As part of my GSoC preparations, I wrote a few patches for Cheese. One of them (a one liner to fix a crash) has made it to GNOME 2.30.1 – the other two (1 and 2) are slightly more significant and involve UI changes, and so will be integrated later.
Free beer to everyone who can catch me in a bar! Free Pepsi/Sprite/Egg Puff to anyone who can catch me in the College Stores ;)
P.S. Obligatory thanks to _ke and fargiolas for guiding me through the difficult bits :)
I mentioned this in passing in my earlier post, and was tweeting about it quite furiously – I’ve been selected to work on Cheese for this year’s Google Summer of Code :D
Link to my, uhm, cheesy proposal
Getting accepted doesn’t mean shit. Actually finishing whatever I was supposed to within 3 months does mean something – especially since I’ve taken on quite a bit of stuff to do (Move to new language + 2 new features). I’m quite the n00b – first time I’ll be doing just one thing over 3 months. Will be setting up a way of monitoring progress (probably via set milestones) soon enough. Will keep this place posted :)
Also, say Hi to my mentor daniel siegel. Him and fellow cheese-dev Flippio Argiolas, who were extremely helpful in getting my proposal whipped into shape (It’s a gist, so you can see how it eveolved over time).
The Oscar acceptance style blog post will be turned in once the three months are over and the newer, improved Cheese is accepted as good enough :D
Quoting from Steven Levy‘s Hackers:
[..] a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill
some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere
involvement, was called a “hack.”
Building things for the fun of building them is hacking. And hacking is not illegally breaking into computers.
I like hacking. I want to be a real hacker. I can’t call myself one yet.
I’m putting this up as a reminder to myself – about what is important and what isn’t. Here is to hoping I remember to say No more often. Here is to hoping that the next time I’m bored, I write something rather than idle on IRC. GSoC (a bigger post about it coming up) is helping – a lot.
I’ll do a monthly ‘things I’ve hacked on’ post, and see how many things turn up on that :)
Wake up at 10. Roll around bed for half an hour. Chase brother away from your computer (on which he was playing GTA (or NFS)). Check mail. Find something to code on, code. Check mail. Check proggit. Check HN. Waste some time on Twitter. Waste some more time on IRC. Check mail. Check proggit. Check HN. Tab around, really fast. Tab around, really fast. Go have breakfast. Or lunch – doesn’t matter what you call it.
Finish eating, watch TV a bit. Bitch about how nothing on TV is worth watching. Come back to room, chase away brother playin games again. Start codin something. Tab to Firefox to read some docs. Check mail. Check proggit. Check HN. Check Twitter. Check IRC. Check mail. Read the documentation I really opened Firefox for. Edit a bit more code. Check mail. Check proggit. Check HN. Check Twitter. Check IRC.
Go upstairs. Bitch about how there was nothing to eat. Grab biscuits and water. Look at the time. Look at the date. Feel Ghosh! My exams are nearing! Maybe I should start studying?!. Go back to computer. Check mail. Check proggit. Check HN. Check Twitter. Check IRC. Bitch about exams on IRC. Feel Fuck exams! Fuck marks! I don’t need none of that shit!. Feel good about yorself. Check mail. Check proggit. Check twitter. Congratulate yourself on skipping HN. Go back to IRC.
Get on Facebook. Reply to comments. Post vague sounding status messages. Comment on pictures, randomly varying between variants of Cute! and lol rofl look at that haha!. Brag on Facebook. Check proggit. Check HN. Check Twitter. Congratulate self on skipping IRC.
Go back to code. Read documentation. Check mail. IM people and have philosophical discussions. Flirt around. Feel tired. Think about wasted day. Resolve to make next day better. Think about studying. Decide it is too late. Go to sleep.
Repeat :D
Warning: Rambling, unedited, 7 month old recollection ahead. Proceed at your own risk.
Ah, PyCon India 2009. My first solo bit of travel outside Chennai. What fun it was :) Though it was almost 7 months ago, most of the memories are still fresh. Compare that to college, where I struggle to remember what happened last week…
Anyway, it was fun. I went off by bus with the rather interesting Anirudh – a profitable startupeer and someone I met when working with Busroutes.in. He has a finances related degree and his startup deals with (rather cool) car electronics. He was also a KDE contributor, and is a very interesting travel partner for reasons too numerous to mention here.
I spent some time at Lalbagh, roaming around by myself (and texting classmates with my legs hanging off a cliff-type place). Was fun! I’d definitely do that again – the place was extremely peaceful.
I stayed at Sudar‘s place. Staying at a bachelor’s place was fun – guess that was how my room would look like if I was left all to myself. It was, however, definitely too organized for my tastes – you could actually walk without accidentally stepping on stuff ;) He’s grown up too fast – he actually dragged me to a food place and forced me to have breakfast!
Hung around mostly with mech-yet-wannabe-geek Kausik (who once famously said that he ‘doesn’t want to use LaTeX for resumes because most people ask for docx or pdf’), Anirudh and Sudar (who was there only for Day 1). Had a longish talk with Kenneth, who I later found out was quite a celebrity on IRC/Mailing Lists. Meeting people you knew onlyine online IRL is unsettling at first.
