Life's a Story

New things developing

2012-03-06T22:17:00.012+05:30

[I hate procrastination. Even if I ever fall into its trap, it comes out to be beneficial at the end.]
It has been a long time before I last blogged about my work.

I had mostly spend my time after coming out of inert state in expanding my horizons forcing myself against new things and finding myself mostly as a receptor with only inputs "ON". I had many projects going on simultaneously just to find myself not lost when seeing anything new: seeking Bash and Make reference manuals more than ever before; teaching myself how to make full feature branches; goofing alot, literally A LOT with one bug report spanning 100 comments (which is also a perfect example evidencing changing requirements are poison), and thus learning more; adopting and experimenting with new tools; GConf/GSettings: (what on earth was that and their port: another window with a score of tabs); experimenting with Glade; .mk files, .client, .manager, .desktop, .service and the desktop directory specification standard; installing icons and the Icon theme Specification; not to forget the DBus Specification and many more which are not even coming to my mind right now! I apologize if you had been around and I had kept you waiting but without creating more suspense, I would like to share some cool new recent developments in my life.

I began working on providing networking support to gnome-games.
It just began with an idea when I was planning to make a healthy wealthy contribution to GNOME with the aim of putting to use what I had learnt until now and learn even more in the process. I had no clue of how I would go about it. My major hurdle was that games are written in Vala which is itself in a state of progress with very little and incomplete documentation and bindings to browse to find your way out, but with Robert Ancell's patience, things have happily began to develop. I'll soon be blogging with more on it.
I was given my brand new GIT developer account with my work vouched by Cassidy and now you can also contact me on vchandni@gnome.org: Thanks Cassidy and thank you Andrea Veri for setting it up for me.
I was made a member of the GNOME Foundation: Thanks to Marina, Fujii, Danni and Emily.
GNOME is being brought to Asia, this year in Hong Kong!

Danni, you made my day!

2011-10-07T19:14:00.004+05:30

The grieving effect of Jobs' demise had just began to ruin my mood (he being one of my role models) when Danielle's honoring gesture made my day!

October 7th is Ada Lovelace Day. A day that showcases women in science and technology by profiling a woman technologist or scientist on your blog.

This calls me to write about an influential woman in technology I know of.
Though it won't be hard to figure out but if you ask me who is my Ada, she is-

Danielle Madeley

Danielle was the one who introduced me to the FOSS developer world and continues to hold immense trust in me. An unprecedented optimist full of ideas and always ready to help. Oh she knows the Linux box inside out and has the answer to any system related issues I face ever! No doubt she loves penguins (the real ones) and is playing with them (the tux here) since the age of ten [edit: not age of ten but tenth standard] when her dad gifted her a Linux CD. She loves her work a lot and I have even caught her working on a Sunday!

She is a super skilled developer who is very patient (a rare combination because codes make people go crazy at times. ;) When asked, how are you so patient, she says, "I also do my screaming locally, when there is no one to hear it, but occasionally my housemate."

Her hobbies are playing saxophone, photography and lately, swing dancing and playing netball too. And its worth mentioning, I have never seen a more concerned environmentalist as her before who even cares about the pests infesting her chilli plants [?].

Will not be able to make it to the Desktop Summit this time

2011-08-04T07:20:00.012+05:30

I applied for a business visa for the first time and it was refused :(
I have filed a remonstrance appeal against the decision as the document work on my part was perfect with the invitation and all other documents the GNOME travel committee and KDE e.V. had provided me, but processing it is going to take at least a month (as a visa officer told me over phone) and I wont be able to make it to Berlin before 8th even if I reschedule my trip.

I am deeply sorry for the change in the program caused due to this. I hope that Desktop Summit program committee will find a good replacement for my talk "Knock Knock! What is new?" which was scheduled for the 3rd day (8th August, 2011) of the conference. I am so sad that I won't be able to join GNOME Women's Dinner nor will be able to attend the Women's Networking BoF. I owe my apologies to the GNOME travel committee too for the changes they will have to make because of this. :(

Schengen Visa Interview

2011-07-27T07:50:00.001+05:30

Just got back from my single day trip to Delhi for my visa interview at the German embassy. Spent two nights travelling in train and my legs pain now making me realize I managed to walk a lot there. Happy to be back home now. Interview went fine and I hope my visa and passport to be parceled to me within 4-5 days. Exited!!

