SUSE. Since I am part of the openSUSE community, I too participated in the spirit of this event in my night time. The project is codenamed Arattai.

I tried to bring a prototype to provide IM/Chat support built-in to the Chromium browser. Watch the screencast below. Please click here in case you do not see the embedded video. Please see the video in full screen HD.

Under the Hood

I have used Telepathy as the underlying library for implementing the basic chat support.
The source code is mostly a prototype which will have to go through a rigorous design review and improved upon if you need to use it in a production machine. This is mostly to satisfy a personal itch and not of good quality yet.
The patches are attached in the Chromium bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98990
I chose Telepathy because it seem to provide the best implementation for XMPP 0174 protocol, Serverless Messaging, which was my primary aim. Also it is agreed upon by both GNOME and KDE. Isn't it something rare ;-) ?
The heart of the code is only about 5 days old and is not of good quality yet.
telepathy-glib has a C interface. Chromium is written using C++ . So, I wrote a TelepathyBridge class with static members to marshal the requests from Chromium to Telepathy and vice-versa. I wrote a TelepathyBean class to move across these layers. Also, there were ArattaiUI and ArattaiHandler classes to take care of the Chromium side of things (like registering a protocol, webui etc.) The user-interface you have seen is provided by the arattai.html and arattai.js files.
I believe having IM support may be important for Chromium as IM is one of the important activities that could not be performed yet on the browser.
There are things like webRTC which will form the future of communication. However, we still have dozens of protocols that work with existing clients which the browser should support (like support for Novell Groupwise, MSN, Office Communicator etc.)

Observations

My personal opinion that, C++ is a needlessly complex language, strengthened. There are a dozen ways to do casting, smart pointers, const functions etc. but no native async/event support. I love C# as a programming language. Sadly C# does not seem to have an appealing future on Linux anymore.
The guy who invented Javascript should have been a C++ programmer.
Javascript typing can get on a C programmer's nerves
Telepathy hackers in #telepathy are extremely helpful. Thanks a lot folks.
Open source libraries in general have very poor documentation, if not backed by a company like Google.
If Telepathy support has to be included into Chromium, it should be available in Windows too.
Automatic memory management is bliss.

Please share your opinions/thoughts about this feature either in the comments or by mail. Thanks.

Google +

2011-09-21T01:42:00.000+05:30

Randall Munroe is a hero of mine. Inspired by him, I tried my hands at drawing a cartoon and made one on Google Plus. However, it turned out to be a bad experiment. Yet in a mood to celebrate failures, I decided to share it. The images are hand-drawn by me and powered by Gimp and LibreOffice.

Please click on the image(s) to see them in high resolution.

மேலாண்மை

2011-09-19T01:18:00.000+05:30

இன்று ஒரு ஞாயிற்றுக் கிழமை இரவு. நேரம் ஏழரையை (கடிகார நேரத்தைச் சொன்னேன்) கொஞ்சம் தாண்டி நகர்ந்து கொண்டிருந்தது. பெங்களுருக்கே உரிய மிதமான ஆனால் நடுங்க வைக்காத குளிர் கொஞ்சிக் கொண்டிருந்தது. படுக்கையில் புரண்டு கொண்டிருந்த என்னை தூரத்தில் இருந்து வந்த பட்டாசுச் சத்தமும், மேள ஒலியும் தொந்தரவு செய்து எழ வைத்தன.

திப்பஸந்திரா மார்க்கெட்டில் இன்று பிள்ளையார் சதுர்த்தி சிலைகளை கரைக்க எடுத்துச் செல்லும் நாள். அதுதான் இந்த ஆர்ப்பாட்டங்களுக்கும், சத்தங்களுக்கும் காரணம். "என்னடா, ஞாயிற்றுக்கிழமை கூட நிம்மதியா இருக்க விடமாட்டேங்குறாங்க! வாரம் முழுக்க வேலைக்குப் போய், உதவாக்கரை மேலாளர்களுக்கு, 'நானும் வேலை செய்யுறேன்' அப்படின்னு நம்ப வைப்பதிலேயே பொழுது போயிடுது. ஒரு நாள் நிம்மதியா படுத்திருக்க கூட விட மாட்டேங்குறானுங்க" என்று சலித்துக் கொண்டே, பக்கத்திலிருந்த மடிக்கணினியை நெஞ்சு மேல் வைத்துக் கொண்டு ட்விட்டரை நோட்டம் விட்டேன்.

டிவிட்டரிலும் சில பெங்களூர் நண்பர்கள் என்னைப் போலவே சலித்துக் கொண்டிருந்தனர். என் பள்ளி நாட்களில், என் சொந்த ஊரில், கூம்பு வடிவ ஒலிபெருக்கி கட்டி, "செல்லாத்தா செல்ல மாரியாத்தா " என்று ஆடிமாசம் முழுக்க பாட்டு போடுவார்கள். ஒரு சிலருக்கு எல். ஆர். ஈஸ்வரி மேல கோபம் வரும் அளவிற்கு சத்தம் வைத்திருப்பார்கள். பள்ளி செல்லும் சிறுவனாக இருந்ததாலும், சொந்தமாக சம்பதிக்காததாலும் அப்போதெல்லாம் சகிப்புத் தன்மை அதிகம் இருந்தது. ஒலிபெருக்கிகாக யாரையும் திட்டத் தோன்றவில்லை அப்போது. வேலைக்கு சேர்ந்ததிலிருந்து சகிப்புத்தன்மை கொஞ்சம் கொஞ்சமாய் குறைந்து விட்டது. இறை நம்பிக்கை கூட அப்படித்தான். கொஞ்சம் கொஞ்சமாய் குறைந்து இல்லாமலே போய் விட்டது. பள்ளிக்கூட பாடத்திட்டங்களில் "இறை மறுப்பு" பற்றி வைத்தால்தான் இந்த ஊர் திருந்தும் என்று திட்டிக் கொண்டே எழுந்து சாப்பிடக் கிளம்பினேன்.

பிள்ளையார் சிலைகளை இழுத்துச் செல்லும் ட்ராக்டர்கள் சாலைகளில் ஊர்ந்து கொண்டிருந்தன. எங்கள் பகுதியில் மூன்று சிலைகளை எடுத்து செல்வதாக ஏற்பாடு. சிலை என்று அவைகளை சொல்வது அத்தனை பொருத்தமில்லை. ஒவ்வொரு சிலையும் அட்டையால் செய்யப்பட பொம்மை. ஒவ்வொன்றும் சுமார் இருபதடி உயரம் இருக்கும். சாலையோரம் வளர்ந்து, சாலை அகலப்படுத்தும் பணிகளில் தப்பிப் பிழைத்த ஒரு சில மரங்களின் கிளைகள் பிள்ளையார் சிலைகளை இடித்து ஊர்வலத்தை ஊர்ந்து போகச் செய்து கொண்டிருந்தன. பின்னால், நீண்ட தூரத்திற்கு நான்கு சக்கர வாகனங்கள் போக்குவரத்து நெரிசலில் சிக்கி இருந்தன. "ஊருக்கு ஒரு பெரியார் வரணுமடா உங்களுக்கெல்லாம்", என்று மனதுக்குள் நினைத்துக் கொண்டே உணவகத்துக்குள் நுழைந்தேன்.

ஒரு ஐந்து நிமிடம் போல் சாப்பிட்டு விட்டு வெளியே வந்து பார்த்தால் ஊர்வலம் வெறும் பத்தடி போல்தான் நகர்ந்திருந்தது. வீட்டிற்கு உடனே போய் சாதிக்க ஏதும் இல்லாததால், தமிழர் வழக்கப்படி ஞே என்று பராக்கு பார்த்துக்கொண்டு நின்றேன் ஒரு ஓரமாக. நடைபாதை வியாபாரிகள் தங்களால் முடிந்த காசைக் கொடுத்து பிள்ளையாரை வேண்டிக் கொண்டார்கள். நிலநடுக்கம், குண்டுவெடிப்பு, போர்கள் என்று நாடே சிரமப்படுதே, இன்னுமா இந்த ஊர் கடவுளை நம்பிக்கிட்டிருக்கு என்று எனக்குள் இருக்கும் பகுத்தறிவாளன் சலித்துக் கொண்டான் , எப்போதும் போல.

வீட்டுக்குள் இருக்கும்போது தொந்தரவாய் தெரிந்த மேள சத்தம் இப்போது கொஞ்சம் இரசிக்கும்படி இருந்தது. கடவுளை கவனிப்பதை விட்டு மனிதர்களை கவனிக்கச் சென்றேன், மேளம் அடிக்கும் மனிதர்களை. இருபது-முப்பது வயது ஆண்கள் சுமார் பத்து பேர் கூடி நின்று ஆளுக்கொரு மேளத்தை அடித்துக் கொண்டிருந்தனர். அந்த கும்பலில் சற்றே வித்தியாசமாக, கிட்டத்தட்ட எழுபது வயது பெரியவர் ஒருவரும் மேளமடித்துக் கொண்டும் நடனம் ஆடிக் கொண்டும் இருந்தார். அவரை பேருந்தில் பார்த்திருந்தால், இருக்கையிலிருந்து எழுந்து உட்கார இடம் கொடுத்திருப்பேன், அத்தனை முதியவரை இருந்தார்.

இசையும் அந்த முதியவரும் என்னை ஈர்த்து விட்டதால் கொஞ்ச நேரம் அந்த ஊர்வலத்தின் அருகிலேயே நடந்து சென்றேன். அந்த முதியவரின் கையில் மிக மெல்லிய குச்சி ஒன்றும் ஒரு எடை குறைவான தப்பு ஒன்றும் இருந்தது. அந்த வயதுக்குரிய தளர்ச்சியோ சோர்வோ இன்றி அதீத சுறுசுறுப்புடன் ஆடிக் கொண்டிருந்தார். தன் கூட ஆடும் வாத்தியக்காரர்களை பார்த்து கழுத்தை ஆட்டிக் கொண்டே தாளத்தை அனுபவித்தார். பரதநாட்டிய கலைஞர் போல அவ்வப்போது விழிகளை விரித்து முகபாவம் எல்லாம் காட்டினார். தான் மட்டும் ஆடாமல் சாலை ஓரம் நின்று வேடிக்கை பார்த்த பாமரச் சிறுவர்களையும் தன் ஆட்டத்தில் சேர்த்துக் கொண்டார். தன்னுடைய பட்டாபட்டியில் இருந்து ஒரு வாழைப்பழத்தை எடுத்து அந்த சிறுவர்களுக்கு பகிர்ந்தளித்தார். அப்படியே கொஞ்சம் கடலை, பட்டாணி என்றெல்லாம் விநியோகம் செய்து கொண்டே நடனம் ஆடினார்.

அவருடைய உற்சாகத்தை பார்த்த போது, தண்ணி போட்டு வந்திருப்பாரோ என்று நினைத்தேன். ஆனால் நடை பிறழாமல் அவர் ஆடிய நேர்த்தியை பார்த்த போது அப்படி இருக்காது என்றே தோன்றியது. பக்கத்திலிருந்த ஜெயஸ்டீ பாரில் இருந்து சில குடிமகன்களும் ஆட்டத்தில் சேர்ந்து கொண்டனர். அவர்கள் ஆட்டம் நம் தாத்தா தண்ணி போட்டிருக்க மாட்டார் என்று நம்ப வைத்தது. சமீபத்தில் திருமணம் நிச்சயமான ஒரு நண்பனின் முகத்தில், தொலைபேசி மணி ஒலிக்கும் போதெல்லாம் வரும் மகிழ்ச்சியை இந்த தாத்தாவின் முகத்திலும் காண முடிந்தது. என் நண்பன் தொலைபெசுவதில் காட்டும் ஆர்வம் உலகப் புகழ் பெற்றது. இந்த தாத்தா தன் தொழிலை அந்த அளவிற்கு நேசிக்கிறாரோ என்று வியக்க வைத்தது அவருடைய முதுமையிலும் தெரியும் முகப்பொலிவு.

காலில் செருப்பு கூட இல்லாமல் அவர் ஆடுவதை கவனித்த நான், அப்போதுதான் அங்கு ஆடும் யாருமே காலில் எதுவும் அணியவில்லை என்பதை கண்டுபிடித்தேன். ஆடுவதற்கு சிரமமாய் இருக்கும் என்று கழற்றி விட்டார்களோ இல்லை சாமி முன்னால் செருப்பு போடக் கூடாது என்று கழற்றி விட்டார்களோ தெரியவில்லை. ஆனால் அத்தனை மோசமான சாலையில் ஆடும் போதும் ஒவ்வொரு முகத்திலும் தாத்தாவை பார்த்து பார்த்து பெருமிதம் அதிகமாகி ஆடிக் கொண்டே இருந்தனர். பின்னல் வரப்போகும் கூலிக்காக மட்டும் அவர்கள் ஆடவில்லை என்பது அவர்களின் ஈடுபாட்டில் தெளிவாகப் புரிந்தது. சுமார் இருபது நிமிடங்கள் அவர்களுடன் நடந்த பிறகு வீட்டிற்கு திரும்ப முடிவெடுத்தேன். அவர்கள் களைப்படைவதைப் போல் தெரியவே இல்லை. அந்த தாத்தாவின் உடற்தகுதி என் வகுப்பு தோழர் எவரையும் விட அதிகம் இருக்கும் என நினைத்துக் கொண்டே வீடு நோக்கி நகர்ந்தேன்.

என்னுடைய மேலாளர், சென்ற வாரம் நடந்த எங்கள் குழு கூட்டத்தில் (டீம் மீட்டிங் ), "நீங்கள் வேலையை பார்த்துக் கொள்ளுங்கள், நான் உங்கள் ஊதிய உயர்வை பார்த்துக் கொள்கிறேன்" என்று அளந்து விட்டுக் கொண்டிருந்தார். சம்பளப் பற்றாக்குறையின் காரணமாகவும், வெளியிலிருந்து ஆட்களை உயர் சம்பளத்துக்கு எடுத்து விட்டு உள்ளே இருப்பவர்களுக்கு பட்டை நாமம் சாத்தியதால் கடுப்பில் இருந்த ஊழியர்களுக்கு அவருடைய பேச்சு ஒரு உத்வேகத்தையும் அளிக்கவில்லை.

கல்வியறிவில்லாத ஒரு நபர் தன்னுடைய வேலையை உத்வேகத்துடன் செய்வதை கண்டால், காண்போருக்கும் தங்களுடைய வேலையை அவரைப் போலவே பொறுப்புடன் செய்ய தோன்றுகிறது. ஆனால் மேலாண்மை, உளவியல் இதிலெல்லாம் வெள்ளைக்கார எழுத்தாளர்கள் எழுதிய புத்தகங்களை படித்து விட்டு, அதைப் பேசி தொழில் ஆர்வத்தை கூட்ட ஒரு மேலாளர் முயன்றால் அது முடிவதில்லை. ஆயிரம் அறிவுரைகள் தராத தூண்டுகோலை ஒரு "செயல்" செய்துவிடும் என்பதை இது எனக்கு விளக்கியது.

சுற்றி இருப்போரை தூண்டுவது, தன் தொழிலை நேசிப்பது, சரியான கருவிகளை உபயோகிப்பது, பாராட்ட வேண்டியவர்களை பாராட்டுவது என ஒரு மேலாண்மை படித்தவர் செய்ய வேண்டிய அத்தனையும் அந்த தாத்தா செய்ததும், அவர் முகபாவத்தை கூட-ஆடியவர்களும் இதர கலைஞர்களும் கூர்ந்து கவனித்ததும், தன் ஆடல் மூலம் பதிலிறுத்ததும்,

விரைந்து தொழில் கேட்கும் ஞாலம் நிரந்தினிது
சொல்லுதல் வல்லாற் பெறின்

என்ற வள்ளுவரின் குறளை நிரூபித்தது. இந்த குறளில் "வல்லாற்" என்ற சொல்லை மட்டும் பலர் மறந்து விடுகின்றனர். நமக்கு தேவையான தூண்டுதல்கள் / முன்மாதிரிகள் எல்லாம் நம் கண் முன்னே சாதாரண மனிதர்களாகவே இருக்கின்றனர். இதை எல்லாம் விட்டு விட்டு நாம் பல இலட்சம் செலவு செய்து மேலாண்மை பட்டம் வாங்கி, மேலாளராக வேண்டும் என காலத்தையும் பொருளையும் வீணடித்துக் கொண்டிருக்கிறோம்.

இப்போது அந்த தாத்தா தந்த உத்வேகத்தில் கொஞ்சம் வேலை பார்க்க போறேன். அப்ப நீங்க ?

Introducing Find Many Strings - A chrome extension

2011-08-20T00:00:00.000+05:30

Of late, I have been reading a lot of code via browser. Sometimes, when evaluating a patch or when reading through open source project sources, I find it very hard to track how variables move across functions/loops.

If I am using VIM, I can happily use CTAGS for this. Chrome highlights all the occurrences of the text that you searched for in yellow color. However when you search for another string, the old highlights disappear. It would have been nicer if any new string search starts highlighting in a different color. I could not find any plugin for achieving this, So, I wrote my own Chrome extension for this.

Please visit the extension page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/phabnclfbnmhmoipebjdfhkiacojlcnc

While I was trying to upload this extension, Google wanted me to make a screencast also. The video of the extension in action is available here (please watch in fullscreen - HD)

Screenshots

Search token input box

Highlights in action

This extension though created to satisfy a developer's need, will be very helpful for any common browser user who wants to search and highlight multiple strings in any webpage (say while searching a page with phone list for multiple people etc.)

The extension is open-source - MIT Licensed and is hosted in github. Your comments, patches, feedback, Likes, +1s, Shares, etc. are welcome. Since it is open sourced, you can feel safe about installing the extension :-)

Possible mistake in Donald Knuth's Talk (or) I am stupid

2011-07-19T21:55:00.000+05:30

Donald Knuth recently gave a talk in Google titled "All questions answered" I think either I have found a mistake in it or I am making myself a stupid in the internet. Latter is of high probability.

In his talk, Donald Knuth says (at 14:30) that:

Ron Graham tells me about the following problem: take any integer write it in binary, so you've got; basically any sequence of 0s and 1s. You can always cut it into substrings. Consider each substring as a binary number, the sum of those binary numbers is a power of two.

When I listened this, I thought, it must be wrong. Consider the following sequence of binary numbers:

100101

I make a cut in the middle of the above number, so that the two individual binary numbers are:

100 & 101

The sum of these numbers is 1001, which is 9, is not a power of 2. It is a bit difficult for my Indian ears to understand his accent, so there is a high probability that I am misunderstanding something. Also, this issue looks too straightforward to me that one of the most brilliant mathematicians on the planet may not say so. What am I missing ? Any help is appreciated.

