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foss.in/2009

Published at: 02:12 pm - Wednesday December 30 2009

foss.in/2009. Nimhans Convention Center, Bangalore, Dec. 1-5, 2009. Yep, a month ago (well, atleast it’s better than a year ago). I attended my first foss.in in 2007, and it seriously changed my life. I can’t say quite the same for this edition, but it was interesting.

The overwhelming focus of this year’s foss.in was open hardware – something I’m really close to. The best talk I attended without a doubt goes to Harald Welte; he spoke on how people (including himself) had reverse engineered RFIDs, and remarkably GSM, and exposed how flawed it was. Harald has this near holy modesty about him, but good god does he know his stuff. Seriously, Harald ist Gott.

Now, the other set of great talks were given by the anti-thesis of modesty, Lennart Poettering (who ist also Gott) (who I’ve venture to call RKK’s protege). He ripped apart any “assumptions” you could possibly have about filesystems, S.M.A.R.T., operating systems, hell anything. General theme (as always) was “Everything sucks, and here’s why.”

Coming to hacking, I must say, GNOME day was a bit of a disappointment. The “focus” this year was GNOME performance again. Some interesting work was done using dtrace on Solaris (now that I’ve seen the tool, I have to admit it is awesome). I sadly didn’t see much cohesion, nor any direction with the GNOME community, which kinda irked me. Personally, I spent the better part of 3 days profiling, checking out applications that needed performance updates, etc. I did find a performance bottleneck with GTK, but it had already been fixed (of course it took me the better part of a day to get the latest version of the sources to verify this…). I also gave a ad-hoc talk about jhbuild and getting “bleeding edge GNOME”, which I think I utterly mucked up, and would like to forget about. Only patch I submitted was one a trivial one to jhbuild. In other words, foss.in/2009 was epic fail for me.

On the other hand, the KDE community was awesome – they had a tight show running, and managed to guide quite a few people into development, and I’m pretty sure a few of which will stay. I bow to Pradeepto, and Akarsh.

On a concluding note, I’m currently having quite mixed feelings with my role in FOSS – I’m certainly not “contributing” anything significant, and I don’t feel much of that community goodness. I think I’m going to probably stick with just opening all my work. It seems rather ironic that my first foss.in had pulled me into FOSS, and now my second (perhaps last?) foss.in marks the end of that period.

Posted in: general by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 1 Comment ,

Excursions in Programming – Generators

Published at: 06:11 pm - Thursday November 12 2009

“Lazy computation kicks the llama’s ass” – Somebody

The concept of a generator may be very foreign to those who haven’t really explored Python – though it is a general principle (like iterators). The crux of it is to generate the members of a set/relation one at time (which are subsequently returned). If you are not going to store the enumeration, this methods prevents needless use of memory (that may lead the program to be extremely slow). The trade of is the (minute) expense of storing some “state” in the function, and perhaps some additional function call overhead that is rarely a concern.

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Posted in: technical by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 4 Comments , , ,

Excursions in Programming

Published at: 06:11 pm - Thursday November 12 2009

If I have not written anything literary over the past month or so, it has been for the singular reason that the only thing occupying my senses has been code (and it’s not like the situation has changed in the least bit). While I have several musings about the nature of expression, and what not brewing in my head, I thought I might spend a moment to elaborate on the interesting programming paradigms/techniques or such that I’ve played around with in the recent past.

This list spans an infinity, and having much to say about each I’ve decided to start an “Excursions in Programming” series to cover them in sufficient length to do them justice. While these techniques may be nothing new to those who’ve used it, I think they serve as eye-openers to those who haven’t. I hope that this collection will interest those few readers who share an interest in programming.

What’s in Store

  1. Generators in Python, C and C++
  2. Lambda functions in Python
  3. The almighty __setattr__ in Python
  4. PDB and Python
  5. Private functions in Python
  6. Using readline
  7. Notes on Yacc/Bison
  8. The Power of Git
  9. Valgrind, GDB GProf

I’ll probably take my time to generate this whole list, but rest assured that I will have less technical topics in between.

Posted in: technical by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 2 Comments ,

On Computational Creativity

Published at: 06:10 pm - Monday October 12 2009

A recent discussion with a friend, Ramya, on the topic of Computational Creativity got me thinking. For sure my views will change in the course of time, but at least I would have penned down – and safely stored – my initial views that I may come back in a month or so and chuckle at my naivety.