Understanding the structure of a GNU Autotools project

2011-07-18T08:16:00.004+05:30

How many times would most of the people using this have downloaded a project built with GNU Autotools and tried to build it following the INSTALL instructions and have been very contended finding success. Nearly half of them would have not needed to know anymore than that and half of the remaining would have got no time/energy to go any further. I am one person transitioning from this nearly 25% of pathetic developers to the other nearly 25% of happier developers.

To get an understanding of what all a project build with GNU Autotools comprises and to respect the presence of each and every file in a source directory, initially and intermediary to configure and build steps I seeked an Autotools reference. For a pictorial remembrance, I roughly sketched a flow graph (which is partially complete with only the most important files and processes which I need to know for now)

For more comprehensive details The Goat Book is an excellent reference (huge and to be taken in as need arises). Thank you Bharath for suggesting this book to me! :)

Edit1: Unwilling to update the diagram above. Refer to http://sourceware.org/autobook/autobook/autobook_276.html#SEC276 for precisely defined ones. Amazing resource.

An Honest Declaration

2011-07-16T01:51:00.003+05:30

I got involved with GNOME through the awesome program for Women Internships from December 2010 to March 2011. With that on end and with the fact that I had already completed my graduation I was expected to join any organization and be immediately productive. So was what I wanted to be but the "any organization" part does not suit me as I do not want to miss geniuses around me when I work.

With the GNOME tag associated with my name, I was undoubtedly offered many positions from application to embedded development but with none I felt the level of satisfaction I got while working for GNOME. I began late compared to my more aware counterparts who started open-source contributions while still in University (and I really regret that) but I realize that to be where I want to be, there is no short-cut and I have to trace the complete path.

So, yes I want to be immediately productive and yes, I want to work with geniuses around me and to fulfill this craving of mine, I will continue providing services to GNOME as an honorary developer until I make myself worthy of being taken in by one of the many firms that have made GNOME what it is today! Although, this required me to convince a lot of people around me but I am happy that they are finally with me now.

The Inner Beauty

2011-05-18T03:34:00.002+05:30

I have been using Linux for quite some time now but only recently got a chance to peek into the internals of the OS I work on in detail. Unix/Linux internals had been on my hit-list since a very long time.
I was looking for some comprehensive books on the same and came across the following (in increasing order of complexity, I list)-

http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/013937681X (introductory text)
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Operating-System-Prentice-Hall-Software/dp/0132017997/ref=pd_sim_b_2
also Understanding the Linux Kernel by Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati is a super cool reference.
[update] and thanks to SEJeff's suggestion, Robert Love's Linux Kernal Development is a must mention and a great deal I was about to miss!

All these go well with a bit of the classic Unix source archive or Linux kernal source or both to compare (which is what it makes more fun and makes you feel out of the classroom ;) and you'll be good without these too in case you lack time or energy..

Interested in starting and maintaining a GNOME user group (GUG) in your area? GNOME foundation will support you!

2011-05-06T19:43:00.001+05:30

Hello all Brave boys and Smart Girls out there!

GNOME is a cool free desktop we all love and its always looking for smart, energetic and enthusiastic volunteers who can help in spreading word about it in various parts of the world! There is a big list of already existing GNOME User Groups but its still too small for what we have envisioned to achieve!

GNOME provides you support in your endeavor by providing you domain and monitory assistance in carrying out GNOME activities.

These links will help you kick-start and show the leader in you-

The official GNOME user groups page: https://live.gnome.org/UserGroups
Subscribe to the GUG-masters list to get yourself a helping hand and begin setting your base: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gugmasters-list
You may use presentation on "Building a GNOME User Group"(from here) by Pockey Lam for helpful tips to getting started.

