Hell Oh Entropy!

I just submitted an ayttm workout proposal for FOSS.IN/2009. Hopefully it will get accepted this time and we get some real work done. I want to get a 0.6.1 and 0.6.2 out before the event begins so that there is a nice clean base for people to work on.

I hope the workout gets accepted.

I hope we get worthwhile contributions.

I hope they have the cold caffeine too this time :D

Free food ftw!

Look what your invention has done to the interweb :(

Me and me missus settled down to watch a movie (300) yesterday only to realize that the volume of the movie was considerably low. All controls on alsa mixer were jacked up to full and it wasn't related to any of the default volume level bugs; I had done an alsamixer -c0 to jack up the volume levels. I have only one audio card.

I searched on the interwebs for a software mixer program that could give me something a little more audible, no matter even if it was slightly screechy. I found nothing worthwhile and was about to give up. Then on a whim I opened up the movie on mplayer instead of the default totem (I rarely need to do that I must say) and started looking at what I could jack up there. Lo and behold, there was a slider in Preferences > Audio tab called Stereo boost (or something like that; it's on the other laptop and I'm too lazy to look it up now), which worked for me. I turned it all the way up and was finally able to understand the dialogue. It's a different thing that the movie turned out to be mostly about people cutting up other people (of course, that was fun too ;) ) so my efforts were worthwhile only for the first few minutes of the movie.

That said, this does not work for all kinds of movies since it seems to turn up the volume only on a specific channel. Due to this, on another movie, the dialogue was drowned out by traffic noise due to this stereo boost being jacked all the way up. Anyway, the point of the post was to say that there is in fact a way to (sort of) amplify sound in software.

Also, it looks like alsa does not quite seem to give the same kind of output that the audio subsystem on windows would give. Maybe this is specific only to certain types of cards.

I started using git with ayttm only a week ago and I'm loving it already. I love the fact that I can commit multiple fixes to my repository and then push them out all together with a single command. Everything remains well sorted out without me having to break my flow to commit changes into the central repository. It's either that or committing a huge chunk of code, and I would regularly choose the latter.

The central repository on SF was a bit difficult to set up especially since it was my first time with git and there was a lot I needed to learn about the system. Add to it the pain of migrating the cvs repository contents to git. But once I figured out the stuff, it all seemed to fit in so beautifully. I know I've only scratched the surface of its power but it just feels good to use. Few programs have given me this wow! feeling since some time now. I guess it's all about individual preference though.

I am importing the ayttm cvs repository to git as I write this. This was something I had thought of earlier, but never had any motivation to do so since things just worked without it anyway. It was Kushal who made the suggestion to me, saying that it would be easier for the Fedora guys to keep in sync with development upstream. I take it from this that the Fedora community will contribute some code to ayttm in the future, which I will be able to pull in easily in the future.

The packages we released for ayttm 0.6.0 were around 1.52 MB with bzip2 compression. The guys at puppy Linux built ayttm optimized for size and they were able to reduce the package size to half with it! Here's the forum post for those interested.

The last six months have been quite big for ayttm, and for me too. We did on last Friday, what was probably our biggest release in ayttm. Well, it's a bit subjective I guess, because I felt that way even when I did the gtk2 port release. And the IRC release. But this one was really big. Check out the release notes and you'll know. When asked about ayttm a few months ago, I had said to Sankarshan that I would be done with yahoo and msn support by next year. I'm really happy that we've managed to get it done way before time. There is yet another goal I had mentioned to him then — making ayttm stable.

We're still not as stable as we'd like to be. There was one completely random crash that Minto (package maintainer for Fedora) came across and showed me at work today. We were not able to reproduce it the second time. We need to iron out these things. My next focus is going to be the chat window/room stuff. The code is almost completely duplicated, so I'm going to make something uniform out of it, focussing more on separating the UI from the core. This will hopefully result in much cleaner code.

Once this is done, the ugly xpm smileys will have to go. I'm thinking of using a subset of the protocol smileys instead, especially the PNGs on the website. The website needs a lot of updating too. Kartik has volunteered to do the online manual and the new screenshots when he has time, so that should be done pretty soon.

There are a few people at work who are wondering if we would do voice support. Maybe.

Right now, the cvs version of ayttm looks pretty good. We've been able to get in YMSG16 support, MSNP15 support and a lot of fixes in the GUI and jabber. I finally got rid of the custom dialogs code in ayttm and Piotr has done a lot of work with the state/status messages. The netv2 code also seems to be looking quite good since nothing seems to be breaking in it of late.

There are a few filler functions that remain to be implemented in MSN so that it does not crash. Also, both yahoo and msn need file transfer and invitations -- I am not done with that either. I have been threatening to do a release for some time now, so I might just act out that threat in the coming weeks. So these are busy days.

First goal of getting yahoo working on YMSG16 is done. Read more about it in the ayttm journal. Roadmap for yahoo support is now:

1. Fix the little things
2. File Transfer

That will come in later. Most likely once netv2 merges into trunk. Now I will be shifting focus to MSN and other tiny protocols (livejournal, smtp, etc.) on netv2.

I finally finished writing a working implementation of the YMSG16 authentication as described in this article. The authentication seems to be working quite well, but nothing else does. The server still does not respond to the older binary type messages. So the next thing I tried was to wireshark the windows based yahoo messenger ( my employer provided the windows box for me :D ) and I found out two things:

• The Authentication probably is what is described in the carbonize site, but there looks to be a different way to get the initial challenge string
• All messages go to and from one server in the form of HTTP POST and responses

There some more cookies involved as well, which is what Adrian was probably talking about in the comment to my previous post. Thankfully, since ayttm is on YMSG12, we are still online unlike pidgin, so no need to rush in a fix for this just yet. That said, the popup says I have until August 15th till YMSG12 dies too. I need to see how pidgin has fixed this. Maybe the fix is much simpler than revamping everything to do what the windows YMSGR is doing.

Update: I was wrong. I sent the wrong message to the server after authentication — forgot to add the challenge digest, which is why it barfed on me. Work is on now for stuff after the auth :)