tuxmaniac’s blog

Yay! At last I need not fight with the autowallahs every morning to “Come to FORUM”. No more swearing at every autowallah who does not come or demands more. No more lazy mornings. Yes. I got a new bicycle. Its the Hercules Ultima 6SP! Comes in with 6 gears. Light weight! I can now travel at my own will without having to “wait” for buses.  I feel excited to go to office on my new bicycle! It should be a nice morning exercise too given the early bird I am to office.

Here I come roads of Bangalore!

Today I upgraded from my Ubuntu Edgy Eft to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta. The upgrade went very smooth, similar to the smooth upgrade from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake. And yes Dapper went on to be a stable release and a legend. Upgrade from Dapper to Edgy was not so smooth. My X b0rk and a few apps went unusable. After a day or two of hacking, I got everything in place. But today, upgrade from Edgy Eft to the Feisty Fawn was smoother. No hazards just for the times when I was running out of disk space as the upgrade was going on. Finally I was lucky enough (or just lucky enough) for the upgrade to finish with 42 MB of disk space left and of I went to a reboot expecting b0rked pieces which would need some fixing. To my surprise (and may be disappointment ) the reboot was perfect with the new revamped usplash image (more “bling”) being diplayed with the black background during boot up. Yay!! The fawn has begun its run…. Some changes that I noticed..

• Linux kernel is 2.6.20-15 (This is a fixed kernel after problems found in the previous patch)
• Sudoku, Chess and battleman are by default in the games list. Wow.
• OpenOffice 2.2 looks better but still not up there
• Debian Etch WallPaper is in by default on the Desktop Background list
• Beryl is now smoother.
• Network Manager upgraded and connecting to wireless networks is much easier now.
• Rest is fine. Except that the splash screen sucks big time. Edgy’s was gorgeous and sexy.

Update: Feisty Fawn Release Candidate has been delayed due to problems found with Nvidia ATA chipsets. Expected release in the week of April 19th (”The Feisty Fawn Release Day” hopefully)

After the Mark Shuttleworth’s talk at Y! Office (or was it the Fedora Guy’s talk??) I had gone to the BLUG Meet yesterday. So what was special?? Yes, it was the Openmoko core guys Harald Welte and Sean speaking on the Open Mobile Kommunications Platform or in short the OpenMoko Project.

The room was filled with about 100 people or may be even less by around 1600 hrs and Tejas welcomed the audience and introduced the speakers (did they really need an intro???) Sean started off with how he got this whole idea of developing a Open Phone and the difficulties faced in convincing the FIC Management to go and support this project. Then Harald Welte took over and started speaking about the more interesting aspects of the phone. Yes, the technical details. An interesting piece of software is the “devirginator” which will enable you to completely reflash the entire phone right from the firmware. The Neo1973 phone comprises of two proprietary blocks apart from the completely Free and Open Applications Processor. One is the GSM Module (the application processor can communicate using standard AT commands to this chip) and the other is the AGPS module. Apart from these two every piece of “substance” that goes into the phone is Free and Open. Harald gave a live demo of Dialing and Incoming call and also the UI as such in general. Snacks were served and everything wound up by around 1930 hrs. I met up with empty_mind, kushal, shres, t3 and my long lost friend “Manager” Mahendra I had discussions with Sean regarding setting up Labs in Universities with OpenMoko providing the platform. Some of the Indian Universities should think about this as Sean is already thinking on a win-win cost model for Universities (especially in India). Great Learning opportunity in Hands University guys!! Make use of it.

It was a lot of fun. Photo set here

I got hold of the Heads First Design Patterns by Eric and Elisabeth Freeman. Nice book IMO. I want to lay my hands on “Refactoring Code” by Martin Fowler. It costs about 3000 INR and is out of stock in all places where I have asked for the book in Bangalore. Anybody having it and willing to resell it?? [I wouldn’t resell a book at any cost or even give it away just like that. Books are a treasure and I will share the treasure with the needy but get it back after they have made use of it] But I know there are loads of people who give away books for weight!! Instead of which I am ready to get the book. If someone could point me to a Indian Book store who could ship the book will also be of great help.

First the happy day scenarios

• GNUsim8085 is in the “Debian Live CD for Engineers”
• Attended BarCamp Bangalore 3. Photoset here.
• I am a Senior Engineer from October 2007 (Yes. I got promotion and salary revision for the year).
• Reached freeze of a project that I was part of for the past 1.5 years.

Now for the worst cases…..

• Moved to another project and “Shit happens”. Project in crisis situation and they expect me to revive it in a couple of weeks. Wtf!! Am new to the architecture and platform. Bloody Managers!
• Worked 60 hours last week alone and the week has not yet ended.
• Stomach was upset and no water suddenly at house.
• No Mobile for two days. Did not know where I kept it. This must be in the Happy Day places since I was really at peace without mobile.
• No Internet connection for over a couple of days. Reason: Major Cable fault.
• Very tough weeks ahead.
• Reviewing Code and restructuring / code cleanup is a PITA. (especially with readability of code very poor)
• I want a change. Have had ‘Nuff!!!! Learning has taken a beating heavily. Domain : Embedded Systems and VLSI CAD Tools