I hope this quick list of ideas may also help you plan out your actions-

You should create a mailing-list on GNOME infrastructure for keeping people updated about the latest advancements and mass mailing all round the year.
Make a cool list of topics that you'll be covering at each get together and plan a theme or basic idea for each meet-up. You can get ideas from here.
You can also at times, invite an established FOSS identity which might not necessarily be part of GNOME and can get cool ideas to implement in GNOME from him or her.
You can definitely slowly incorporate hack-fests and documentation-fests as theme ideas provided you find people capable to take part in those.
Initially you may need to train a bunch of volunteers who can take care of introducing GNOME and GUG to large groups of people. They should better be clear, confident and convincing.
You will also need a group of technically trained people(or train them) who can identify and train potential contributors.
Do something that people can take back home with wellness in mind. Definitely keep some computers on which people can experience GNOME and maybe distribute a free GNOME3 CD to each member in the first get together and note their first response and suggestions to improve GNOME.
Keep in mind that part of the group is to involve new users and contributors and most of them might be having no idea of what GNOME is all about so you and your volunteers need to be patient in handling them.
Celebrate GNOME Events :D
Never forget the GNOME Code of Conduct.

Rock on!

Three Cheers for GNOME 3!!!

2011-04-09T02:34:00.006+05:30

Everyone is celebrating the GNOME 3 release with over a hundred launch parties being organized in different corners of the world. At this moment of applause, I want to extend my sincere thanks to the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME.Asia Committee for choosing India as the spot for the largest GNOME.Asia event ever! Along with the student training sessions, it has definitely sparked a lot of awareness amongst students here as can be seen from post summit follow ups answering which I have spent quite some time after returning from Bangalore.

To the students I want to say a lot of things have to be learnt and this is just the beginning. Your enthusiasm is going to guide you into being successful contributor. I have seen many of you newcomers actively showing up on IRC on #gnome-love and I want to see even more numbers and even more women contributors, at least all those students with whom I had a one-to-one talk!

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me enabling me to attend it. Huge targets were achieved in a manner which was real fun! I saved a wonderful collection of memories from Bangalore hackfest and Asia Summit 2011:

Slideshow requires Flash plugin to be installed

More of these can be found on http://www.gnome.asia/photos
For those who could not attend the summit or my talk in particular by any means, you can find my slides here.

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Updates

2011-04-03T03:22:00.009+05:30

Day 1 and 2 of the Hackfest begun from the Intel's HAL Airport Road office at Bangalore (thanks to Srinivasa for getting it arranged).
I got a surprise on the first day sent to me by Empathy maintainers, Guillaume and Xavier =)

Thank you both for this awing surprise! That was really motivational.

The Hackfest was kick started with a round table deciding upon the tasks to be accomplished during the five day event and ended with a wrap up of the entire day's activities done by each person to analyse the effectiveness and time utilization.

I volunteered to assist with marketing and organizing besides hacking.
In this while I had been trying to get more media contacts for interviewing our delegates and covering the event. Two of them from Linux format whom I contacted about a month ago actually arrived here on April 1. We were able to arrange discounted accommodation for them in the same hotel as where we stayed and they have been doing their job well without bothering anyone during working hours. I was made the newest addition to the GNOME Asia Organizing committee and tried to give my best to the role and provided my point of views and ideas whenever necessary, about possible ways of spreading awareness of GNOME in Asia, keeping the often overlooked facts in mind.

Hats off to the release team for worked really hard and preparing GNOME 3 ready for release ahead of time (not to mention the April Fool's prank was unexpectedly adorable ;) I had been observing the extensive amount of work a release requires and sleepless nights the release team members spent busy writing release notes.

For Empathy, I was able to begin making changes on my hugest branch for persistent chats which involved studying about Webkit and Pango. I followed up with the Usability team for their useful input on the design changes required to be done in Empathy for this and also discussed it with Allan Caeg. I reported and pushed a patch for a small MUC usability patch and with Fred Muller's help, found out two file transfer bugs in Empathy<->Pidgin interaction over which I'll be working soon after this to make him happy!

