Planet LUG Manipal

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Simple MVC implementation for PHP

Ankur Shrivastava — 2012-01-01T18:20:56+00:00

It has been some time since i have worked on a ‘significant’ side project, i have started to feel a slow down in the number of side projects i do not because of my full time work at Zynga but because i have become too lazy, to break this chain and to make sure i at least work on some project i have decided to work on a side project at least once in 2 weeks, i hope i will be able to keep this new year resolution.
Few weeks ago i tried my hands on Yii i really liked it, its simple, easy and efficient !! which made me wonder how much effort is there in writing a MVC framework in PHP, few hours work and the result was mvc-php (ya i suck at giving names to projects), i have used mod_rewrite and got basic controllers working, now working on getting Smarty integrated but still cant decide on what to use for models, was thinking about doctrine but it looks bulky, i still have no particular use case for mvc-php, i hope it gets some where

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Command Line Fu

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-11-14T07:21:47+00:00

http://xkcd.com/196/

A few weeks back i bought a new monitor Dell U2312HM, its a brilliant monitor with support for portrait/landscape switching.
so as it always happens after buying a new monitor i planned a movie night and ran into the screen lock problem, i have set 2 minute timeout for screen lock and some why changing screen settings didn’t work, i knew i had to find a solution and fast or the above xkcd might actually happen with me

so this is what i came up with, having worked with X bindings before for Game-on this was done in under 5 mins (after reading some docs) , another day saved all thanks to Linux, X11 and previous X11 binding experience

This code moves the mouse pointer back and forth every few seconds, which is defined in DURATION

Manish's Tech Blog: Ubuntu Power Users reorganization An advice to our new roletaker

Manish — 2011-11-04T15:36:27+00:00

Jono founded Ubuntu Power Users group a few months back. Since then lot many things were discussed but due to being a bit late in the cycle.

Power Users Group got a fresh new start and it was advised to hand over the bigger responsibilities to James Gifford. If any of you don’t know him, he a a very young yet highly energetic community member and an active member on AskUbuntu.

James, every initiative has it’s high and low in activity. When Power Users was started there was many good discussions but now it looks like the team really needs a strong leadership. Do not be demoralized if you find that you are the only person who is working under power-users banner. There might be other people interested in contributing, but they might not feel like contributing when they find themselves alone. It is always more encouraging and consoling to find that the project you are contributing to has an active leader and your work is actually going to make a significant impact. When there is a leader who is working tirelessly, I feel more confident because even if I am not able to contribute, still there is someone who is making sure that my work will reach the wider audience.

Being a leader is tough. Being a maintainer of a software project is also very tough. It is sometimes easier to be a person who just commits code than being a maintainer. You have to make sure that all the nuts and bolts are assembled together in the correct order. Contributors might only make separate pieces, but you have the responsibly to assemble them together and make a working product. Sometimes you even have to make sure that your assembled piece works properly when it itself has to act like a nut to an even bigger piece of software.

I admit having the feeling of “Why? Why am I the only person who is working on it? Does it mean no one else is interested?”. The answer is that probably many other people might be interested, but they are just too busy in another piece of software or community which they maintain. They might be not getting enough time to contribute to the project in which I or you work.

That said, James please make sure that atleast Ubuntu Tweak is included in Ubuntu archives starting Precise. The Ubuntu developers had their own valid share of criticisms for this product, hence it is time to address the issues. I can help you in support and documentation part (on AskUbuntu).

Best of Luck

LUG Manipal: Open Talks

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-10-26T08:41:35+00:00

LUG Manipal presents Open Talks in the 1st week of November 2011 on interesting topics covering Perl, Hadoop and Lucene (technologies essential to Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter), Version control using GIT and Google Summer of Code (GSoC). The talks are absolutely free. For more details, keep checking your hostel notice board.

LUG Manipal

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project IV Part 2

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-10-15T13:03:33+00:00

In continuation of Weekend Project IV, i have updated the code to work with the a graphics LCD, i am using JHD 12864e it works on Ks0108 driver, earlier i was writing my own driver for this graphic LCD but i found that Arduino already has support for the LCD using the GLCD library and its pretty awesome.

here is the working

Shubhendra Singh (BE-2k5): An year in life.....

Shubhendra Singh — 2011-10-09T06:46:08+00:00

An year in life, 2010-2011. One of the mysterious years. Summer of 2010 itself was so gloomy with Intel internship not starting, which wasn't a big deal once you know you did your best to do find an internship, got it but didn't start due to some strangest reasons,as they say "Man proposes God disposes". Summer at New Media innovation lab was quite interesting with work varying from Wordpress learning to Mobile web stuff. Summer ended with even stranger void in life, 6 August 2010 Nanuji (my father) winked at me on some joke (man's joke :) and I thought your father becomes a friend the day when he is comfortable winking at you at that time and even you are comfortable. That friendship wasn't meant to be long at least physically. 8 August to 8 October, 2 months of living in a hell. Seeing someone die everyday is like some part of you dying every second. 8 October was the day he left us physically, in those 2 months I came to know what it meant to be "man of family", and my life changed forever. Next 10 months were like I was doing things for which I was too young. Everyday was like a test, sometimes I had the answers sometimes or rather most of the days I failed miserably.

Learning from your mistakes is best way of learning new things. I found "you can be as mad as a mad dog but then you have to let it go".

I talked with several different people with completely different background. I found people shouldn't be judged by their appearance, wealth or any materialistic things. A person can be your Krishna, your Bhagwat and you should respect everyone and anyone. A person who isn't nice to you, try forgiving him/her and those who love you try to be with them forever.

Saw days where I just couldn't answer why? I found that people have come up with there struggle phase and that is unavoidable, you can only make it easier by "never giving up" and always carrying a smile on your face would do 90% job.

People change drastically at some point of time. I found that having expectation from anyone is like expecting sun would rise from west.

You never know the future and probability. I found that you haven't seen the future so don't think you can do this thing in future. Do it today and plan for tomorrow too, because someone else might rely on your planning.

Money is one thing which is always scarce. I found that more you run behind money the more you will run, it is necessity but you shouldn't make it your obsession. You won't have time for others than to use that money fruitfully.

Success is a parameter set by you. I found that for someone success is being on top of world and while, for someone else its earning a piece of bread for his children everyday. Life is a strange after all.

You can do anything. I found that result is not in your hand, but you can try everything. If its meant to work it will and if not you won't be able to make it happen anyhow. Yes but try your very best so that you won't be sorry afterwards.

Never run from your responsibilities. I found that running away from things is worst decision in life, and taking help of materialistic things like alcohol is even worse. Satisfaction is in your brain not in things.

These were some of the things I saw too closely, I feel I was lucky to have a person like him in my life who trained me for everything in life. The Guru I could have asked for was my own Nanuji.

Manish's Tech Blog: Zeitgeist User Survey 2011 Fall Results

Manish — 2011-10-02T19:36:52+00:00

Hello everyone,

As I announced earlier we had opened User Survey for Zeitgeist for general feedback and assessment of our own work. It was also to help us understand what are the user requirements.

After 5 days, we have received 261 responses. Instead of going in details and boring you, I would like to keep the post as short as possible and provide detailed analysis in the next post.

Our survey contained questions related to general Zeitgeist questions, Activity Journal, Activity Log Manager, Datasources and Community aspects. Users were also asked about their distro of choice and optional name, age and Country.

Distribution demographics

The biggest share of responders were using Ubuntu – 136. 30 of them were using derivatives. I am also happy to see Fedora and Gentoo in the list.

The other 10 distros included Mandriva, Chakra, Kubuntu (which could be part of Ubuntu and it’s derivatives)

How did you come to know about Zeitgeist

Online blog/news-outlet and Planet make up a huge percent of users. It is evident that people do follow these two very closely. Notice that total does not add up to 100% as just hearing the name might not be sufficient for someone to figure out what it is.

How much do you know about Zeitgeist

Pretty much obvious conclusion. The user know what it is but most of them are not geeky. Looks like those 6 “I hacked on the codebase” was selected by contributors.

Do you know what is Zeitgeist Datasources

One half of my brain says “Teach them what it is” and the other side says “No. Not everyone is very interested in being force taught”. Guess what? I take the central stand and will publish a short article on what all components of Zeitgeist do.

Which of these Datasources do you use?

This is a VERY VERY important chart. This tells us the adoption of datasources esp when datasources are not present in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE (AFAIK for last two). I think they are present in Gentoo and Arch.

I am really humbled that so many people like Firefox datasource even though it had suffered so much with regular xulrunner API breakage. With our new datasource which uses js-ctypes, all the API headache is gone. Gedit. Banshee and Chrome too score pretty high

Which datasources would you like to see in the near future?

I never thought Thunderbird would come out as first. My expectations were with Gnome-0shell which is actually second.

Good news is that Thunderbird datasource is in progress. Mark Jtully is working on it. Gnome-shell would is also in progress.

Since other were 76, I would like to name a few, though I would prefer a separate post for this. The number 76 has led me to make up my mind for a special treatment.

Let me list a few:

Novacut

Jason. Is that you? If yes, then contact me on IRC

git-repos

Personally my favourite too

Pidgin

Work in progress

Empathy

Telepathy plugin already present

Clementine

Even I am excited about it

KDE

Work in progress. Stay tuned for the next blog post

Heard about Activity Log Manager

Activity Log Manager is Administrative tool for Zeitgeist. You can temporarily stop logging, blacklisting certain applications from logging information, blacklisting certain mimetypes, clearing all history between time range etc. It is a handy tool. A new version is going to be out soon.

It is really sad that half of the people never heard about it. Looks like we failed at spreading the word. By the way there has only been a single release.

How much are you involved with the community?

40% of the people are users. “Nor am I interested” is not a harsh phrase. It simply means “I use so many applications and it is not possible for me to be involved in each and every community”.

15% of the respondents are eager to join the community. Probably you all can help us in testing. This is where most of the manpower is needed.

In case you have problems, where do you ask your questions?

Two-third of the people do prefer forums. Mailing lists and IRC still trump over Q&A sites. I think many people have answered this not only for problems but also for general questions.

In case you are an Ubuntu user, you can ask your question on Ask Ubuntu and tag the question with zeitgeist tag.

Are your problems related to Zeitgeist solved?

Did I tell you that this chart has boosted my morale? 70% of the people didn’t have problems with Zeitgeist. I now really guess that these people were asking general questions or discussing about zeitgeist and replied to the above question.

Whatever be the case, we still have 10% unsatisfied users from the samplespace. 10% is a significant number. Hope we can bring it down by the next survey.

Few interesting comments we received

More focus on the related items of Zeitgeist

Looks like we really lacking here. Thanks for reminding

The ability to put zeitgeist in private-mode

It is already present in Activity Log Manager

I’m a software developer and do lots of testing every day. I need a way of blocking activity from my development/testing trees

There is a “Logging Active” toggle button in Activity Log Manager

It[Activity Journal] needs to be abstracted into Unity

Isn’t it already? Probably the implementation is different. There is no journal view in Unity

It doesnt show all my files

You need more datasources. In other words we need to provide more datasources which you need to install.

