There is a lot to write about the Shaastra gone  by (for those uninitiated,  it is the technical festival of my university,IIT Madras and one of a kind in India), but only if the typical CSE assignment drills would stop …. But there is Science Fiction to talk about, where I got the first prize in rather queer circumstances. It isn’t usual for a contestant to come to know of a writing contest midway through it, to run to the venue midway and somehow jot down stuff while supposedly overseeing builds. Well, I had fun

Thanks to a classmate,I have my story ready to be put up here. So here I go to log my story below before I lose it like I did last year. I am satisfied that I could point somewhat to how life is getting technologically interesting but alarmingly mechanical with time. To the rest, well, comment on it and I shall know.

Credits :

1. Amrita – The co-ordinator who took the pains to ask me to write, when I was totally clueless about the event, maybe just because my story placed second last year.

2. Arun Chaganty – For being stubborn on typing out the story and “proving his vettiness.”  (Someday, I shall understand how his personal scheduing algorithms manage to bring out fantastic results while being so pointless on the face of it.)

3. SuperVol Subhashini and my co-coordinator Vijay, who took care of the lab setup for the two hours that I was furiously scribbling away.

The Story:

It was built by the human race for human research and supposedly comprised of humans. Yet, there was nothing ‘human’ about this place. Eureka, one of the most awe-inspiring technological breakthroughs of it’s times was a bundle of paradoxes, in more ways than one. This giant space-ship laboratory was the cradle of numerous astounding discoveries in space-time relativity. But the discoverers themselves had no clue of space and time themselves as they worked away to glory round the clock in a setup that floated across the cosmos at gigantic speeds.

Inside one of the special research chambers of Eureka, it was yet another day for Zora. Well, it was ‘just another day’ for this beautiful and composed lady, even as each day witnessed her coming up with some milestone invention in human-embeddable chips. “If only we could embed the infinite computational resources that we make use of every moment, integrating it with our brains and empowering it…”, she would always say, “there would be no limits to what we could achieve.” Her ideas and work made her among the most respected and looked up to scientist in Eureka, and that was enough to keep her fuelled and working non-stop. The fact that her loved ones thought she was out there making machines of men, having already turned herself into one in the process didn’t make much of a difference to her.

As Google Summer of Code 2009 draws to a formal close, its time to sum up all my work and the fun I had with my project, thank the people who have stood by me all this while and hopefully give some insights into the project.

This post briefly sums up the work since my last report, when I got a basic Maemo-Angstrom filesystem image working.Since then I have focussed mainly on the following two issues -

1. Improving the Hildon Desktop environment and adding useful applications - The improvements included getting the application menu in hildon-desktop working, fixing some crashes and detecting a couple of OE related packaging issues, which led to those crashes. I have also added support for all the hildonised gpe applications from Diablo extras-devel, and some of the Fremantle Stars applications – omweather, maemo-mapper etc. Work on modest and other Fremantle apps is in place.

2. Restructuring my work -The earlier repo at http://github.com/rkirti/maemo-oe/tree/master required the user to manually add some recipes to the OE tree due to core components like glib/gtk etc. I have now changed and restructured this to create a proper OE overlay, just like jalimo does for instance, and the new overlay which can be used on top of a clean OE tree is hosted  at - http://github.com/rkirti/maemo_angstrom/tree/master

Instructions for usage have also been documented here.Flames/suggestions/comments are as always welcome here or on IRC.

To sign-off, here a couple of screenshots of the newly added applications.

Hildon Desktop on beagleboard from the VNC viewer

Omweather running on Angstrom as seen through the VNC viewer

Update 1:  I am currently testing my work on the Beagleboard, so interested beagleboard users can look at this download page , for the latest image to test with.

While its been a long while since I last had a proper update here and there are quite a few things that need/deserve to be written about, I shall keep them pending for the meanwhile, thanks to GSoC work and other stuff. What I can’t keep off and am compelled to spend a couple of minutes recording them here is the following two random musings (not mine!) which seem to be hovering around me too much

Since my last post, I have been working on duplicating the hildon-desktop environment that I achieved on my laptop, on an Angstrom base on the beagleboard adding the needed bitbake recipes.

I now have a hildon-on-angstrom image which I could get ready about two weeks back. The image has hildon-desktop, some plugins,some supplementary apps. like Maemopad and Maemopadplus and so on. This forms the basic of a maemo-angstrom-image. I am currently testing it on a Beagleboard.

The apps boot well, but there are issues like locale support not being present and difficulty in loading icons which I have working on for the last week. Both the errors seem to be arising out of lack of support in the image. I am building a file-system image with gpe-image/ x11-gpe-image in Open Embedded as a base. The work over the next week will involve finishing cleaning up these issues with the apps currently, documenting the status, adding the maemo connectivity elements (already in progress), and some base packages.