P.S: In the unlikely event that (pigs flew) Knuth mentioned something wrong about this mathematical problem, I should write to him to send a signed cheque (check) for 0$ (anyway I won't encash it) :-)

Madras Anti-Hindi Protests & Karunanidhi's Speech

2011-07-17T22:33:00.000+05:30

When India got independence from the British, English and Hindi were adopted as the official languages of India. After a series of hot debates, a Munshi-Ayyangar formula (after K.M. Munshi and Gopalaswamy Ayyangar) was devised to confirm that No language will be called the National language of India, but English and Hindi will continue to be used as the official language of the country atleast until 1965.

The congress Government of the Madras presidency led by Rajagoplachari (who tried to woo the North Indian heads of his party) tried to impose Hindi as a mandatory subject in the state. This was met with opposition by the natives as they felt it undermined the rich cultural heritage of Tamil, the language which is more than 2000 years old and still in use. This law to make Hindi mandatory was revoked.

As the 1965 deadline approached, situation became intense in the Madras state. Student protests, mass riots changed the political situation of the Madras state drastically, kicking the Congress Government out of power (till date). Two students Thalamuthu and Nadarasan were killed and a sense of frustration and anger spread throughout the state. There was a blackout of every educational institution and Government office for almost 2 months in the state. The central Government was taken back by the resilience of the Madras state and announced that English will not be removed from the official language status of India, until the southern states agree. In 1967, Indira Gandhi announced that English language will have official status in India indefinitely.

The current constitution (iiuc) says: English will be used as the official central Government language for the region C of India. This region C composes of the four south Indian states. Regions A and B consists of the North Indian states where English or Hindi will be used as the official language.

The entire Madras Anti-Hindi protests are nicely documented in the wikipedia . During these anti-Hindi protests, as mentioned earlier, the congress Government was kicked out of power and led to the raise of the DMK party. A truly charismatic leader C.N. Annadurai rose to fame and establishing the ideologies of equality, atheism and fighting against casteism and religion. He was ably supported by a groups of talented public speakers who kindled emotions among the students. The most popular and the charismatic of his subordinates is M. Karunanidhi. It is a pity that Karunanidhi lost track in the last years of his life and succumbed to family pressure and started believing in God and superstitious practices. It is sad to see what senility does to some Atheists.

I stumbled accidentally onto an audio of Karunanidhi's speech during the Anti-Hindi protests in 1965. It's truly mesmerizing. If I were a student listening to him at a testosteroney age, I am sure I would have followed him blindly. You can listen to the audio in this youtube link. The text of his speech is:

---

கேடு வந்ததடா இந்தி மொழியால் தமிழருக்கு என்றவுடன்
எழடா தம்பி எடடா போர்வாள் !

மந்தி இந்தி தமிழ் மலர் சோலையிலே தாவி வருதல் கண்டோம்
ஆவி பிரினும் அஞ்ச மாட்டோம்
அடடா யாரங்கே,
அடித்திடுக முரசம் என்போம்
அணிவகுத்து கிளம்பிடுவோம்; மொழிப்போரில் நம்
பணிமுடித்து திரும்பிடிவோம்; அல்லால்
தாளமுத்து நடராசன் வரிசையிலே
தமிழராய் பிறந்தோர்க்கெல்லாம் அமையட்டும் கல்லறை என்று
தடந்தோளை குலுக்கிடுவோம்

மலை எலாம் வளத்தைப் பாடும்; தமிழர்
கலை எலாம் பண்பைப் பாடும்; கடல்
அலை எலாம் நடனம் ஆடும்; பகைமை
குலை எலாம் நடுங்கி ஓடும்!!!

கூடு வளர் காடுதனில்
ஓடி விளையாடுகின்ற
பீடு மிகு மானினமும்
பாடும் இசை ஜோடிக் குயில் தாளமொடு
பாவமிடு கான மயில் புள்ளினமும்

பட்டுக் கொடி
கொற்றக் குடை
சுற்றிச் சுழல்
வெற்றித் திரு
முத்துத் தமிழ்
கற்றுச் சுடர்
பெற்றுக் குல

(குல) மானம் காக்க புறப்படுக மறவர் சேனை
மானம் காக்க புறப்படுக மறவர் சேனை

எங்குற்றான் என் தமிழன் !?
இங்கு வரும் இந்திதனை எதிர்ப்பதற்கு துணிவை இன்றி !?
செங்குத்துத் தூணைப் போல் நிற்கின்றானா !?

அங்கத்தில் துடிப்பின்றிக் கிடக்கின்றானா !?
அய்யோ பாவம்;
அவனுக்கு சங்கத்தில் பாட்டெழுதி அரங்கேற்றுங்கள்!
தங்கத்தில் சிலையொன்று அமைத்திடுங்கள்!

உளி இரண்டை உதட்டின் மேல் வைத்தாற் போல்
ஒளி மிகுந்த பாண்டியர்க்கு மீசையுண்டு

இழி வந்ததில்லையென்று இன முழக்கம் செய்வதுபோல்; காதின்
வெளி வரையில் படர்ந்திருக்கும் சோழன் மீசை

களிர் ஆட்டும் துதிக்கை போன்று
கண் நோக்கி வளர்ந்திருக்கும்
சற்று நெளி காட்டும் நீளமீசை
சேரன் மீசை

அன்றந்த மீசை எலாம் துடித்ததனால்
பகைக் குன்றங்கள் பொடியான கதைகள் உண்டு
இன்றந்த வீரம் வேண்டும் மிகவும் வேண்டும்
இன்செயல் வீரம் தேக்கி
வன்செயல்கள் அறவே போக்கி
முன்பிருந்த தமிழர்கள் உணர்வைப் பெறுக !!!

Srilankan Army Warcrimes - Killing Fields Video

2011-07-04T19:35:00.000+05:30

The nation of Srilanka has people of Sinhalese and Tamil origin. Ethnic fights between these two have been happening for decades. Tamils have been living in Srilanka for centuries as well. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (shortly LTTE ) is a group of Tamils who are fighting for the creation of a separate land for Tamils by the name of Eelam. The Srilankan Government and the LTTE are involved in a brutal civil war in the Tamil areas resulting in tragic deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, over the last few decades. Numerous complaints have been raised during the final phase of this Srilankan Civil War in 2009, about a large number of war crimes by the Srilankan Army.

Channel 4 has published a highly disturbing video which talks about some of the inhuman atrocities of the Srilankan army. People from UN are also interviewed in the video. The video footage is available at: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/sri-lankas-killing-fields/4od#3200170

The video is highly disturbing, contains very vulgar scenes of mass rape and mass killings. I do not recommend you to watch this video if you are weak-hearted. It is the most disturbing thing one can see. I am sharing this video only to share the news to the international audience of my blog. It is a pity that even in this century when we have organizations like United Nations, crimes of such scale happen. I wonder how Ban ki Moon can sleep peacefully after failing so badly at his job as the head of the United Nations.

The Srilankan Government, as expected, has claimed that the video is unauthentic. However, it is yet to be seen if there will be a international panel analyzing the video. I also read that this video will be aired in some of the western world televisions this week.

Light Story - Indian wedding photography

2011-03-30T00:24:00.000+05:30

Vijesh is one of the few people in my college circle that pursue a real, creative hobby instead of just watching television, even after the marriage. He has worked as a photographer for the Indian edition of TEDx conference as well. He has decided to take up his hobby of photography into a serious second-day-job and is now a Wedding Photographer. Below are two of my favorite wedding photoes taken by him.

His service goes by the name of "Light Story" and he has a shiny wordpress website. Check his website (and also the flickr link from there) for more photoes of Indian weddings.

Personally, from a cup-is-half-empty perspective, I find Indian weddings tedious, unnecessarily expensive and as an event used by [old ] people to compare clothing, jewelry and salaries. Indian marriages bring with it, a lot of fake smiles, falling on the feet of never-seen-before relatives, exaggerated bridal-makeups, ridiculously costly dress purchases, etc.

Indian state of Kerala has the highest literacy rate of 95% and thus is the only state that remains sensible in the marriage ceremonies, by keeping them low profile and short enough to suit the attention span of the current micro-blogging generation. Weddings involve a series of complicated long events in the rest of the Indian states. However, not all is so bad and there are some bright spots among these ceremonies and thankfully not everyone thinks like me. Vijesh manages to identify some subtle beauty in these events and his photoes are a proof of his genius. So, if you know of an upcoming Indian marriage and is searching for a cameraman, I strongly recommend Vijesh.

Pre vs Post Increment & Performance Impact

2011-03-22T15:51:00.000+05:30

While browsing across some open-source projects, I have seen code snippets of type:

for (i = 0; i < n; ++ i )

The pre-increment "++ i " confused me as to why one should use it, as post increment is most commonly used. Googling told me that pre-increment is faster than post increment as the value of i need not be stored to a temporary register before the increment operation. This sounded logical to me and I believed it and used pre-increment in all my loops. I didn't bother to measure it though.

Few days back, Kernel developer Tejun Heo complained in twitter about the usage of pre-increment in loops that it doesn't give any benefits and affects readability. This time I got around to doing some measurements with the following code:

 int main()  
 {  
      int i, j ,k;  
   
 #if 0  
      for (i = 0; i < 10000; i++)  
      for (j = 0; j < 10000; j++)  
      for (k = 0; k < 40; k++);  
 #else  
      for (i = 0; i < 10000; ++i)  
      for (j = 0; j < 10000; ++j)  
      for (k = 0; k < 40; ++k);  
 #endif  
 }

I compiled the above code with 0 and 1 for the #if macro and found that the resultant binaries were bitwise same. So, the preVspost changes contributed nothing for performance as the resultant binaries were exactly identical in either case. So, it's irrelevant if you use post or pre increment for the "for" loop index variable.

I realized that it does not matter if the operation is pre or post increment or assignment, if the value of the expression is not stored at all. So I modified the code to store the return value of the pre/post increment operations and decided to measure the performance. So the code became:

 int main()  
 {  
      int i, j ,k, t;  
   
 #if 1  
      for (i = 0; i < 10000; t = i++)  
      for (j = 0; j < 10000; t = j++)  
      for (k = 0; k < 40; t = k++);  
 #else  
      for (i = 0; i < 10000; t = ++i)  
      for (j = 0; j < 10000; t = ++j)  
      for (k = 0; k < 40; t = ++k);  
 #endif  
 }

This time I strongly believed that there will be a difference in performance and compiled with the values of 0 and 1 for the #if macro. I did a test run of about 10 iterations for each of post and pre increments. The result was however surprising. Post-increment consistently outperformed pre-increment and finished faster always. I was startled about this observation.

Since so many performance centric people have used pre-increment instead of post-increment in the past, I believed there must be some reason for people using pre-increment. I asked this in a SUSE mailing list for an explanation of the above observation. There are people in SUSE who are as long-experienced with computers as my age. They provided me the answer for this. Earlier, gcc used to generate sub-optimal code for post-increment and that is why pre-increment was used then. Compilers have come a long way and programmers don't need to think in weird way to outsmart the compilers anymore.

C++ and Operator-overloading

With C++, one can overload the increment operator for our own classes. Even though, post outperformed pre marginally, for basic datatypes in C, with the higher-order C++ Classes, it is a different story. I recommend you read this article if you want to know more.

Iterators and modern programming languages

Modern programming languages provide iterators for easier and more effective looping, like foreach in C#. It is always best to use those iterators instead of a traditional for loop and an index variable, to iterate through a collection.

For the sake of curiosity, I tried comparing the post vs pre increment performance in a C# code (just the same above snippet modified to have a public static void Main() etc). I expected that the post will outperform the pre operations and I was right. However, the difference between post and pre increment with the mono C# compiler is substantially high. Post outperformed pre consistently by as high as 2-3 seconds, for the above 3-level nested loop.

Theoretical Micro-Benchmarking & Confirmation of a Tautology

The for loop I used in my example is to highlight the performance difference of pre and post increments. However such micro-benchmarks are theoretical and cannot be extrapolated to match real world scenarios. They are far from it.

It is safe to assume that your application will not become faster by tweaking post or pre increments. So, you can continue to write for loops with post increment which are easier to read and don't appear strange on a contributor/maintenance-engineer's eyes. Most of the slowness in applications are attributed to poor algorithms, bad I/O patterns and doing unnecessary things. Focusing on increment/decrement operators will not give any performance benefits and if you want speed up your applications, begin at Profiling, not at optimizing. As one distinguished engineer once told me, "Optimization without profiling is a waste of life".

Tools Used

openSUSE 11.4
GCC Version 4.5.1
Mono 2.8
Thinkpad T400 running Intel Core2 Dual CPU

TODO

Understand how to use objdump to look at the assembly instructions baked in the binary and try to figure out why post operations are faster by understanding the assembly code.

Please let me know if you have anything to add for the discussion.

GNOME vs Canonical, Freedesktop.org - A Neutral Observation & Summary

2011-03-10T17:15:00.000+05:30

Few sensational things happened last week in one of the oldest debates of the Linux community, GNOME vs KDE, touching on the topic of freedesktop.org and joined this time by the new hot topic, "GNOME vs Canonical". The bulk of the actions happened in the comments section of two blog posts, one by Dave Neary (1) , well-known GNOME advocate and another post by Aaron Seigo (2) , well-known KDE Developer. I want to improve my writing skills and the ability to get information from a community discussion. So, below is a step in that direction.

Disclaimer: All opinions are personal and none of the views expressed represent my employer, NASA, WHO or anyone else for that matter. The following is the juice of the events of last week written from a (as honest as possible) neutral perspective. Read through this post if you don't want to read through all the comments in the mentioned blog posts.

GNOME 3 release is just days away. Canonical and the GNOME community have taken different routes with Unity and gnome-shell respectively. Dave Neary wrote(1) a blog post with an analytic title "Has GNOME rejected Canonical's Help ? " . Neary cited instances of Canonical exhibiting behavior that shows discomfort in the Canonical-GNOME relationship.

The main point of contention was: rejection of libappindicator (3) by the GNOME release team roughly an year ago. appindicator is an implementation by Canonical for the management of system tray icons. It was brought under a specification titled "status notifier" to the freedesktop.org. Dan Winship and Matthias Clasen from GNOME have faced some severe issues with the specification and deemed (4) it unfit. The rejection reasons cited by the GNOME release team for appindicator were:

it doesn’t integrate with gnome-shell
probably depends on GtkApplication, and would need integration in GTK+ itself
we wished there was some constructive discussion around it, pushed by the libappindicator developers; but it didn’t happen
there’s nothing in GNOME needing it

Neary asked for proofs of libappindicator proposal for gnome-shell and any convincing/rejection discussions following the proposal, if any. The openness and accountability of the gnome-shell development process can be known by such proofs.

Aaron Seigo of KDE blogged(2) about the controversy and used the opportunity to vent out his frustrations with GNOME. His post with an inflammatory title of "Collaboration's Demise" seem to indicate that the KDE project has faced severe pushbacks from GNOME for the ideas/standards proposed by KDE. Seigo feels in the last 5-6 years of freedesktop.org operations, GNOME seem to reject ideas based on a (Not Invented Here) NIH syndrome.

As expected, there were comments from GNOME people on Seigo's blogpost, though with a disclaimer that they don't officially respond on behalf of GNOME and are personal opinions. The main counterpoints by GNOME people that I could catch are:

The idea of appindicators was proposed sometime in 2008. But was not discussed in open after that for a long time.
Roughly 2 years after that initial proposal and without any open-discussions on the design, a big code drop was requested for libappindicator and proposing it as a external dependency.
The libappindicator also needed copyright reassignments to Canonical for any contributions. A practice that is being widely frowned upon in GNOME and FOSS projects in the recent times.

The main complaint from Seigo on his blog is that GNOME is deviating from freedesktop.org standards consistently in the last few years and this is unhealthy for cross desktop applications. He feels that appindicators is yet another symptom of this problem. It remains to be seen if this is the personal opinion of Seigo or if the KDE Board/Project too feels the same.

In addressing the events of the past week, Mark Shuttleworth has posted a blog (5) and accused the GNOME leadership (probably referring to the release team and Board, which is unclear from his blog) that the environment in GNOME is not conducive for internal competition. He believes that internal groupism in GNOME is killing baby ideas from anyone outside the group. The tone of the post is harsh towards the GNOME leadership and is filled with advice. Towards the end of his post, Shuttleworth notes that strengthening the partnership with KDE and freedesktop.org is the way forward and is more fruitful than convincing GNOME.

It may be an eventful time in the next few days to see how the GNOME community reacts to this. There will be a blog post by Jeff Waugh for sure, atleast, it seems. As of now, RedHat the biggest investor in GNOME and we expect no change in their stance. Novell seem to be happy with the way things are going in upstream and will stay close to it, it seems. Canonical is toying around with the idea of creating new cross-desktop standards and make Unity more popular. They seem to have appealed to some people in the KDE camp atleast (like Seigo). But it remains to be seen if this newly forged friendship is exposing real problems with GNOME or it is just a temporary sensationalism that will subside soon.

During the next Desktop summit, the GNOME and KDE boards have a huge task of ironing out the difference of opinions between GNOME and KDE people regarding the freedesktop.org processes. I don't know if everyone in KDE camp feel that GNOME is blocking changes in fdo or it is a perception of a few people like Seigo only.

My Take:

+ Most of these problems could've been minimized if Canonical have done their work in GNOME git repositories instead of doing it in their own private space. Nobody likes huge code drops. Doing things in private and opening up later is not a correct behavior in any open source community. They should have learned from the past mistakes like: Novell's gnome-main-menu, Android's Wakelocks etc.

+ Involvement with the community should begin as early as possible. It is not okay to assume, "We are special and we will get our way through even if we involve community in the end."

+ As is said in every GUADEC, GNOME is People. If Shuttleworth is unhappy with the leadership of GNOME, the way to fix it is not by doing things in private or by working with KDE/freedesktop.org (which is good but won't solve perceived problems with GNOME), the right way is to get involved with GNOME. How many Canonical employees are part of the GNOME Release team ? How many Canonical employees have ever been part of the release team ? Employ more people to work in upstream so that you can influence GNOME decisions. Grab the steering if you want to drive, don't be a back-seat driver.

+ There may be serious problems with the way freedesktop.org is managed if the complaints by Seigo are shared by many people in the KDE community.

Links:
1 - http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/07/has-gnome-rejected-canonical-help/
2 - http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/03/collaborations-demise.html
3 - http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2010-June/msg00001.html
4 - http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/03/collaborations-demise.html?showComment=1299623993569#c1004728938259200386
5 - http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/654

Some of my observations have been wrong. If so, it is just because of mistake and not because of bad intent. Please let me know and I will correct myself. Thanks.