It’s [Activity Journal] good, but shouldn’t we be providing this information through the UIs made available by the host OS?

It is somewhat done for Unity. Next up in Shell and Plasma. In any case none of them show the Journal view as Activity Journal

I really like being able to see what I did, and when I did it. The thumbnails for code snippets, videos, and pictures are also rather nice. Congrats on making a easy-to-use computer journal

All I can do is smile

Please integrate it into Gnome Shell if it light enough.

This is also my personal wish. It might take some time

It would be nice if these datsource plugins are included by default without the user having to do it manually. This way it just works.

This has to be done at distro level. This is something even I would love to see

A ppa would be nice.

A you wish, but remember there can be dragons

LUG Manipal: Mobivision Workshop 2011

varun — 2011-09-26T12:49:30+00:00

Mobivision workshop has always been one of the top workshops by LUG. Unlike every year this year workshop was conducted on Android. Previously the workshop used to be on Symbian (Using Python for S60) .

Day1 – Installation of eclipse and android SDK was done. Everyone installed and started there emulator successful. Hello World program was explained properly. Making UI through XML and through java file was explained. Then App inventor tool of google was shown.

Day2 – Basics of java and then android overview (activities, intents, widget…) was covered first. Then Lab1 was done which was hands-on-session . Everyone used Linear Layout, Button, EditText, Checkbox , etc… through dynamic programming and made a simple app. How to use LogCat to debug code was also taught.

Day3- Different Example codes were explained and distributed. Lab2 was done which was hand on session. Same layout which was made in day2 was now made through xml. It covered different layout, widget most importantly listview, adapter, layout inflator, etc.

Lastly there was discussion on ideation as well. How to generate ideas for an mobile application. What all thing we should look for when we go for making an mobile application, etc.

All files are attached (Lab1, Lab2 complete, examples and slides)

http://www.slideshare.net/sritolia/android-workshday1

http://www.slideshare.net/sritolia/android-workshobasic-java

http://www.slideshare.net/sritolia/android-workshop-day3

http://www.lugmanipal.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/lugmanipal.zip

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Weekend Project IV

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-09-25T10:08:11+00:00

Few days back i bought an Arduino UNO board, this is my first Arduino Project and it was damn easy!! I can see the power that Arduino has to offer for hobbyist, i have worked on 8051 and few avr (without Arduino) before, doing stuff with an arduino is pretty easy and straightforward.

In this weekend project i am using a JHD162a (16×2 LCD) connected with Arduino UNO to display the name of the current song being played, i am running mpd on my machine so have used python-mpd to retrieve song info and pyserial to transfer the data over UART to UNO, the UNO just spits out the data received over UART to the LCD.
This is a copy of my earlier project which i did in my third year in college, but that was using a 8051 and i wrote a library (code available here) to control the LCD, currently i am using the LiquidCrystal Arduino library for that.

here is the demonstration

UPDATE -> song name, artist and time also added, video here

PS – you might also want to see the extremely cheap CNC machine being made by one of my friend

LUG Manipal: Installing the Android SDK

varun — 2011-09-22T09:24:58+00:00

1) System Requirement – Check whether your operating system supports for developing Android applications using the Android SDK.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/requirements.html

2) JDK- Download and install the Java JDK depending upon the OS and processor (32bit or 64 bit) you have. http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
JDK 7 is recommended.

3) Eclipse – Download eclipse zip file and extract it. – http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ .The “Eclipse Classic” version is recommended. Otherwise, a Java or RCP version of Eclipse is recommended.

4) Download Android SDK – download and extract the android sdk depending upon the OS you have. http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

5) ADT Plugin – Install the ADT Plugin

Start Eclipse, then select Help > Install New Software….
Click Add, in the top-right corner.
In the Add Repository dialog that appears, enter “ADT Plugin” for the Name and the following URL for the Location:
```
https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/
```
Click OKNote: If you have trouble acquiring the plugin, try using “http” in the Location URL, instead of “https” (https is preferred for security reasons).
In the Available Software dialog, select the checkbox next to Developer Tools and click Next.
In the next window, you’ll see a list of the tools to be downloaded. Click Next.
Read and accept the license agreements, then click Finish.Note: If you get a security warning saying that the authenticity or validity of the software can’t be established, click OK.
When the installation completes, restart Eclipse.

6) Configuring ADT Plugin – go to Window=>Preferences=>Android and change the build path to
wherever you put the android-sdk folder.(the sdk you downloaded in step 4) .

7) Try the hello world program from here – http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html .

(You may follow the detailed instructions from the official web site – http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html )

Soumen Banerjee (BE-2k7): My Setup

Soumen — 2011-09-01T05:38:08+00:00

Hello! I tink it is time to Update on my setup. I have an HP6515b Laptop and very few brains… With these limited resources i spend time having fun with my computer and enjoying life in general. My comp. is a real problem though.. Half the things on it were not supported on Linux, my favorite OS until recently leading to myself spending a lot of time thinking of workarounds to get simple stuff like internet working… All that has changed with the latest and (arguably) best from linux’s stable of OSes Hardy Heron. It brings integrated hardware support to my computer making it easy to setup and fun to use.

Ayush Pranshu (BE-2k5): About JanLokpal, Anna and misinformation

gurudev — 2011-08-17T23:19:29+00:00

A lot of shoddy articles are doing the rounds on Anna Hazare and his motives. A case in point is this article

1. That the Lokpal, as envisioned by the civil society team, will have para-judicial powers of all 3 arms of the govt. This is misleading as the Lokpal will have the same powers as the CBI does in bringing the case to court. If you have differences with the version produced by Mr. Hazare’s team then you have been given the opportunity and the means to read the proposed bill and give feedback and suggestions. I doubt you have used the means at your disposal and yet you questions and level allegations without having the decency to do you bit to stop corruption. Instead what you seem to suggest it do nothing and let the situation be. Inaction this time around would be akin to treason and in clear violation of our Fundamental Duties as citizens of India (yes, there is something called Fundamental duties).

2. Also that Hazare expressed support for Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar. I take offence when you club Mr. Kumar with Mr. Modi. It is an insult to use their names in the same breath. I respect Mr. Modi as he is a Chief Minister of a state and has done admirable work in governance and development of his state. People continue to hark on Godhra and the Gujarat riots but they forget the good that has been happening after it. They prevent the Muslims of Gujarat from becoming part of the mainstream and keep them solid as a vote-bank for so-called secular parties. We are supposed to be a socialist, secular democratic republic. This implies that no party and govt organ should invoke caste and religion for votes. Yet governments and parties openly woo vote banks of caste and religion, either in the form of reservations or in the form of the fear of the hated enemy. In this case, the very enemy of the minority in Gujarat is their friend who is bringing about development and reducing corruption. It is time we let the minorities develop a free and open mindset devoid of fear and propaganda.

It is foolish to say that when Anna commended Mr. Kumar and Mr. Modi on their governance, he also supported Mr. Modi’s non-governmental deeds. I have seen the news clip in question and it is a sad commentary on your skills as an articulate citizen. Whoever does good governance should be applauded and feted in a time of mis- and non-governance in India. Granted that the way Mr. Modi came into power was controversial but what he has done since is nothing short of commendable. Whom would you prefer, someone with a murky background yet committed to development and clean governance or the current dispensation who do exactly the same things or even worse in the garb of secularism but never deliver anything substantial?

Mr.Nitish Kumar is the most respected and clean politician in India who has changed Bihar from the mess of Congress-RJD. We always blame Mr. Lalu Prasad for the mess that was Bihar but we always forget that Congress supported all his policies throughout his tenure. Mr. Kumar is a politician whom India would be lucky to have as our leader. He has initiated reforms at the grass-roots level, streamlined the police, reduced political interference, locked up criminals and created an enabling environment for Bihar to rise fast. He does not indulge in religious and casteist politics, uses development as the barometer for the voters to judge his government. His government has pioneered in the use of technology for efficient delivery of services to the poor and by connecting all district HQs to report to the CM directly each day. He has pioneered a bill to seize the property of corrupt officials so as to deny them the unfair lure of money that often influences investigations and courts judgments. This has broken an important link in the chain of corruption. There is lot to be learnt from his methods and ideas.

3. People all around say repeatedly that ‘an overhaul of the system‘ is required. This is just the sort of shoddy fence sitting that has led to our current corruption malaise. You only identify the symptom and say that the symptom must go but never bother to point out the how and wherefore. JP proposed a solution but no one followed it. Now Anna is doing something and instead of joining in a constructive debate, you are resorting to character assassination. I had hope to read a well researched article on the nexus between Anna and the ruling class but have ended up reading lame-ass shit that only points fingers. Please get your facts right assuming that you are an affected member of the general public and not an ass-licking stooge like Mr. Digvijay Singh, Mrs. Ambika Soni, Mr. Chidambaram and PM Singh.

4. I do not know about Anna’s exploits in Ralegaon-Siddhi, what I have read in various articles is what you have stated so I will not dispute this point, but I have sufficient faith in the people and myself to not support Mr. Hazare in case we see the ‘casteist, communal and patriarchal‘ policies emerging out in the open.

Saahil (BE-2k7): New Blog

Saahil — 2011-07-13T19:26:09+00:00

Stuff moved people! Be kind and follow my new blog at saahil.posterous.com.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): 6 months in Citrix / Bangalore

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-07-05T03:02:48+00:00

Lot of time has passed since i last updated my blog, i have finished the 7th Semester of my engineering and just one step from my degree, i have moved from Manipal to Bangalore for my last (8th) semester and I was interning at Citrix Systems, working with NetScaler Tools team. The last few days as a college student have turned out to be awesome, living in Bangalore with friends is fun (except for Bangalore’s night life which sucks big time). During the last 6 months i have learned at lot about life, universe and everything :p .

The experience at Citrix was great mostly because of the kind of work and guidance i was given, we arrived in Bangalore on 3rd Jan, it was weird that no accommodation was provided to us for the initial weeks, but since manipal is one night journey away from bangalore, we came here after our exams and searched for a flat, we finally decided on a flat in Cambridge Layout (near Indiarnagar) since it was pretty close to our work place which was near brigade road !! I was working with the NetScaler Tools team on a internal stress testing tool called BlackWidow, the best thing about my work at citrix was that i had to work with FreeBSD kernel, which meant i had to use *NIX development tools (cscope/vim/kgdb which is what i am pretty comfortable with) and not some bloated IDE (for me Vim + cscope > any IDE) which i had to learn for my last internship at microsoft, this helped me get started pretty quickly which surprised my mentor, although i was not assigned the feature i wanted to implement still my work was pretty interesting.

I found Citrix to be a really awesome company to work at, it has a lot of interesting products, the people are friendly and helpful and the work culture is great, ohh and not to forget the facilities they provide to employees, but one thing that I noticed during my internship is that the work can become monotonous, so you really need to pitch in and get some interesting work or one might end up doing similar work again and again, but then i think thats the case with most of the places.

