For the last few weeks, my productivity has dipped to an all time low. Progit is to be blamed. Suddenly I find myselves hitting refresh to see what’s ‘hot’ leading to more time reading blogs and articles, and less time actually getting some work done. So, from this point on I am activating a self-imposed ban on progit.

Lets see how long I last urge :D.

EDIT: Bleh…. Gave up, ban lasted 12 minutes

Legolas Greenleaf long under tree

In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea!

If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,

Thy heart shall rest in the forest no more.”

My favorite character from Lord of the Rings. Not as good as the original, but I drew these after a very long time.. :)

I also felt like creating a deviant profile for myself.

Went for a little holiday to Kerala (Kochi, Guruvayoor and Calicut). My dad wanted to go to Kerala and catch up with a few of his college buddies and Me, I wanted to visit the lanes and streets of Calicut where I had roamed as a very little boy. After all, I had lived there for 8 years and Kozhikode hasn’t changed a lot to be honest, except for fresh coats of paints. A new building here and there, one or two demolished. But most of my favorite spots still remain, PaiCo, Alakapuri, Lions park, my school :D, the local chips store, the ‘samooham’, winding lanes of chalapuram..etc..

The best part is, I met my LKG class teacher out of sheer luck. Woot, its been 14 years and still she remembers me :D (I must have been very very ‘notorius’), After all she had the patience to teach me that ‘C’ follows ‘B’…..

And not to forget the ‘Anna kada’ as I used to call it, Still the same…

NSS school…

Tali Shivan Temple.

Sunset at the beach with little karthik,

…and, couldn’t help myself :P

SHR (Stable Hybrid Release) released images recently and boy, did they do an awesome job at it. By far, SHR and Debian are some of the images that uses the FSO daemons by default. So turns out to be a great testing ground for the FSO APIs. And after a long while, I also got some time to play with my Freerunner. Here is a screenshot of TangoGPS in action.

Hmm..Someone seems to have mapped Chitlapakkam and East Tambaram a bit for OSM. Wondering who that is. :)

As for fsod, I could really use some help especially with autotools. I managed to set up a preliminary a python scripting interface so that fsod can load python scripts. But that’s as far as I got. Apparently DBus needs a mainloop to be setup for exporting objects on the system bus. And since GObject introspection in python seems to be absent at the moment, I had to create bindings to my code. This process is documented and explained here. But still, I am at a loss as to how to pass the DBus connection object from the mainloop to the python scripts. If someone knows how to do this, please poke me.

The code could be found here. (src/subsystems/Python especially can use some love)

Update: I made a package out of today’s tree. Find it here.

Semesters start this friday, Nov 7th. :(. So will be missing in action for the next two weeks…..

Till then,

Ctrl-Z

Its been a while since I blogged about odeviced. In my earlier posts I had mentioned the possibility of integrating odeviced and others (which do not exist at the moment) into a single daemon for avoiding too much fracture. I have pushed some code that does this, converting odeviced into a Device subsystem that is loaded by a master daemon called fsod. This, of course is very similar to the python implementation (frameworkd) which is pretty awesome at what it does and has become a sort of success story for using DBus as the fudgy layer separating toolkits and the underlying systems which in themselves are tightly coupled.

The current code base is written in vala (and C where it is required) which unfortunately lacks certain features of DBus like async callbacks and some method signatures at the moment (I may be horribly wrong. I would be glad if someone points out in that case. The mailing list discussion on async support here). But at the same time, writing GObject code in vala is infinitely easier and lots of fun too :D.

It would be also be pretty awesome if fsod could support loading python plugins, kind of like what gedit does. The GSM code especially could benefit from this since there is not much to gain in terms of performance here.

As for fsod, the sources are available here. In case anyone wants to get hold of a opk of the current code to install on the Freerunner, it is available here. Comments are welcome

Four words. Shaastra ‘08 was frigging awesome. I was there a couple of days and had fun meeting people (shres, madhusudhan and many others). Also got to speak about FSO framework (slides later) as part of the FOSS sub-conference. Lots of food, some awesome talks and a wonderful atmosphere made the event memorable. Too bad, I had to leave early for the FOSS HackFest on 2nd night.

Only one gripe though, the event was not laptop friendly =(, It would have been awesome if the organizers had provided wifi spots near the talk venues.

Thanks to kstars, vimzard, vikram and other volunteers for organizing the event .