Introducing GOSC - A Graphical client for openSUSE Build Service

2011-02-18T02:37:00.000+05:30

Introducing GOSC - a graphical client for openSUSE build service.

openSUSE buildservice is an awesome framework for building rpms for multiple distributions. It is used by the openSUSE project, the Meego project, VLC, all distro releases from Novell, and in many other places. Usually OBS is accessed by a browser, I have implemented a simple GUI tool for working with OBS servers.

If you are extremely busy, just proceed to the screenshots section and the github tree. Otherwise, read below:

History
1) A few days back, sragavan, ravim85 and I were chatting on twitter that the new (2.0) interface of OBS takes too much of clicks and too many page navigations for simple operations (compared to older interface). I felt that it will be better if I could get the build information about all my projects in a single page and also allowing me to easily see the build logs of various packages.

2) I have always wanted to learn python. I have given some small level python patches for some projects. But haven't had any experience in writing a python project from the scratch.

3) Today (yesterday to be precise) I had an annoying meeting that drained me mentally and ended up with some frustration. I wanted to get rid of the bad mood.

Based on the above three factors, I decided to complete a project that I just started day before yesterday (with a simple Python HelloWorld) into an usable thick-client for openSUSE build service. The result is GOSC and the code is already in github.

OSC commandline & OBS Library
I wanted to use a library for talking with the OBS APIs from my GUI client. But darix confirmed my fear in IRC that no such library exists as of now. One option was to copy paste code from the osc commandline client's sources. But this is ugly and will give maintenance nightmares. So, I decided to just use "osc" from my python programs and create a GUI wrapper using Python.

yabsc
Srinidhi told me of a different client for build-service named yabsc. I looked into it. It was written in true KDE fashion, exposing every possible control to the user. It lists all the projects building in the entire build-service and not just "My Projects". Also, I felt it is a little keyboard unfriendly and had too many tabs. So I ditched it as it was not meeting my usability requirements. However, if you are a looking for a more powerful, more matured product and not scared by too many controls on screen, it is better if you try yabsc.

Screenshots

Initial screen. "My Projects" are shown in the top-left listview.

Double-clicking a project from the list, will list the packages in the project in the adjacent listview. The buildresults of the project are shown in the bottom textarea.

Double-clicking a package from the top-right listview, will popup a Repository chooser dialog.

The entire buildlog of the selected package is shown in the textarea.

The source is licensed under LGPLv2.1. There are a lot of small fixes that could still be added, like a "Loading..." status bar for network operations, Caching of buildlogs, project names, subscribing to build notifications from the build-server etc. But they are not part of my regular workflow and also I strongly believe in "Release Early Release Often". So, I am releasing in this barebones version, which already seem to solve my workflow needs.

During the implementation of this, I learned a lot about python. This experience also strengthened my old opinion that Compiled languages are better for large scale projects.

Your feedback, comments and patches are very much welcome.

Rep Rap - Bringing China to your Desk

2011-02-03T19:18:00.000+05:30

I was reading an interview of Novell Distinguished Engineer and hacker-extra-ordinaire Michael Meeks about LibreOffice and FOSDEM. Towards the end of the interview, he mentioned about a free software project and community named RepRap.

I've never heard of it and so got curious and found the project's home page. I believe this idea is better than even sliced bread and has a huge potential. I am thoroughly impressed. It is about 3D printing of plastic. Watch the video demonstration for yourself. Worth sharing.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

2011-01-28T00:18:00.000+05:30

I am not a huge fan of [auto]biographies. I consider it boring to read about the lives of celebrities. Prior to this book, I have read just two autobiographies, of Mahatma Gandhi and Linus Torvalds (Really, Should I link to their wikipedia page ?) The former surprised me about Gandhi's transparency and the latter made me feel that an assorted collection of Linus' LKML review comments will make a better read.

I picked up It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life an autobiography of Lance Armstrong from my Library, as I have heard a lot about this book from my reading circle. It is an old book written about a decade ago and it is a shame that I came across this only so late. It is about Armstrong's fight against cancer and how he survived to win Tour-de-france after his monumental fight with cancer.

My Verdict: 5 Stars. Buy this book immediately.

... However, Don't read the book immediately. Keep this book in your closet. If at some stage in your life, if you feel very down morally (dumbass supervisors, evil managers, bad job, layoffs etc.) read this book and you will have a new ray of hope. It will help you realize some of the common wisdoms. Few things I re-realized after reading this book are:

Never give up your self-confidence. If you don't believe in yourself, none will
Family and friends are more important than day-job / bread-fetching
Even Lance Armstrong had his self-doubts. Nobody can be Chuck Norris. Don't be scared by self-doubts
Humility is the mark of a true hero
Bruteforce is not a solution to all problems

There is one section of a book which I found a little boring, when he takes us through the race in the tour-de-france. May be people who are interested in racing may find it interesting. I learned that bike racing is majorly a team event only after reading this book. I thought it is an individual sport.

This book is not meant for casual glancing at coffee time but for a deeper reading experience. You won't feel sad after reading the book though, but instead will feel a lot inspired. Highly recommended.

P.S: While reading this book, I came to know that one of the well-known Tamil actresses, who have stolen the sleeps of quite a few people, is actually a cancer-survivor and had a newly found respect for Mamta Mohandas.

Current Music: Atrai Thingal Vaanidam ...

Porting Sonar Theme to GTK3

2011-01-20T23:04:00.001+05:30

Dear Internet, the openSUSE GNOME team needs your help in porting the Sonar theme to GTK3. We require people with skills in CSS for this work. For more details please refer to this mail by Vincent Untz. If you want more details, please join #openSUSE-GNOME in Freenode IRC.

Thanks.

Show/Hide Files and Icons in GNOME Desktop

2011-01-17T17:17:00.000+05:30

I wrote about webilder earlier which will give you stunning random wallpapers for your linux desktop from flickr. I have a habit of allowing the number of files, screenshots and documents in my desktop to go on a large number. Once they reach a critical number, I get around to cleaning the files. But because I have so many files, the beautiful wallpapers are sometimes not shown clearly. I felt there should be a way to toggle showing the files in Desktop and it turned out there is a way.

Step 1: Launch gnome-keybinding-properties

Step 2: Click on the "Add" button in the bottom and in the resulting dialog, type "Hide Desktop Icons " for the Name field and for the command field, type:

gconftool-2 -s --type boolean /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

Step 3: Create another keybinding by clicking the "Add" button and this time create a "Show Desktop Icons" item. The command for this will be:

gconftool-2 -s --type boolean /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop true

Step 4: Set custom keyboard shortcuts for these two commands. I have used Alt+F11 and Alt+F12 in my case.

Update: You can just use the following command and have only one keyboard shortcut as well. Thanks to the anonymous commenter who provided the tip (please guys, leave your name when commenting :))

gconftool-2 --toggle /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop

Now you can toggle (show/hide) your desktop icons at a keystroke and enjoy your clean wallpapers.

HTH :-)

Download all youtube videos of an user

2011-01-15T13:02:00.000+05:30

Recently I got addicted to watching Nigella Lawson Cooking videos on youtube. As much as I like youtube, I prefer to watch videos offline as well. One user has uploaded a lot of those videos and I wanted to download all the videos by that user.

I tried a few firefox plugins, youtube-dl python script, etc. for doing this but none seemed to be fit for the job. Good old Shell-script came for rescue. I saved the user's youtube homepage in .html, grepped through the file for links, ran uniq and then fed them all to youtube-dl and bulk-downloaded all the videos. If you want parallel downloads, you can easily do that also by tweaking the script.

The commands are:

> grep -E 'http://www.youtube.com/watch\?v=[[:alnum:]-]{11}' dump.html -o | sort -u > vdos
> for i in `cat vdos`; do youtube-dl -t $i; done; rm vdos;

HTH someone.

If you know of a better solution (some firefox/chrome addon, Greasmonkey, etc.) which will work in Linux, please let me know.

Update:
1) MessenJER told in my comments that I could achieve the same by going to the RSS page of the user:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/SomeUser/uploads?alt=rss&v=2&orderby=published&client=ytapi-youtube-profile

2) Vignesh V corrected a mistake in my previous command. From the man page of uniq:
'uniq' does not detect repeated lines unless they are adjacent. You may want to sort the input first, or use `sort -u' without uniq

Introducing Sqlite-Commander - Curses Client for your SQLite Database

2011-01-02T16:32:00.000+05:30

I am happy to introduce to you, my recent nighttime hack "Sqlite-Commander - A Curses client for your SQLite Database".

While I was working in a project involving sqlite, I wanted to check the contents of a sqlite database. The command line sqlite client involves too much of typing for viewing records. The sqlite viewers that I found were not very keyboard friendly. There was a firefox extension which looked good but I felt it is too clumsy to launch that application. Also, I wanted a tool that will read SQLite tables over ssh without requiring much bandwidth. I could not find any CUI client for SQLite and I felt it may be useful to write one, atleast for my satisfying my needs. So, here we have Sqlite-Commander. The name is inspired from an awesome piece of software Midnight-Commander written by Miguel De Icaza.

Screenshot

Sqlite-Commander => Click to enlarge

Features
+ Shows the list of tables in the left pane.
+ Allows you to navigate the list of tables using arrow keys.
+ Shows the first 30 records for the selected table in the right pane
+ Non-printable columns are shown with a ???
+ Maximum of 30 characters are displayed per column. Column data exceeding this length are shown with "..."

TODO
+ It is not a full-fledged SQLite client with rich features. It is like an enriched version of cat for working with sqlite. I don't intend to make a release, as I am not sure if this will be useful for anyone other than people who work with SQLite and can use only a terminal/ssh. If there are enough users, I will enhance and make it a full-fledged product. So drop me a mail if you are interested in this project.
+ It should be fairly straight-forward to implement connectivity to any database (MySQL, Oracle, etc.) such that we can have a generic SQL NCurses client. It will be a good exercise for someone who wants to know C#.
+ Add a scroll bar and show more than 30 columns. Should be moderate/easy to implement.
+ Add a dialog box to execute any random SQL statement. Should be fairly trivial to implement.
+ Create Events such that pressing Enter on the records list will pass the currently selected record to a custom script/command. Useful ?
+ Copy selections of records to clipboard. Easy to implement.
+ Handle tablenames with special characters.

Thanks
Credits are due for the awesome mono-ncurses interface authors (Miguel and Co.) If you are looking to writing some terminal application I can heartily recommend that mono-ncurses is the best library you will ever get. Before beginning this application, I evaluated a few options (like Python etc.) and nothing comes close to being as easy to use as mono-ncurses. Also, special thanks to VIM and git, two of the most productive tools ever invented.

MeeGo - Naming Conflicts / Controversies

2010-12-14T22:43:00.000+05:30

Some of you might remember the Naming Controversy behind Meego. There is a new blog post by Andrew on this matter and since he is not on Planet GNOME, I am just linking here, for the interested people. In case you want to know what the issue is all about, read further.

There were Maemo and Moblin platforms from Nokia and Intel respectively. They both merged to form the Meego project under the governance of the Linux Foundation. Distributions such as openSUSE, Fedora, Debian tried to spin off Meego based derivatives and faced a lot of troubles.

Well known openSUSE rockstar Andrew Wafaa, overcame some of these troubles and did a distro release using these Meego packages on top of an openSUSE image. He named this distro "Smeegol" => SuSE + Meego. This effort by Andrew (and other distros) is a step in bringing the cool, shiny features of MeeGo to the masses, by riding on the large user-base of the existing distros. However, this has not went well with the linux foundation and they have asked to change the name of the project. They were afraid that Andrew using "Smeegol" will dilute the brand image of Meego.

Let us take a different case. "Linux " is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. If he has decided that nobody should be using the name "Linux" in their projects, We may not be able to use names such as "RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)", "SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLED/S)" etc. Allowing other people to use the name "Linux" (with due credits of course) has given it a widespread popularity. The Linux Foundation seems to be missing this point altogether and insists to move away from using {M,m}-e-e-{G,g}-o or any subset of those letters or sounds in that order, alone or in combination with other letters, words or marks that would tend to cause someone to make a reasonable connection of the reference with the MeeGo mark.

There are two problems here:

1) Anyone who hears about Smeegol will think about "Lord of the Rings" and not Meego. So, this should not affect LinuxFoundation at all. However, an even bigger problem is:

2) Should Linux Foundation take such a hard stand on maintaining the exclusivity of the "MeeGo " brand ?

With Android grabbing significant market share every day, I wonder why Linux Foundation insists on not playing well with the distros, with respect to Meego. There is a tweet from well-known kernel Hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman also expressing his unhappiness. However, it is not all gloomy and I believe that the linux foundation will fix these problems soonish.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are purely personal.

CPU or I/O ? What matters most ?

2010-11-16T23:48:00.000+05:30

The internets are buzzing with a miraculous patch that is all set to improve Desktop responsiveness. Phoronix have a video proof also about that. However, numbers will lie and I am not so excited about this patch. I don't contend the fact that the patch improves CPU scheduling, but the main problem for end user desktops is not CPU but I/O imho.

CPU scheduling is just fine for most of the enduser workflows. None of the end users are going to compile kernel and watch a video parallely. And these days, most of the common tasks are done in a smart phone and not even with a pc. I tried running a Kernel with ConKollivas patch and did not find any improvements in my laptop. I don't expect to see much improvement with this patch either.

Bad user space algorithms, improper I/O, poor data structures are the primary reason why end user applications suck and the desktop appears poorly-responsive. Just because we change the scheduler, Firefox is not going to start as fast as Chrome overnight. We need to improve our user space applications if Linux on desktop has to be more responsive.

Michael Meeks's iogrind work has shown us that sqlite writes all-over the disk and fixing that may help many applications start faster (or until Intel gives us all free SSDs ;)) Also, I got reminded of an excellent slide from Federico's GUADEC talk.

So, A is I/O and B is CPU. So, until I/O is improved I will be skeptical if a CPU patch can create a miracle for desktop user experience :-)

Please note that I am not trying to degrade the efforts of the person who has done the Kernel patch. I believe it is awesome to work on TTY layer and get praise from Linus himself. But I just don't believe that it will cause miracle for endusers. I will be happy to see me go wrong in this case.

Detecting Memory Leaks in Kernel & Managed code OSes

2010-11-10T17:05:00.000+05:30

This blog post has two sections. Firstly, a section covering "Memory Leak detection in the Linux kernel in 10 easy steps" and the next section is about, "Implementing operating systems in managed code (like C#/Java)". Feel free to goto any section you prefer.

Introduction

A memory leak is a behavior of a program when it consumes memory but never releases it. In user-space, these days, new applications are written mostly in sophisticated, evolved, modern programming languages like C#, Java etc. This releases the burden of memory management from the programmer. Programmers need to manage memory themselves, only when they code in pre-historic programming languages like C ;-) There are nice tools (like Valgrind) that can detect memory leaks, if they happen in user-space. Valgrind won't work in Kernel space.

The Linux kernel is predominantly written in C, so that programmers can stay close to the hardware. Also there were no large-scale managed languages at the time the project was started.

There are some interesting projects that help in writing FUSE filesystems via Mono/C# etc. However your grumpy blogger didn't find them to be active and for all practical purposes, C is the default Kernel programming language.

Few days back, I was tasked with detecting memory leaks in a legacy kernel module that is not in Linus' tree. Code that goes into Linus' tree is usually of high quality and won't have memory leaks because of the rigorous reviews that are performed in LKML. So, any kernel code that is not merged upstream has a high chance of having leaks, among other bad things (so upstream your code, NOW). The simple tutorial below will explain how to detect memory leaks in kernel modules.

kmemleak

There is a nice tool named 'kmemleak' available in the Linux kernel since 2.6.31 to detect memory leaks. This tool is claimed to report a few false positives but that should not stop someone from using it. I was trying to find a kernel-space-leak-detector but did not find any links via Google. Some kernel hackers told me about this tool over IRC and this post is more as a pointer to the "kmemleak" docs, when somone googles for "kernel memory leak detection".

Pre-requisites:
+ You need to know how to build and install your own kernel.
+ You need to have 2.6.31 or newer version of the linux kernel
+ It is good if you know how to compile a kernel module. But don't worry if you don't know. You can refer to my previous tutorial for a simple hello-world kernel module.

So, without further ado, the steps are:

Step 1: Compile kernel with "CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK" option enabled. You can get to this option via: make menuconfig, "Kernel Hacking", "Kernel Memory Leak Detector" , while compiling your kernel.

Step 2: Increase the config option "Maximum kmemleak early log entires" value to a sufficiently large number like 1200. The default value of 400 may not work correctly in all configurations.

Step 3: Install this kernel and Reboot to this newly configured kernel. Do not be alarmed if your machine is slow.

Step 4: Upon reboot, Check if your debugfs is mounted. Otherwise mount it. If all is well, you should see a file kmemleak under your debugfs mounted location.

mount -t debugfs nodev /sys/kernel/debug/
cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

The above /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak file will contain information about any memory leak that has been detected so far since the machine booted. Ideally there should be none, until this point in time.

Step 5: Now we will see how we can detect a memory leak in a dummy kernel module as follows. Write a dummy kernel module with the following source (hello.c):

#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/vmalloc.h>

/* Never write a function like this ;) */
void myfunc(void)
{
        char *ptr;
        ptr = vmalloc(512);
        ptr = vmalloc(512);
        ptr = vmalloc(512);
}

int hello_init(void)
{
        printk(KERN_ALERT "Hello World");
        myfunc();
        return 0;
}

static void hello_exit(void)
{
        printk(KERN_ALERT "Goodbye World");
}

module_init(hello_init);
module_exit(hello_exit);

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL v2");
MODULE_AUTHOR("Your Name");

Now the most important line in the above code snippet is:
ptr = vmalloc(512);
We allocate memory, as above, in the kernel module but never free this memory.

Step 6: vi Makefile
EXTRA_CFLAGS=-g
obj-m := hello-kernel.o
hello-kernel-objs := hello.o

Step 7: Generate the kernel-object file hello-kernel.ko in your current directory:
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`

All commands from now on require root permission.