The main motive behind me coming to bangalore was meeting interesting people, not that people in Manipal were less interesting, i wanted to meet with some ‘similar’ minded people. I had hardly talked to other people from my college who interned with me, but they turned out be interesting, also interns from other colleges like PeeShit (read PESIT) were interesting. I didnt actually went out to meet people, but then i guess i can do that now as i am going to stay in bangalore. A few days back i met folks at Artoo on their Demo Day, they are doing some really interesting work.

My internship is over but I will be staying in Bangalore for my first full time job, i have a few on campus and off campus offers but more on that some time later, Thanks to my flat mates Mikhail Jacob, Sohil Himanish and Tushar Dadlani for making my stay in Bangalore awesome and Thanks to my mentor, manager, all fellow interns and everyone else at citrix for making my work awesome, you people rock !!

Manish's Tech Blog: Releasing Zeitgeist Datasources 0.8.0

Manish — 2011-06-05T21:12:28+00:00

One behalf of Zeitgeist Team I am happy to release zeitgeist-datasources 0.8.0

Zeitgeist Datasources are a collection of extensions/ addons/plugins which log the activities of the user and insert it in the zeitgeist engine which can be later used for lot of useful tasks. These extensions insert lots of extra events apart from the ones logged by zeitgeist-datahub
http://wiki.zeitgeist-project.com/Getting_Started

The extensions present are

Eye of GNOME
gedit
Totem
Rhythmbox
Tomboy
Chrome
Emacs
Firefox 4.0
Geany
Telepathy
Vim
XChat
Bazaar

Get the release tarball from here
https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datasources/0.8/0.8.0

Few of the extensions require Zeitgeist 0.8.0 to build.
https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.8/0.8.0

Launchpad project Page

Datasources: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datasources
Zeitgeist: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist
Libzeitgeist: https://launchpad.net/libzeitgeist
Zeitgeist Datahub: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-datahub
Zeitgeist Sharp – https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp

More info about Zeitgeist

Website: http://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://wiki.zeitgeist-project.com
List: http://lists.zeitgeist-project.com

Package for Ubuntu would be available on Zeitgeist PPA. I have built it in my PPA, it needs to be tested and then copied to the Zeitgeist PPA. If you have added the PPA, then you should get the update

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): MEDIAFIRE DIRECT LINK GENERATOR

djays — 2011-04-28T05:20:44+00:00

THIS SCRIPT DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE!

IF ANY FUTURE SCRIPTS WILL BE MADE THEY WILL BE POSTED AT MY NEW BLOG

http://djsh.net/

UPDATE2: Mediafire updated their page leaving this script non functional.

UPDATE: Added Proxy Support

This is a python based Mediafire link resolution script . It resolves the input link to give the direct link to the file.

By using this script you are automatically agreeing to MediaFire ‘s Terms and Conditions.

If you wish to have the source code , contact me.

DOWNLOAD

For help use “mediafire.pyc –help”

Posted in Bash, Linux, python, Windows

Dhananjay (BE-2k7): Moving my Blog

djays — 2011-04-24T05:32:01+00:00

After nearly 2 years of inactivity I have decided to resume the work on my blog and this time i have bought hosting.

Please bookmark the new link http://djsh.net

Filed under: Uncategorized

LUG Manipal: Rendevous with Facebook Basics Workshop

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-04-12T19:55:46+00:00

A Workshop on Basic Web Development was conducted by LUG Manipal. It furnished the attendees with the knowledge of the web technologies required for the upcoming workshop on Facebook Application Development. The primary focus were the concepts behind web development, such as Client Server Architecture, Server Side Languages and Client side Languages.

Day 1:
The XAMP suite was given to the attendees. The focus of the workshop was on PHP, MySQL, HTML. The workshop started with a discussion on the Client Server Architecure. It was followed by an introduction to HTML. Major HTML tags were covered, and the day ended with a simple page, covering most of the important tags.

Day 2:
The second day was devoted to PHP. The basic concepts of server side scripting were covered. Also, the working of PHP, the syntax of PHP statements were taken up. At the end, the attendees were able to pass information from a form to another page and process the information

Day 3:
The focus of the third day was MySQL, and its connection with PHP. In the beginning, basic database concepts were discussed. MySQL was introduced, and basic queries such as INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, DELETE, SELECT were discussed.
The Connection of PHP with MySQL with the particular functions was discussed in detail. Inserting values from a form into the database, and retrieving the data from the database and displaying it on the screen was demonstrated.

Day 4:
The day started with an introduction to Sessions and Cookies. The differences between Sessions and Cookies and their respective uses was highlighted. The creation and usage of sessions and cookies using PHP functions was demonstrated. The day ended with a simple login script demonstration. An insight was also given into Facebook application development using PHP, which will be covered in the next workshop.

References:

To know about the installation procedures -> Link

Slides of the Workshop -> Link

Get the Official PHP Manual from its website.

Get the Official MySQL Manual from its website.

LUG Manipal: Open Talks II Description

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-04-12T19:29:14+00:00

The following topics were discussed during the 2nd open talks session :

Cryptographic Hashing :

On the 28th of March, a one-hour talk on “Cryptographic Hashing” was conducted. The talk comprised of the basics of hashing, digests and it’s applications in real world scenarios. It introduced the attendees to the different types of hashing functions and it’s evolution over the course of time, detailing it’s use as an alternative to storing passwords in plain text at the server end and also it’s utility as file checksums. They were also given a brief insight into the different methods used to break hashes which included brute force, cryptanalyzation and rainbow tables.

Link to slides for this session

Regular Expressions :

Regular Expressions are commonly used in Compiler Design, and form a basis for theoretical computer science, but their power in programming languages for pattern matching, and searching is under utilized. The focus of the talk was to apply the power of regular expressions in programming.
The highlight of the talk was on constructing regular expressions. The format and various syntaxes were discussed. All the required concepts were covered in a construction of a regular expression for a typical email address. Lastly, an example on Java, showing the practical implementation of regular expressions was shown. Implementation in C++ with the Boost/Regex library was also mentioned.

Click to Download the Reference Document

Augmented Intelligence and Machine Learning :

The talk began with the discussion on what learning is and what styles of learning surround us. The classic approach of classroom was picked up and so was the process of distance learning. The distance learning model was picked up and we saw as to what its various advantages and disadvantages are. The talk was focused on Opencourseware, which was an initiative started by MIT, USA which put up their entire course material online including lectures and handouts so that people could learn from them.
The second part of the talk session was on machine learning and augmented intelligence. With the main focus being on Milo, a online entity that was created in association with Microsoft, it could actively learn and could be taught new things to do. It exhibited Augmented intelligence and discussions ensured on the same till the end of the session.

Esoteric Programming Languages :

Esoteric languages are languages that are created testing the boundaries of programming languages, they are often written as a joke or humor and exhibit no sense of purposes whatsoever. Still, they are interesting to learn and a lot of fun.
There were several languages that were demonstrated. Brainfuck was the main focus however. The most popular esoteric language has only 8 commands and has the minimalistic designs. Other language include Piet, which takes bitmap images as input. Whirl which has only 0 and 1. and other such languages. The humor aspect of the session was the main focus as computer science jokes and parodies were at the fullest.

Allegro – C/C++ Gaming Library :

A talk was held on Allegro a C/C++ game programming library. It was basically an introduction to Allegro and game programming in general.
At first the audience were made familiar with the initial setup procedures as required by Allegro environment for outputting data to the screen. Next they were shown the basic functions provided by the library to output bitmaps and sprites onto the screen along with a brief introduction to masking functions.
How to animate sprites to show movement was shown next. This quickly followed the implementation of Double buffering to facilitate smooth motion of the sprites on screen. Collision detection was explained at this stage with proper demonstrations along with the explanation of Bounding Box Collision concept.
Lastly, the programs were shown highlighting the differences between those using timers and those not using them.

Manish's Tech Blog: GNOME.asia

Manish — 2011-04-07T16:03:34+00:00

GNOME.Asia was held in Bangalore from 28th March to 3st April. It included a hackfest from 28th March to 1st April and two days of GNOME.Asia summit on April 2nd and April 3rd.

On 1st of April I attended AndroidCamp and was drenched by the time I came back home. only to find myself not well to attend on the first day of the summit. The first day was cut short to half because you Cricket World Cup Finals. India was in finals, the summit is in India and India is a country where cricket is religion and you expect people to turn up?

As I heard from Manu, the first day turnout was huge. That day India won the World Cup (YAY!). Next day I somehow managed to get up and head towards the venue (only 30 kms from my home). I was one of the few people who reached the venue before 10AM on Sunday.

The first session I attended was from Allan Day on Designing the next generation desktop. Then I proceeded to another hall where Andre Klapper was giving his talk on Contributing to GNOME Documentation. He had some examples which was more easy to understand than plain talk on concepts and theory.

By the time Andre finished his talk, I met more friends – Yuvraj, Sindhu and Shashi. Next talk was from Yuvi who was talking on GStreamer 101. He explained GStreamer from a newbie perspective and slowly his talk started carrying more geeky explanation (expected). He continued even after his session got over by explaining his he got into GSoC on the Cheese project. He is the REAL motivator

When Yuvi finished his talk, Manu and Sankar were waiting for me outside the hall. This is the first time I met both of them even though Manu is from my college. There were more students from my college – two names I can remember is Vikas and Saurabh. Looks like LUG Manipal bore some substantial results.

After these session, I had a golden moment of my life when I went and met Vincent Untz. He is the current Godfather of GNOME. We both talked a bit on Zeitgeist when Allan Day and Andreas Nilsson also joined the conversation for a minute or two before we all moved for lunch.

The only two talks I attended in second half was on GDK(entered late so didn’t remember much) and another on DLNA in GNOME3 world by Arun Raghvan. I could not attend any other talk because I came out to talk to our friends when we met after a long time.

I am a bit sad that I missed a few talks. One of them was by Manu on Libyui and Contributions made by a newbie to free desktop’s empathy by Chandani Verma. I should have stayed back and also attended the Lightening talks. All the slides are available here

The event was well organized. I could not see any kind of chaos or anarchy. The openSUSE stall was filled up with students asking for it’s CD. I saw many students trying out openSUSE and guess what – most of them had Ubuntu installed. Whenever I glanced here or there, I could see people using Ubuntu everywhere

LUG Manipal: Pre-Requisites for Rendezvous with Facebook workshop.

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-04-03T19:41:05+00:00

Following are the methods to install the Apache-PHP-MySQL packages to your systems. People interested in coming for the Web Development Workshop starting from 5th April , should take a look.

For Ubuntu users:

If your Ubuntu is the one from the Linux Install Fest, your system already has the required packages.
If you dont have the packages , type the following commands in terminal :
- sudo tasksel install lamp-server
- sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

For other Linux users :

Download the following package :
- Link to Xampp for Linux

For Windows users:

Download the following softwares :
- Link to Notepad++ , a source code editor for windows.
- Link to Wamp Server , package containing all the required software.

