A new release with a lot of bug fixes and some useful features is coming soon. With this release, we will have localisation support with strings translated into Gujarati, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Catalan and Esperanto. If you are translator, head to the translations page and start firing in some translations in your language NOW.

We are happy with Launchpad just for some very inflexible structure that it imposes (but thats a different blog altogether) and the absence of a wiki. We are back to active development and are absolutely excited with the numerous feature and support requests that are coming in via email as well as the trackers. I guess the German Wikipedia page on GNUSim8085 did contribute to the sudden rise in interest. Happy hacking and simulating.

So here goes a quick how-to (more of a note to self) on how I setup a remote git repo on one of the servers I have ssh access to.

1. SSH into your remote server (ssh uname@remoteserver)

2. Say, you are starting off setting up a git setup on this remote server. Create a directory by name say git (In the below example I put it in the home directory). All projects shall go into this directory.

uname@remoteserver$ mkdir ~/git

3. Now, create a project.git directory. If your project name is ledblink then do the following.

uname@remoteserver$ mkdir ~/git/ledblink.git

4. Initialise a bare git directory

uname@remoteserver$ cd ~/git/ledblink.git

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ git – -bare init

5. Edit the description file to describe the project [Optional of-course]. Then edit the config file to enable reposharing by adding the line “sharedrepository = 1” under the [core] section.

6. Setup appropriate permissions. In the below example user only rights.

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ chmod -R g=u .

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ find . -type d | xargs chmod g+s

So all is done on the server side. Go back to your local machine.

7. Go to the folder you want to be version control or create a fresh directory where you will put your project files. Lets say localprojectrepo is the directory name. Change directory into the localprojectrepo and do the following.

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git init

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ touch samplefile.txt

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git add .

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git commit -m “First commit”

Your local git repository is created. Now lets add the server as remote so that a push “syncs” the changes to the remote server.

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git remote add origin uname@remoteserver:<pathto>/git/ledblink.git

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git push origin master

Life is good! To take backups of your remote git repo, use your favourite means to copy the ~/git directory you create on the remote server. Thanks to good old friend Anurag for helping me through the details.

This time around Santosh Vattam and myself are taking leads in having a RTEMS Workout. We have put up the pre-requisites, purpose and general outline on the wiki page here. Currently we are stream lining the objectives into being more specific. If everything goes well, we will be kick starting the workout with a basic introduction to RTEMS, a quick overview of the architecture, a walk through of source code structure and some basic knowledge sharing wrt what might be required during the next 4 days. So Day 1 would mostly be setting up and getting up to base. Day 2, 3 and 4 would be hard days filled with coding, debugging and lots of fun! Day 5 would be more of a wrap up – collecting patches, cleaning up things, sanity checks and reporting!

So, if you want to see your contributions go into NASA and ESA space shuttles then RTEMS workout is the place you need to head to. RTEMS community is a bunch of extremely nice people full of patience and am sure you will have fun hacking with us.

On a sidenote, I am currently at Zurich Airport calculating the probability of missing my connecting flight given that my first flight is delayed, life is full of mathematics. Number never fail to impress me. See you at FOSS.IN 2009!

Most often when we start a project, we get a very generic picture , read around the project’s required literature background and immediately get into the “details” of the system a bit too fast without “completely” getting a grip on the Functional Overview of the system. Many people do the documentation (including explaining the design structure, functional flow) after coding a basic prototype and this itself in my opinion is a flaw. I found it much better to do the reverse and found most successful “engineers” do that way. There have also been scenarios where people have asked me “You draw a structural representation of your system before implementing??” which I find very amusing. How can one get something done without having a picture on paper first?

So the first thing I do now when starting off on a new project is to get a very high abstract picture of the requirements of the project. Then a bit more digging into the “functionality”. It more or less can be compared to a behavioural modeling of the project. Something like this  . Note that the picture does not have any details of implementation (like which function to call, in what module will the implementation go into, what parameters to pass, which module is reusable etc etc). Its just plain functional diagram. This in my opinion helps one to cover most use cases, error scenarios. Its much easier to handle or think about these scenarios at a high level. Believe me, its just too easy to get into the nitty gritty and start putting down the details. Slap yourself and come out of that once you find yourself doing it. The paradigm is that once you are into the details you lose track of the big picture and hence the wider scope and overlook several scenarios. Yes, of-course there will still be some scenarios overlooked but it would be less in number and much easier to handle.

Once most cases are covered one can now, start digging into the diagram and find out re-usable portions of a module easily by repeating flow diagrams, eliminate conditions etc. And then get into the low level design and coding aspect. Also having such a high level functional diagram in place gives rise to many test cases and ensures you test most common conditions before hand. I use Freemind for these diagrams. A great tool not only for mind mapping but also for such things.