Before the summit, I got a peppy GNOME 3 T-shirt and Free Software promotional stuff including stickers I decorated my laptop with-

On April 2nd, the first day of the summit, I attended keynotes by Brian Cameron and Vincent Untz and also his next talk on Building GNOME on build service and SUSE studio which contained some notable points for me. After this, I spent some time at the help desks with students new to GNOME and Linux in general and tried to ease their Linux fear clearing their basic doubts about migrating from Windows to any Linux distribution and explaining its benefits. Tried my hands over OpenSUSE for the first time on a demonstration system and learnt about it from Manu Gupta who has been supporting it since over an year now.

I'll be giving my talk on "Contributions of a newbie to the free desktop's Empathy" tomorrow! Be sure to attend it on Track 2. Will be updating more pictures soon!

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Adventure Begins ;)

2011-03-28T01:07:00.001+05:30

Hi!

Today I landed Bangalore, the venue for GNOME Asia Summit, 2011. My travel was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Other than Bharath Acharya, the backbone for the event, I met Srinivasa Ragavan, Pockey Lam, Vincent Untz, Andre Klapper, Frederic Peters and Frederic Muller, Allan Day, Ryan Lortie, Josselin Monette and Andreas Nilsson today! We had lunch together, walked up to a nearby mall and talked over a lot of stuff! It was fun! Hoping to meet the other Hackers and Marketing, Design and Release team members in the coming days.

GNOME Hackfest begins tomorrow.

The week ahead is going to be busy but full of adventure! :D With lots of registrations for the summit already made and student registrations going free, a huge audience is expected for the launch party and GNOME 3 is catching the mood!

Will be adding on more related details as I get time.

Contact Blocking and Report Abuse to be available in Empathy3.0

2011-03-14T14:19:00.007+05:30

Many users had requested this feature (bug) and it is now available for all to use.

Now Empathy supports blocking/unblocking contacts on per-user basis for connections that support contact blocking (for ex. gmail) and report abuse for connections that support this feature (though currently there are no connection managers implementing this). Danielle completed two branches for "Contact Blocking" and "Report abuse" last month and I recently re-based them to master for her which took some time since the branches had diverged much.

Here a few snapshots of the interfaces introduced-

The Blocked Contacts can be viewed and managed with Edit->Blocked Contacts menu-item

in the main window to open up the following dialog

Blocked Contacts Dialog

...on which you can perform usual live search.

One can right click individual contacts in contacts' roster and on selecting "Remove" he'll

notice this extra "Delete and Block" button, if supported.

The Contacts->Block Contact menu item in chat windows is a check menu-item that can be toggled

The subscription box provides a convenient way to right away block a contact without need to first add him or her.

Confirmation dialog that would pop up on each attempt of blocking a contact

On completion, Empathy was in string freeze while getting ready for release, and the ready-to-merge branch was too cool not to be available in this release, so Guillaume requested a freeze exception from the i10n team which was granted and the branch was finally merged! :)

Recovering data from a broken hard disk

2011-03-02T09:41:00.012+05:30

Some time ago, my computer's hard disk broke and I didn't had a recent backup copy which increased my pain.
I hope no computer dependent ever faces such crappy situation. Just like a burnt child dreads fire all life, I have made it a habit to backup my system data at the end of each day (backintime is a super fast tool) and monitor the healthiness (SMART status) of my hard disk's regularly!

Here I describe how I recovered my data in that situation. Most of the commands mentioned here will require root privileges.

It happened one fine day when I started my computer and after making some changes on a set of files, tried to save them for testing. System refused and reported that my file system was read-only. Without thinking much I tried to restart my system and it never opened up in GUI. I ended up with unmountable partitions-

mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory

Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init= bootarg...

and then it asks me to enter commands in Busybox.