LUG Manipal: Web Development Week

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-04-03T04:03:39+00:00

LUG Manipal presents a web development week.

Spotlight Features:
1> Learn to make Facebook Applications
2> Learn the use of web-based frameworks to build web-sites in minutes.

Schedule :
Fundamentals of web development : 5th to 8th April
Including Html, PHP, Mysql.

FB App Development and Web-Frameworks : 11th to 13th April
Including FB Application Dev. and Web Frameworks.

Workshop is completely FREE and open to all.
No Registrations Required.

Venue : NLH 403

Manish's Tech Blog: Android Camp Bangalore

Manish — 2011-04-01T20:21:51+00:00

I got up in the morning only to find there was no electricity. Not sure if this is somewhat related to April Fool prank, but was enough to piss me off. Checked my watch – 9:30AM and the unconference is supposed to start in half an hour! I needed to get ready and travel more than 18 kms. The next one and an half hour involved running all around the house to get ready, gulping down breakfast, hunting for buses and then finally messing up with an autorickshaw driver when he started using his random number generator for determining the fare.

Finally I managed to reach the place by 11AM. The event AndroidCamp was of an un-conference style. Upon entering the first bad news I got was that I missed a session on Arduino which went excellent.

The rest of the first half session were pretty boring except one from Kashif Razzaqui. His talk was on his experience when developing apps using cross-platforms development tools like Titamium and PhoneGap. He nearly blasted off on the technologies which I think all the geeks love to do. I can see from everyone’s face that they were really enjoying his session. He pointed out how developing anything with Titanium is a total PITA. He did use some funny and amusing quotes like

Those Apple fanboys have to use objective C which cannot be even called a programming language

If Java and XML gives you a hardon, then something is really wrong.

Not sure if both of the quotes is exact as he said, but the audience did chuckle and smile at these jokes. No one at the event did a “Well Actually”

Then Kiran told us that the food van had got lost and the driver is circling the neighborhood searching for the venue. How not, even we all had so much of problems locating the venue. During that time Kashif put up a video of Android during Google IO.

After the lunch when all of us are supposed to sleep, two sessions caught everyone’s excitement. Since I was in the “Geek” room I missed the Firmware and Rooting talk in “Suits” room. Later two sessions happened in Suits room – “Android-scripting” and “Android Rants”.

The session android-scripting was taken by Sajjad ‘geohacker’ Anwar. He is the person who works on OpenStreetMap, writes python code and contributes to Ubuntu Accessibility. He explained how and when scripting can be useful using python than writing Java code. People put up points about speed, performance of this idea, all of which was answered by him. Good job.

The next session was about “Android Rants, The reluctant skeptics” by Supreeth which was basically a session to tell what all issues you have with Android. Some of the topics discussed were

Battery
Upgrades
Fragmentation
iOS and Apple as a competitor
WP7 as a competitor

I think this was the topic where people took part with utmost interest. Comments came from all the sides of the room. Supreeth had to stop them many times to make sure that the discussion did not turn unruly or offt-topic. I don’t think any aspect of mobile ecosystem was left out during this talk which includes Android, Google, Motorola, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Nook, Windows Phone 7, Nokia, Palm, HP and every other entity even remotely associated with mobile phones.

The last session was the Feedback session. This was the session where everyone ended up speaking even though I thought that only a few people might express their opinion. The thing most requested was keeping such events on weekends as getting day-off is really tough for most of the people especially when it is Friday.

All the day I kept a track of the April Fool pranks starting from cyanogen quitting Android to GNOME3 getting delayed to Google Motion. On returning home, I stumbled across one excellent-brilliant-kickass article I am Jef Spaleta by Jono Bacon. This was the day! Lastly if you didn’t notice even WordPress has a small prank (for wordpress.com hosted blogs)

LUG Manipal: Open Talks II

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-03-25T20:50:02+00:00

The second session of Open Talks is here, this time its a five day talk session featuring the following talks:

Cost: Completely FREE
Day 1 – 28th March – Hashing and Regex
Day 2 – 29th March – Augmented Intelligence and machine learning by Prof. K.P. Rao.
Day 3 – 31st March – Allegro – C/C++ Gaming Library
Day 4 – 1st April – GIT and Virtualization
Day 5 – 2nd April – Esoteric Languages (like brainfcuk).

LUG Manipal: Qt Workshop

Kartik Mandaville — 2011-03-25T20:45:53+00:00

LUG Manipal recently conducted a workshop on Qt, an open source cross platform application development framework. The workshop was conducted on 25th February-1st March. The event was conducted by Saurabh Sood and Nitesh Narayanlal, both second year Computer Science students.

Day 1: The Qt SDK was given to the attendees. they were introduced to the Qt framework, with an insight into the internal working, and the difference with other frameworks was explained. It ended with an introduction to programming with Qt

Day 2: Some basic programs were explained. The Qt Designer was also demonstrated. The concept of Signals and Slots was also discussed. The day ended with the design of a functional Notepad application

Day 3 and 4: The Notepad application was completed. The features added were cut/copy/paste/clear, Save, Open, About. Most of the attendees were able to complete the application.

The overall reaction to the reaction was positive, with a decent turnout even on the last two days.

Soumen Banerjee (BE-2k7): Python Incremental Backup Scripts

Soumen — 2011-03-24T09:38:16+00:00

While interning at Honeywell, I found this small problem that I had to solve. We arent allowed to move flash drives around since they are quite a security risk to computers running Windows XP, and if you want to backup your files between a home computer and a work computer, there is really no better way than a flash drive. Given that we couldnt use them though, I had to come up with a clean solution to the probem. I tried taking differential backups with 7zip which does a pretty great job at this, bu the problem is that its “differential” is based on timestamps. The home computer runs Linux and the Office one Windows. For some weird reason, the timestamps on windows are of different precision than those on linux, so basically, the same file modified at the same time looks different to 7zip on a windows box and a linux box.

I had to come up with some kind of solution for this, so I wrote the following python scripts. One is for backing up a custom folder (say Project) and the other is for restoring the backup on another machine. These scripts take an md5 sum of the contents of the files, so timestamps dont matter.

backup.py

restore.py

The usage is simple. Just copy these scripts to the folder which contains the folder you want to backup. For example, If you want to backup D:\Games , just copy the scripts to D:\ . Now edit the scripts and change the line :-

dir_backup=”Directory” to

dir_backup=”Your Folder Name”

In the above example, that would be :-

dir_backup=”Games”

Now youre good to go. Just double click the scripts (in windows) or run the scripts from the terminal (in linux) to run the backup. When you first backup, some files will be created. Just take the scripts to some other computer and copy delta.7z and remove.txt to the same directory, and run the restore script on it. This would generate the folder you backed up in the same directory as the scripts.

From here on, you just need to run backup.py on one machine and copy the 2 mentioned files to the other and run restore.py. The scripts will make sure that everything is up to date between the folders.

As an example, suppose you have a home computer and an office computer and youre trying to backup the folder “Project”(assume we begin at home),

Run backup.py at home

Mail yourself the delta.7z and the remove.txt

Copy the scripts and the 2 files to some directory on the office comp.

Run restore.py on the office comp.

Make changes to the Project folder at office

Run backup.py at office

Mail delta.7z and remove.txt to home comp.

Copy (and replace) these files into the directory where the scripts are located.

Run restore.py

And so on…

Do comment if you have trouble understanding this!

Manish's Tech Blog: VCS Wars: I have my own place

Manish — 2011-03-16T18:27:03+00:00

Till date I have used many version control systems with widely ranging usage periods. There are a few which I would like to try out in the future, but that would happen when I start caring more about my VCS than the code.

The first VCS I used was SourceSafe for a very short duration, then Team Foundation. The real taste of VCS was from subversion. Then I moved to git and bzr and of late used Rational Clearcase

SourceSafe and Team Foundation

I got the pleasure of using SourceSafe once when I had to get a few files. I did it only two times as far as I remember. It was for getting some legacy code for reference as far as I can remember. Now as people who have to deal with it call it a PAIN, so I am lucky to have never dealt with it again.

Team Foundation this was my first real source control system on which I laid my hands on. I still remember the shelving capabilities and a few more features. Anyway not interested anymore.

Subversion

This was the first version control system which I used for learning. Even though it was centralized version control system, I still found it superior to TFS (probably I learnt what it was or I never tried our TFS properly). A reason why I was able to learn it was it was simpler than its brothers which were of distributed nature. Still branching is one thing which I was never able to understand properly using svn.

Last year 5 of subversion developers met and decided on the future of their baby. They came to the conclusion that by somehow putting themselves in DVCS planet would be useless. They have a place of their own. I still see subversion having the biggest foothold in corporate sector amongst all the open-source VCS/DVCS

Rational Clearcase

Probably the (or one of the) crappiest VCS/DVCS (no clue where it fits in) I have ever used till date. Just put some 20 files, each of 300 lines and hit Check-in, go for coffee, return and find that the check-in hasn’t completed. Okay fine, I exaggerated. Whatever be the case, Clearcase is alive just because it has IBM behind it and then know how to stuff their crap on enterprise sector. (Lotus Notes anyone?)

It is said that Clearcase handles binary files better than other VCS. I can find very limited use-cases for this feature. What is the advantage when it cannot handle regular text files properly?

Sadly, Clearcase also has a place of it’s own.

Mercurial

No experience till date. Used it once when I wanted the latest code of django-piston. It is used by Python (don’t contribute), Mozilla(don’t contribute there), OpenOffice (no interest in Office Suits). This sums up my experience of hg, so it’s better to keep my mouth shut on something I never used rather than quoting from external sources.

Git

Git is fast. Git is lovely. Git is wonderful. As people say “Git won the DVCS wars in 2008 and left every other DVCS high and dry”. It’s branching and merging awesomeness is unmatched. It is Fast. To me, git became so widespread due to many reasons and one of the very important one is – github. It was because of github, most of the people got a place to host their projects and share it with their friends. It is a social network for programmers.

So as powerful git is, it comes at a price. It is pretty tough to understand. If you never had any experience with any version control system, you might need to put in extra effort. The concept that multiple branches are contained in the same repository together and the concept of remotes had made me dizzy when I started using git. Till date I keep on telling people that git tracks changes and not files. This is apparently visible when you find your file in both the list of “Changes to be committed” and “Changed but not updated”.

I always held the opinion that git is a spaceship – Incredibly tough to control for people who don’t know what to do. Once you learn how to control it, its a pretty smooth journey.

So now asking the same question for git?Does it have it’s place. Yawn! Isn’t the answer obvious?

Bazaar

These days I am spending most of my time on Bazaar (next is Git as usual). The initial impressions are the it is slow (due to additional runtime costs?) It has it’s own share of problems like slowness etc which everyone talks about. You will find a lot of people using it as a punching bag. Google for it, it is useless to rehash the old thing again.