In Chennai we have three seasons, summer (nov-march), f***ing hot summer (april – june), a mildly wet but still hot summer (july-oct). In case you are wondering where I am pointlessly heading to, I was talking about the Google Summer of Code 2008 which ended successfully for me :D; the code which I submitted was only about 56KB which means I was the laziest among the 9 other GSoC’ers for Openmoko. On the whole, I think Openmoko had a wonderful SoC this year.

I will continue working on the freesmartphone.org initiative and do my little bit to help around. I was planning to release the ipks along with FSO milestone 3, but it turned out that my build tree wouldn’t let me to do that without a fight (at `NOTE: Running task 256 of 718’ now), will post the link once I have the packages. Get it here. (Thanks to mukt.in team for hosting it)

Meanwhile, Software Freedom Day will be celebrated worldwide on September 20 (third saturday of September) and the ILUG-C gang will be there at Kamban Engineering College, Thiruvannamalai this year. So if you are in Chennai at that time and want to do something fun for the weekend, please volunteer!.

P.S: I am planning to give away my Freerunner for free, first to comment this post gets it..

..NOT!

Phew. GSoC 2008 program is going to end in a couple of days and boy, did I have fun. Most of the code for the second phase was actually pushed last week. Anyway, here are the updates.

• Accelerometer plugin for Freerunner. Now you can use odeviced to retrieve accelerometer values for the position of the device along the x,y,z axes.

• Completed Powercontrol plugin. Kept putting this off, but got myself to complete it today.

• IdleNotifiers enabling apps to keep track of the state of the device viz. IDLE, BUSY…etc

• Input plugin for signalling input events on DBus. Like button presses, etc. Should make this asynchrounous once vala offers support for async DBus on the server side (‘read’ systemcall can block)

• Initial Audio plugin, am keeping this as a TODO outside GSoC.

The daemon is far from complete and GSoC was meant to be just the beginning to get the basics right. Integration of odeviced as a subsytem of a frameworkd implementation (theres already a python implementation) in C is something I am looking forward to contribute in the next few months. It would be uber cool, if someone lends a helping hand for now to make odeviced work on other devices on which openmoko (and FSO) can run.

I am not sure if people will find this interesting, but still

• The plugins average around 14kB in size, with powercontrol being the biggest of all. (25KB)

• The main odeviced binary is around 26KB, which IMO, is quite teency weency.

(But given the fact that the code links against GLib and DBus, I have no idea if these numbers mean anything at all. I would be grateful if anyone thinks this is something to cheer about)

P.S: I am looking for a temporary place to host the ipks for the lazy ones, will post the link once I get that. Meanwhile, get the code here.

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.

The entire scope of mukt is to introduce people to FOSS. This is quite unlike other “biggies” in India like foss.in which is mainly concerned with the developer folk. In fact, mukt.in was more like fossconf with regards to its intended audience. Last year was more satisfying for me personally because I got a chance to actively help around. This year I didn’t move my butt and was pampered like a elite speaker, which I felt to be weird.

But at the same time, the event as a whole was a great success! The interactions between the speakers was awesome, many of us whom were using the free wifi at krish’s place. His mom made me feel home and all salutes to a nice lady who happens to make the best “chai” ever.

We also visited Charminar, Got stuck at Hussein Sagar in the midnight where there were no local buses, realised that samosas can cost a fortune in some places (;) ). And of course, thanks to Aju bhaiyya for the tee. (you are the best for now :D)

Ok, so here are some of my thoughts on improving mukt.in with which I have become quite attached,

• I feel the duration of the event to be too long. Two days would be apt and the third day, as mbuf put forth rightly, could be made as a “Picnic day”. Get a mini-van for the speakers and visit the tourist spots or some hang-out. A wonderful way to get together and make mukt more of a friendly cozy foss event that everyone would love to attend.

• Be a bit strict with the kind of talks that make it to the final lists. Ask the speakers to submit slides and be strict with it.

• Chinese food, all the three days was a bit sucky. Tokens from the local canteen would have been cool instead.

• I realised this rather late, but the mukt.in logo could have been a bit more expressive. Like a little image of Charminar or even the Buddha of Hussein Sagar that adds some weight to the logo. You get the picture.

I guess thats about it. Next time, I am ruddy damn sure mukt.in will be bigger and more “mukt”ier.

@mukt.in organizers, take a week off and sleep well. You guys deserve it!