On much googling I found this somewhat useful.
I decided to use my Ubuntu live CD to recover the data, check the drive's status and reinstall the system if possible. The disk utility reported two bad sectors and when that happens, there are more to follow.
Broken disk was not really bad for my PC was still under warranty but I was worried about my data.
In panick I decided to use the dd command to create an image of the partition on a blank external drive.
I got this error:

ubuntu@ubuntu:/$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/media/2c0adbca-f37e-4f53-b975-8c7a99ee2757/sda3.imgdd: reading `/dev/sda3': Input/output error5341584+0 records in5341584+0 records out2734891008 bytes (2.7 GB) copied, 162.043 s, 16.9 MB/s

Then Danni suggested me to use ddrescue as a tool to copy my disk off. ddrescue is like dd, just that it retries, skipping bad bits.
So I tried to install ddrescue onto the live CD but each time apt-get kept getting stuck while unpacking, in D-state (ps aux | grep dpkg showed the unpacking process' status Ds+ which means uninterrupted sleep.) Processes in D-state cannot be killed until system is rebooted and are termed as zombie processes.

Dismounting the corrupted partition didn't help either, I'm not sure why.
The syslogs kept displaying IO errors on device sr0 which is the cd-rom usually, so I instead burnt Ubuntu rescue remix (which has many rescue tools including ddrescue pre-installed).
Then in hurry and without knowing the consequences of writing a large file onto a MS-DOS file system (which was what this external drive was formatted with), I started creating the corrupted file system's image with the rescue remix.

My disk was spacious enough but the process halted reporting disk to be out of space.

My bad, I doubted this was because of mismatching file system on my external drive and thought of formatting my external drive with two partitions (for the first time): ext4 for the image and NTFS for the rest. For this I studied the fdisk and parted commands extensively. I eventually could make a large enough ext4 partition but something went wrong with magic numbering when fiddling with fdisk. The image was ready within a second which smelled of something wrong! :-/

The reason for image creation faliure turned out to be the disk's file system. MS-DOS restricts files sizes from being more than 4GB[?] in size. Danni told me I could save the image (which is nothing but a byte-wise copy) to any file system with larger file sizes permitted (not necessarily ext*), so I deleted all partitions and made a single fully stretched one (using fdisk utility). I formatted it with NTFS whose data I would be able to see using any OS like this:

mkntfs /dev/sdc

where sdc was the external hard disk (mount -l command shows currently mounted partitions or df -T could also be used to check this).

Then, with all other partitions unmounted (umount command) and only the external disk mounted, I ran the ddrescue command. The steps were:

Mounting the external hard disk file system I was writing the image to (sdc1 in my case) if not yet mounted:
mkdir /mnt/target
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/target
Writing an image of corrupted partition (sda3 in my case) to the file system mounted:
ddrescue /dev/sda3 /mnt/target/ddrescue.img /mnt/target/ddrescue.log

This ways, I was able to create my image with corrupted data skipped.

Checking the image using e2fsck couldn't succeed and I needed to run fsck manually:

fsck -y /mnt/target/ddrescue.img

[
FWIW, my image on check (without repairing it) reported:

error: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found

]
Now, rerunning check reported the file-system's copy to be clean and (hopefully) repaired and ready to mount.

I tried it using mount loop (which is just a way to mount a file as a file system) as:

mount -o loop /mnt/target/ddrescue.img /mnt/recovered_sda3

where /mnt/target/ddrescue.img was treated as device and /mnt/recovered_sda3 was the desired mount point directory. Now I was able to use /mnt/recovered_sda3 just like root directory with all my data in /mnt/recovered_sda3/home! :D
I tried to format my corrupted partition and even to delete the entire partition on the faulty disk but could not do it.
Finally, I installed Ubuntu on a new hard disk afresh, mounted my external drive onto it, mounted the recovered partition's image and copied my /mnt/recovered_sda3/home onto /home :

rsync -auvxz --progress /mnt/recovered_sda3/home/ /home/

(keeping the trailing '/' intact)

With that, had my computer back to what it was before the snap!