I am going to talk a bit on the good sides of Bazaar. First it has a lot of good UI tools. I mean Bazaar Explorer is really great when compared to any other Git UI tools. I know most power users like command-line, but I use Bazaar Explorer to commit as I keep a diff and commit window open side by side, look at the changes and write the commit messages. I think many more newcomers might find easier to adopt bazaar since it has better UI tools. For Git, gitk looks pathetic, giggle looks fine, but is still behind, only gitg is of the quality I expected. Still gitg can be improved a lot.

Second advantage that bazaar got is that it is easier to use. I have taught bazaar to a few of my friends and they were pretty quick to pick it up. I found that bzr adjusts better to my workflow. Since in bazaar every branch rests in a separate directory, I have found less head-banging amongst the developers.

I found that a lot of advantages of bazaar are tied with it’s launchpad integration. I have never used it outside launchpad. It would be great if someone using it on GNU Savannah might explain their experience.

We in Zeitgeist development use bazaar a lot since it is hosted on Launchpad. Me and Federico are the two people who know git pretty well (Federico is the champ). Since zeitgeist alone is nothing more than a white elephant, integration of zeitgeist in applications leads us to use git also when sending patches. There are cases when “I have many changes in the source but git diff isn’t showing anything”. Probably git has too much power and sometimes it can lead to panic. It takes time to learn and utilize the full power of git.

I still find bazaar to be a great DVCS for people who don’t have much experience using a Version control system or are not so much technical. The target audience can probably include artists too. This is why I say “Bazaar has it’s own place and trying to compete with git is useless“.

Conclusion

One of my close friend told me – DVCS is religion, never talk about it publicly. You invite wrath.

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): small epoll wrapper

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-03-12T21:32:24+00:00

I remember my first encounter with epoll some time back trying to get a simple server working, implementing a proxy and then a few days back i saw one of my friend trying to get started with epoll, which made me think it will be good to have a simple wrapper around epoll which will allow me to get started with the application and not worry about epoll specifics and at the same time providing enough control, so i wrote a small wrapper with callbacks, which has been quite helpful for my epoll usage, here is the interface poll.h

code and a sample can be found on github

PS – just checkout libevent which is an awesome battle tested event notification library, and a quick getting started

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Simple hash tables in c

Ankur Shrivastava — 2011-03-11T14:09:51+00:00

I was working on a code where i had to lookup a structure based on the file descriptor (socket) again and again in a code, i was using a linked list initially but as the nodes grew i knew i should use a hash table, so i wrote a simple hash table implementation which did the work.
its a just works implementation there are a lot of thing which can be added like a perfect hash function but as long as hash table is not the bottle neck this should work, code can be found on github
file hashtable.h contains the definition

file hashtable.c contains the implementaion

file Makefile is the makefile

file main.c contains the sample

file debug.h contains some debugging options

Manish's Tech Blog: A bit of autotools bashing

Manish — 2011-03-04T22:49:17+00:00

Even programmers need to have some fun.

<m4n1sh> mhr3: I loath autotools

<m4n1sh> the best line in Makefile.am is

<m4n1sh> # end of magic

<m4n1sh> the whole thing is magic

<mhr3> m4n1sh, apparently you’re doing magic

<mhr3> autotools themselves are nice and clean if you dont

<m4n1sh> I am still to come across a single build system which doesn’t play with your blood pressure

<mhr3> yea.. there isn’t one

<mhr3> it’s number one feature of all of them

<m4n1sh> is that the basic requirement for all of them?

<m4n1sh> or stop pathetic programmers from creating pathetic applications?

<mhr3> don’t know if it’s requirement, but surely it’s the first feature that gets implemented in any of them

Manish's Tech Blog: A Re-Introduction to Zeitgeist

Manish — 2011-02-10T20:16:05+00:00

While the Zeitgeist team has assembled together at Aarhus, Denmark for their 2011 hackfest, I am sitting at home due to shortage of time for Visa application. This hasn’t stopped me from continuing my work and mythbusting is also a very much-needed action.

Recently I came across a post on Linux Insider in which the author has written up a post named GNOME Activity Journal: Not a Big History Buff.

Instead of screaming and accusing of spreading FUD (which isn’t a sure shot solution for every problem), I thought I might reply with the solution. Putting it nicely as a blog post might help everyone.

WARNING: This is a tl;dr post.

The post has many errors, some minor misnomer and few factual errors. I would like to clear and doubts and for some points – add more commentary.

1) Architecture and component description

The Activity Journal was first introduced as GNOME Zeitgeist. It is a tool for easily browsing and finding files on your computer. It keeps a chronological journal of all file activity and supports tagging and establishing relationships between groups of files.

Right now Gnome Activity Journal(also called simply as Activity Journal) is a separate component from Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is an umbrella term. The engine is the core component which logs events and exposes them via a DBus API. Activity Journal fetches this data from the Engine’s DBus API using the Python bindings.

Zeitgeist does not provide support for file tagging as Zeitgeist is not a file tracker. It is an event logger.

2) Logger or file search?

It is a history logger but not a true searching tool.

True. Use find command for searching files. You can search within the file if some event contains that file (like file was opened, close, modified). This functionality is provided by Zeitgeist fts extension. fts – Full text search.

3) Work of Activity Journal

Activity Journal is a tool for browsing and finding files on your computer.

Activity Journal is well.. an Activity Journal and not a file search tool.

4) Zeitgeist in GNOME3

The concept behind Zeitgeist is planned as an integral part of the upcoming release of the GNOME 3 shell.

Sadly, Zeitgeist is not a Gnome Project. Gnome-Activity-Journal was rejected in a meeting in May 2010 and was announced by Vincent Untz on Wed, 2nd June 2010. Since Activity Journal was rejected, so it did not make much sense to take in Zeitgeist engine too. Later, Seif asked whether we should apply again, but most of the team was not much interested as by that time Zeitgeist modules had not undergone any massive change which could got zeitgeist accepted in Gnome.

My take on re-application was “Don’t re-apply just for the sake of re-applying”

5) Zeitgeist and Gnome-shell

GNOME shell developers are touting this as one of the major changes in the new shell’s GUI

Citation needed!

Zeitgeist does have integration with Gnome Shell but still, any integration work takes time. Keep your fingers crossed.

6) Storage of events

The application stores your file access history in one central database for quick access. Any application can easily add its own data to the mix. But I found that not all programs are invited into this database.

Zeitgeist is written in Python and uses SQLite as database. This database is kept at $XDG_DATA_HOME/zeitgeist/activity.sqlite and can be opened with Sqliteman (at your own risk)

Yes, any application can add its own data to the daemon. These plugins in every applications are called dataproviders or datasources. Many of the dataproviders are present and most of them are packaged in Zeitgeist PPA. Rhythmbox and Banshee dataproviders are upstream.

If you see that not all files are present in the database, you should understand that those applications are not pushing their information in the daemon. A plugin/extension/addin/addon is needed for that application whose work is to push the events to the daemon.

Thirdly, events in the daemon can also be pushed passively by zeitgeist-datahub which is a zeitgeist-extension and runs along with the daemon. It pushes data from GtkRecentManager to zeitgeist daemon. So all data which is available in GtkRecentManager is also present in zeitgeist daemon provided datahub is running along with the daemon (by default it does)

Zeitgeist is not magic. Some way or the other the event has to be logged. It is logged by many way or the other. Either by datahub or explicitly by extensions. We try out best to have extensions for every application, but still it would take some more time to come up with extensions for all major applications.

7) How events can be logged?

It is certainly a better option than looking through a file manager window filtered by date. But the journal app fails to track all of my files.

Reason is as explained. Try opening a file via command line – it doesn’t show up in zeitgeist daemon since datahub cannot find that event. Those files needs to be present in GtkRecentManager.

8 ) Dataproviders

For example, I use Note Case Manager to keep all my notes and gathered snippets of information. Activity Journal shows no record that I opened the Note Case database.

Then you need a plugin for Note Case Manager. I use Tomboy and you can see that it is tracked by the Tomboy dataprovider.

9) Not everything is logged

Also, the journal ignores files opened under Wine.

Yes. Wine is not supported. It is planned but not a very high priority as most people use Wine mostly for playing Games. We have limited manpower and endless list of action-items.

10) Where are events logged?

The tracking occurs even if you do not open the journal app.

Yes. This is because Journal is just a front end. The zeitgeist engine keeps on running even if you close the Journal. The events are not logged in Journal but in engine and journal fetches the data from the engine. Hope this makes it clear.

11) Activity Journal plug-ins

The Blacklist Manager lets you add and remove items from the Zeitgeist blacklist. It, too, appears to be worthless, as you cannot actually do anything with it.

The Blacklist API in its current form is sort of useless. I admit it as I have been assigned to work on it. We have still not reached on a grand consensus on the API since it is hard to come up with a good one. I was supposed to implement in this hackfest but could not attend.

12) Availability of Journal plug-ins

So far, it seems no other plug-ins are available to download and add. The journal’s interface has no menu option to import or create plug-ins.

True. If you can think of a functionality, please file a bug against gnome-activity-journal project on Launchpad and set it to Wishlist. We can implement them if feasible.

13) Extra Dataproviders for web usage

The skimpy online documentation suggests that the journal will also track Web sites visited.

(The link is broken). It can track the websites you visited if you install the Firefox or chrome dataprovider. Right now none of them are packaged as we found it a bit tough. We are progressing towards it.

14) Pinning

I never figured out exactly what pinning a file does.

Pinning a file makes it accessible for your “Today” since people work on the stuff within the last 2-3 days which people want to keep in view. It is useful to pin stuff so that if you are not using them, they will always be visible for you.

15) Current version of Activity Journal

However, a more developed version within the GNOME 3 Shell or an improved version beyond 0.5.0.1 for the current GNOME shell might add to this app’s importance in my computing routine.

Activity Journal 0.6 is out. Download it or install it from our Zeitgeist PPA.

16) Further clarification and Ubuntu Developer Week session

Me an Seif are taking a session on Rocking with Zeitgeist during Ubuntu Developer Week. Be there if you want to ask any questions. Note down the timings: Tuesday 1st March 19:00 UTC.

LUG Manipal: LUG Open Talks 2011

varun — 2011-01-25T19:13:03+00:00

3 Talks, 3 Interesting Topics
Thursday, Friday and Saturday. (20th, 21st and 22nd of Jan).
1)20th Jan (Thursday) – Wikipedia & Open Information – By Prof K.P Rao
2)21st Jan (Friday) – An approach to algorithms for coding competitions
3)22nd Jan(Saturday) – Design Patterns commonly used

Details:
1)20th of Jan – The first of the talks were by Prof. KP Rao and was on the Wikipedia foundation. The talk was wonderful and Prof KP Rao shared with us his 50 years of teaching experience and also talked on the various aspects of wikipedia and on the concept behind it. He also talked about the ideasOpen Information – By Prof K.P Rao

2)21st of Jan – The second of the talks was on Approach to algorithms in coding competition, by shivhari shankar on the memebers of LUG, Manipal. The talk was on the basics of coding competition and thoughts that go behind solving one of them. Standard problems were also picked and analyzed. It was an open session with anyone allowed to discuss and analysed the problem given. Problems like the n queens problem and permutation and combination were well received by everyone and there was an overall informal session that was fruitful and useful.

