Hell Oh Entropy!

Yes, I can now work on ayttm at my workplace as well. I joined Red Hat last month :D

I had to replace gtk_tool_item_set_tooltips() function in various places since it is broken in the latest libgtk. Anyways, it has been deprecated since some time now, so no harm in that. The only big effect is that I had to bump up required gtk version to 2.12.

Anyways, once I get my bearings right at work, I should be able to contribute more regularly :)

Also, we need to push ayttm into Fedora.

I’m wearing a new hat now…. a Red one ;)

I joined Red Hat on 27th January. Now I can finally work on FOSS during work hours and try to make something worthwhile out of myself.

Pune seems to be a real nice city except for the public transport. I’ll have to learn to ride a bike and get one myself soon. The weather’s great though…

I had thought of posting a pic of my new Red Hat cap but bluetooth’s not working on my new laptop (company provided :) ) yet… rest assured that it looks cool though ;)

Right now I am not tied to any employer; ended my 2 year association with TCS yesterday. It’s not that it’s not a good place to work; it is. But it just doesn’t do FOSS. It uses FOSS, just doesn’t contribute. Hence, I’m jobless for now… probably on Tuesday I’ll be wearing a different cap ;)

I've had virtually no internet access since I came back from FOSS.in/2008. And now that I finally have it, things are changing big time and I have virtually no time left to spend on my laptop. Some changes are due after this Republic Day (26th January). Stay tuned :)

A great event to go to if you want to know exactly how many and how much Indians are contributing to FOSS. Major contribution seems to be coming on the KDE and the Linux kernel front.

Workouts must have been great -- didn't get a chance (nor was I adequately prepared) to go to any of them since I was busy with my own little workout -- trying to get asynchronous connection going on ayttm. It's almost working now, except for SSL stuff. It has nothing to do with connection management really. It has something to do with threads, callbacks and the main loop. If you look into the implementation of eb_do_no_callback_dialog () and imagine it to be in a different thread than that in the main loop, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about. I hope I'll have it fixed before I leave for Mumbai on Monday.

Oh, and met Philip for the first time in person. We had an ayttm BoF session today, in which I struggled with the SSL stuff and Philip and Pradeep tried to get ayttm to compile on Pradeep's laptop.

I'm at FOSS.in right now, listening to Rahul Bhalerao and hacking at ayttm till my laptop charge lasts (which is another 40 minutes now... must learn to conserve better).

Right now I'm trying to do fully asynchronous connects for ayttm. Currently, DNS lookups are synchronous and will hang up whenever there's no network and no cached DNS. It's worse with proxy -- the whole thing is synchronous.

A gas stove and utensils to cook, a mattress to sleep in, clothes, soap and water and…

… a laptop with internet access ;)

That's my new weapon, which I've finally got working amidst the usual Diwali fever; shuttling between Kharghar and Mira Road and generally trying to get my home in shape for our first Diwali. Anyways, on to the weapon in question:

• Processor: Intel Dual core 1.86 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB
• HDD: 160 GB
• Network: Ethernet, Wireless, Bluetooth
• Looks: Boxy, the kind most think looks ugly. Works for me though as long as it does what I want it to do.

The entire package cost only 29000 INR from Croma and I slapped on 999 INR for an HP PSC. A discount on being a Tata employee meant that the PSC was effectively free :)

Tried Mandriva, Fedora and then finally went back to Debian because I didn't want to waste time trying to stumble around another distro. Yes, I've been too long on Debian (6 years) and every other distro seems to me as being deficient in some way or the other. Mandriva is too much GUI; it's almost as if it doesn't care about anything else. Fedora is really good, but just not Debian. It puts too much into the default install and seemed to want to connect to the internet each time I search for package descriptions on the package manager. Anyways, my opinion in this case is probably slanted because I tried Fedora only for a couple of hours, enough to download a Debian Netinstall CD image ;)

The four hour journey to work and back and our system performance issues at work are becoming a pain now. I started working on the facebook plugin last weekend and it’s just stuck at that. Hopefully there will be some respite next week.

Or probably not…

Consulting is when four people are assigned to “Meet, Collaborate and Execute a Challenge Efficiently and Effectively” in a month; basically a job that can be mopped up by one person in two days.