Had I had faced this situation on a healthy hard disk (as sometimes happens if the computer suddenly shuts down while booting) and if direct checking and repairing the file system using e2fsck/fsck failed, I could have copied the repaired image of the partition bytewise back to the same device like this:

dd if=/mnt/target/ddrescue.img of=/dev/sda3

Thank you Danni for guiding me through this and saving me a lot of time and Google searches.

Internship updates...

2011-02-25T16:02:00.015+05:30

Hey people,

Didn't get chance to blog about what I had been doing lately so here's a compiled mix of it all.

Good news first:

Now Empathy multi-user chats are separated from the chat-room windows they are displayed in. i.e. users will be able to join/leave chats without closing the room [commit].

I am working on the opposite i.e enabling the user to continue being connected to a chat when chat-room window has been closed (bug).
The /part command is working for chat-rooms and private MUCs (bug [commit])
UPDATE: There was a small fault in part message construction in telepathy-idle. It was not sticking to correct format of PART messages as per RFC 2812 sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 which was preventing the full part message from being displayed to the members. It has been fixed in this bug now.
To prevent a user from deleting significant accounts like freenode from list of networks, a new "Reset Networks List" button was added in the IRC Network Chooser dialog (bug [commit])

New things I learnt in this phase:

Insight into telepathy-idle
Using Wireshark to monitor packets sent to and received from a network
Conflict resolution after rebasing.
To help me gain more experience with conflicts, Danni has given me two massive branches to rebase.

There were some not so cool things also like, I started my work on notification for enabling/connecting a disabled/disconnected account when trying to connect to rooms affiliated to it (bug) but it eventually turned out to be blocked by this bug. There must be some comparison workaround used by Empathy to keep things working which I am yet to discover! A particular horrible thing was my hardisk snap and not having an up-to-date backup added to it but I was happy to be able to recover my data (thanks to Danni). It was another learning experience and I'll dedicate a separate post to it.

~

Gnome.Asia Summit 2011 will be held in Bangalore, India this time. I am happy to get a chance to speak about my internship experience in my talk- Contributions made by a newbie to the free desktop's "Empathy", in front of such assorted community of developers, documenters, marketing people, GNOME users and prospective contributors. I am particularly exited about getting a chance to see the biggies of this world! :D

India celebrates its 62nd Republic day!

2011-01-26T00:01:00.000+05:30

This one's is for all proud Indians and all world citizens who are happy for the republicans of the largest democracy in the world! :)

Today is a day to retrospect and be thankful to all those who brought a revolution to the nation and contributed towards the preparation of a permanent constitution for its people and for their future generations to be able to live a just life, in peace.

Internship - Week 5

2011-01-24T20:57:00.006+05:30

The much awaited "Save all' button feature of Empathy's debug window is now in a working state. :)

I started working over this one in my 'Save all' button branch as my second ever bug to be fixed for Empathy but insufficient experience in asynchronous programming and debugging caused it to stand by. This week I went back to it and with the past one month's experience, it was all play!

Here's a shot.

This "Save all" button will be useful when users face issues and are unsure of what part is causing a particular problem. It could be the connection managers, mission-control or parts of Empathy itself. So with this branch merged, instead of saving individual logs for each service selected using the service chooser, one will need to simply use this button and have a compiled log saved on disk.

I made another not much observable change in this branch too. The older save button used to fetch log messages from the model which was updated from the cache and was used to display the messages in the main view. To make both saving tasks work coherently and to avoid code reuse, I changed it to load messages directly from the cache like what our new "Save all" button does.

There was this another bug evident using telepathy-gabble 0.11.5, about which I also mentioned in my last post, where, in MUC chat window tabs the typing icon was not getting correctly updated [bug]. I begun with a patch for it but after discussing it over IRC, finally closed it as the typing icon in MUCs is no more relevant when the typing icon is displayed next to the composers now.

Internship - Week 3 & 4

2011-01-17T14:40:00.011+05:30

Hi all!