Step 7.5: [Optional] At any stage, if you want to clear the memory profiler output so far created, so that we can focus just on the leaks reported from then on, you can do:
echo clear > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Step 8: Now insert the kernel object
insmod hello-kernel.ko

Step 9: The memory leak detection thread runs periodically. If you want to perform a test at any instant you want, Do:
echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak

Step 10: Now we will check if the leak is detected. Do:
cat /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
You should see:

unreferenced object 0xf9061000 (size 512):
comm "insmod", pid 12750, jiffies 14401507 (age 110.217s)
hex dump (first 32 bytes):
1c 0f 00 00 01 12 00 00 2a 0f 00 00 01 12 00 00 ........*.......
38 0f 00 00 01 12 00 00 bc 0f 00 00 01 12 00 00 8...............
backtrace:
[< c10b0001>] create_object+0x114/0x1db
[< c148b4d0>] kmemleak_alloc+0x21/0x3f
[< c10a43e9>] __vmalloc_node+0x83/0x90
[< c10a44b9>] vmalloc+0x1c/0x1e
[< f9055021>] myfunc+0x21/0x23 [hello_kernel]
[< f9058012>] 0xf9058012
[< c1001226>] do_one_initcall+0x71/0x113
[< c1056c48>] sys_init_module+0x1241/0x1430
[< c100284c>] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x22
[< ffffffff>] 0xffffffff

As you can see in the bold text above, the leak is detected in myfunc function.

Caution: The memory leak detector code may take some time to identify the leaks. So repeat steps 9 and 10, after few minutes, if you don't get the leaks reported first time. You can try to kiss your hand elbow to pass time meanwhile ;-)

Further Reading
+ LWN Article about kmemleak - http://lwn.net/Articles/187979/
+ Under Kernel sources directory: Documentation/kmemleak.txt

Thanks a lot to Catalin Marinas for kmemleak and the people at kernelnewbies for helping, not just for this problem but for nuuuumerous people.

If you were looking for just kernel memory leak detection, the blogpost is over. If you don't mind reading about some other (un)related projects, continue reading onto Part 2.

Operating Systems in Managed Code

There are some hobby open-source projects aimed at implementing a OS using managed programming languages, like Mono or Java. But none of them have any official corporate backup yet. So they are in experimental state, such as: SharpOS, Cosmos, JNode etc.

+ Sun/Oracle has a product named JavaOS developed along with IBM, but I am not really sure how active this is. Its business model is unclear as well.

+ Singularity - The most high-profile name in this research is Microsoft. However, even they don't seem to be too active either. Singularity is their project aimed at creating a managed-code OS based on a microkernel architecture.

Sad that this is not purely open source. If MSFT uses an (L)GPL-like-license and gives some more technical vision / docs of this project, may be it could generate enough enthusiasm in the student and research communities.

With increasing number of CPU cores and excellent libraries like parallel extensions to C# and functional programming languages like F#, it may be fascinating and easy to do crazy things (like LINQ as an IPC mechanism) if you are implementing a OS in managed language. You can extend your kernel in any language say, Python, Ruby etc. using projects like IronPython, Ironruby.

Or may be it is just that I am over-expecting managed code to do wonders on behalf of the programmer.

The biggest benefit of writing an operating system in managed code is, it will be more Secure. There will be no more buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, pointer exploits etc.

Ten or fifteen years ago, there were far more operating systems, like Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian, Mac OS, OS/2, VMS, Haiku, BSD, etc. and the field was rich, competitive and interesting. Now there are just three major players Windows, Linux and Mac, in all devices ranging from Mainframes to Datacenters to Mobiles. As these commercial operating systems mature, they are becoming more boring to learn and do stuff, the students among you (my blog readers) can try to spend time in these managed-code OSes. Who knows, there could be the next Linus Torvalds in you.

Academics love to brag about Microkernel architecture and Linux hackers love to ridicule the cost of implementing a messaging system for such an architecture. However if you use a high-level language, with facilities like LINQ, protocol-buffers; this messaging/interaction system & Interfaces versioning etc. will be far easier to implement, atleast as per my understanding. This is probably the reason why all the managed code OS-es are based on a micro-kernel architecture.

There will be performance problems in such OSes, but performance is not the only criteria for an OS, as there are other benefits like Security (no pointers), Reliability (no null pointer dereference crashes, double free crashes, etc), Extensibility (Extend the OS in Python, C#, F#), etc.

Writing an Operating System may not be the most business-savvy decision but it will definitely help in understanding the science better. And in student life, one can afford to have a hobby project that may not have immediate day-job relevance.

Send in your feedback/comments/opinions about this post or talks/links/research-papers about operating systems in managed code. I would love to hear from you.

Ubuntu Bug - "Sent from Ubuntu" for Evolution

2010-09-20T22:27:00.000+05:30

While reading through my twitter feed, I got an interesting tweet which pointed to the following Ubuntu bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/615300
Enable default Evolution signature as "Sent from Ubuntu"

Someone wanted to copy the "Sent from iPhone" idea for the Ubuntu machines. Just like any other online long discussion, most of the arguments I believe will be time-wasting to read ;-)

Evolution has Face header support for a long time now and I wonder if the next course of action will be to add the distro logo as the Face header for all mails sent from the distro. For Face header screenshots, Look here.

Bidirectional Synchronization of SQL based Databases

2010-09-12T12:00:00.001+05:30

Any of you aware of any projects or research papers on bidirectional synchronization of SQL based databases, that will do an intelligent sync. ?

To explain it: Consider the sqlite database in your browser that stores you browsing history. Now is there a way to store this sqlite database in a server and intelligently synchronize new/deleted history items (instead of the full file) from different clients parallely (say mobile, two PCs etc.)

I know of projects like Mozilla Weave which does this. But What I am interested in is not in finding a solution for the above history-sync problem, but a generic technology for synchronizing SQL accessible databases.

How to write a Kernel module

2010-07-17T14:07:00.000+05:30

A very very simple and rudimentary tutorial to know "How to write a kernel module". This is _no_ substitute for reading a good driver book/tutorial. This is just to give a launchpad for a novice to start on kernel programming.

Step 1: vi hello.c

#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>

static int hello_init(void)
{
        printk(KERN_ALERT "Hello World");
        return 0;
}

static void hello_exit(void)
{
        printk(KERN_ALERT "Goodbye World");
}

module_init(hello_init);
module_exit(hello_exit);

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL v2");
MODULE_AUTHOR("YOUR NAME");

Step 2: vi Makefile

obj-m := hello-kernel.o
hello-kernel-objs := hello.o

Step 3: make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
You should see hello-kernel.ko in your current directory, by now.

Step 4: sudo /sbin/insmod hello-kernel.ko

Step 5: dmesg

You should see "Hello World" here.

Step 6: lsmod | grep hello-kernel

Step 7: modinfo hello-kernel.ko

Step 8: sudo /sbin/rmmod hello-kernel.ko

Step 9: dmesg

You should see "Goodbye World" here.

SYSTEM and METHOD for TROLL CONTROL

2010-06-10T21:27:00.000+05:30

Since anything (however stupid it might be) can be patented, I am gonna patent the following:

Title: SYSTEM and METHOD for TROLL CONTROL in open-source projects mailing lists, via Contribution-Points based eMail Limits

Certain mailing lists are more troll-prone than others. For instance, foundation-list, project-list etc. are more troll-prone and attract a lot of noisy crowd than other useful mailing lists like performance-improvement, research, product-XYZ-users-support-list, etc.

For these troll-prone lists, we should have a points based eMail restriction. A person with 10 points can post only 3 mails per week, one with 50 points can post only 10 mails per week, etc. At no stage, a mail conversation (unless technical) can be allowed to have more than 19 mails (Refer previous patent)

These points should be awarded based on people's contribution. Say, for every 2 bugs fixed, you get 1 point. For every 3 queries resolved in user-support mailing list, you get 1 point. For every new software you package for your distribution, you get 1 point etc. Since not many look after support forums, every issue resolved in forums will give you 2 points. (Note: not "every comment in a forum", it is "every issue resolved")

People who have made zero contributions to a project in vital activities like packaging, bug-fixing, documenting, testing, bug-triaging etc. should not be allowed to start a thread in these troll-prone mailing lists. There are no restrictions on questions on legal, technology aspects. But the restrictions apply for questions on abstract areas like Vision, Strategy, Corporate-affiliation etc. where one can talk without making meaning.

known-limitation: Sometimes, even a good contributor will behave child-like and will involve in pointless trolling. Sadly, There is no cure for it :(

I need to hire a patent-writer so that I can get the above crappy, non-sensical idea, written in abstract words with diagrams, flow-chart etc. so that the stupid, lame proposal becomes patent-worthy.

In proprietary software development, corporate people waste time in Meetings. In open-source, we waste time in mailing-list trolls. Atleast, in the latter, we can choose to not-participate and there is a handy option of "Mark all as read".

This really lame post is written in an insomniac night in about 10 minutes, Thanks to Independence.

openSUSE Art (Mug)

2010-04-29T14:47:00.000+05:30

On one of those bored evenings, I had: an empty DelMonte tin, some openSUSE DVDs, a super glue and some kitchen utensils. And, I ended up doing things as in the video below. Watch it.

openSUSE Art (Mug) from Sankar P on Vimeo.

If you are using a RSS reader, please open the blog in a new browser window to see the embedded video. Preferably see the video in HD and in full screen.

Now that you have watched the video (hopefully), If you could think of any _really_ ;-) artistic things that can be done with this tin, drop me a comment.

For the photographs, Thanks should be given for Devadas Kovilakath, Nikanth K, Bharath Acharya. Thanks to Jhonny Jacob for the tins.

The Last Answer

2010-04-23T21:35:00.000+05:30

“Then, too, although what I know is infinite, it is also true that what there is to know is infinite, and how can I be sure that both infinities are equal? The infinity of potential knowledge may be infinitely greater than the infinity of my actual knowledge. Here is a simple example: If I knew every one of the even integers, I would know an infinite number of items, and yet I would still not know a single odd integer.”

Murray said, “But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers.”

The Voice said, “You have the idea. I am pleased. It will be your task to find other such ways, far more difficult ones, from the known to the not-yet-known. You have your memories. You will remember all the data you have ever collected or learned, or that you have or will deduce from that data. If necessary, you will be allowed to learn what additional data you will consider relevant to the problems you set yourself.”

Current mood: Thoughtful

Remainings of the above text, can be found here

I Wish ...

2010-04-12T22:13:00.000+05:30

... I have joined a Technology Startup, right after my college.

By startup I don't mean one of these mushroomy, money-minded Indian companies (working on social-networking), whose sole aim is to be eaten by a bigger crocodile. I mean a real technology startup focused on innovation and steered by experienced, energetic and technical people (like Ximian, Sonus, Qumranet etc.).

However, to join a company like Qumranet, I should've used my latenight hours in college, working on Linux Kernel, instead of Java web programming or pointless browsing. Anyways, I have no regrets about joining Novell. It is the most suitable company for me, in the list of all companies where my classmates joined. I just believe things would've been far more challenging, positive, energetic and with more learning opportunities to have worked in a startup.

openSUSE Conference

2010-04-07T00:03:00.000+05:30

Atleast in India, more people are looking forward to openSUSE conference 2010 it seems (than 2009) We should start the preparations :-)

Forking Evolution ?

2010-03-13T16:36:00.000+05:30

Someone, who probably has no idea of what it takes to maintain a large codebase, suggested that Canonical/Ubuntu should fork Evolution. He also sensed a non-existing Microsoft conspiracy. These days we seem to hear more about conspiracies by evil corporations than about technology/user-needs ;-)

Interestingly, it has generated some replies from my engineering inspirations - NotZed and Fejj. Fejj's comments in the original post here. The reply blog post of NotZed, in his typical to-the-point-style here. (There is a section about India as well, which I found interesting to read)

For Enterprise Desktop users on Windows, Outlook is the single-most indispensable and attractive software, that slows/stops people from migrating to Linux. The reason why it has so many passionate users, is because MSFT invests a lot of people for this product development/QA. For Evolution to seamlessly replace Outlook, what it needs is not-a-fork but more-resources (people not resources like memory ;-)).

A saner and practically more useful suggestion, to Canonical, would have been, to sponsor for few programmers to work for Evolution; Just like how RedHat has increased their contribution to Evolution, in the last two years or so. Copyright assignment is a stop-energy. To make it is easier to contribute to Evolution, it is LGPL, for a while now.

There are people on Canonical who are far more business-aware than me, who will just laugh and ignore at this fork-suggestion. But this post and the replies rekindled some old memories and thus this post.

On an unrelated note, I believe IMAP4 has outlived its time. I wish to see something on the lines of reMAP to gain popularity and interest. A new, open protocol that is REST-driven, conversation-based, http-cacheable/shareable, internal-cloud-host-able etc.

Installation of Multimedia codecs based on Country

2010-01-20T16:50:00.000+05:30

During our last openSUSE Project meeting, there was a discussion on Multimedia Codecs. Currently, in openSUSE (and in almost all other Linux distributions) multimedia codecs are not shipped along with the DVD, because:

* The software is proprietary software, it does not conform to the Open Source definition.
* The software is providing functionality which is patented and the patent holder is preventing distribution of the software
* The software violates laws concerning software distribution in jurisdictions where the companies behind the distribution conduct business.

However, Legal restrictions differs across countries for different multimedia formats. There are places where there are no legal restrictions on some formats.

We can run a server/service on such a country where there are no legal restrictions multimedia codecs (or on international waters ?) which when given a Country name, should respond with the List of allowed multimedia codecs for that country (and also the binaries).

During installation, users are asked to choose their Location (timezone etc.) and after every installation, on the first run, we can pass this location information to the above mentioned Geo-Codecs-Service and get all the safe-to-use-binaries for the selected location.

This Geo-Codecs-Service can be jointly operated by all linux distributions (or for that matter can be used by any interested operating system).

So, the question of this blog post is: Are there any legal problems with this above approach ? I am sure someone should have considered this earlier and should have found any reasons why this may not be possible. Please type your comments here. Thank you a lot for your suggestions. Also, thanks to Karl Fischer for making me blog this and get a wider opinion.

Recognizing

2009-11-23T20:45:00.000+05:30

Recognizing someone whom you have not met in a long time, is faster via voice (phone) than appearance (visually).

But why we don't focus on voice, to recollect, when someone appears in front of you and asks "Remember me?" !

Useless post, Don't bother commenting. ;-)

Stunning Random Wallpapers for your [openSUSE GNOME] Desktop

2009-10-29T15:04:00.000+05:30

I came across an interesting project named Webilder. It is so awesome.

Webilder can...

- download flickr photos that match tags (for example: beach,party)
- download photos from flickr users of your choice.
- download most interesting photos from flickr.
- download amazing daily proshots from Webshots (requires Webshots account).
- automatically download new photos for you.
- change your wallpaper every few minutes.
- import webshots collections (wbz or wbc formats).

Webilder includes...

- a simple photo collection browser, that will let you view the images in fullscreen, or set them as a wallpaper.
- browser integration for webshots - downloaded images are automatically added to your collection.
- command-line photo downloader.

I've got some stunning wallpapers from Flickr's daily feed of Interesting Photoes. I experimented with few keywords like: Gothic, Smile, Beautiful, Pretty, etc. And I got some wonderful pictures.

Sample Screenshots from my Desktop

openSUSE was not having rpms for this package. So I went ahead and created a build-service project for this. Go GRAB The RPM :-) (1-click install)

After installing the rpm, right-click on your gnome-panel and add "Webilder" from "Add to Panel..." You can click on this icon and launch webilder any time you want. From Tools -> Preferences you can choose the flickr tags, time after which wallpaper should change automatically, configure webshots account etc. Make sure you enable "Download Interesting Photoes" under flickr tab.

Thanks a lot to Nadav Samet for the awesome application. There were some small bugs in the software but there are some excellent wallpapers that I am getting that make me ignore these minor issues. I hope we get enough contributors to get these minor issues fixed and more features added (Download only high-res images, etc.)

openSUSE Conference 2009 & Germany Trip

2009-10-02T16:23:00.000+05:30

The openSUSE Conference 2009 on Germany was my first overseas trip. A small twitter style update about it is:

Pre-Travel

- The VISUM (German for VISA) processing for the Germany trip began very late, owing to the budget discussions. At last, Thanks to Zonker and Nat Friedman, all these issues were settled and the budget sources were found.
- YSR's death caused grief to various people in various ways and I was no exception. My first visa interview date became a state Government holiday because of it and so visa interview got post-poned
- Got the visa approved just two days before the actual travel date and began my travel (and purchases)
- Big Thanks should be given to Alexia Henrie, Jacqueline Junghanns, Vijayalakshmi Sharma for all their timely help

Travel

- The flight started at 2:00 am from Bangalore. Suresh and Nikanth who came with me clarified my few inquisitive doubts. After long travel and a two hour wait in the cold Paris airport, we reached Nuremberg at around 5:00 pm local time. Somehow I did not feel one bit sleepy.
- Nuremberg is a lovely place and I immediately fell in love with it. It is not a crowded, traffic-filled modern city but a small city with lots of green fields, clean air and water. The day we landed the sun was shining brightly, much to my relief.
- There is a castle in the city center and every wall of this castle and every building around this castle has a story behind it. My friend taking me through this trip patiently explained me all the stories in detail.
- Met a lot of people in the conference. The openSUSE conference had people coming from all corners of the world - Australia, China, India, Europe, England, US, Mexico to name a few.
- It was good to meet all the great people of the openSUSE community in person. Some of the people were drastically different than I have expected.
- I was interviewed by Sirko Kemter (gnokii) for radiotux. The audio podcast is available here. Listening to this audio clip helped me understand the things that I need to improve in my future interviews ;-) It is indeed a great honour and I should thank Sirko for this.
- Attended a lot of talks. But my "Session of the conference" goes to a talk with a noble purpose. The unconference session on Accessibility by Stephen Shaw and Bryen Yunashko is the one that I felt the closest to my heart. It motivated me a lot to contribute to a11y. Let us see what I can do.
- After the conference I spent about 3 days in SuSE offices in Nuremberg. The facility is fantastic and ~3 people get a private office with a glass wall on a side. The whole building is naturally lit and aesthetically designed. It is a real A+ facility.
- The Internet connection in Germany is the fastest I have ever been. For someone coming from India (where we have to still pay a fortune for 2 mbps connection) when the speedtest site showed me download speed of 64 mbps, I was awestruck.
- I did not have much problem with food. Contrary to what I expected, Not everyone in the western world is a meat-eater it seems.
- The Germans seem to eat breakfast like a king and their dinner like a pauper ;-) The breakfast is too extensive with a huge variety and the dinner is very light and with less choices. (may be a flawed observation)
- Germans prefer to call their homeland - Deutshland. The term "Germany" is given by british people who have the habit of altering the names they cannot pronounce. We have these cases in India as well.

