Flush May 15, 2009

Gee whiz, it’s been 2 weeks since the end semester exams finished. And perhaps a half a week since the semester actually ended (thanks to the current CSE setup at IIT Madras). And so much to update on.

The Semester

Firstly, the end semester exams went off without too much of a hitch. They were definitely the most “peaced-out” end semesters I’ve written, though I ended up staying up till 3-4 a.m. for almost all the exams (including HS!). All in all I am happy with what I’ve taken away from the semester in all but the maths course (Probability and Random Processes) which was a farce to begin with. For those not in the loop, there were 205 students in 1 class, being taught by a cynical professor who didn’t care the least bit about the student’s comprehension. It was definitely the most enjoyable semester we’ve had yet (with the exception of the maths course that is).

The Internship

By some quirk of fate, I was selected for an internship at Qualcomm Inc., San Diego. The arduous 24 hour long flight to San Diego made me feel like Kunta Kinte aboard the slave ships (a reference to Roots by Alex Haley). A gross exaggeration, but I could positively feel my legs deaden and slowly wither away. I’m sharing a room with Kishore Jaganathan, who when not torturing the other Indian interns with his mokkes (PJs), is amazingly good company. Especially when drawn into technical/academic conversations. All hail.

Regarding work, well, I can’t disclose much due to the NDA. The project I was assigned was cancelled by the company, and another guy from India and myself were transferred to another project on the first day of work though. The new project makes a lot more sense to me, so I’m happy. I also am happy to note that Qualcomm is quite open-source savvy, and has an extremely efficient online work flow. My mentor is also quite open to change is considering adopting Mercurial for version control. It’s not git, but it’s distributed version control, so I’m happy yet again.

Vimjuta: Phoenix Rising

Finally, I have some time (or I’m making some time) for Vimjuta and Anjuta. Thankfully, GNOME has moved to git, which makes non-account holders like myself a lot more convenienced. I do see a lot of GNOME developers cranky about the change though. My current top priority is to push my patches in Anjuta into Anjuta’s trunk. I’m getting more and more comfortable and attached to Git. I currently have 3 branches running parallelly. The master is for general Anjuta bug-fixing.

My changes to Anjuta’s document manager are roughly 2-fold; a reimplementation of document tracking, and the inclusion of a new kind of document that can be managed. I have both of these running in two different branches. This means that I can keep track of each set of patches and update them (and merge between branches). And that’s a huge benefit for me. Secondly, it becomes really easy for anyone to try out my changes as all he/she’ll have to do is: git pull http://arun.chagantys.org/url/to/be/decided.git/ master to include my changes into his/her working copy. Three cheers for DVCS!

That was one humongous post. Before I part, a set of congratulations to all the GSoC-ers who made it. And a personal pimpage to those from IIT Madras, Kashyap Puranik (kashthealien) for Kalzium (KDE), Prakash Mohan (praksh) for KStars (KDE) and last but not least, Kirtika Ruchandani (rkirti) for Maemo/OE (Maemo).