The passed week and its last, I worked on the following:

made the /nick command to be shown only in chat-rooms supporting nick renaming [commit]. This made use of a newly added Renaming interface which is not very much tested, though [commit].
made nick command function use RequestRename function of Renaming interface [commit], instead of prior undocumented abuse of function SetAliases.
Created a new feature to display typing icon in the contact lists of private chats and chat-rooms [commit].

The last feature was a proposal that caught my eye while browsing the empathy MUC issues.
Having the knowledge of who is typing in a chat room in real time would be quite useful. This was possible using "composing" states obtained from chat state notifications. Although one-to-one user chats in empathy provide this facility but private chats and multi-user chat rooms were still deprived of this feature.

While working on this, Danielle helped me with chat state observation and discovered a telepathy-gabble bug causing unexpected parsing of incoming chat states as a part of this endeavor, after which I was able to pursue my tasks at hand. Hence, to test this work out, you'll need the bleeding-edge telepathy-gabble.

Here are demonstrating shots for the same:

Private MUC

Chat room

So you can see that with the gabble bug rectified, now the chat window tab typing icons also work but they are a bit faulty. "Why", is what I am looking into!

Internship - Week 2

2011-01-04T10:49:00.005+05:30

Hi there,
A very Happy New Year 2011 to all of you!
Last week, the Christmas and New Year fervor enthused everyone. The commits I feel weren't satisfactory and i'll be consequently giving more love to Empathy this week.

I submitted-

a patch for allowing only contacts supporting chat rooms to appear on the Manage Favorites dialog
a fix for code reuse with a similar issue in Join Rooms dialog

Some of my time was spent figuring out why /nick command behaves weirdly in Jabber MUCs and am currently working on this bug.

Internship - Week 1

2010-12-27T03:26:00.001+05:30

Hi all,
Last week I created a new popup feature that would allow the users to quickly enable/disable accounts from the accounts tree-view in accounts dialog.

Right clicking a disabled account.

Right clicking an enabled account

Note that the icon on the enable menu-item is the most-available presence depending on the chosen presence and not always necessarily the "available" icon.

I also made a small change in the way private and multi-user chats appears to a user. Influenced by approach used by Google talk, the user's name in current chat will be reduced to the string "Me: " thereby making chat look clearer and avoiding unnecessary clutter. This recent change is awaiting commit after which a private chat will look somewhat like the following with only the current chat affected.

Using "Me" for the user's name in private chats

...and similarly in Multi-user chats too.

Now, i'll be concentrating on improving Multi-user chats (MUCs) and removing its major and normal bugs.

Internship begins...

2010-12-15T09:48:00.003+05:30

So it's Dec 15th and my internship begins today. Excited? Yeah!! Immensely and a little nervous too!!! :D

Well in this while I had been somewhat preparing for my internship to start in a good pace. I went through the basic GTK tutorials and underlying API references and fixed some of the bugs in Empathy.

A few ambiguities resolved. A small fix was made in Empathy's account's dialog which required changing the tab focus chain sequence. Another notable change was that when no accounts are set up in empathy (or all are disabled) then instead of having the full 'Room' menu made insensitive, only sub menus Join, Join Favorites and any favorite rooms are made insensitive. Which means, if a user had no account set up then he can now click on the "Room" menu and his default empathy view would be somewhat like this (ignore the theme):

There will be a 'Save all' button functionality added to the debug window hopefully soon. The work on it was stalled due to some GTK bug yet unresolved. I created a standalone application to demonstrate it but that didn't seem to have caused much effect.

I hope I keep up to mark and create things that the open world would remarkably recognize and appreciate! I have a long way to go and this is only the first step. I have learnt a lot of things on my way to this first rung of my career and it was a wonderful experience.
Wondering how enthralling it's gonna be beyond this. :)

My Hi to GNOME Planet dwellers!

2010-11-13T00:58:00.000+05:30

Being here makes me feel that I really belong to an assorted group of really skilled and motivated group of individuals, all trying to contribute in their own special ways to make the world a little better, a little happier place for the rest!