Autobahn

The thing about Deutshland that impressed me the most is: Autobahn . It is an engineering wonder. It can be roughly compared to the national highways in India for purpose - but way beyond comparison in terms of quality. The suggested speed in the Autobahn is 130 kmph and everyone exceeds this. There are _no_ speed limits on these roads and you can go as fast as you can. Travelling in a sports car in this road felt like flying. The roads and traffic lights are so well planned that I didn't find a single speed breaker.

The first thing that impresses any Indian going out of India is the awesome roads. The congress primeministers who ruled India for more than 50 years and travelled to Europe and USA were able to find Girlfriends but not the fact that good roads are vital for a country. Thankfully we had one Mr. Vajpayee who realized the need for world-class roads, after more than 50 years of self-governance.

Post-travel
After 9 days of trip, I found that: Sorkkame endralum adhu num oorai pola varuma (Even Heaven cannot come close to hometown). : It is such a nice feeling to be back in India and feel the humidity in the air, hear the horn sounds again, and feel the warmth of the merciless Sun. I believe The lack of sun and the high-cold is probably the reason for the low population (humans and insects) in the western world ;-)

Some of the photoes are published in my facebook page.

Most Wanted Feature

2009-08-04T22:40:00.000+05:30

In People of openSUSE interview, there is a question: Which application or feature should be invented as soon as possible? :

If I were to answer this question, I would say:

Mailing list softwares should calculate the mail counts in every thread and if a thread exceeds 19 mails, it should be deemed spam and terminated immediately. No further replies on the thread should be allowed to pass-by. The software should use AI and block any mails, if some smart users try to change the subject and continue the thread. If the warriors cannot come to agreement in less than 19 mails, they wont settle in 100 mails either. So let them meet offline, face-to-face and decide upon solutions.

Well, may be it is too much of an ask. A mutt script to automatically mark threads with more than 19 mails as read will be better.

okaythnxbye

P.s: Why the number 19 ? I just wanted to honor the boundaries of teenage.

Vijesh

2009-08-03T14:38:00.000+05:30

I and two friends were travelling in a new car bought by one of my friends. I was taking a photo of the driver's eye image shown in the rear-view mirror. And the conversation went like:

Friend 1: What a sense of photography, wow wow !
Me: We are all engineers you know, we should constantly innovate ;-)

Friend 2: BTW, speaking of photography and innovation, whom is Vijesh trying to impress ? he is blogging a lot about photography these days.

Me: I think he is genuinely interested in photography and it doesnt look like he is interested in photography to impress anyone. May be he could've started for that reason.

Friend 1: Who is Vijesh-da ?

Friend 2: He is a Kaatawn. The only guy whom I have ever seen hit a six from our hostel ground center up unitl G block Mess.

Me: I will make sure I will convey the words of praise to him :-)

So, Vijesh, It will be nice if you can do a "Ghajini" like pose with your mottai thalai ;-)

Google Chrome OS

2009-07-08T11:59:00.000+05:30

So, the big news from Google is that they are releasing a new open-source operating system, primarily targetted for Netbooks, name Google Chrome OS. I had plans of buying a netbook which I guess I will postpone, until a clear winner (market leader) emerges between Moblin, Google Chrome OS, Windows7, and etc.

An ironical and interesting thing is, there is no offical installer for Google Chrome for Linux yet, but the announcement says, google chrome will be based on Linux. (should I say GNU/Linux ;) ) Looking forward to future.

irc, keyboard, etc.

2009-06-09T15:47:00.000+05:30

The keys "s" & "d" are dangerously close. In IRC, I almost sent: "Just kissing" when I wanted to send "Just kidding".

And, it got me to think about Levenshtein distance.

Dogs of War - United Nations

2009-05-17T21:35:00.001+05:30

I was wondering if the United Nations (UN) has been able to prevent/stop any wars at all. For sure they could not bring peace for:

- Tamils in Srilanka
- Tibetans in China
- Afghan women in some parts of Afghanistan
- Kashmiris from Pakistan/India
- Iraqians either when Saddam ruled or when US attacked them (No debates please on whether this is right or wrong)
- Iran/Palestinian problems

Reading about the recently intensified war of Srilanka vs LTTE and the thousands of harmless civilians getting killed, I was reminded of a conversation in the book "The dogs of war" which goes something like:

Wars are made by egotistic people on power, with terrible impact on common people lives. The winners write the history in whatever ways to boost their ego and fame, often projecting the losers of war as the most evil reincarnation of Satan.

These are not the exact words, but is something on these lines. The author will cite Adolf Hitler as an example of this, how Hitler has a bad reputation in history books across the world.

These words of Frederick Forsyth are so true that I believe organizations like UN, though started with noble goals like world-peace, can only slow down things but are incapable of stopping people at power, from abusing it to gain personal glory.

I was also reminded of another thought, whose source I forgot. Humans as a species have become so fitter, that they can be destroyed only by each other. So we are inventing modern ways to reach human extinction faster with things like cluster bombs, chemical weapons etc. I am not sure if there will be a third world war, but there will be no fourth world war, as humans would've become extinct by the third.

I was told by some of my European colleagues about the angry emotions of some non-native europeans, (immigrants/refugees of wars) when they hear about bad things in their homeland. I just wish peace and safety for everyone and not any other life getting injured by the Dogs of War and emotions of the affected people. As a politically powerless human being there is nothing more that we (me and most of my blog readers) can do except Hoping for a peaceful tommorrow.

Comments are closed for this post.

Book on openSUSE 11.1 - LinuxIdentity

2009-03-03T16:39:00.000+05:30

In an otherwise gloomy past few days (recession, share market down etc.) my book on openSUSE 11.1 is released.

This is the kind of book which can help even your grandma to use openSUSE as her primary desktop, with the same effortless expertise, with which she would use a bread toaster. Go ahead and buy it :-)

A few people who (in)directly helped me and must be thanked are: Caroline Turner of Linux Identity, Anja Stock, Marcus Meissner, Puthali HB, Zonker, The awesome maintenance team in SuSE (security and L3 included) who pushes all the needed updates right on time, my Family, Friends & Colleagues and above all The highly active openSUSE Community :-)

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions e-mail them to me.

Naan Kadavul

2009-02-15T22:00:00.000+05:30

It seems தமிழ் கூறும் நல்லுலகம் wont accept me as a blogger, if I dont write a review about "Naan Kadavul" (I am God, naanu Gaadu;) (what is God in Kannada?) ) So, on popular demand:

+ Absolutely worth the money. You will not regret watching it in theatre. Most of the movies these days are not worth watching even in thiruttu-VCD

+ Special credits should be given to the crew selectors (assistant directors probably). Perhaps this film holds the record for the maximum number of handicapped people and beggars than any other movie.

+ If gathering so many beggars is a tough task, making them act is an even tougher one. Bala deserves yet another national award. He is capable of making even a stone pillar (or Trisha for that matter) act.

+ If there is one actress in India for whom you can keep a closeup shot confidently, it should be Pooja. If the regional politics in the award selection committee are less, she will definitely get a national award.

+ The villain is a 52 year old mottai, who will put all the 6-pack-aspiring heroes to shame. He is terrific. After Virumaandi, a real villain is found whom the audience will love to hate.

+ The film is probably the first in Tamil cinema to extend the "There is no GOD" argument to Islam and Christianity. There has been no other director, who had the backbone to say "What good is Allah or Jesus ?" till now.

+ There is nothing much to do for Aarya. His role is restricted to four things: Dancing, Smoking-pot, Fighting, Yoga. It seems Anbumani Ramadoss has banned screening of smoking cigarettes only and not Ganja. Thankfully Ajith did not act in the movie and spoil it.

- One thing that I couldn't agree to is the depiction of the anti-social, cannibalistic aghori as the ultimate savior who saves the good people.

- TN Police have seen too many saamiyars. So, in a TN police station, a Ganja smoker with an unshaved beard will not be dealt with respect or fear, but with lathi and laadam (hoofing ?)

- If I were the director, I would've titled: "இவர்கள் பிச்சைக்காரர்கள்". And I would've made the Murugan character in the movie, turn an unexpected hero killing the mottai. I would've trimmed all that aghori thing, which I feel is unsuitable for a peaceful modern day society. The film would've flopped though ;-)

Final Verdict: If you find yourself complaining too much about pay hikes (or lack of it), bonuses, house loans, petrol cost, traffic jams etc., watch this film and you will realize that there are worse things in world. In fact when you come out of the theatre, You will feel happy about what you've got and will remain quiet. A must watch.

Sidenote: Actresses in Tamil cinema (especially Trisha) carry an off-screen ego and bandhaa, as if they are capable of teaching Steven Spielberg how to direct. In reality, they will run around trees with heroes either double their age or younger to them. Pooja seems to be an exception. She was in a chat session with the artistes of Naan Kadavul in Kalaingar TV. She seem to know all the people by their name and instead of any I'm-the-queen-of-england speech, she fluently conversed with these physically challenged people in Tamil and made them comfortable on facing the camera. I'm impressed on an artist off screen after a long time.

ChikPet

2009-01-18T21:02:00.000+05:30

My ex-room-mate has got a house on his own and is moving shortly. We went to HomeTown, in outer ring road, last week to buy lamps and glass bulb covers (Is there a name for it ?) Hometown has a massive collection of everything you will ever want to buy for a new house, under one roof. We felt the prices were a little too high and somebody recommended this mysterious place called ChikPet. So, today we went there.

I assumed: ChikPet = Chicks + Pet : and hence a place where chicks (and there is no wiki page for chicks) will come with their pets. Instead it turned out to be a place time-jumped straight out of 1980s. There were numerous shops in the narrow streets. Most of the shops have rented very small spaces that they have a seperate godown section somewhere outside where you have to go, in case you are buying more than a piece.

Prices are damn cheap. Nothing is sold in MRP. Make sure you take someone who can bargain well. If you are buying in large numbers (7 sets of lamps, a dozen cfls, 4-5 fans etc.) , you get good discounts. The same set of things a person bought for 20k somewhere else, we could buy for ~7k. One simple instance is: 15 watts CFL bulb is atleast Rs.20 cheaper per piece.

My Kannada skills, with a not-so-foreign accent and a very limited vocabulary was put to test today and I managed well. The kannada shop owner even complained about some of his Tamil customers without realizing that I am one. Later he had an embarrassed smile when we spoke with each other.

However, If you want to go, a few words of caution: a) Preferably, go as a gang of guys. b) Not at all the place for a rich looking software engineer carrying a blackberry (stick to HomeTown) c) Not a place where you can take your wife and kids to select and buy d) There could be damaged, shattered pieces in the glasses. Check them well before packing. e) many shops are closed on Sundays f) I heard this place is famous for sarees (one more reason why u should never take (old ?) women)

P.S: I'm tempted to use a lot of text-within-paranthesis for meta-things. Is there a name for this addiction ?

On a Bored Evening ...

2009-01-14T22:49:00.000+05:30

... I sat in the Forum top floor staircase, right in front of the escalator. I was looking at the people coming in the escalator and moving to PVR and observed some obvious facts.

- More than 95% of married couple coming to PVR have a nice, round pot belly. Men make it more pronounced by wearing belts. Women suppress it nicely with loose fittings.

- When I was a young kid, most of the children whom I played with (and /me as well) were skinny. On the contrary, More than 90% of the kids that came to Forum then, were extremely obese.

- More than 90% of fathers were hyper-caring about their female children, while coming out of the escalator. They even suspend their mobile phone conversation. Boys on the other hand are just ignored ;-)

- 75% of the people coming were either couples or families. ~25% were male bachelors. There was just one gang-of-girls. So, if u belong to the 25% and came looking for single girl(s), probably you are in the wrong place.

- More than 99% of ugly women show a lot of fake excitement when they meet other ugly women. A surprisingly large number of ugly women bump into each other, near the escalator end.

- More than 99% of the guys who accompany the ugly women are weird looking. Rings in wrong places, faces unshaved for months, Hairstyle reminding beggars in Ganges banks, etc.

- More than 90% of ugly woman use kaNmai (what is it in English ? Eyepaint ?) (which makes me think what is kannada for eye, kannu?)

- 100% of young girls (< 8 years) seem to have feet with springs and a never ending source of energy. They somehow lose their charm after 8 years. (for varied reasons)

- More than 90% of kids (7 - 12 years) wear eye glasses. After 12 they probably switch to contact lens.

- A ugly woman is ugly even if she wears costly clothes and heavy makeup.

I observed some other obvious things which I don't recollect now.

All observations are interpreted in a way that will suit my thoughts. So, dont bother to correct my observations, if you find them wrong. It is probably intentional ;-)

This post is a warmup post, as I forgot that I can write non-evolution posts, for years now. I have setup proper labels, my normal blogging should resume. Not that anyone miss my posts, but blogging personally helps me enjoy reliving my moments.

Funambol Evolution Bounty - 750 USD

2008-12-22T22:29:00.000+05:30

From Twitter:

storming: $750 bounty for Evolution plugin RT @funambol: New Funambol Code Sniper: Eplugin for Gnome Evolution.

More Details : Here and Here.

If you want any help, hang around #evolution in irc.gimp.org

EMail processing , Desktop Search - Interested ?

2008-12-09T21:58:00.000+05:30

EMail processing & Desktop search : Are you interested in these ? I dont have a job opening on this but instead have an interesting problem at hand and would love to receive your thoughts on it.

As you might already know , Srini and I have implemented sqlite based summary for Evolution. With the previous summary format, Beagle was able to search evolution mails via its meta-summary approach. After on-disk summary implementation, this meta summary is no longer in use.

Now we need to figure out a way, by which , email meta-data (from subject etc.) can be made accessible for applications like Tracker, Beagle, Google desktop search etc. Philip Vanhoof started some work on this and a discussion is open on the evolution-hackers and tracker-dev thread. Express your esteemed comments and opinions on the thread.

Evo - License changes - contd.

2008-09-19T12:02:00.000+05:30

I just committed the 6th batch of Evolution license changes. A big THANKS to all the people who have responded to our Taking Forward thread on the mailing list. Special Thanks to people who help us to reach for more committers.

Apart from that, Michael Meeks has presented iogrind in Plumbers conference and I am eagerly awaiting the video / audio of it. Check out (or should I say git-clone) iogrind sources from its new home - iogrind on gitorious. I am happy that some of the minor UI changes that I made have already been merged mainline.

License changes - Part 3 & 4

2008-09-12T21:55:00.000+05:30

Evolution license changes part 3 and part 4 have been committed. We will be patching the COPYING file in the evolution sources for Monday's release , as the license change may not be complete for all the files before the release. Thank you all for helping with the process.

Evolution sources license changes - Part 2

2008-09-02T22:00:00.000+05:30

I committed the second batch of license changes for Evolution sources a few minutes back. More than 450 files changed. So, when you update evolution sources next time, Don't Panic , if you see a lot of updates. More changes will be committed as and when we complete the code auditing.

Evolution Source Relicensing

2008-08-28T11:49:00.000+05:30

Following our earlier announcement of evolution sources relicensing, I committed the change of License headers, for a part of Evolution sources, from GPL to LGPL.

The license change for the remaining files will be done as we progress with the code auditing. We are really excited and feel that this would really help Evolution a lot.

I learned a lot about scripting and the importance to come up with a standard header so that any sed, awk ing can be done easily.

Water Beauties

2008-08-16T09:08:00.001+05:30

I am curious how it is pre-programmed. Do we have moving water guns ? How is the movement synchronized ? How is it possible to make the water travel in a bended path etc. ? What are the algorithms typically used for such things ?

Such things can be used for window close animations ;-)

gnome-do & twitter

2008-08-14T23:53:00.000+05:30

My favorite addictions gnome-do and twitter just got more attractive, with nicer integration. After using gnome-do, I have started liking it so much that I have removed the start menu from my panel.

Updating your twitter status is just four keystrokes away with the help of gnome-do.

1) Type and select the text you want as the twitter message
2) super + space key (brings gnome-do)
3) Type: twe
4) Enter and published.

I am not sure if the plugin handles the famous "twitter fish page" yet and automatically retries.

If you are in Opensuse 11.0, make sure you have the latest updates for gnome-do. With old version, the twitter account setup never worked.

Are you a meat eater ?

2008-07-29T15:16:00.000+05:30

Are you a meat eater in the western world ? If so, you must watch the following video.

Video - http://www.meat.org/index-1.asp?c=mymbagnn0708

Warning: Contains some disturbing images.

I am not sure how much authentic the information is though.

Thanks to Partha for sharing the video.

NatGeo - Inside the living body

2008-07-27T23:23:00.000+05:30

I came across an interesting video from National Geographic titled, Inside the living body. The video is a journey of human life right from the moment of birth until death, progressing through decades of age.

The video starts with the toughest challenge that all the humans on Earth has faced - Birth. It explains the seemingly intricate process with nice visuals. The closeup video, of first the child's head followed by the whole body coming out, can be a little disturbing to watch, for some people.

It is a little unbelievable to know that: The baby sees the world in blurred, black & white images until 2 months and the baby can identify its mother's face only by 4 months. This is the time taken to develop the optical nerves and the brain to understand the inverted image of the world.

The video then covers the Meconium Ejection. Coincidentally my fav. blogger blogged it recently. The path taken by the first milk, the first food and the first poop is then shown.

Humans crawl before they walk. Crawling helps them in understanding the 3d world and this is achieved by three special bones behind the ears. Crawling helps us in adapting to the dimensions. Humans are bipedal and hence it is easier to have this equilibrium-indicator near the eyes. I wonder how it will be for Quadrupeds as they have to worry about more body length.

As we proceed to the next decade, the video discusses about various hormones that shape up this age. It talks about Dopamine, Testosterone etc. reminding me of the excellent books by Helen Fisher.

As we proceed to the twenties, Life gets interesting as we look for long term commitment and attachment, driven by Oxytocin (reminding Ms. Fisher again). The video explains some of the changes experienced by the woman body during the pregnancy stage. A small (disturbing) video segment of Caesarean birth is also shown.

The video proceeds to explain about Muscles, skin cells, bad effects of alcohol and smoking, stress etc. and travelling to the old-age. The video ends on a mystical note covering Death.

Overall, the video is a nice watch and very well suited for knowing about the basics of physiology. It has lots of internal visuals. There are some extreme closeup videos of internal body functions which are so interesting. You will not regret ordering this video. Go Ahead.

Concordantly, I believe: NatGeo is much more helpful than my school textbooks, in understanding the basics of sciences. If it were up to me, I will make the Government(s) let NatGeo to frame the syllabus of school subjects, (supplemented with their awesome videos). A NatGeo video is far more useful, informative, attractive and realistic than the boring, abstract school text books (and unfriendly teachers). Kudos to NatGeo.

