Back to blogging
I’ve been putting off blogging for a very long time now. Many people have encouraged / asked me to blog stuff I work / play around with.
So to avoid the laziness, I now have the WordPress app for Android so that I can post small and quick stuff.
Hope I’ll be able to continue posting. Feedback welcome, as always! 
FOSS.IN/2008 :: Day 1 update
Was totally excited to be @ FOSS.IN for the 5th time!! Reached the venue by around 10AM. Ankit, Johnny, Sankar, Nikanth, Suman and Suresh were already waiting outside. Later met Partha and Harinath. Felt good to be there again!
This time around, I had a laptop with me. Had grand plans to do live blogging and tweeting about the sessions / event. But unfortunately, the battery didn’t hold on for long. I still managed to take some notes. And not to forget all the issues with E17 + WiFi + IRC. 
Some notes from the event:
Tuesday, November 25, 11:04 AM
• Finally got my laptop hooked onto the network
• Tuesday, November 25, 11:14 AM – Lamp lightingKeynote by Herald Welte:
• Open Source is, conceptually, about writing code that is *readable* by other users and not *just* run on a machine
That’s it – my battery went dead after that. The second talk for the day was by Amit Shah – the *only* Asian on the Linux KVM team – titled, KVM: The Interview. Enjoyed it a lot – though spent a while helping out one of the gentleman in the audience to setup WiFi on his HP laptop running openSUSE 10.3 – same old Broadcom card issue. Compiled the kernel module and gave it to him. Not sure if it helped him. Gotta check tomorrow.
After lunch, me, Ankit, Hari, Nikanth and Suman went to Herald Welte’s workout – Improving Free Software based GSM protocol analysis – After listening to the problem and the kind of tasks that were up for grabs, we felt that we wouldn’t be able to help out in anyway, rather waste the audiences’ time by simply lurking around. So we all went to the nearest Tata Book House, and everyone else – other than me, of course – bought books and we were back in the venue.
Later we had a small BOF session, where the original intent was to get Ankit and Harinath teach me some basics of C# / Mono – but we ended up doing a very general discussion on Mono with one of the IBM guys walking in and getting an idea about Mono and Moonlight.
That’s all that I have for the Day 1. I’m kinda tired now and its too damn late. I better sleep now or will miss Nikanth’s workout in the morning!
Bugzilla browser app :: new idea
Discussing about some new ideas for the HackWeek 3, psankar gave me an idea that we should have an application to browse bugzilla. At first, it sounded like a cool, fun app kinda project. The use case really didn’t strike to me.
A couple of days later, I realized the importance of such an app to QA engineers and non-developers. After looking at the mailboxes of some of my team members at work, I realized the value-propostion of this idea. Most of my teammates are QA engineers and they, of course, receive plenty of bugzilla emails. One email each for change in the bug status, keywords, comments, or any other available field. In the end, these bugs could be those filed by the individual QA engineer himself / herself as well as any product / person they might be responsible / watching. Its evident that each of them end up having a huge collection of “unread” emails.
I did a quick survey on the number of bugzilla emails received by each of my teammates. On an average, each individual receives 33 emails everyday and an average of 1937 emails in their mailbox – all of the above numbers is just for the bugzilla emails. Only one of them had a very different count for the above numbers – ~300 emails per day and ~6000 unread emails.
Phew! I had just found the compelling use case for a standalone app for browsing bugzilla. Did a quick google search for available desktop client for bugzilla and found DeskZilla and a few others. DeskZilla is a Java app with pretty much the same features I had in mind – data caching for offline access, quick local searches, etc. – but I really didn’t like the UI. Yes! That same old Java UI on Linux.. It even kept crashing on me due to “Out of memory” errors. The biggest disappointment is that its not open source!!
So tonight, I started learning Glade and digged a bit about PyGTK. Some questions that I’m still trying to find answers:
* Which would be a better choice to have a cross platform app – Python, Perl or Mono?
* For the layout, the only thing that comes to my mind is having a tree view on the left and a preview pane on the right (even DeskZilla has the same layout). Is this the only way to present such data to a user?
* Been thinking of using sqlite3 for storing data / caching. Would it suffice? How large can a dataset be when it comes to bugzilla data?
Would love to hear any suggestions / thoughts / comments on the above questions as well as the entire idea itself.
Web4India completes 10 years
Good people we meet
Last Sunday, one of my very good friends, Umesh, met with a tragic accident. He has been in ICU for the past 7 days. The accident happened somewhere around midnight and no one even cared to call an ambulance or the cops. After lying unconscious for close to a couple of hours, Umi received the attention of a passerby – Manjunath. Manjunath then informed the cops and then traced down Umi’s identification, his residential address as well as his employer – Aditi Technologies. As soon as the news spread about Umi’s accident to his teammates, all of them rushed him to the NIMHANS hospital – from where he was later shifted to Hosmat Hospital.
Another very good friend of mine, Partha, has blogged in detail about this accident and how Manjunath and people in Aditi helped Umi. You can read more about it at:
We all are so grateful to Manjunath and all people at Aditi who extended their support to Umi in the nick of time. We can’t thank these noble souls enough.
May God always bless them all!!!
Umi is recovering in the hospital. He is responding well to the medicines. I haven’t been able to meet him from the past 2 days, but am in constant touch with other friends of mine who visit him on daily basis.
Firefox3 Download Day!!
Mozilla’s ambitious Firefox3 was supposed to be available for us in India by 10:30pm, 17th June. I guess, there were some problems with the servers initially, but everything seems to be under control now. Just finished downloading my copy of FF3.
I hope Firefox3 breaks the record. My best wishes to Mozilla and the community!!
bashhttpd :: web server writen in bash
One of my ex-colleagues from DeepRoot Linux, Laxminarayan has written a HTTP server using bash. He even uses it on his home server (actually, on his laptop 
– http://kamathln.homelinux.net/. Pretty neat stuff. He had started working on this when we were working together, but now it looks pretty neat. Check it out – http://sourceforge.net/projects/bashhttpd – though its not the latest code.
/me on wordpress
After having lost all my data on www.freeshell.in, I finally decided that its time to move to a new service. I someday hope to run my own server. So long…