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Posted in: general, technical by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 9 Comments

Shaastra 2009 Hackfest Roundup

Published at: 02:10 am - Friday October 09 2009

IIT Madras hosted it’s second hackfest last weekend, during it’s annual techfest, Shaastra. The hackfest was phenomenally successful, with 6 projects running concurrently producing about 7-8 patches in total. Within our second instalment itself, we’ve probably established ourselves as the most productive student-run hackfest in India, something we are extremely proud of 1. The hackfest is of course something that is very dear to me, and it was really heartening to see it bloom like it did. A review of what happened last year can be found here.

The projects that were being hacked on this year were:

Organisation Mentor
Sugar OS iwikiwi
ffmpeg Jai Menon (jai)
GNOME Arun Chaganty (vimzard)
OpenEmbedded Kirtika Ruchandani (rkirti)
Firefox Siddarth Agarwal (sid0)
Linux Team IBM

Rumours had it that KDE was also present at the hackfest, led by Akarsh Simha (kstar), but I think they never managed to get KDE to build ;-) .

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Posted in: technical by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 2 Comments , ,

Paper Soap Pulicat

Published at: 11:09 pm - Wednesday September 23 2009

This weekend, CocoD and I embarked on an adventurous trail deep into the Tam heartland to India’s second largest lagoon, Pulicat Lake. Soaking in the sights, sounds (and smells – good god we wish we didn’t), the two of us boldly proved our manliness by cycling the whole of the 62.8 km (ref. Google Maps), on the ultimate chick magnet, the Tam Cycle. The two of us also boldly proved our idiocy, carrying only our bags, some grub, spare change, a video camera and some paper soap. What follows are the chronicles of our tripiocity.

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Posted in: general by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 3 Comments

Revisit to the Tripfest Era: Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Published at: 09:09 pm - Monday September 14 2009

It’s been far too long since I came up with decent material to put up here. Rather than let my blog die, the organic creature that it is, I thought I might as well look deep in my archives of half-baked articles and post something from there. This is one such article that I have no clue why I haven’t published as yet. I wrote it loooong ago, around the time of my rant about PlasmaPong, and is of a similar theme (and no surprise it’s a rant too). Anyways, here it is, in it’s raw un-edited format (oh, the value addition of lazyiness):

Transport Tycoon Deluxe

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Posted in: general, technical by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 4 Comments ,

Captain Vs. Champion

Published at: 04:08 pm - Monday August 10 2009

Captain Vs. Champion

There is a fantastic open-source turn-based strategy game that goes by the name of “The Battle for Wesnoth”. It has some excellent code, celebrity hackers (rusty and esr), engaging game play and pretty good graphics. It’s goal was simplicity in design, and richness in game play. Inspiring as it is, I found it to be an anchor for a question that’s been mulling in my head for quite a while now; Which is better, Captain or Champion?

Captain Vs. Champion

Captain Vs. Champion

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Posted in: general by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 3 Comments , , ,

50th

Published at: 04:08 pm - Monday August 10 2009

It is my utmost pleasure to announce that this is my 50th blog post. I am amazed that I have managed to keep up the habit of writing something or the other (often material not worth reading) for over a year and a half now. From the initial angsty days (i.e. when I basically ranted about everything), to the glorious tech days when I was aggregated on Planet GNOME, to a period of random poetry and prose to the recent phase of introspective articles, I’ve been more than happy with my posts and their variety. Sure, I haven’t taken over the world (yet), but that’s not going to keep me from celebrating this minor accomplishment.

I’d love to hear any comments you have about content so far.

Posted in: general by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 3 Comments

Childhood Dreams

Published at: 02:07 pm - Thursday July 30 2009

I’ve recently watched Randy Pauch’s last lecture (I know, I’m behind the times). It was amazingly inspirational, and couldn’t have been delivered better. It also got me thinking about my own childhood dreams and I realised that if I don’t pen them down somewhere, I’ll forget them or manipulate them. So here’s a list of my childhood dreams (as best as I remember them) in no particular order:

  1. Be an archaeologist and dig up some dinosaur bones (I was a huge dinosaur fan…).
  2. Get into MIT (this was a semi-promise I made to Mr. Derek Mosser, my 4th standard teacher, before I actually knew what that entailed).
  3. Compose and play live a blues piece similar to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Vinnie Moore.
  4. Do Jackie Chan-level stunts (if I recall correctly, this was back when I was horribly fat but not willing to acknowledge the fact).
  5. Be a Jedi Knight.
  6. Write a novel.

The list isn’t as long as I had thought, but good god, I have no idea how to achieve any of them. This is an extremely meme-able topic, so I’d love to see anyone else’s list. Finally, I’d request you all to please comment, my blog is getting lonely :-P .

Posted in: general by Arun Tejasvi Chaganty 15 Comments , ,
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