It might sound very trivial, but how many of us have got stuck in the utter complexity of the system and miserably struggled to get ourselves out of the situation? If you have any other suggestions do feel free to leave a comment.

Google Summer of Code 2009

I am participating in this year’s google summer of code program as a student (yes, you read it right , as a student ).  You can find my proposal to RTEMS here (pdf). The Community Bonding period is almost coming to a close and the work package is getting more clear day by day. My mentor, Thomas Doerfler from Embedded Brains Gmbh has helped me refine and catch up with all the necessary required knowledge to start work. Thank you Thomas. So this summer is already scheduled for me. Oh! You can find the project related wiki page here.

Photography

Whenever I feel like “Its getting on to me”, I take my good friend (now its got some companions like tripod, UV-Filter, Polariser etc) and go shooting. Outcomes are the sets of Tulip Show (one of my favourites), Geneva Autoshow, random pics of my town and nearby areas. The photos I liked the most are in the Masterpieces set. Some preview below.

 

Oh and my cooking skills have improved tremendously. I can now cook Palak Paneer too

Academia

Its been hectic, hectic and hectic. But things are looking good. If everything goes well I should be able to get some experiment results out of my project by July which could be great. I have decided to put all my code that I have written for my assignments on the interweb under the WTFPL. Thanks to Thibault to have suggested it If FEL team accepts we can package it under different sections and provide it along with the FEL Spin for F12. I have a few blog posts to make on some roadblocks I came across which could be really very interesting and informative for fellow Computer Architects, students and in general to anybody interested in Hardware Modeling and Design.

Thats all folks! Later!

GNUSim8085 FOSS.IN 2008 Delayed Release

What was supposed to be a foss.in 2008 release has been delayed by a month and it just became the Christmas Release. Yes!!! GNUSim8085 1.3.5 is released! Go grab it now. So whats special about this release? You can run gnusim8085 now on Windows machines as well. Kudos to a lot of guys who helped fix a lot of issues that were big road blocks for the release and foss.in 2008 was the place where things got sorted out and most of it got fixed in the Workout. So thats news number 1 for you all.

Next..

Around Switzerland in 4 days

Starting tomorrow evening I will be touring Switzerland (Bern, Luzern, Diablerets, Geneva and the likes.) with a very very good friend of mine who is coming down from Germany. I am really looking forward to it. And I will be doing all these with a special thing in my hands. (thats the next news..)

The Special Thing

The special thing is the wonderful DSLR Nikon D60. I got this at a great price. Thanks to Nikon for the 100 CHF cashback offer. Thanks to Abhijeet for the gift contribution. I just cant believe that I am the owner of a D60 now. Yipee!!!! And already I have started flooding flickr

So thats it for now. Wish you all a Merry Christmas and see you again around New Year’s eve. Happy Hacking!

If you are still clueless as to what FOSS.IN is all about  (even after reading through this sentence) then it probably isn’t for you And the news is I will be saying “Hola”, “Bonjour”, “Hi”, “Hallo”, “Nihao”, “Namaskara”, “Vanakkam”, “Namasthe” to a lot of my friends this year too.  Apart from the “scheduled” talk on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” on Friday (yes, my talks always coincide with a more glamorous session *always*), I have planned to have some workouts (unofficial ones from those listed on the site). One such planned workout is the GNUSim8085 Workout.

If you are interested in taking part, please use this doodle link to give your preferred time and I will blog about the timings sometime around Sunday evening. The venue of the workout is most probably the terrace or corridor or some place which has a free power socket .
The Current agenda of the workout is as follows:

1. Get the Windows Version of the package released (long time pending and also means people with “official” laptops running Windows are welcome and wanted for testing)
2. Fix lying around small bugs.
3. Brainstorm on further development and maybe get a base framework done on one of these ideas.

Looking at the current state of things it could either happen on Wednesday or Thursday. This is just not it. Some Fedora and Debian work will also be done. Details in another blog. See you then.

PS for Students: I believe this is a very apt small package to start contributing to Free software. You are the most welcome. This doesn’t mean oldies are prohibited .

[0] Will FOSS get me a Job?
[1] How do You select a career oppurtunity

[2] Why not the Best?

Happy Reading!

Last week I was offered to help the fedora electronics laboratory project and I gladly accepted. Now, I have the official Fedora packager status and have already made couple of commits to the project. Thanks to Chitlesh and the fedora team and I am sure I will continue to contribute to the best of my abilities!