The work on the recipes for the packages, the conf. files and image recipe can all be found at my github account:

http://github.com/rkirti/maemo-oe/tree/master

Some screenshots of Maemo apps. running on my Beagleboard viewed with the vnc viewer :

Hildon Desktop via VNC. Basic plugins supported, but lack of locale support is the show-stopper

Application Menu

MaemopadPlus, screenshot taken from Remote Desktop Viewer

As the screenshots show, the basic framework for Maemo support is ready, but the UI/apps. here need a whole lot of refining to get it to the same states as those running within Scratchbox. Comments/Suggestions/Flames/ Request for particular apps. to be supported in OE would be most welcome!

Progress

This post is meant to be a summary of my work over the last fifteeen days and a discussion on what follows, the issues I face and so on.  I have finally managed to get Hildon desktop running outside scratchbox, something I was stuck with when I gave my first report.  I  have a certain sort of UI running at the moment, and the recipes for which are done and will be released after testing this week. They are currently hosted at http://github.com/rkirti/maemo-oe/tree/master

Laugh at me if you wish to, or call it heights of craziness.

I wouldn’t be surprised,since most of my classmates (and non-classmates too)  find my addiction for writing well-highlighted notes in >= 3 colors ridiculously amusing anyways.But then, old habits die hard, and as I find myself  using Vim  these days for everything I can, I miss the good old luxury of color and personalization of notes that pen and paper provide. I could switch to a normal word-processor and use the M$ style WYSIWYG formatting – but that would be like tasting bitter-gourd after fig ice-cream

So I tried to see if I could do some quick job to make those additions to Vim today- keeping  a couple of my notebooks with me  to see the requirements. This is what I could get -

The Plugin in Action - Note the template with User Details

Scorch,screech,hiss and hiss again
There goes the fire, rekindling its pain
Yet every moment a spark, brilliant-so-ever
A seductive invitation to come and get slain..

The light that doth become its notion of supreme beauty
Woo-ing it so strongly,making it forget its duty….
Pure,dazzling,inspiring – the fountain of its bliss
But why so full of strife if bathed in all sanctity ?

Happily it flies forward,blinded in the shimmer
Burnt,scorched, wings about to wither
Yet so at peace with itself, so full of its dreams
So oblivious of the reality awaiting thither…..

And for a moment it does stop, when truth does scream
When it finds reality pinching round the clock
But it only takes the light just another gleam
And there its flies again,dreaming of its ’sun’ once more…

Dear God,why must it be so blinded? or so enchanted and fooled?
Becoming the object of all laughter and  great pity ?
For ‘it’ is the moth, and I can’t help but empathize
To be hurt by what it loves the most – that is its destiny.

A randomly jotted outcome of  some very vetti vague philosophical musings merged with a retrospection of reality.  Try as I might, I can’t stop my thoughts and writings from being  hijacked by the moth. Sigh.

Google’s choice of a surprise gift this time for the GSoC students – a one year ACM membership Needless to say, I am so looking forward to this one. I haven’t as yet checked out things in detail, but this interested me a lot.It is not directly an ACM thing as such, but it did make a lot of sense for me.  More on this sometime later. For now, back to N800 emulation….

So I am almost like a month late…selection on 20th April and the  first update  today – fie on me ! And of course, need I mention the end-sems and the ‘God forsaken semester extensions”   (to put it in NG Srinivas’s  Godly words) ??

Anyways, like the good old Gujju saying goes….જાગ્યા ત્યારથી સવાર ! So here I am, with my first baby-steps with the Maemo SDK . While I am much more comfortable with Open Embedded and Bit-bake – that bit might also take quite some time, since I need to set up a build system from scratch. (don’t ask me why, for the answer leads to an issue I have been scoffed at many many times for, by classmates Arun and Suryakiran !)

Meanwhile, fellow GSoC-ers from the institute have been racing ahead with their projects and I only hope I can join the gang !

PS:  The post above skips the most important parts of the story… (talk about incoherency and inefficiency after night-out chains..)

1. My application and project details here and here is the wiki for the GSoC projects hosted by Maemo this year. Updates and technical details (which should follow soon) to be hosted here.

2.  On an unrelated note, Maemo is hosting 10 GSoC projects this year of which 2 are by Indians and 5 are Canola based.  There seems to be an astronomically huge amount of interest in Canola , after it going open source. I wish I was either a  multimedia freak (having lost touch with movies and quite a lot of music for I don’t know how long) or an application developer to be able to make some  sense of the hype.  Anyways, through the GSoC period I surely will…