However, their DVD costs are too high to get into not-so-rich countries. As a result they give away a lot of potential customers to Pirated Downloadable Versions. I wish they come up with some attractive country-specific low price editions, just as what book publishers are doing for a long time.

Project Madagascar

2008-07-16T18:47:00.000+05:30

By April 2008, something exciting happened for Evolution. After I becoming the mail maintainer (nope the exciting thing is yet to follow ;-) ), Srini and I decided to work full time on the long-pending idea On-Disk-Summary.

Srini had spent some of his ITO time (One more reason why one should work here), in writing a PoC for DB Summary. There is a notzed-disksummary-branch started by the eminent Michael Zucchi. Based on some discussions with our SLED Desktop Architect, - the inimitable Michael Meeks, we wanted to move mailer to EDS and expose mailer as a service.

The basic architecture is simple.

To explain it in simple terms,

Currently (well, until 2.22 I mean) , if you have vfolders, there is a problem. Even if you are looking at a folder that has just 10 mails, if you have a vfolder, constructed on a folder with 10lakh mails, and has clicked it atleast once, the summary file for the 10 lakh mails folder will be in memory (virtual as decided by the os). Since this summary file is a flat file, there is no easy way to load parts of it. We need only the counts and not the things like subject, sender etc.

So, with our new design, We store the summary in a sqlite database. This helps us in querying whatever fields we need alone , into the memory. So, you don't need to hold the entire 1 lakh info-es of a never-gonna-see-again folder in memory. Instead you just fetch the count alone.

Meta-summary
The code to create meta-summaries has been removed. We prefer applications like Beagle to make use of the camel APIs to query directly from the summary database itself. Once mailer is moved to EDS, anybody can query for mailer data from eds, instead of playing with the database directly.

Search Improvements
All our searches (except body-search) are done in the database and only the resultant message infoes are kept in the memory. Not all infoes are brought to memory just to do a search. Wecan also have indexes on subject and sender as they are the oft-searched fields. This will be highly useful for mobile clients etc. as I understand it.

So, if you have a folder with 1 lakh mails, and you set your quick-show to show only last 200 mails, only those info-es will be in memory. The camel infrastructure supports this (just use sql) and we need to add support on evolution side for this 200 mails thing yet.

The code is now in Trunk. Give it a try and ping us in #evolution for any issues that you run into. You need to update eds as well as evolution code. IMAP and Local providers work really well atm. none of the date based searches work. But we promise to fix them soon :-)

Our heart-felt Thanks goes to NotZed (the person who coined on-disk-summary iirc), Fejj, Michael Meeks, git-svn, Habbie (in #sqlite) and all Evolution hackers.

P.S: "1 Lakh = 100000" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh (Thanks to sexpert). We need a common standard everywhere.

Experiments with Truth

2008-07-15T23:38:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Thunderbyte, I got Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography. I read it as my bus book. This is the first time, I read an auto-biography. I don't think it is right to write a review for an auto-biography, as it is like commenting on one's life. Anyways, Gandhi's life is too great and I am too insignificant to comment about his life ;-) Hence, here are some of the thoughts that popped up on my mind after reading it.

- The book is very cheap and costs only Rs.30 (< 1$) The reason is probably bcos of subsidies. However, I was unable to digest its cost being lesser than other autobiographies, say Hillary Clinton's

- Gandhi is so unbelievably honest in accepting his mistakes. He, I guess, got addicted to the pleasure of being open, that he never hid any of his mistakes, even when confession is not a requisite and some facts can be omitted.

- Gandhi has done a tremendous job as the father of the nation. But for his children, he is a lousy father. He is even more lousy in the role of a husband. Every country wants a Gandhi but I guess no family will want a Gandhi in them.

- Gandhi's biography never mentions about Jawaharlal Nehru, which is very very surprising.

- When Gandhi started the Satyagraha Ashram, there were 25 initial members, with more than 12 people from TamilNadu. So, Gandhi is truly a national hero and probably the last man from North India to conquer the hearts of even extreme corners of the South of India. There are plenty of woman though ;-)

- More than 3/4th of the book explains his activities in South Africa. Had he worked completely in India, he would've been just as famous as Vallabhai or Bharathiyar and wouldn't have got the mahatma tag. (on-site, travel etc. helps you know ;-) )

- Gandhi's book snapshots the then Indian's lack of cleanliness. There is no better account than this book for this aspect.

- Gandhi reminded me of my grand father when I read that he refused to take non-veg even when prescribed by the doctors. But forcing this to his kids, isn't that a great idea anyway.

- The two best things that has happened for Gandhi (imho) are: 1) Marrying Kasturibai 2) Being born as the younger brother of such a nice person

- Gokhale is the unsung hero of the Indian war of independence

In addition to all these things, there is one more interesting thing that I have observed.

Gandhi makes so much of fuss about Celibacy. He feels so painful that he cannot get rid of his lust. I do not see anything wrong with lust - as it is the major driving force of Evolution and just a natural emotion. Familiarity breeds contempt and hence the best way to get rid of lust, is to get satisfied rather than abstaining.

It makes no sense to vow, "I will never have a sexual intercourse again in my life". It should be a dynamic on-demand thing and not a pre-decided policy. Otherwise it sounds like some of the stupid and rigid policies that corporates have.

Overall, it is a good read. There are a few things that I personally found to be very interesting and inspiring, like Vegetarianism, God of Truth, Civil disobedience, Cleanliness awareness campaigns etc. Above everything else, one thing that touches the heart of the reader while finishing the book is the Simplicity of Gandhi even after achieving such name and fame. It is a nice book to own and don't hesitate to buy it, if you come across it.

A free (as in beer) version is available here.

2 Happy News

2008-07-11T21:48:00.000+05:30

Today I received two happy news.

1) Evolution re-licensed as LGPL. As I understand, this makes it easy for us to get more plugins for evolution. Some people were not happy with giving copyrights etc. More details and a formal mail is in desktop-devel list.

2) I am announced the acting manager for Evolution for the next week, to fill in the temporary void. It is an extreme honor and I will strive to be worthy of it. Thanks to the people above me in the org. ladder, for trusting me with this. With the highly-motivated and co-operating team mates around, it should be an interesting task.

And I miss Guadec :'( But I hope to meet some of these awesome people elsewhere soon.

EMail Name Quotes

2008-07-07T16:04:00.000+05:30

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there any standard / RFC on adding quotes to names before the email address ?

Say,

1) My Name < myname@email.com>

2) "My Name" < myname@email.com>

Which among the above two is valid ?

What is the need for the quotes ? We can easily parse the name without the quote also. Anything within < > is email and anything preceding it is the name (until the previous comma or the beginning of line).

On thinking more, I could think of only one problem which this might solve. A name can have comma, Like,

"Charles, The King" < charles@uk.country>

So, in this case alone, it is not possible to parse the sender correctly without the quote.

Overall, my question is : Is there any RFC or open standard that mentions this somewhere ?

I googled around for an answer. But did not get anything useful. Thanks in advance for your responses and thanks to Nikanth for bringing this up.

Meeting the Ents

2008-06-23T19:49:00.000+05:30

Amidst the chaotic, noise-filled, notoriously trafficked, concrete jungles of Bangalore lies a calm serene forest-like accumulation of Trees. It is Off-the Koramangala inner ring road. This place has always reminded me of the Ents.

Like the folklore Ents, these trees have silently watched Bangalore losing its Garden city tag to the newly acquired Concrete Jungle tag. Every time I cross the inner ring road, I see the trees waving their massive trunks as if signaling, "No entry. Bangalore is full. Create satellite towns and spare the remaining beauty at least". I guess all urbanizing cities face this problem.

There are large steel fences blocking entry from the road to the trees. I decided to take a walk across the greenland and hence entered through one of the large gaps in the non-contiguous compound. I roamed around for a good 2-3 kilometer before deciding to sit and rest, leaning on a tree, watching the reddish orange sun settle into the west, smudging the sky with some brilliant shades.

I knew that returning back could be a problem, if it is too dark. Bangalore was once known for its abundance of snakes. I saw lots of rats playing around and a few termite mounds as well. So, with abundant food, much better environment, what more can Snakes ask for. But I am no stranger to snakes, and felt I could manage. So, I stayed for a while and got back only when it was getting a little dark.

I observed that there could be more insects (ants, grass-hoppers, dung-beetles to feed on the droppings of grazing buffaloes) in this particular piece of land alone than the total number of people in entire Bangalore. As people expand, and create towns, we destroy and expunge thousands of insects, truncating their gene-tree and stopping the gene flow. Perhaps, this is the principle of Evolution - survival of the fittest. I was amused to find that there are no societies existing to take care of the insects. I cannot count an instance of when blue-cross (or similar groups) fought for insects. Probably for them, only macroscopic organisms have Life ;-)

Overall, it was such a refreshing, energetic, blissful experience to do some retrospection and think / worry about things, on which I have no control whatsoever. I just wish I have taken a camera to put a pic on my blog. But, I didn't.

And a word of warning, for those who are tempted to go. You are strongly discouraged to go there. It is a military area and I heard (hoax ?) people occasionally practice shooting there. So, if you want to hang on to your dearly life, don't attempt any such cheap thrills. I made sure that I did not cross any military / restricted-area board and always stayed within the trees and the grass fields.

who is the author ? - (non-english)

2008-06-05T22:47:00.000+05:30

Non-Tamil (Thanks to puthali for correcting this) speakers, please skip this.

For all the Tamil speaking makkal, I remember reading the following kavidhai somewhere. Any help on who is the author and the name of the book / blog-url will be useful.

கடவுளுக்காக மனிதன் முடியைக் கொடுக்கிறான்
மனிதனுக்காக கடவுள் ஒரு மயிரையும் கொடுப்பதில்லை

colorgcc for OpenSuse 10.3, 11.0 and Factory

2008-05-22T15:36:00.000+05:30

I am a great fan of the colorgcc package. It helps a lot while compiling your programs. It gives error messages and warnings in different colours, which makes it easy to spot, where you are screwing up your programs. For some reason, I couldn't find it with 11.0

So, I made a build-service project. The rpms are available here. Grab them or use the fantastic 1-click-install.

Isn't Opensuse so wonderful ? If you miss a package, you can not only create rpms for it, You can distribute it to the entire world. And they can get it in 1-click. The entire process took little less than 5 minutes (except building, which is automated).

Build-service rocks. Thanks to all the people who made it and keep it running. One more reason why I love Opensuse :-)

String bug in Nokia phones

2008-05-14T21:01:00.000+05:30

1) Store a number in your Nokia phone, say 99807 XXXXX

2) Try saving another number which is just one unit of Levenshtein Distance away, i.e., to speak in plain non-computer-science english, a number which differs from the old number by just one digit. Say: 98807 XXXXX

3) Nokia mobile will bang with an error "User already existing".

I wonder how this missed their testing. This must be some simple wrong usage of sub-string strcmp operations. May be an accidental regression in the algorithm used for the suppression of the country-codes.

I cannot stop expecting that the mobile's platform was open-sourced, so that I could've patched it myself and gave back the fix.

P.s: I tested with many pre-N-90 models and the problem was in all of these low and medium cost phones. If you have any of these new brick-like phones, you may not notice them.

Heroes

2008-04-22T12:43:00.000+05:30

World needs Heroes and I have just found one in Steve Townsend.

Re: Speaking of Hack Week Projects...

2008-02-25T10:55:00.000+05:30

Fejj, That is an awesome news ! A "Evo-plugin" project type for MonoDevelop is sure to attract a lot of people.

There is a patch that you need to apply to Evolution sources to get Mono plugins to work.

With the current code, the plugin-type "Mono" is registered by the "mono" (loader) plugin. So until this type is registered, a plugin of type mono cannot be loaded. So I implemented plugin-load-levels. By which, all type-loader plugins will be loaded in the first level. Then the individual plugins will be loaded. Grab the patch from the bug.

However, I have not committed this so far b'cos: If the mono plugin is loaded and there is a crash in any part of Evolution, gdb does not stop at the crash. In the terminal, a generic mono stack-trace is printed, no matter where the crash is. i.e., if Evolution crashed in say composing a new mail and even when I have no mono plugin loaded for that scenario, then also a Mono specific stack-trace is printed in the terminal.

I was worried if committing the patch may lead to useless traces. So I have not committed the patch. Any idea how we can debug this ? Once the trace issue is fixed, we can commit it immediately.

I wanted to implement, "Develop a Evolution plugin in 5 clicks" wizard, (similar to a/c setup) with radio-buttons for various hooks, which on selection creates a bare-bones template, where the user can just go and write the function body (in the auto-generated .c[#] file). Based on the selected hook, we can give URLs for Camel or related API docs also in code comments.

Sadly, all these ideas never got kick-started because of various reasons :'( And I did the plugin-load-levels as part of my ITO last time and never really had the time/mindset to continue again. You kindled the interest today :)

Apply Patches from Evolution Mail

2008-02-13T23:13:00.000+05:30

When you receive a bugzilla mail, informing about a new patch added to a bug, You might be tempted to apply and review the patch. So, to shorten the mouse-clicks, redirections, new application launching etc., I decided to add an option, "apply target as patch" as a menu-item to the rclick-context menu on any url, in the body of a mail.

I can download the patch contents using GnomeVFS and save it to a temporary file. I can get the location where this patch should be applied, using GtkFileChooser. But:

--> How do I programmatically apply / dry-run a patch and get the status / result of the patching ?

Right now, I am using a system ("patch") . I know this is fugly and needs a lot of improvement. Suggestions are welcome. I am tracking this plugin development as part of Bug #223783

Thanks in advance for any help.

First iogrind Commit

2008-01-30T18:21:00.000+05:30

My first commit in iogrind module. Hopefully much more to follow soon :)

Thanks a lot to Michael Meeks. He massaged my patch to bring it to a commitable state.

The task was to simulate warmup traces, so as to reduce the noise in the simulations and hence the simulations mimic the actual behavior much more precisely, rather than a cold-boot scenario.

It is not as complex as it sounds and the patch doesn't solve any Seldon Crisis. It took more time for me to understand the problem than to cook the actual patch.

I hope my next patch should be accepted-just-commit-it kind without needing much review comments. Also, I hope I'll move ahead to solving complex problems in iogrind. But all that has to wait until the next weekend :)

Folder Summary Mismatch

2008-01-16T15:30:00.000+05:30

Gnome bugzilla has(d ?) an infamous bug filed for Evolution :

Bug 213072 - Error "Summary and folder mismatch"

This bug has seen The evolution of The Evolution. This bug pre-dates the birth of evolution-data-server module (where the fix is committed now). This bug has seen multiple releases, change of maintainers, company acquisitions, product-transition, License-changes, change of release cycles, loads of arguments, heated discussions, hurt-souls and everything imaginable. Often reminding of the quote: Men may come....

Fejj and NotZed have addressed the issues that will cause this mismatch, via things like O_LARGEFILE support, disk-full handling etc for all these years. It was time to nail the final remaining issues as well. As the inimitable Andre Klapper pointed out, this bug was topping the list of show-stoppers for Gnome 2.22 Since the symptom is same for all the problems, this bug was among the top of most-duped bugs and hence most-criticized as well.

Srini , with his DB-based summary work's knowledge and I with my Camel GroupWise Provider knowledge sat out to knock off this bug for 2.22 We analyzed various reports of users and found: Re-Creation of summary is ruled out as we lose all user flags ((un)read status, labels, junk etc.) The issue is caused mainly when the From address is not found where it is told in the .summary . So we decided to update the From-pos locations in the .summary file, by parsing the .mbox once.

I cooked up a patch for doing this. Thankfully, JP Rosevear (whom I wish blogs more often) had an mbox archive which had this summary-mismatch problem, in Novell Bugzilla. I tested my patch against that mailbox and it was solving the issue :-) We manually modified the code to save summary and tried my patch against the corrupted summary. As expected, my code made the summary to auto-correct itself and proceed as effortlessly as it can.

While code-walking, I found some issues that might cause an infinite loop in case of corrupt mbox files. So I fixed those scenarios as well and I committed the patch. While announcing it to the doc and i18n lists, got a string suggestion and committed that as well. As Andre noted in the bug, it needs *more* testing and eye-balls. Go through the changes and let me know if something can be improved.

Update: The indefatigable Andre Klapper has marked this bug as Resolved. So the bug is finally done. The problem with broken mboxes will be reported by a different string and hence this bug may no longer re-open.

Active IRC Day & iogrind

2008-01-10T20:06:00.000+05:30

Today turned out to be a very engaging day in IRC. Firstly there were some discussions with the indefatigable suseROCKS on #opensuse-gnome. Then with srag on #evo-idc and then with gicmo, kjetilho on #evolution. Had some interesting chats with mmeeks_ and drichard as well. Understood from Mr. Meeks what is so unique about his setup that gets us some special unique crashes/issues.

I wanted to spend some time in some other project in addition to Evolution, where by I can meet some more great people. Many a project came in mind, like mono, kernel, samba etc. I was having a chat with our Distinguished Engineer - Michael Meeks, and he suggested to work on iogrind. I wanted to see his demo/talk about it in Guadec 2007. But his video is not encoded yet because of some audio problems and is not available yet :(

I am off for a vacation and once I am back would like to play with iogrind and try to contribute. So my old wish of working with some of these folks in the same project will come true. If any of you out there want to join me in iogrind work, let me know so that we can start together.

Novell Bugzilla - Remember Me Option

2008-01-03T18:22:00.000+05:30

Novell Bugzilla does not have an option to "Remember me on this computer forever". As a result, everytime we click on a bugzilla link, it takes sometime in page-redirection. So I filed an enhancement request to remember-forever.

If you also have wanted this feature, add yourself in CC to get notified on when it will be done :)

Inconvenience Regretted

2008-01-01T15:13:00.000+05:30

I tried blogger's label for my posts, which somehow triggered spamming planetsuse with my old posts. Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

Green-Week & Global Warming

2007-12-14T13:03:00.000+05:30

Warning: Nothing Technical. Just Skip it.

Novell Bangalore (Bengalooru) is celebrating Green Week. A Task Force has been formed and it's been formulating strategies to spread awareness to reduce Global Warming etc.

Anyone who have read "State of Fear" will have a tinge of suspicion about Global Warming (even though some of the arguments of the author were refuted by some NGOs).

In one of their awareness mails, the Task Force advised people not to use Plastic bags anytime and always use paper bags. I feel if not for plastics then we would have expunged more trees and as per what I have seen in NGC, recycling a tonne of paper saves about 9 trees. So if everyone skips plastic and turns to paper, our de-forestation rates might increase drastically. I looked for some discussion on "Plastic - Good or Bad" kind. But nothing could be found :(

An argument put forward by plastic opposers is that it does not decay easily and is omnipresent. But some research has made good progress in generating bio-degradable styrofoam.