3)22nd of Jan -Being civilised humans, we conform to certain behavioural patterns in life to be a part of the social systems. Similarly there are many practices, many problems already solved. Design patterns is about finding a pre made good solution to your problems.

Slides for the talks:

Design patterns

Session 2-Algorithms

Manish's Tech Blog: Dream desktop: Slowly moving closer and closer

Manish — 2011-01-23T12:22:08+00:00

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Zeitgeist holds immense possibilities as I explain others

Using Zeitgeist you can keep a log of all the files you opened with exact times, create statistics, learn your workflow and make yourself more efficient. Zeitgeist does not log only files but any activity or event like receiving calls, dropping calls, starting a track in your favorite media player. The possibilities are immense. The sky is the limit

We have many more new dataproviders including XChat. If you have patience, wait for a release or if your hand is itching, you can get them from Zeitgeist PPA

In case you face a problem, ping us on #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net or ask the question on askubuntu.com with zeitgeist as the tag.

Manish's Tech Blog: Techrights/Boycottnovell Bane or boon? An experience

Manish — 2011-01-16T09:45:57+00:00

Yesterday I was browsing through the internet when I came across this link with the quote

“Microsoft has pushed DirectX into Intel’s silicon,” explained to us a reader

Can there be a limit on sensationalism? Dr Roy cannot escape his responsibilities by quoting misleading facts. Now, instead of cribbing all over, I headed to their IRC channel and met schestowitz and explained him the case. He did agree that that quote is not exactly true. Still that article is not edited to reflect the truth.

Roy was very polite and patient while I expressed my opinions, which is actually a good thing. Since it was a weekend and I could not go out due to some personal reason, I decided to stay on the channel just to know their real motives.

Microsoft employees are devils

This is a common belief that Microsoft employees are working day and night to destroy the world. Arn’t all the policy decisions taken by the top execs. How many of the employees actually nod everytime Ballmer says Linux is cancer? Probably physically yes, they do nod. How many care?

Then MinceR jumped in and started proposing that they are evil/unethical people. I tried my best to explain that they need to earn their bread and butter. A vast majority of the software programmers don’t care about FOSS ideologies nor Microsoft’s ideologies. For them employment is a contract – you pay me, I work for you. Every person has a family to feed and a life to live. Social and peer pressure is also a factor why people want to work for Microsoft/Google/Yahoo etc. The dream of a better future is also a reason. I don’t paint every Microsoft employee as a devil.

Name calling is nothing new on #techrights/#boycottnovell , even I got flared, but I ignore those comments. It never came to my mind that some people think they have a right to be not polite. A strange right I never heard of.

Tobacco Industry

Roy thinks that tobacco industry is responsible for people’s death. I don’t disagree 100% as these industry cannot be completely absolved of their responsibilities. If people smoke and die, isn’t it the person’s fault. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. You cannot drop a nuclear bomb somewhere and blame nuclear technology for the devastation. Lastly remember that tobacco industry works only because we consume tobacco. It is a simple demand-supply equation.

I was even advised to go and read the principles of Gandhi(Ghandhi), which is strange since I was born and brought up in the country of Gandhi. If you want to take a page out of Gandhi’s struggle, look at civil disobedience, esp the Dandi March. He never needed to abuse or spread violence for achieving his target. Civil disobedience in FOSS world is to use FOSS products exclusively. Gandhi even called off Civil Disobedience when violence started occurring.

David Nielsen

So there is a common understanding that David being abused was good for the whole world. Look at the statement which David got

Matthew Woehlke: I’m going to guess a lot of that “disrespectful personal mail” revolves around the use of mono? And why shouldn’t it?

So there is a clarification that disrespecting is a right. There is also an explanation that this isn’t a harsh reply.

If this wasn’t enough, then you can even find out of context cooked-up statements like

MinceR	once again, m4n1sh explains that verbal abuse is the greatest crime one can commit

MinceR	presumably right ahead of copyright infringement. :>

MinceR	murder is way behind

I have no clue how this all comparisons were made or I ever used murderer and copyright infringement ever. By the way nothing special, this is expected.

At that moment it was only sebsebseb who was actually talked rationally. He did explain his stand and took the pains to read the backlogs before discussing further.

Identica

As I am not on identi.ca, so sebsebseb told me “People on identi.ca don’t like omgubuntu“. Actually I don’t find any reason to be on identi.ca. Just because it runs FOSS? Identi.ca is the smaller brother of twitter which lacks wit and sarcasm. There is no humour in any dents. Twitter community rocks. identi.ca community needs to improve themselves. StatusNet software for running identi.ca is great, but that hardly matters if you don’t have a good community.

I wanted to pass some links on how identi.ca is sort of usless, but I would reserve them for further use.

OMG Ubuntu

So the crime OMG Ubuntu committed is that they don’t scream and run around the room crying “Mono is crap and a threat”. I have seen all kinds of reviews on OMG Ubuntu including applications written in C, C++, Python, Vala, C# or any other language out there. It’s a news site and does it work as required. You cannot be impartial by leaving out Mono applications and calling yourself great. Leave that decision of using mono applications on the authors. They probably have more brains than you actually think.

They are pissed off at David writing blog posts about Banshee on OMG Ubuntu. Joey is not a programmer not any super-techie guy. Everyone does his fair part of job. One great comment is

the entirety of omgubuntu is juvenile, ignorant, and not worth our attention

That comment holds good for techrights actually. I firmly believe that you cannot say anything without annoying people. If you are being opinionated you will hurt sentiments. People love to get annoyed and take offence.

Conclusion

I chuckle when I am called stupid, and weird comments like qu1j0t3: he’s reaching for any insult he can hurl at us especially I never used a single abusive word. When 4 people were answering at once with huge messages, it takes time to reply. When I could not, I got this compliment

he can’t pay attention, both of his neurons are occupied with worshipping m$.

The usage of constant M$ makes me laugh. That’s all you can do to promote free software?

schestowitz needs to make it clear whether he agrees with all these abuses and dogpiling? Otherwise people will consider all these comments to be the views of techrights community.

Does FOSS community need techrights? Is it bringing good name to the FOSS community? To the non-FOSS world are we looking extremist?

Now excuse me, I have to go and get some work done unlike techrights activists. I have a few assigned bugs, a few packages to build (learning) and write some documentation for my personal pet project.

Soumen Banerjee (BE-2k7): Ministrel, your very own storyteller

Soumen — 2010-12-27T10:37:13+00:00

Ministrel is a Qt app to read to read out story books.

Here is the github repository https://github.com/soumen08/Ministrel

The github repository has a README towards the bottom explaining the app’s usage and installation.

Get the source from here, and then follow the installation steps mentioned in the README.

If you’re interested in the latest code, you can clone the git code by doing -


git clone git://github.com/soumen08/Ministrel.git

cd Ministrel/

qmake

make

make install

Now to why I wrote the app. I love listening to my novels. It allows me to do other things while still reading the novel. I used to use espeak on the command-line before, but deleting the text till where I had read (so that I could carry on from there) is very annoying. When I learnt Qt, I figured one thing I could do with it is to simplify novel reading for myself and for the community.

Ministrel has evolved very much from how it began. The idea throughout has been to increase functionality while not compromising on efficiency. It would have been far simpler to implement Ministrel in python, but I chose C++ and stuck with it so as to get to the lightest fastest app I could.

Ministrel at this point only supports text files. People have observed that it would be better if it could also support pdfs and a few other common formats. I shall be working on that when I have the time. In the meantime, you can use any pdf reader to export the pdf to plain text. Also I recommend the Project Gutenberg website for a large collection of free books(very good ones) available in text form.

Have fun with it and drop me a line at soumen08 at gmail dot com for any queries or suggestions.

Merry Christmas!

Manish's Tech Blog: Got my Ubuntu Membership

Manish — 2010-12-08T18:31:02+00:00

Hi everyone,

If everything is setup fine, this should be my first post on Planet Ubuntu.

A bit about myself. I am a long time Ubuntu user from Bangalore, India. I studied in Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal. Started my working like last year in July. I have been one of the founders of Linux User’s Group in my college alone with friends Ayush and Shubhendra. [first meet pic]

I have done lots of work in spreading Ubuntu during my college days. Many of my friends are running Ubuntu for which I provide support. Even my brother, cousins and many relatives have been attracted to this wonderful distro.

These days I work mostly in Zeitgeist Team. My work started with creating the CLI bindings for zeitgeist so that awesome apps like Tomboy, Banshee and F-Spot can have zeitgeist integration. The integration with tomboy and banshee is nearly done. Next up is f-spot. I have been trying to get into the engine more and more these days. Thanks a lot to the Zeitgeist team. It rocks! You too are invited to be a part of it. You’ll get lots of warm hugs.

A few projects apart from zeitgeist which attract my attention are Elementary Project and Novacut. Thanks to the founder of Novacut – Jason Gerard DeRose who taught me packaging(including basics). Thanks to Elementary guys who told us that FOSS applications can too look beautiful and artistic.

My next aim is to become a MOTU. I am slowly learning packaging better and better each day. Some years back I used to do bug triaging, but now I am actually interested in squashing them.

Lastly thanks to the excellent Ubuntu community. Love you all.

Manish's Tech Blog: Zeitgeist daemon extensions explained

Manish — 2010-11-28T12:05:39+00:00

While working on this Zeitgeist bug #612344 I recalled that Stuart Langridge had once quoted

Zeitgeist has extensions. These aren’t brilliantly documented yet, but you can drop a Python file into .local/share/zeitgeist/extensions and if it’s got the right sort of class in it then that class will get run as a part of Zeitgeist.

Sometimes it is said that code is the best documentation. This becomes the only solution when there is no documentation available on wikis or help pages. When working on that bug, I started hunting for documentation on the web. After a few minutes I understood that looking at the extension code is the best way to go ahead.

How extensions are searched and loaded

Every extension needs to inherit Extension base class which is present in _zeitgeist.engine.extension namespace. So basically the first line has to be

from _zeitgeist.engine.extension import Extension

When the daemon is started, it looks for the environment variable named ZEITGEIST_DEFAULT_EXTENSIONS to hunt the extensions which are supposed to be loaded. If this is not set then extensiondir variable contains the path of all the extensions. You can know about this

>>> from zeitgeist._config import extensiondir

>>> extensiondir

‘/usr/share/zeitgeist/_zeitgeist/engine/extensions’

It even searches for the extensions in your local path. This means an extension can be enabled globally as well as locally. The path in your local home directory is the one fetched by

>>> from _zeitgeist.engine import constants

>>> constants.USER_EXTENSION_PATH

‘/home/manish/.local/share/zeitgeist/extensions’

All these files are then scanned for class which inherits Extension class.

The structure of an Extension

Extension has a few methods

1. pre_insert_event(self, event, sender) – The control passes through this method before every time an event is going to be inserted. So the method gets the instance of the event and the dbus Busname of the client which logged the event. If it wants to block the event from being inserted, this method simply returns None. The fields of the event can also be modified if required (probably useful for privacy control). Before using the event, please check it for None since another extension which has the event instance might have set it to None.

