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.

After a week’s waiting my mentor informed me that I had passed the mid-term evaluations. (he said that my performance for the first phase exceeded his expectations. ).
Its been a long time since I actually blogged about the progress. After I got the Freerunner in my hand (muhuhahahaa), it was more fun since there were subtle changes in the way the code ran on the device. Tracking down segfaults was uber awesome.
Plugins are now written *entirely* in vala. Earlier, this used to be an ugly abomination of hand-written and vala generated C code. Now, where good ol’ C is necessary, .vapis’ have been added that wrap around code written in C.

Sunday’s are fun. Even more, when you get together with your school buddies for a long chaat.. Burp!
I haven’t seen most of these guys for a looong time. So it was fun reliving the school moments. As for me, I was mostly silent having my mouth full with “Dahi Puris”. Seriously, Adayar Ananda Bhavan in Tambaram makes a good bunch of them. Its an ecstatic experience, when the “puri” breaks in your mouth releasing dollops of fresh sweet yoghurt with an assortment of tingly sauces. Try it when you go there. Highly recommended.
It would have been awesome if the entire class turned up. (That way I could have eaten more )
And special full credits to vidhya for bringing a camera that didn’t have batteries. Now, we have to be satisfied with crappy pics taken from even crappier mobile phones.

I am pretty sure my friends would go “WTF, you are too dumb for Goog” by now.
Guess what, I am a full time employee of Google now!. (*ahem* for three months).
I was more of an impression that I was technically an intern for three months. But after reading Aju’s post, it turns out all Summer of Code students are technically full time employees. (Anyone thinking otherwise please comment).
This means I get uber bragging rights.
What happens after 3 months when I am jobless again?

As the summer holidays progress, I am finding myself become a nocturnal being. My sense of a “day” has changed a lot.
Wake up at 1200 or 1300 hours and fall asleep at around 2-3 AM, in a position as in the above photo (taken from my mobile which has a crappy camera). Back against the window, legs across my cot only to find myself waking up late in the afternoon sun with an excruciating pain in my back. Its great in a way, since both my parents leave for work early and I have the entire house to myself (na, I don’t run around naked).
After waking up, the usual stuff, watch TV for a while and back to GSoC stuff..

After a little chat with mickeyl, I realised that exposing crucial functions like load() and unload() was not that of a good idea considering how odeviced is supposed to closely interact with the underlying devices. Consequently there has been some changes over the last week,

I will be entering final year in a couple of months and this means…PLACEMENTS!!! yay! (..or the lack of it)
This means more “Mock Interviews Sessions” and “GDs” to “empower” engineering students to get placed in the only 3 software companies that exist in this physical Universe. Infosys, TCS and CTS (Apparently our college is too dumb for hybrid corporates like m$).
And this blog post sort of sums up my thoughts. Highly hilarious, rolled on the floor injuring my mutti.
Especially at this,
“Any actual work experience?
Buying groceries for my neighbour who has this pretty daughter called Gayathri.”
Oh, yeah! I can empathize.

Why Milestone? Nope, I didn’t come up with fancy code or a “beautiful” one for that matter (Came up with a way to unload plugins). Milestone, because today was the first day I was squeezing up my half empty head to work around a teency weency problem. In short, I am happy I was actually thinking today about squishing a segmentation fault which was bringing the whole house down due to dbus and the kinky wifi plugin.
Now a word of warning. The wifi plugin is a circus freak of sorts. Being the lazy bum I am, I found it a drag to manually get into the trouble of coming up with xml introspection data for the “org.freesmartphone.Device.plugins.wifi” interface.
Instead I just came up with a grand plan of letting valac generate wifi.c and wifi.h, which I could modify later. Piece of cake? Sure…

One of the Life’s greatest ironies. I actually enjoyed studying for the Artificial Intelligence exam, one of my favourite areas. In fact an hour of my favorite anime, Ghost in the Shell: SAC on monday was timed perfectly for the exam the next day.
But when I received the question paper, I sat there wide eyed just like the android who gets pwned by the Tachikomas when they attack her with the Liar Paradox. A big BLEH..
I managed to write (in my own words and crappy handwriting), a couple of big questions and 5 short ones. To add insult to the injury, yesterday’s paper was my personal record for the most number of pages filled in an exam; 42/44. My previous record was 34 :D.

Man, its quite difficult to sneak up and write a blog post when semesters are around the corner. So as mentioned in the last post, my project for this summer would be to write a device daemon for the Openmoko platform. We already have neod offering keypad and power management, but its not that elegant. Hence I proposed a DBUS replacement as a SoC project which got through.
So, heres a pdf of the proposed *ahem* architecture. (Boy, I love that word. Sounds enterprisey). it looks a bit sucky since I did it using a touchpad, but hey, something is better than nothing.
I was looking at pulseaudio code for a while and liked it pretty much. So naturally, odeviced will borrow ideas from pulseaudio a bit heavily. My idea of odeviced is as follows,

Man, its quite difficult to sneak up and write a blog post when semesters are around the corner. So as mentioned in the last post, my project for this summer would be to write a device daemon for the Openmoko platform. We already have neod offering keypad and power management, but its not that elegant. Hence I proposed a DBUS replacement as a SoC project which got through.
So, heres a pdf of the proposed *ahem* architecture. (Boy, I love that word. Sounds enterprisey). it looks a bit sucky since I did it using a touchpad, but hey, something is better than nothing.
I was looking at pulseaudio code for a while and liked it pretty much. So naturally, odeviced will borrow ideas from pulseaudio a bit heavily. My idea of odeviced is as follows,