Even otherwise, in future, if proper research is made, it may not be difficult to automatically accumulate [non]degradable from garbage. We can also look for dumping our inorganic waste into other planets/asteroids (and new business opportunities as well)

However, I accept that natural resource usage should be judicial in the same way as memory-usage of processes. And here are some of the steps that will be welcomed by almost all of the [Indian ?] software engineers:

- Give laptops to all employees so that they can consume electricity for just one hour and use the machine for ~ 3 hours.

- Ask employees to work from Home so that the costly operations of running the office (Power, A/c, Office Transport, Commuting, Stationery etc.) can be avoided.

Parts of the awareness mails sent by the task group is not applicable in India, as we do not have Gasoline cars or Thermostats in houses. Most of the awareness docs. speaks about gasoline and thermostat. Since most of these docs / Fwd.s / internet information are mainly adhering to the western life-style, this is not applicable in India.

Personally, I will say more people are affected by diabetes, asthma etc. than global warming and we need more awareness for diseases and healthy-life-style than Global Warming. And drawing A3 size color posters for globalwarming will only contribute to increasing it ;) (remember war for peace)

Now Bengalooru 's cold weather is getting on to my nerves. I will be really happy if I can make use of some Global Warming ;)

Objectives Management

2007-12-07T11:06:00.000+05:30

It is the time of the year, when you have to blow your own trumpet about things that you have done only to hear back from your Boss (PHB for some others) [what more , how different] you should have done.

Companies doing only innovative work may not be able plan the work ahead (bcos innovation = new work none thought before) . But in practice, any corporate engineer is paid not to just go and innovate all through-out the year. He is expected to solve customer-issues, cleanup the sh*t that he committed in the past, review things, sit through long meetings, voice opinions, make noise, fight with competitors, become strategically important, etc (Read Dilbert for knowing what etc. means) . All these activities cannot be done well, unless planned well in advance.

Hence for this reason (or something else) every established company wants its employees to manage objectives of what he wants to achieve. Atleast, it helps to give your boss reasons to justify, to your peer, why you should be given more hike/ bonus than him/her. Unfortunately, every review cycle creates some hurt hearts and irate minds. I guess that is why it is better to align the review with December holidays, so that affected people can recover in their vacation, before coming back to work.

We use a web-based tool in Novell for managing objectives. I felt that it was designed to be a thick client-side app. but made into a web-tool in the eleventh-hour.

There is even a "close window" option in a web-page (in the tool), which will work similar to the Back button in the browser.

You cannot directly add an objective and start typing the boring text. You have to create an objective and then edit it, to add text.

It was pathetically slow that day when I typed my objectives making my patience grow by proportions of Oceans and Mountains, and hence wondered about the abbreviation OMT ;)

It will timeout for me asking password by the time I complete typing an objective's review.

Similar to the dearly 1-click-installer it had a 1-click-change-manager as well :)

May be it appeared so bad because of the poor network that day. Reminded me of Federico's talk:,
Some Usability stuff fail to appeal when the interface is lethargic and less responsive.

Now, Setting Objectives is not sufficient and one needs to accomplish them as well. So I need to snip my rant and get back to work, amidst this current grueling cruel Bangalore weather.

Google is Evil ?

2007-10-09T20:33:00.000+05:30

Taken from #evolution channel on irc.gimp.org

Write Evolution Plugins using Mono / C#

2007-10-04T18:44:00.000+05:30

In my goal to improve the Evolution Plugins framework, I took up and completed a work that was started years back and suspended half-way and remained untouched then-on.

What was there ?

A mono-loader plugin which was essentially a partial implementation of Embedding Mono.

What I did ? (Warning: Some boring text)

I implemented "Plugin Load Levels" viz., EPLUGIN_LOAD_LEVEL_LOADERS, NORMAL, DELAYED, FINAL.

Any plugin that you write will be by default loaded in the NORMAL load-level. Any plugin that creates and registers a plugin-type will have to be loaded before a plugin of that type is loaded. The LOADERS level will ensure this is done.

When Evolution is launched, the plugins will be loaded in the enum order that I have mentioned above.

DELAYED and FINAL are extra deferring levels that any plugin writer can use. Such an iterative plugin loading mechanism will facilitate implementing inter-dependant plugins as well. For instance, a displayGoogleEarthCo-ords plugin may be loaded only when we have a getLocationFromMail plugin loaded.

There were some problems with mono_method_desc_new and I changed some APIs used in the mono-loader and replaced the above-mentioned with mono_class_get_methods etc. and changed the invoke order a little bit.

I made the mono loader register a plugin-type called "mono" which can be used by any of the plugins on the subsequent load-levels.

After testing the type-register, I wrote my "Hello World C# class" and compiled using Mono and generated my first .dll Ensured the .dll's MonoMethod gets executed. I then extended this Class' functionality by which it can connect to google and translate text from English to Spanish. Made the plugin to pass a CamelMimeMessage (a mail that you have received) and get it translated to Spanish. Then the translated text appears in a C# window via GtkHTML# I googled around to see if the recent Moonlight project (which makes everyone go ga-ga) has any HTML renderer that can be used to display the mail. I gave up eventually as the feeping creaturism was put to check by a customer issue which needed some urgent eye-balls.

What's more to do ?

Michael Zucchi, as usual, has done a neat and great job of writing a Camel.CS, Evolution.CS, EBind.CS These files needs to be auto-magically generated (via a Camel.cs.in probably) to get rid of the hard-coded version numbers and for complete-coverage.

The .CS files needed, to use Evolution and Camel structs as Classes, from a Mono plugin, should be put in some standard location. This should to be decided.

More cleanup

Possibilities

A lot of interesting things can be done once the mono plugins is implemented fully. Like:

- Exchange Server 2007 has a Exchange Web-Services Interface. IIUC Working with web-services should be a lot easier and featureful when done via Mono than plain C. So implementing support for Exchange 2007 can be done via this Mono plugins (which I am planning to takeup as my ITO task)

- Beagle can use Mono EPlugin to do some action whenever a new mail comes. Beagle may not be able to talk directly with Camel but there can be a mono-plugin for Evo. written which can do whatever beagle/any Mono app. wants from Evolution.

- Create notes for mail and get them synced with Tomboy

- Enterprise wide Message Templates can be obtained from SharePoint servers for usage in Evolution.

With my limited knowledge these are the toy-uses that I can think of. However there can be much more potential use-cases.

Notes:

1) I wanted to add a pic in this blog like, Rupert sitting over a Mono Coffe-mug, or Evo-Rupert shaking hands with Mono-Rupert. Unfortunately, nobody around me have any mono related goodies. So this became a boring all-text-post. Miguel: Please send us something ;)

2) I am tracking this progress in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483372

3) One can write a plugin in mono as soon as the patch for load-levels is committed. The EBind stuff is needed only when your plugin wants to access Camel and Evo structs.

4) I need to write a "How to write a plugin in 7 steps" manual.

5) Would have been lovely had I demoed this in Boston Summit 2007 [Visa problems :'( ]

6) I have taken a screencast of the plugin. But invariably all the free video-uploaders youtube, video.google.com have an unacceptably lossy-compression. If you look at the original ogg and here you will understand.

Evolution 2.12 & GroupWise Provider

2007-09-21T23:44:00.000+05:30

Evolution 2.12 is released. This is Srinivasa Ragavan aka srag's maiden release and a job more than well-done. Kudos Srini. (And this is for that Coffee treat ;) ) A sneak-peak of what it provides is here.

Personally, this release is special as:

This is the best release ever made for the "Novell GroupWise" provider aka SOAP Mailer of Evolution. From the humble beginnings during the initial SLED Betas, it has grown leaps and bounds and is highly stable now. SOAP Mailer has a rewritten Folder implementation, better-summary-support, optimized server - n/w usage, revamped Status-tracking etc. It is a pity that the improvements made to GroupWise mailer don't get the same kind of bells and whistles and recognition that the Exchange counter-part gets. (Ok. Users feel happy which is different) Perhaps all related to vision, focus, plans etc.

Thanks to Preston Stephenson, Tim Draper and the entire GroupWise Server team, the SOAP Interface of the GroupWise server has also stabilized and matured. Valuable suggestions made by them helped in moving in the right direction, many a time. Thanks for those Thursday calls.

Server is rock-solid. Client is rocking. And as one could guess what follows next, Customers want it :-) Dave Largo (Hmm. Richards is his last name), the dedicated admin and a bestseller's author who looks after the City of Largo Evolution deployment has more details. There are certain nitty-gritty improvements needed to complete his deployment in a proper way. And this should be done sooner. Dave was instrumental in we developers getting into Largo network for debugging bugs triggered in tough-scenarios. Thanks for all your help, Dave.

Considering the fact that it was considered to replace SOAP Mailer with IMAP during the initial SLED BETA days, the improvements done to SOAP Mailer are innumerable. Looking back, Partha and Me - The SOAP Mailer hackers - can feel proud for the improvements done.

If your mail server is a GroupWise server and you are not using Evolution, I personally will recommend you to use Evolution GroupWise provider. It has a lot of things that IMAP cannot provide. Like: Send-Options, Priorities, Message Status Tracking, Delayed-delivery, Retract, Calendar-Integration etc. Give it a try and let me know if there are any issues that you still face.

Another reason why this release is special for me is this is the release in which I have become the Evolution EPlugin Maintainer. Feels good to maintain something that will matter the most, soon. I have some plans for EPlugins and hope to do a good job as the previous EPlugin Maintainer. In fact I made the first major change to EPlugins framework - the first after it remained untouched for almost an year - during this release by making it possible to write configurable plugins. More improvements are on the way :)

Add your YaST Sources with 10.3 Factory and feel Evolution as it happens.

Re: Camel-Lite instead of Camel

2007-08-28T11:49:00.000+05:30

Murray, Here is my (i.e., Not Novell's) response to your proposed near-future work for Evolution.

To use Camel-Lite in Evo instead of Camel will be like an Elephant trying to use a Sun-glass (or jacket or socks. Your pick) designed for an Ant.

Camel-lite is stripped down to be unusable by a corporate-desktop-user. Reasons:

- No one will bother to even consider using a mail-client, if it does not support Message-Threading.

- What good is a mail-client if it does not support filtering based on his / her company specific header(s).

- Lack of search/VFolders with custom headers

- Camel-lite talks all glory of IMAP but what about Exchange and GroupWise ? Do you think a mail-client (and hence a Linux Desktop) can even think of corporate deployment if there is no Exchange or GroupWise connectivity ?

Points 1 and 2 are based on the header-restriction that is done in camel-lite, whereby you fetch only a minimalistic, anemic set of headers. In Evolution's Camel, it is beautifully handled by making the headers-to-fetch customizable.

Usage of mmap is projected to be one considerable improvement in Camel-lite. By using mmap there is no actual memory saving unless you want to be fooled by top and ps. However, the patch submitted was hackish and still has not satisfied the reviewer's comments.

< Quote whois = PVanhoof >
I will not strongly steer Tinymail in the direction of supporting each and every piece of shit IMAP server. If they don't get it right then they should not have users via Tinymail. That's putting the burden of supporting their server-defects on me.

< / Quote >

Tinymail is analogous to Camel-lite in the above statement if you get the full context.

Such a statement may be suitable for a research / hobby project. But Evolution in most of the distros is a product aimed at corporate deployments. So it should work well with all the blatantly-standards-abusing-broken-damned-braindamaged servers. Camel of Evolution needs to adhere to the IMAP standard implemented by most of the servers (not something in the newest extension of an RFC) and also handle broken cases.

The near future of Evolution should be steered based on actual user needs. Exchange Server 2007 support, Things needed from Evolution and EDS by the OnlineDesktop, GroupWise proxies and Events, Better plugin management are the things that are needed and should be worked by Evolution hackers. These work will be a lot more useful and productive than trying to push a rocket with a hand-piston.

The aim of Modest and Evolution projects are different. Modest might look for a modest light-weight Mail library and Camel-lite will do a good job as it is based on a library that is tried and tested and Evolved over a period of time. Evolution works well with things that have Evolved along with it. There could be a few things in Camel-lite which Evo can make use of (Like better IMAP error messages, POP Summary support, etc.) and these will be absorbed into mainstream Camel. But there are a lot of things that Evo's Camel has which are quintessential for a desktop email client.

Feels Extremely Good ...

2007-08-02T11:08:00.000+05:30

... to look at my comments section for obvious reasons.

Configurable Plugins

2007-07-26T18:26:00.001+05:30

If you have written a plugin for Evolution, you will know that there was no easy way to Configure the working-style of the plugin. You either have to depend on the mammoth general-preferences window or some gconf-keys. The former approach clutters the already horrendous preferences-UI and the latter is not so user-friendly.

So I did:

As you can see, now it is possible to configure plugins within the plugin-manager itself. It is as easy as you just select a plugin and press configure. If you are a plugin-writer, you need to implement a function e_plugin_lib_configure which will be called when one attempts to configure your plugin.

In the above screenshot, I have implemented configure support for attachment-reminder plugin which Jony wrote to look for clues while composing a message and warn you if an attachment is missing. Earlier this option was buried somewhere under composer->preferences.

I initially thought if I can give a GtkContainer within the plugin-manager, within which the individual plugins should put their configuration-widgets. But something warned me against Resisting Geometry. The dimensions of the dialog may not be sufficient for all the plugins. So I just left it to the individual plugins to pop-up their own dialogs.

I've already heard from Gilles that he will be comparing this style against some other Gnome apps' implementation and give some feedback. That should be interesting. Whatever I have done concentrates mainly on the background framework part and the UI can be tinkered later. I have some plans for improving the plugin-manager UI and the whole plugin framework. But they have to wait until 2.14 :(

Which is worse ?

2007-07-24T20:34:00.000+05:30

Shilpa Shetty receiving a doctorate or Prathiba Patil becoming the first female president of India ?

Face Header support for Evolution

2007-07-17T18:24:00.000+05:30

During OpenSuSE Hackweek, I was told about Face Header by Srinidhi. I thought it will be cool to have it in Evolution. So here it goes.

Face Header:
Face header is a way by which you take a small 48*48 PNG, base64 encode it and attach it as a header of a mail. While receiving the mail, you decode and display it.

I added support for sending an image as a Face header and the ability to decode it to Evolution.

That's how it gets rendered in Evo. I am attaching the image used by Michael Zucchi as his signature image.

Suppose if there is a photo associated with the email address in your personal addressbook, then I am avoiding the Face header and showing the contact photo. For instance, If I have saved Fejj's photo, for the @poison.ivy (my email server), Evo would've rendered it as:

This is implemented as a plugin named "Face" and is already in svn. I hope NotZed and Fejj will not sue me for using their photos :)

Signatures on Top

2007-07-16T16:48:00.000+05:30

"Signature" should be at the bottom of whatever you type. Everybody agrees to this. But when people do a Top Posting, there comes a debate of where you should attach your signature. The standard says the signature should remain in the bottom of the mail only. Evolution is (! was) also following this. So is GMail.

But out there are certain broken mail-clients that allow user to put signatures on top of the quoted message. Since, you don't want your client to be ditched by a certain segment (and a big segment :( ), you end-up providing configure option to spoil yourself.

I implemented support for keeping signature on top of one's replies. The above shows the way the signatures will appear. The user-configurable option is :

Minimizing Damage

Can something be done to minimize the damage ?

I tried what I can.

1) The RFC says two "-" symbols followed by a white-space or new-lines marks the beginning of a signature. So I substituted one "-" with a blank space.

2) I added "Not Recommended" after the user-configurable option.

P.S: The arguments of top vs bottom posting is an interesting read.

Linux Cost Containment

2007-07-09T15:43:00.000+05:30

It is a well-known fact that moving to Linux results in less initial and operational costs. But how much does it reduce actually ?

The answer from Elcot (led by an eminent Mr.Uma Shankar) for this is:

- Savings of Rs. 5.00 crores ($US 1.2M) in migration of database on 20 servers alone
- Easy decision making due to cost savings from 25% to 90%
- New PCs for Rs. 21600; a savings of Rs.18,400 a piece. Savings of Rs.17.00 crores ($US 4.0M) for 40,000 PCs

On an overall, if just one department in a state Government can save more than 20 crores by moving to Linux, think how effectively the tax-payer's money can be utilized for far more important things like Healthcare and education. I hope the rest of the Government departments follow the path of Elcot.

Full video and statistics here!

Train the Trainers

2007-07-09T15:27:00.000+05:30

Usually professors and lecturers makes students forget worldly problems and get into a gentle sleep. It was pay-back period last week and I was all pumped up to give my lecturers the taste of their own medicine ;-)

The Computer Science Department of PSG Tech has organized "Faculty Development Programme" - a 10 day workshop aimed at keeping the professors and lecturers up-to-date on current trends and technologies. This was sponsored by AICTE and more than 25 people from various academic institutes attended it.

From Novell, Ankit and me attended this. We gave a talk about What the open-source work culture is; How projects are run by communities and the initiatives taken by Novell in the Open Source world. We gave a demo of our renowned OpenSUSE. We discussed about how Open Source can be beneficial to companies and Governments. We discussed in detail about the Elcot scenario. The audience were dumbstruck by the cost savings on moving to Linux.

We then talked about what Hacker Culture is and how it helps in working in harmony, even if the developers are distributed across the globe. We explained how various projects like Gnome and Mono are run. We then talked about OpenSource in academia and how it is helping thousands of students. (Read OCW)

We gave demos of OpenSuSE using both installed and Live DVD versions and many people were surprised to hear that one can use Linux without installing. We showed them how one can contribute to Open Source even if he is not a programmer.

We had a three hour slot and by the end of the session, so many lecturers from various institutes invited Novell for a talk in their colleges as well. OpenSuSE DVDs were distributed to the audience.

We met a project scientist, Dr. S. Srinivasan nominated by Anna University who is the incharge of Linux in academia in Tamil Nadu. Anna university is coming up with a self-study paper named "Open Source" for about 300+ colleges affiliated to it. He asked for our suggestion in framing the syllabus for this course. So if you have any specific thing in mind, you can mail it to me.

Thanks to Rishu for co-ordinating the trip when we were busy with the hackweek. Also, a big thanks to IS&T and Vijayakumar for the DVDs.

Novell WorkPlace

2007-06-28T19:01:00.000+05:30

After my last post, I got a few mails suggesting that I need a change of job. Things are not that serious anyway :)

Ranting in one's blog is the best way to "Free your mind" so that one can whet the mind to focus in the job on hand. Though I was feeling a little tired, when writing that blog, it has got nothing to do with my company.