For this hook, the event enters one extension and the output of this extension(ie. event) is then passed to another extension.

2. post_insert_event(self, event, sender) – Same as pre_insert_event except that it is called after the event has been inserted. In this method the nothing needs to be changes or returned as the event has already been inserted.

3. get_event(self, event, sender) – This method/hook is called everything an event is fetched and to be sent to the client. This hook also behaves like pre_insert_event in the sense that the even returned from this method is then passed to other extension’s get_insert_event and can be changes similarly to pre_insert_event.

4. pre_delete event(self, ids, sender) – This method/hook is called before an event is to be deleted. Please note that the input argument is not event but a list of event ids. Event id is the unique way to identify an event within a zeitgeist database instance. It does not return anything

5. post_delete_event(self, ids, sender) – This method/hook is called after the event having the event ids in the input argument ids has been deleted. It returns nothing.

Example extensions

By default zeitgeist has two official extensions which is shipped with the daemon. It is

The project Zeitgeist extensions is for hosting the extensions. One excellent extension for zeitgeist is full-text-search extension which can also be installed in Ubuntu by installing the package named zeitgeist-fts-extension

Right now Blacklist, Datasource Registry and fts also expose their functionality via DBus. For that, the only magic you have to do is to also inherit dbus.service.Object

Conclusion

I don’t think writing zeitgeist extension is a rocket science from any angle. All your need is patience and courage to poke the zeitgeist engine developers on IRC.

Happy hacking!

Manish's Tech Blog: Zeitgeist in my blood

Manish — 2010-11-21T18:47:13+00:00

For the last three months, I have been working with the Zeitgeist team for achieving the goal of a semantic Linux desktop. Right now I am not much involved in the daemon, but not for long.

Basics

Daemon is just one part of the solution. A server is of no use if there isn’t any client to use it. Similarly now what zeitgeist needs is a deep integration with most of the applications and the shell. Unity is already on it’s way rocking ahead with Unity Places. There are many applications for which plugins have been developed to push events to the daemon. Apart from these Banshee plugin is there in banshee-community-extensions and Rhythmbox plugin is already upstream in the source tree.

The awesome team

I think this is my first experience working in an open source project with a team. Believe me, the team is awesome. To put it straight – MIND BLOWING. Mikkel is the architect who is the role model for being always right. Seif is always encouraging. Markus Korn’s keen eyes on details and the knack for extreme review sessions make sure that the mistake I commit is always the first and last time. Same goes for Micheal Hruby. Siegfried does a lot of heavy-lifting and is the person I catch first when some information is needed about the daemon/API/backend.

The development process is pretty much democratic. Before any new feature is added or before something is finalized a lot of discussion takes places. There is a voting in spirit with democratic values. This is a sign of QA. No one is allowed to push a change to the trunk without any other person reviewing it. The patches are then fine tuned and ultimately the merge happens.

Seif’s role is that of a manager. No! I am not talking about the managers in your office. Manager role here is about keeping an eye on the overall thing so that every other person can concentrate on their work. He is also our community manager. That’s why you can see his face everytime zeitgeist is involved. Even though he started the project, we don’t have a benovalent dictator.

back to top

Role

When I started contributing, everyone in the team mostly worked on python and C/Vala applications. This left a gap for integrating zeitgeist in CLI based applications. Randel Barlow had tried sometime back, but he hit the rock(ndesk-dbus) and stumbled over. (Die ndesk-dbus). I took over the work of creating a CLI wrapper over DBus API. Finally after some lengthy hack sessions and constant hair-pulling, I managed to finish the work with help of Mirco Bauer who created the build script(autofooling in our language). All the time during the development, ndesk-dbus was at the receiving end of my rage.

back to top

Packaging

Jo Shields came into picture when he did the necessary work for packaging the library. Well, after the decision to make Banshee the default media player for Natty. most of the focus has shifted to slim down Banshee. This needs a lot of work and the Debian CLI team became very busy. The only work left was packaging the library.

Yesterday I caught Jason Gerard DeRose on #novacut and asked for help to package it. Even though he had never packaged CLI based applications, he offered his help to the best of his capabilities. I worked till 5 in the morning to get the build working. His step-by-step guidance and explanation made me his instant fan. Jason – we need people like you. Seriously! Be convinced that novacut will receive all the help possible from me.

Here is the PPA. This is my first package(for Maverick and Lucid), so please be calm. It should not screw up your system. Be relaxed! The name of the package is libzeitgeist0.1-cil and if you want to build the dataproviders yourself, then you need to get libzeitgeist-cil-dev

back to top

Banshee and Tomboy Dataprovider for the impatient

If you love Banshee and Tomboy and feel that they need Zeitgeist love, then here is a dirty solution. I am providing the binary files for it. Manually dropping the files in the respective locations is a bad practice. Actually getting these dataproviders packaged can take some time, so for those people who can’t wait can try downloading both of these files. Remember to delete them when these are packaged. I will warn you again next time when the package will land.

Banshee dataprovider [code]: Put the file in /usr/lib/banshee-1/Extensions

Tomboy dataprovider [code]: Put the files in ~/.config/tomboy/addins

back to top

Disclaimer

If you want to submit your objections to mono, please go and talk to mono developers. For a non-techie end user, mono hardly matters. For them having an application with better desktop integration matters. I work for them. I serve them. Again if you think my work is going to be the reason for the upcoming apocalypse on this planet, do feel to contact me via Launchpad page. Please keep your mails polite.

You can ignore the title of this post if you were about to take it literally.

back to top

Manish's Tech Blog: FUD and facts

Manish — 2010-11-10T15:03:06+00:00

Mono is a very controversial topic in Free software world. We have no shortage of proponents and opponents. There are people who want to clean the FOSS world by removing mono from the picture and there are developers claiming that they are comfortable with mono, so it’s fine for them to use it.

Now imagine a situation when you try to “get the facts” but the information itself is wrong? Guy Van Sanden wrote a post about Get the facts on mono which attracted a lot of comments. The follow up, Cleaning mono from your system (Ubuntu) was full of huge mistakes. If you want to spread FUD, please do it properly. As he said, entering this command

$ sudo apt-get remove –purge mono-runtime mono-common libmono0 mono libmono1.0-cil libmono2.0-cil

will clean all your sins and you will attain salvation. The catch was probably he copy-pasted from somewhere else. Just by a quick glance today morning I could make out that the whole command won’t work. There is no package named “mono”. Lower down the comments Debian/Ubuntu mono packager Jo Shields leaves a comment explaining why he is *wrong*. mono-common too does not exist. libmono2.0-cil doesnt have any Microsoft namespaced packages. As per the description of this package

This package contains various Mono libraries for CLI 2.0:

Mono.CompilerServices.SymbolWriter

Mono.Http

Mono.Web

OpenSystem.C

Apart from that it looks like he did not even try out mononono since all the comments point it out and he actually acknowledged that it doesn’t work.

Flames

All over these years I met two kind of people who talk about Mono

MONO IS GOING TO DESTROY FOSS AND LINUX. ALL MONO PACKAGES VIOLATE MICROSOFT PATENTS AND CAN KILL YOUR CAT AND WILL BLEED YOU TO DEATH
Hey, are you sure all the packages/components are protected by CP? Can you provide some hints on how packaging is done to avoid or lessen the patent risks? These are the patents #xxxxx and #yyyyy which mono can possible infringe. What care can you take to avoid them?

The sad part is that most of the people I met use language 1 and their statements contains a lot of speculations and hardly any proof. Finding people of kind 2 is tough, but they are overshadowed by the people of kind 1. If you are one of the person of kind 2, come over on IRC and let’s have a sane discussion on mono based on facts and proofs rather than speculation and FUD. I would love to be influenced. By the time I simply ignore trolls of kind 1

Hate and Love

There was a time when I take any development from a critical angle. Like many others the decision was either white or black (Love or Hate). Well, I did not spread and FUD but black-white did not last long. I gave up hating anything. Now I don’t hate any technology, any language, any library etc. I have my like and dislike which does not map to love and hate.

Due to Android-Google-Java-Oracle incident you can see people suggesting that Java is patented which people should not use it. I don’t share that armchair-advisor kind of mentality. If I want to use it, I will use it. If it’s not fit for my use, then I won’t. The would have more to do that just hating technology.

For me technology is a tool for getting my job done and making my life easier. It isn’t a religion which I need to follow. I nearly stopped caring about haters. Why? I remember once when David Siegel recalled “Haters gonna hate” in an interview.

Strong passions is fine since loving something doesn’t automatically means hating other things. There are other colours in this world apart from black and white.

Manish's Tech Blog: Release: Zeitgeist-sharp 0.1.0.1 Stark

Manish — 2010-11-01T14:12:54+00:00

How many of you love Tomboy? How many love Banshee? F-Spot? Some of you might not but some of you might swear by it. Yes, for people like you – how about if your favourite app is sweetened by the spoonful of zeitgeist love? After call for testing, the zeitgeist-sharp team was unable to find any major issues with the library. So, on behalf of the zeitgeist-sharp team, I am happy to announce the first release of zeitgeist-sharp 0.1.0.1 “Stark” which is the client wrapper over Zeitgeist’s DBus API.

Development: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp/
Accouncement: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp/+announcement/7120
Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp/+download
Documentation: http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist-sharp/0.1/0.1.0.1/+download/zeitgeist-sharp-0.1-api-doc.tar.gz
For the brave – Get the trunk code: bzr branch lp:zeitgeist-sharp

So what does this mean? This means that sooner of later, you will see zeitgeist integration with these apps. The work is basically divided into two parts – Dataprovider plugins and Dataconsumer plugins.

Dataprovider

The word dataprovider needs no special explanation. It is basically a plugin/addon whose sole work is to “push events” in the daemon. This data is then available for different kinds of work ranging from checking history or any complex data mining activities.

Dataconsumer

It is basically those applications which consume the events pushed in the daemon. You can actually have a list of all the tracks you listened till now in decreasing order of count and also the exact time when you hit Play for that specific track. You can check when you added a track, when you deleted and a gazillion of other activities. Let your imaginations fly.

Packaging

I would like to thank Mirco Bauer(meebey) and Jo Shields(directhex). meebey was the one who did created the autoconf based build. Jo Shields is the brave man who is handling the packaging. Thanks a lot – Debian CLI Team rocks. Thanks for your efforts in packaging.

Future

My hopes from zeitgeist is really high such that you can call it unrealistic. We really need people who can write dataproviders. Here I am not calling people who any language and not just mono. If you can think/want to write a dataprovider for any app, contact us. We will guide you. It will be fun. We have bindings for mono, C/Vala and Python as of now. The java bindings is in development. If you want to contact us, please come on IRC channel #zeitgeist on Freenode and catch any of us.

