Planet SoC

After intense negotiations with the college that made me realise that I could be a good business man, I was given OD to attend mukt.in. I was there to talk on DBus (which by the way was EPIC FAIL!). On a brighter side, I had fun showing off my gsoc code to people at qvantel. One of the things that I learned from this “version” of mukt.in was to prepare talks well in advance, otherwise you end up giving a mediocre presentation.
There were a lot of great things about mukt.in this year than the last version. The venue, the speaker list, the topics covered and the people who attended it.

Wow, DHL dudes are fast. They took just 4 days to ship the device considering there was a sunday in-between. Thanks to Daniel for sending the devices to the SoC’ers.
I don’t have a dedicated camera, so pics are a bit sucky
(Evil maniacal laughter) Here are the pics…muhuhahaha

A few days gone by, and endless wrestling with git wherein I was not able to push code. Turned out, I was using the wrong URL to push ..doh!
But anyway, the code is beginning to stabilise a bit (Read no unexpected segfaults, only expected ones..). The last few days were spent in changing the method names in accordance with OTAPI naming conventions after my mentor went through my code.
There is also another important change. The sysfs nodes for backlight and power plugins were hardcoded in their configuration files. So, I came up with some helpers that creates DBus paths automatically based on the device class which they belong to. Here’s a picture of today’s code in action,

So, presenting a preliminary skeleton service for odeviced that loads shared object libraries (or in other words plugins). Nothing to be proud of, but hey, something is better than nothing.
Here’s a screenshot of a very very preliminary odeviced in action..

Basically its just a dbus service that can load modules from a predefined location. Here’s how it works currently,

After the lousy semester exams, I decided put in some time to learn vala and dbus to cheer me up. For the unitiated,

• `Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.‘
• DBus is a low latency IPC system with less overhead with emphasis on desktop applications

I must say the folks at #vala in GimpNet has been patient with me, especially considering the silly questions I had been asking for the last couple of days. I should get commit access to the git repositories of freesmartphone.org in a short while as well :D.

Atlast after sleepness nights, the results are out. I made it to this year’s Google Summer of Code. I will be working for the Openmoko project under the mentorship of Mickeyl. Fun times ahead. Will post the details later.
Now where the hell are my books. Got fricking semesters this tuesday :(.

As I said in my earlier post, Vista didn’t last long. I was planning to install Gentoo in my Vaio CR 36 but couldnt, as it had problems with the ethernet card ( not to mention the wireless). My option was to install Ubuntu Gutsy as it has very good support for laptops out of the box. But Gutsy couldn’t get sound working and hence found a perfect excuse to upgrade to hardy beta.
24 after upgrading to hardy, came to know that beta_1 of gentoo 2008.0 is out. Downloaded the 64 bit mrinimal iso and got it up and running on my laptop. Things that doesn’t work in both the distros (as of now. May change as I RTFM more)..

I had been looking for a machine replacing my 4 and a half year old computer which served me really well. I was really keen on buying (my daddy actually) a Dell XPS m133o. But the lack of payment options and the service tax really added to the hefty price. Yesterday my mom took a stroll around the Sony World and found a 14 incher which she thought would fit my needs. I went and took a look and it was love at first site. Today I brought it home :D..
Its a Sony Vaio VGN CR 36, The specifications are really competitive..Here goes,

Since ceiling fans are the main cause of the apparent noise in classrooms, ban them. Use air conditioners instead.

I havent been a big fan of creating python extensions using gobjects but noticed that the libjana by chris doesnt have one. So just my bit to help around.
Bindings for the above libjana library. Still really really really……..really (500th) super prototype code.
Get the bindings here
As always all sorts of help is appreciated

Finally, got the patience to make an hackergotchi of my photograph using GIMP.

Original photo taken at FossConf by dumbhead.

Totally screwed out for the last 5 days. 3 days of intense FOSS at Fossconf and internal assessments at College after that. What a week. I had Ub3rcool fun at fossconf meeting new people and matching irc nicks with faces, presenting a tutorial on writing python extensions and pygsmd, and of course voluntary work eating food which was provided to us.
I am feeling lazy to give a report on the event, which my fat elder bro has taken time to do so.
The best I can do is give you some links =).
http://flickr.com/search/?q=fossconf 
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/tshrinivasan/FossConfDayOne

Rats and mice are not funny. I admit it, I am not a guy a pest eradication centre will die for.
So, there I was, home alone with a big bottle of orange juice peacefully fighting with some python spaghetti I call code.
“Drip”
“Drip”
…..
Frigging tap started leaking suddenly, went to investigate and out of my anger, broke it. There I was, drenched above the equator. I did manage to fix the leaky tap, (by the way it was 3 in the morning). And there, a goddamn cute little rat came out of nowhere and scurried over my toes  and finally ended up under the refrigetator. Of course, I was pretty freaked out and in the process knocked over a few kitchen stuff.

I got to test some code in the neo and found that sms sending using pygsmd works quite well!!..Also I was looking for an opportunity to brush up my 2 hour stint with pyGTK which I had a long long time ago. What better reason than to create a dirty, scrawny, crufty, fugly GUI for sending SMS. Heres a screenshot of the GUI in action taken from the neo itself. It doesnt really follow any GUI guidelines (who would care at 2:30 AM)…When you click SendSMS, it calls pygsmd.sms.send() and sends your message..and when you click Quit button, the obvious thing happens.

I dunno if it adds functionality to your already functional firefox, but still its damn cute and quite interesting from the technical point of view. Add a new “persona” to your browser on the fly. No crashes bringing down the house although, I am not able to resize the browser. Only a matter of time before someone comes up with a LOLCAT persona..
Heres a cute screenshot

Get it here .