I am Chandni, a recent grad from Dr. M.C, Saxena College of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow, India. I have a passion for finding an elegant solution for any kind of problem, be it in a physical form, puzzle-like or algorithmic thus developing in me hobbies like puzzle-solving and competing in algorithmic coding contests with other brains in the world.

I will be working on Empathy IM client under the expert guidance of Danielle Madeley. I owe a lot to Danielle, firstly for being such a kind heart and patient person as she is, for guiding me through my first commit and being there whenever needed (which was really difficult as this was my first contribution to open source I had never used a version controlling system before), and last but not the least, for informing me about the program and giving me the confidence to go for it!

Getting selected on such a prestigious platform was something unimaginable. Being here provides me a chance to touch the lives of so many dependents and admirers of the open-source desktop with my ideas and skills. I am proud of being a woman and being chosen here also gives me a chance to prove to the world that a female mind has abilities no less than anyone else in the world.

Lastly i'd like to thank all the Empathy folks for their help in both big and small ways and for their time they have invested on me. I'd like to get in touch with more of you while contributing on IRC.

My SSH key

2010-11-12T16:10:00.008+05:30

I created a SSH key for authenticating me and establishing a secure connection between my pc and the project hosting server. Otherwise also, if your SSH servers are visible over the Internet, you should use public key authentication instead of passwords if at all possible!

I created a key pair using RSA public key cryptography algorithm using 3 simple commands on the terminal:

Note: The ssh-keygen command automatically creates ~/.ssh and assigns appropriate permissions to it, thus reducing the 3 commands to just 1. Thanks Marius for correcting.

ssh-keygen -t rsa

also, I for better security, I considered using

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

Then I was asked for a filename and location and a pass-phrase after which it was done! :)

My public repository!

2010-11-12T15:16:00.001+05:30

I learnt some GIT basics in this while. There are many books and tutorials available online for getting hands on with GIT. The GIT community book is what I found to be particularly powerful and easy-to-follow reference I would commend for all newbies.

I created my first SSH key and a public project to host branches of projects I'll work on.

Updated:

My Gnome work will be hosted on the glassrose-GNOME project on Gitorious.org and I'll push my Empathy WIP branches in the Empathy repository in this project. :)

I'm a proud GNOME Intern now! hooray!

2010-11-06T12:46:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone!

Yesterday night the results for GNOME internships 2010 were finally officially announced and I am in!! :)
The best Deepawali present ever. :) What occasion would have been more auspicious than this for the results to get declared!

Everyone was happy. My dad and my grandparents were more than elated as they wouldn't believe me before anything was up on notices! I received my family's blessings and applauses with heart full of gratitude as their belief in me was always intact and they gave me the freedom to pursue my dreams!

I planned a gift trip for mom and dad to Jim Corbett Wildlife Sanctuary on my expenses. I had heard them planning the visit along with their old friends sometime ago. ;)

I extend my thanks to all the empathy folks, particularly Danielle Madeley who supported and guided me all the way through! She's really talented! This wouldn't have been real had she not been there. Thanks again!

added a new feature to empathy!

2010-11-03T01:04:00.000+05:30

Today I coded a 'Save all' debug logs functionality for empathy ( Bug 592994 )

Yea, 'twas a handsome amount of code for anyone's second fix :) , but choosing this was a conscious decision! While looking for a resolution, I was exposed to some of the important and frequently used data structures in GTK, like GtkTreeModel interface and its GtkListStore and GtkTreeStore implementations. I used widgets like GtkComboBox, GTkToolBar, GtkToolButton and Gtk core reference - stock items while creating a custom button as this.

This bug was a must for me!

My first empathy commit

2010-10-16T07:55:00.002+05:30

Hey guys, yesterday was somewhat special for me as I made my first commit to empathy! :)
Check out the bug i fixed here and my commit here.

Will be committing some more in quick succession. Keep watching!

Hello World!

2009-11-15T00:29:00.001+05:30

As u might have guessed from the above title, I am passionate about programming. Here I start with my first blog. Hopefully you'll see some valuable stuff here in days to come apart from an insight into my life. Thanks for reading!