Seif Lotfy: seif or seif_ or seiflotfy
Manish Sinha: m4n1sh or manish
Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen: kamstrup
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals: RainCT
Markus Korn: thekorn
Micheal Hruby: mhr3

UPDATE: There can be a bit of confusion in the versioning. The ABI version is at 0.1.0.1 but the release version is at 0.1.02 . As long as ABI isn’t broken release versions are fine. 0.1.0.2 has some patches against 0.1.0.1

Manish's Tech Blog: Want Zeitgeist love for Banshee/Tomboy/F-Spot ? Call for Testing

Manish — 2010-10-25T15:21:02+00:00

Introduction to Zeitgeist

I hope many of you must have heard about Zeitgeist, an event logging framework which is becoming mature day by day. In the language of Zeitgeist developers, here is the definition

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations.
It makes this information readily available for other applications to use.
It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

Zeitgeist sits as a daemon and activates a Session bus (DBus) over which applications can send their events. Using a great DBus API, events can be logged, retrieved and also monitored asynchronously. If you want you can also write extensions for the daemon(like full-text-search and blacklist). It is developed using python and uses nepomuk ontologies to establish relations between various events.

API Wrappers

The daemon is useless if the apps dont push data into it. So, some of the developers of zeitgeist engine have a python client binding which wraps the bus and gives a higher level view of the API. Authors of Python wrapper are Seif Lotfy, Markus Korn, Siegfried Gevatter and Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen.

There is one wrapper which is complete and is called libzeitgeist. It is C/Vala binding over Zeitgeist API. It is written by Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen and Michal Hruby

Are all apps written in python? Is Banshee/Tomboy/F-spot written in python? One great aspect of FOSS is that all the developers are free to choose the language and technology of their choice. Banshee/Tomboy/F-spot devs chose their technologies. The technology chosen is just a part of the reason an application can be great. The real work is in actually making a great application in which Banshee/Tomboy and F-spot devs have succeeded.

You might be thinking that Mono apps would have had zeitgeist integration by now? The answer is sadly no. Seif Lotfy had once tried implementing Tomboy integration. The problem faced is that the API wrapping code has to be replicated in all the apps. Solution: Make it a separate library named zeitgeist-sharp

Once the library matures, the efforts on integrating zeitgeist in mono apps reduces considerably and you can see all your favorite mono apps being powered with Zeitgeist. Banshee can have last.fm style logging on what music you have listened. This information contains the tracks played by other players which you have used on the computer (like mpd or Rhythmbox or Clementine)

The Solution

One fine day, Seif pinged me and asked if I can write a mono wrapper over the API since the daemon team is too busy. I created most of the wrapper functionality with constant support from Seif. I was later joined by Mirco Bauer(meebey) who is on Debian CLI Team. He did the QA and writing the build scripts. Later I wrote the unit tests.

We are about to release the library, but as all of you know, code is never perfect. To achieve as much perfection as possible, we need you help. If you are free, you can test out the code. The process is very simple. Get these packages. The version in the brackets are preferred ones

MonoDevelop (2.4)
Monodevelop-debugger-mdb (2.4.3)
monodevelop-nunit (2.4)
ndesk-dbus-glib devel (0.4.1-3)
ndesk-dbus devel (0.6.0-4)
mono-devel (2.6.7)
bzr
gtk-sharp

If you are on Ubuntu 10.10, just one command can suffice

sudo apt-get install mono-devel monodevelop monodevelop-debugger-mdb libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev monodevelop-nunit bzr

Get the trunk code by

bzr branch lp:zeitgeist-sharp

Goto the folder, double click on the Zeitgeist.sln file.
Click on Build>Build All
Click on View> Unit Testing
Click on Unit Testing dockable window and and click on Run Test button. Alternatively you can double-click on the first element in the tree expander
All the unit tests should pass and should show Tests: 84 Failed: 0 Ignored: 0

Here are the screenshots

How to run the Unit Tests

All the tests should pass, so that we can be confident of the first release. If a test fails, please right click on the failure message, click Copy and file a bug. Please check whether the bug has already been filed. Please note that this is not a release.

License: The code is released under MIT/X11 License.

If you have time and have lots of excitement, then you can catch us at #zeitgeist on Freenode. I am m4n1sh, seif goes by seif, seif_ or seiflotfy and Mirco as meebey

Hoping on getting a lot of community love.

Manish's Tech Blog: So should I fork?

Manish — 2010-10-05T05:55:04+00:00

As the same time, there’s often a hypocrisy in these communities. When a change is suggested, half the developers shout “show me the code”; when the code is written another half complain about the style or how it’s the wrong way to do it; and when the code is released independently because an upstream merge is just too difficult, yet another half complain about the project being forked. However, the fork allows the code to prove itself in the real world and not simply in theoreticals, and what more proof is needed?

via a commenter on a famous Linux portal

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): multiple mouse / keyboard in linux

Ankur Shrivastava — 2010-10-03T20:33:26+00:00

4 mouse cursors on a single screen

few days ago i came upon an article about human computer interactions which mentioned different ways we interact with computes and how we will interact with computers in future, the article instantly reminded me of MPX, now i dont know how many of you remember MPX which enabled interaction of multiple mouse/keyboards in linux. Xserver 1.7 which is used in most of the disto’s was released with MPX, so i decided to find out how to make it work on my existing Fedora 13 box, and using it is pretty simple you just need to use xinput and configure X for multiple input, for that you first need to install xinput, on fedora it is provided by the package “xorg-x11-apps” just do a

[ankur@x144 ankur]# yum install xorg-x11-apps -y

and you are done, for other distro’s i guess there sould be a similar package, after the install we need to find what all is plugged in to the computer, for that we do “xinput list”

[ankur@x144 ankur]# xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ PS/2 Mouse                                  id=14    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint                    id=15    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                       id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard                 id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus                                   id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button                                id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button                                id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ Laptop Integrated Webcam                    id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard                id=13    [slave  keyboard (3)]
↳ Dell WMI hotkeys                            id=16    [slave  keyboard (3)]

this returns a list of all the input devices, i am running this on my laptop so you can see “AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint” and “AT Translated Set 2 keyboard” which are my laptop’s mouse and keyboard, to enable multiple keyboard/mouse i will create a group and move my laptops mouse and keyboard to the group,

[ankur@x144 ankur]# xinput create-master main
[ankur@x144 ankur]# xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ PS/2 Mouse                              	id=14	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint                	id=15	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                               	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button                            	id=8	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Laptop Integrated Webcam                	id=9	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=13	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Dell WMI hotkeys                        	id=16	[slave  keyboard (3)]
⎡ main pointer                          	id=10	[master pointer  (11)]
⎜   ↳ laptop XTEST pointer                    	id=12	[slave  pointer  (10)]
⎣ main keyboard                         	id=11	[master keyboard (10)]
    ↳ laptop XTEST keyboard                   	id=17	[slave  keyboard (11)]

above i created a group by the name “main”, you can see a second mouse cursor on screen as soon as you do this, to make both these mouse/keyboard active i will move my laptop’s mouse (id-> 15) and keyboard (id-> 13) to this newly created group

[ankur@x144 ankur]# xinput reattach 15 10
[ankur@x144 ankur]# xinput reattach 13 11

now if i connect an external mouse and keyboard to my laptop i can see both working simultaneously, if you want multiple (more then 2) mouse and keyboards to work, you can create a separate group for them and move them to that group in a similar manner.
after doing this I was not able to find any benefit of using multiple mouse/keyboard on a laptop but it will make sense when you have multi monitor setup and multiple users trying to use the same machine simultaneously.

Manish's Tech Blog: Which license gives us more freedom?

Manish — 2010-09-25T18:45:05+00:00

It’s late Saturday night. Though I have returned from PyCon India 2010 day-1, there are still a few thoughts on my mind.

Which license do you choose for your open source projects? Strong-copyleft? Permissive? Do you choose LGPL which I consider somewhat between between GPL and Permissive licenses.

I used to be a strong advocate of GPL and strong-copyleft licenses. Now “strong” is missing. I nowadays prefer using MIT/X11 license. If the project is a library of something like that GPL sucks (my opinion). It actually limits the freedom. GPL is fine for projects which consist mostly of UI code. LGPL is something I have never tried before. If I don’t like GPL, then my second choice is MIT.

The most confusing and debated aspect of licensing is whether “sharing of modified code” is actually limiting freedom or guaranteeing freedom? Even though it looks nice, it doesn’t work out to be so good all the times. Sometimes companies keep distance from GPL as it is dangerous since one fine day the upper management might question the people working on the project for the reason of releasing the source code? The case was simple – they were complying with licensing requirements.

The biggest evil I find with GPL is that you cannot link any GPL libraries/module to your application and release it under GPL incompatible license. Why? GPL incompatible licenses are not open source licenses? There might be some legal or moral reasons behind it, but I don’t care so much, as I am not a lawyer.

Now coming to permissive licenses. Now since licenses like Apache and MIT give you more freedom, so there is a chance of misuse. This means that if someone took my code, close-sourced it, so my code becomes less-open? Well I don’t share this view, but highly experienced lawyers do think so. (Alert: Links to TechCrunch, click at your own risk)

From now onwards I have decided to go the way of MIT/X11 license for most of my projects. In any case I am not so good with UI programming, so GPL doesn’t come into picture. Most of my projects are basically libraries or modules or anything which doesn’t have a UI. I don’t even create command line interfaces for a few libraries which I have created.

Good night. Tomorrow is my talk at PyCon India on the topic on launchpadlib and using Launchpad API using python.

Ankur Shrivastava (BE-2k7): Game On / Weekend Project III

Ankur Shrivastava — 2010-09-25T17:30:36+00:00

Few weeks ago I posted about playing pong using tilt sensors on the phone, Now me and Abhimanyu have taken that to the next level and have made it a generic game controller for any game running on the computer. We faced some problems when Abhimanyu’s Samsung Wave refused to work, but luckily i bought a Samsung Galaxy 3 (Android 2.1) about a week before that, so we shifted out focus on Android.
For Game On we make use of the phone’s sensors and touch screen to generate different gestures and motion events, we use these events to generate control data and sent the control data over a socket to the computer over a wireless network. On the PC the received data (different for each motion event or gesture) is processed by the computer and a specific task is performed, in this case generating a Key Event.
The Code for Game On can be found on github

Here is a video of the android phone (Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3) being used to control a car racing game.

And now the working

After this we decided to work on something which i wanted to finish a long time ago (remember Weekend Project I) so we finished Weekend Project III which is well Weekend Project I + Weekend Project II

And the working of Weekend Project III

Weekend Project III Data Flow

The Data Flow is Phone —-WiFi—-> PC —-USB—-> USB to RS232 Converter —-UART—-> MicroControler —-Relays—-> Toy Car Remote —-RF—-> Toy Car, which is almost same as that of Weekend Project I, except for processing of Sensor Data on Phone.

PS – if you were not able to look at the video’s above they can be found here, here, here and here, also Game On won 2nd prize in Mobi Vision – a mobile application development competition

MobiVision in TextTatva and i dont exactly look like that cartoon depicting me !!