Instead, Novell is such a fantabulous place to work. I don't think you can get the same amount of Freedom, Technology, Diversity in many other companies. And if you are a geek (Not that I am claiming I am one), Novell is a place where you do development and not back-office support (not that it is any inferior).

IMO, the biggest advantage in working for Novell is that you get to directly interact with a lot of highly enthusiastic committed achieved individuals. For instance, I get to interact with people who have not completed their mid-thirties yet and [achieved]:

- Technologist of the year

- A Distinguished Engineer

- Architect of an entire Desktop

- Designed the Linux Penguin

- VP who still writes compilers

and obviously my heroes

Novell (not just the Linux Group) is such a nice place to work and the amount of learning that you get here may not be possible in (m)any other companies.

Weekend is Calling

2007-06-22T16:22:00.000+05:30

Another week bites the dust. Yet another boring week passed uneventfully. The damp and dark weather is worsening the mood. Complete lack of any physical activity is aggravating my already fragile sleep. Late sleep translates to late wakeup and early (!?) morning head-ache. Irregular Food Habits is not doing any good either. Not able to recollect when I last had something hot and boiled. Been eating lots of spicy and fried food for a while now. I miss home and PSG Tech Hostel's timely safe food.

Two years back I've had zero money on my own but was feeling a lot happier. Now, I feel I have more than enough money but thinking more like a nihilist. Not written any good (code, poem, idea, whatever) lately either. May be I should take a holiday or a bigger change (Annamalai Univ., Farming ?) May be being twenty-something !

Next week, here at SuSE, we will be doing something good and interesting. I am planning to take up something that is left half-cooked by one of my heroes. I am not sure if I can disclose the details now. So let this better be abstract. I am hoping that this should re-generate some lost passion and energy.

Also, Jony gifted, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Considering the fact that I am a pantheist, this book should be an interesting read for the weekend.

Read about the Mono team's hackathon. And I am amazed by the extent to which Miguel has tracked the progress and got the work done. Implementing Silverlight in 21 days is not a mean achievment. May be the Redmond Giant should take a leaf out of these people's book in meeting deadlines. One reason I could think why were they were able to do this is: The boss instead of sitting somewhere and commanding got down and worked-with the people. I should try to do the same if I become a manager someday. But in India, Managers have lot of other things to do, like motivating, meeting, etc. etc.

Not wishing to miss the evening bus, I am stopping here and publishing the post without continuing my rant. L8r.

I Wish I Was There

2007-05-30T21:09:00.000+05:30

I wish I was there

Thanks to dido

Relaxing Rupert

2007-05-18T11:52:00.000+05:30

Thanks to the innovative HR folks here in Novell Bangalore; Rupert has a brand-new plushy, bean bag to take rest. Even we employees don't get such comfort ;-)

Mythical Man-Month

2007-05-11T14:18:00.000+05:30

Mythical Man Month is one of those books which I wanted to read for a long time, which was getting procrastinated for some strange reasons.

The recommendation by DanW triggered the interest to read this book.

The book is a nice one and a must-read for all the architects, managers and aspirants to be so. I am unable to believe that this is written so long back as the discussions can very much be related to current days as well.

The book has a nice collection of quotes and a lot of interesting concepts. Some of the quotes that I liked from the book are:

- Nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month

- Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.

- How does a project get to be a year late? ... One day at a time.

- Adding more men to an already late project makes it later

- Why did the Tower of Babel fail ?

And the most interesting one is:

He'll sit there and tell "Do this, Do that" and nothing will happen.

To which one of my work-mates made an addendum:

... And if nothing happens, He has enough power kick-out all

Five *s, Strongly-recommended etc.

IMAP - Configurable Headers

2007-01-22T18:17:00.000+05:30

It's been known that Number of Headers fetched will adversely and directly affect the IMAP Performance. People wanted to fetch a few custom headers along with the minimalistic headers (used for Firewall/Spam/Filters etc) Fetching ALL Headers is not an option for them as it will slow down things. So, Evolution needed configurable-Headers support. Hence we have:

The screenshot is the work on the Evolution side. Camel's IMAP Provider is also affected by this.

I committed the patch a shortwhile ago and this is my first commit on the SVN :)

The Anthem - By Ayn Rand

2006-12-01T15:05:00.000+05:30

... is a must read for anyone who like the idea of Self-Respect. And who aspires to be a Linux Hacker.

Get it here or for free (as in Beer) here.

Happiness

2006-12-01T14:57:00.000+05:30

There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.

-- Mary Wilson Little [via] Javeri.

Marriages

2006-11-27T18:44:00.000+05:30

Too many marriages to attend last week. But the work-bug bit me and hence couldnt attend any of it. One that I wish I could have attended was the one of my class-mate's. It is special as it is one of those (nowadays) rare occasions where a mature, accomplished MAN gets married to a (hyper ?)active young girl. Ironically, she is the same person who mentioned that Women should NOT look for Men taller/elder than them when choosing a partner. But she made the wise decision when it came to her life. Lately been attending or hearing about too many marriages where the BOY is either younger to the girl or both in the same age-group.

Marriages remind me of the unix analogy of Deferred-Write; The later it is the better it is (for men atleast). A man has maximum happiness and minimum things to lose-sleep over, when he is a happy earning-bachelor. So do not shorten the happy-go-lucky life unnecessarily and get into the Family-web. When you are forced by your parents, do the sensible thing as Sriram did. Get commited to a girl and post-pone the marriage, as long as you can convince the girl with valid reasons and she is sensible enough to understand it.

My friend once said Bachelorhood is Bliss. In addition to the freedom that you get, the more you wait for your marraige, sweeter the married life is. And you will be more stable financially.

PS: For all non-Indian readers: In India, Marriages are once-in-a-life-time occasion for most of the Indians. There is no turning back. Once you take the red-pill, you need to spend the rest of your life wondering how deep the rabbit-hole will go..

Code, Bullet-proof code, Idiot-proof code

2006-11-06T15:01:00.000+05:30

Anandeep has a nice post on Unsexy software development; where you write code for your living. Taken from http://port25.technet.com

I loved doing development in a research and university environment. You got to write cool code, prove new ideas, break new ground and generally ended up with bragging rights to say “I did an image recognition algorithm on a multi-layer architecture implementing reactive and planning parallelism on an autonomous robot!” The code had to work on your workstation or maybe on a demo machine once. Once you wrote the code, the only people who touched the system were hapless graduate students implementing the next big idea. They had to come to you and you could then dazzle them with your insight! This was “sexy development”!

When I moved to industry and wrote software for day to day use – things changed. Now you had all those people with “manager” titles telling you what to do, and those people called “testers” who told you why your code sucked (you couldn’t logically argue your way out of that because the weasels usually had proof)!. Of course being consummate professionals you adapted. You got the religion of “bullet proof code” and worked on making sure the testers only had “fit and finish” bugs filed against you. Which the intern could work on. That was still fun - a different challenge maybe not as “pure” as designing a neat new algorithm but pretty good nevertheless!

You got past the testers but when they integrated the components that you had bullet-proofed to run end-to-end or user acceptance tests, unexpected stuff happened. Who would have thought that they would configure the machine that way or that another non-surface component could pass you null strings. Now you had to plan not only for the testers – but also for other developers and those pesky sys admin guys. How did they become sys admins? They couldn’t tell a polynomial solution from a log n solution anyway! But being nothing if not adaptable you adapted. You now built bullet proof AND idiot proof code. (My father, a military pilot and flight instructor, when teaching flight safety used to say “Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious!”). It got a little boring at times but you still had the satisfaction of building something that was “engineered”.

I thought I had shipped the product but I found couldn’t sit back and relax. The support guys were making insinuations against my code. It didn’t work they said – and you hadn’t put in the right level of granularity in the logs for them to do a diagnosis. This had nothing to do with Computer Science – any bozo could write stuff to the log. Why didn’t the intern do it? What do you mean he can’t make sense of my code? Yeah, I do know my code best. I guess it’s the right thing to do. Certainly not as fun as designing, bullet proofing and idiot proofing new code but good supportability is “sine qua non” for a well done project!

Is that the end of it? No, further design and coding needs to be done for making software more manageable, to make the logs more systematic, to make sure that the product works when its deployed to multiple configurations, that it performs well and fails gracefully.

Unless you specialize in a certain aspect of manageability, reliability or diagnosis – this is not “sexy” development. I probably wouldn’t get as much satisfaction from designing event logs as I would from designing a new search algorithm.

I was getting paid to do all this (ok, so it was my own startup but I was getting paid in VC money!) and it was still very hard. We did do it but it took lots of coaxing of our developers to pay attention to this. They all preferred to work on the next release that had all the sexy features. Even though they knew that to make the startup successful and still have a job, the unsexy stuff needed to be done and done RIGHT!

When you are working for the “love of the game” and not money, like in Open Source – who coaxes you? Who does the unsexy stuff? Are there enough people who specialize in the esoteric aspects of event logs, that this is not a problem? Or do users who need the feature “just do it” and add the code to the community version? Or are things slipping through the cracks?

I did a sweep of the usual suspect Linux developer mailing lists and found that there is concern about whether unsexy stuff gets done. Here is a typical comment that I saw

“I think that the only issue with Open Source boils down to this:

The things that nobody wants to do, but somebody has to.

Nobody wants to think about documentation. Or user interfaces. These things are hard, tedious, and a hell of a lot more boring than actually coming up with stuff to "make things work".”

Documentation is famously one of those things that is considered “unsexy” (well, ok in commercial software too). There are efforts like Grokdoc to make documentation of Open Source projects sexy by making it a priority. But the “who does unsexy?” issue is a real concern in Open Source.

We ran into a similar issue with event logs. You know the text stuff you write so that you can find out later what happened. At the lab we just did an investigation of whether we could tell if one of our boxes had crashed from the syslog and from console messages. We were a little taken aback by how many times we couldn’t tell what states the machine had gone through.

On doing some investigation we found that the most influential project that was addressing this issue, the Evlog project (most supported by IBM) has been quiet since 2004. This code is used internally within IBM but was not mainstreamed into the Linux kernel.

How does one get unsexy stuff like this into the Linux kernel so that is comparable to UNIX/VMS/Windows?

I contend that it is critical to Open Source that attention be paid to the event logs. They are critical in making any operating systems reliable. VMS/UNIX/Windows all went through the process of making their event logs more meaningful – and this has helped make them much more reliable.

We will be addressing this further in the next couple of weeks – keep tuned!

Evolution Exchange - Check All Folders

2006-10-19T14:09:00.000+05:30

On Evolution exchange, there is(was) no option to not check mails on "All folders". This will be a big nuisance when you have a lot of Public-folders and you have enabled, "Automatically synchronize mails locally". A few customers were facing a lot of problems due to this.

I am not sure why such an useful feature to "Check mails only in selected folders" was never implemented in Evolution exchange. It is there for ages in IMAP, GroupWise. The patch should get into CVS and the auto-build soon.

.NET experience of a linux guru

2006-10-17T00:45:00.000+05:30

< quote who="Not Zed">

Despite many claims to the contrary - which I never believed anyway - c-hash, .NET, and so forth is no more productive than any other environment i've used. Arguments could be made to suggest infact that all the overheads and buggy development enviroment reduce productivity (my old 1.5Ghz laptop feels a lot snappier in general than this 2x3Ghz box running windows).

I have a thought on why some people claim that such modern enviroments are 'orders of magnitude' more productive than more time-honoured systems. They basically can't code for shit to start with, so the time they'd have spent fixing their own bugs in utility code is saved by using the framework/toolkit/whatever's utility code - but that is a long way from actually getting any work done.

Software Processes

2006-10-13T13:27:00.000+05:30

Software Processes are like self-motivating books (Crap like Mutton-soup, You wont lose, mars and venus, etc) . Both of them are not of any help unless you are ready to fool yourself and believe that you have been motivated to work better because of them.

Why do people fail to understand (or accept) that The Sucess / Failure of a project is not dependant on the Presence or Absence of a process. It is more due to the individual discipline of the stakeholders.

A process as long as it acts as a Regulator is good to have. But the moment it becomes a Restrictor, it should be ditched.

It is Performance that counts not Position

2006-10-13T13:26:00.000+05:30

It is Performance that counts not Position, at least after Death. Got it as a mail forward.

A priest dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates.

Ahead of him is a guy who's dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt, leather jacket and jeans.

Saint Peter addresses him, "Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to admit you into the Kingdom of Heaven?"

The guy replies, "I'm Joe Cohen, taxi driver, from New York."

Saint Peter consults his list. He smiles and says to the taxi driver, "Take this silken robe and golden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

Now it's the priest's turn. He stands erect and booms out, "I am the Right Reverend Joseph Snow, pastor of Saint Mary's for the last forty-three years."

Saint Peter consults his list. He says to the priest, "Take this cotton robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

"Just a minute," says the priest. "That man was a taxi driver. Why does he get a silken robe and golden staff?"

"Results," shrugged Saint Peter. "While you preached, people slept. When he drove, people prayed."

Un Kangal

2006-09-15T18:46:00.000+05:30

This is the best pudhu-kavidhai that I have ever come across. It is simple yet has a deep impact. This is written by Mu. Mehta. I tried translating this from Tamil to English. Yet Poems are like C programs - Hard to translate (port) whereas Stories are like Java programs - too simple to translate (port). I found my translation not giving any rhyme at all. So I havent published it. If some one interested can translate it, I will be happy to link it from here.

Design by Committee

2006-09-15T16:29:00.000+05:30

This mail by Dan Winship explains the perils of designing-software-by-committee in a nice way. The mail is an elongated description of "Too many cooks spoil the food".

I would like to borrow the words of one of my heroes Donald E Knuth, "Premature optimization is the root of all evils" and change it a little bit as : "Premature open-sourcing is the root of all evils". Also I feel that "In general any Community contains a few catalysts which/who decides a project's future that makes the product either the Buzz-of-the-year or the Bummer-of-the-year"

The mail contents (as taken from desktop-devel mailing list) is :

-------

From: Dan Winship
To: Luis Villa
Cc: JP Rosevear , desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: NLD10 and GNOME
Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:35:48 -0500

Luis Villa wrote:
> On 2/7/06, JP Rosevear  wrote:
>> The changes that were implemented were not as radical as the
>> mockups. Basically what Nat F. showed in Paris is what was
>> implemented.  The code will be released to the community soon.
>
> To ask the obvious question, why not now, and why not discussed
> publicly earlier?

So here's my (ie, not Novell's) answer.

Two words: "bike shed"[1].
Or actually, "stop energy"[2] works too.
Your pick.

Although the changes aren't nearly as radical as the original
mockups, they are a big change from the current GNOME panel
menu. If we had proposed the changes on the mailing lists,
it would have started a huge discussion about what people
hated about the design ("you can't make the panel menu depend
on beagle!!!") and how it should be different. And then we
could have either (a) completely ignored everyone and done it
ourselves anyway, or (b) had a long conversation about the
merits of the design and then not actually finished the code
in time for NLD10.

So we did it ourselves, and now either GNOME will like what we did, in
which case, yay, free code for GNOME, or GNOME won't like what we did,
in which case, no harm no foul for GNOME, and yay, brand differentiation
for Novell. (And anyone who yells "fork" deserves to get one stuck in them.)

An equivalent answer to the question is "because you can't do design by
committee". Everything good in GNOME is good because one person or a
small number of people working closely together made it good. Much of
what is bad in GNOME is bad because lots of people have contributed
without having a single vision of what the end result is supposed to be.
I mean, look at the stuff John Williams has been blogging about the last
week[3]:

* Evolution's UI blocking on I/O SUCKS. Due to lack of design in the
 early stages of development (Update: This is now removed in Evolution)

* Evolution's integration with gaim and tomboy RULES. Both of these
 happened because specific people (ChipX86, orph) made them happen.

* Multimedia integration SUCKS. No one has ever sat down and tried
 to fix the big picture. (Although I think the gstreamer team is in
 the process of doing this now?)

* Apps not remembering their window size and position SUCKS. Again,
 needs someone to take this problem and make it their own. I
 remember xkahn was trying to fix this a few years ago, but never
 finished.

* Bug-buddy SUCKS. Jacob's original UI was simple and brilliant. But
 as more and more people added more and more features without
 looking at the big picture, it got unwieldy. (But now a small
 team is putting the simplicity back in again.)

* Deskbar applet RULES (kikidonk), dashboard RULES (Nat), and beagle
 RULES (trow and joe). None of these was done *exclusively* by
 those people, but each of them reflects one person's (or a few
 people's) vision, as opposed to the current state of bug buddy,
 which just sort of happened.

This is just another aspect of the UI "simplicity" thing. We like UIs
that try to do the right thing (metacity, epiphany/firefox, evince)
rather than UIs that try to make every possible user happy
(enlightenment, mozilla, gpdf/acroread). If you try to design something
by committee, you either have to end up with the latter sort of messy
does-everything UI, or you ignore and hence piss off a large chunk of
the committee.

And that's where we are with NLD. There is no way that everyone in the
GNOME community is going to like the changes we wanted to make. But we
did the user testing, and we believe in it, and we want to make the
changes anyway. So we're doing it. Maybe it will turn out good, and
maybe it will turn out bad. Either way, the GNOME community learns from
it. Think of it like this: wouldn't it have been cool if we could have
tried out spatialus on our users, found out that they hated it, and then
reverted back to browserlus, without ever having to actually piss off
our users? This is essentially what is going to happen with NLD10. If
Novell's customers like the NLD changes, then GNOME can adopt them. If
Novell's customers don't like the changes, then GNOME can stand off to
the side and say "yeah well, we never liked that UI anyway. Not at all
like how we would have done it." :-)

But some people will still say "But couldn't you have discussed it with
the community before doing it?" No, we couldn't. If we had, it would
either not have happened, or it would have sucked. It's inevitable. It's
not a problem with the GNOME community, it's a problem with communities
in general. The wisdom of crowds[4] only works in situations where there
are clear right and wrong answers. If you try to apply it to a design
problem, where there are many entirely different right answers, then you
end up with a wrong answer. Always[5].

So to sum up: design by committee is bad, endless debates that result in
code not actually being written are bad, design by very small teams is
good, software with a unified vision is good, trying out cool new UI
ideas is good, free code at least doesn't suck, and of course, for
Novell, not shipping NLD10 is bad. I don't think there's anything we
could have done to get more of the good without also getting more of the
bad.

-- Dan

[1] http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml
[2] http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy
[3] http://gnomerocksmyworld.blogspot.com/, Jan 29 to Feb 6
[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385721706/102-7630748-5396113
[5] http://www.diacenter.org/km/usa/most.html