The event itself went well. I was inside only for a couple of major talks – the one about waffle by cnu is the only thing I could remember. I was mostly out in the corridors, typing out code in (one of the many) laptops that Sudar has. The lightning talks were way more fun – because they were only 15 mins or so long and packed a lot of tech (I particularly remember the one about Python internals by artagnon and one about a GAE app by ideamonk. I gave one too – the last one, so I had no projector, no working laptop, no mic, oh and Kausik who was supposed to present with me ditched me in the last minute :P It still went exceedingly well – it was my first time ever talking on a stage of any stage outside college and the practice I had from giving them in college (Thanks to Dorai and the iCell) helped a ton. I even cracked quite a few jokes that was recieved well. Fun times – and I guess it finally killed the last remaining bits of my ‘shit, you aren’t really expecting me to go up there and talk, are you?’ feelings developed from school days :)
Before I left, I visited planemad at NID. Awesome place. Someday, I hope someone established a National Institude of Programming at such a scenic place, where people can come together and learn about programming rather than engineering (which is just college-management-speak for IT Industry Zombie Production Factory)
There you go! That’s a rambling account of my PyCon India 2009 experiences. Next one is probably going to be in Chennai – looking forward to that!
I’ve been running yuvi.in and busroutes.in on my [Webfaction][3] account for a while. I got the account for free – after Remi Delon from Webfaction noticed one of my tweets.
Review: I’m going to save that when my free one year plan expires, I can upgrade to one of their better plans. It is so good :)
Highly Reccomended!
I bought a brand new Samsung N210 Netbook about two weeks back – and have been using it almost non-stop since. I’ve been taking it to college every day, using it at every oportunity I get – on the college bus, on MTC buses, on the train, while waiting for the train, hell even during a rather very boring class!
Was it worth the 20k bucks I paid for it? I’m typing out this blog post while waiting at my Doctor’s, so I’d say it is well worth the 20k bucks paid :)
I’ve gotten back to reading fiction ever since I got my netbook (review comin up!). Project Gutenberg has been very helpful. Jules Verne’s Adventures of a Special Correspondent was the first one I completed. It is a good book – but not phenomenal. It does have a few very good moments, and one of them hit extremely close to home.
Towards the end, when Claudius Bombarnac rumbles about how the Chinese do not make full use of the engine’s power – always keeping it running at 40 mph even though it could be pushed to do way more.
“I agree with you, but where you have a railway you might as well get
all the advantage out of it that you can.”
“Bah!” said Pan-Chao carelessly.
“Speed,” said I, “is a gain of time–and to gain time–“
“Time does not exist in China, Monsieur Bombarnac, and it cannot exist
for a population of four hundred millions. There would not be enough
for everybody. And so we do not count by days and hours, but always by
moons and watches.”
“Which is more poetical than practical,” I remark.
“Practical, Mr. Reporter? You Westerners are never without that word in
your mouth. To be practical is to be the slave of time, work, money,
business, the world, everybody else, and one’s self included. I confess
that during my stay in Europe–you can ask Doctor Tio-King–I have not
been very practical, and now I return to Asia I shall be less so. I
shall let myself live, that is all, as the cloud floats in the breeze,
the straw on the stream, as the thought is borne away by the imagination.”
“I see,” said I, “we must take China as it is.”
India too, as I see it from where I am, is pretty similar. Practacality can go shoot itself in the head.
What do I gain by copying stuff from the board to the notebook? Nothing, but do it anyway because that is how it has always been done.
Why should I go back 10 years by not using a mobile phone? Because we aren’t good enough to hold your attention long enough, so we are going to force you to not do anything else even if you are going to be bored to death (even if literally).
Why should I use Turbo C, even though it is extremely antique and doesn’t really conform to any standards? Because that is what the people setting the syllabus learnt! (Nothing personal, TC.exe – just that I hope people stop believing Windows was written in Java/VB because you can do GUIs only in those!)
Doesn’t matter if there is a better way, if it is not the way it is done. Conservatism. Bah
I’m talking only from my point of view, from where I have been (apparently) hurt. I am sure this is not the only place – this happens everywhere. Anti-Change Conservatism. Which I am told, is not even the true meaning of the word conservatism. I hope someone sometimes explains to me what the word was supposed to mean, and how it came to represent parents who won’t let their kids out to have fun with their friends.
Good news is, trains in China are no longer run at a max of 40 mph. Change does occur, but it takes time, and hurts those who live during it. We are those people. I hope.
I had my first ever dream in binary today.
The cycle moved like this:
Borg -> nanoprobes -> a scene in Minority Report when nanobots go around looking for John Anderton (Tom Cruise), who was hiding in a bathtub full of water -> Will Smith and his Dog cuddling in a bathtub in I am Legend -> the climax of I am Legend when Will Smith blows himself up to save the others -> A column of binary numbers came up, showing state of Will Smith as ‘SAD’ AND MSB FLIPPED TO ZERO, and then he has this epiphany (Realization of God Moment) and becomes ‘HAPPY’ and the MSB FLIPS TO ONE.
WTF? Shouldn’t he be sad when the MSB is at one (Negative) and happy when it is at zero (Positive)?
Note for Non-CS folks: MSB -> Most Significant Bit, the left-most bit in a binary sequence. Usually, setting it to zero means the number is positive, and setting it to 1 means it is negative.