“He didn’t want to fight for petty wins when there was a bigger game in town. And the bigger game was pinball. You win one game, you get to play the next. You win with this machine, you get to build the next. Pinball was what counted.”

Its a tough task not to relate to the characters and the story that Tracy Kidder unfolds before you in The Soul of a New Machine. He depicts heroism in systems engineering and makes circuit designing sound like the sexiest job ever. He ensures that you, despite being a mere reader, get the kind of adrenaline rushes the 30-odd team did as they set out to build the next-generation 32-bit minicomputer over that one year period.

The book has a Pulitzer prize to its credit and has been called the “original nerd epic” by many critics. Given all that, attempting to write a review would be sheer folly. Several people have done a great job of it before. Below however, is an attempt to log what I learnt from the book and what I enjoyed the most. The post is long and verbose, but it doesn’t count.  The hope is that the (usually non-existent) reader will be inspired somewhere midway to give up on the post and grab the book instead. 

So what makes the book so likable ?

Bringing out something that is Transcendental

The technology that the book talks about is far outdated today. From minicomputers to  the age of handhelds, we have long taken for granted technology that the protagonists considered path-breaking. However, Kidder’s observations about the way engineers work, what keeps them driven, how teams deal with long-term challenging projects still remain valid in the current world. Even technically, there are certain insights he provides which really amaze you as they come true now . For instance, “A time would probably come when components would operate so quickly, that the distance the signals would have to travel would ultimately affect intimately the speed of most commercial computers“. Its something we take for granted now, but to have this insight 30 years back is brilliant.

The Author, his narration, his attitude
Hey, its a journalist trying to understand the computer industry. So on first thoughts, one probably doesn’t expect much of an insight on the technical side. I expected the book to be a “view from 20,000 feet above” of the intricate process. Wrong. The book taught me more interesting things than any course on computer design or architecture I took. The author claims that he struggled with the technical details, but eventually, in the book he brings them out as the most amazing analogies teachers could give. From microcode sequencing,page faults, instruction caches, logical  address spaces, privilege levels and protection rings – he has a simple, handy explanation in day-to-day parlance for anyone. He makes sure that not knowing the technicalities does not prevent the reader from appreciating the challenges that the engineers faced.

A peek into corporate dynamics
For those engineers who look at management with a sneer, this book is only bound to magnify that feeling. On one hand you have the brightest of people ever, facing impossible deadlines in designing something thats ground-breaking. On the other, there are the managers who seem to be practicing what they call the “Mushroom theory of management” – Keep them in the dark, feed them shit, and watch them grow.

• “A logic analyser costs ten thousand dollars, overtime for engineers is free.”

Bringing out a good technical product is about a lot more than making a good design  and getting it manufactured – thats the lesson one learns from the protagonist. Ah, the protagonist ! He is an engineer at heart but when circumstances demand, he strategizes, cooks up plots and gets more adorable with every move he makes. He is a perfectionist but also he knows when to move with the times, and write on his board – “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well”.

Dating the engineers, Up Close
Every now and then, you get something to keep you in awe of those people. It could be when the main designer spends twenty hours in the library hunting for quotes and flourishes to add to his ISA specs.

• “They revealed the class of feelings that Wallach brought to his job. And with these, he had signed his name to his piece of the new computer.“

Or it could be how the midnight programmers approached life.

• “Taking that machine apart was a fantastic high. Something I could get absorbed in and forget I had these other social problems.”

They talk and live engineering like a religion and their passion is contagious.

• “Writing microcode is like nothing else in my life. For days, nothing comes out. The empty yellow pad sits in front of me,reminding me of my inadequacy. Finally it starts to come. I feel good. That feeds it, and finally I get into a mental state where I am a microcode writing machine.”
• “The pressure, I felt it from inside of me.”

Leadership
People (yours truly is a good example) keep fumbling and keep flailing around trying to figure what leadership is. In that regard, the protagonist here is a rather uncanny phenomenon as a leader. He leads by example, but he also does a lot to turn his own team against himself. No one really knows whats on his mind. And yet, he evokes respect.

• “West is interesting. He’s the main reason why I do what I do.”

Working in teams
Team dynamics can be interesting and confusing at the same time. The book teaches you to accept it in whatever form it comes.

• “Often Guyer leaves at around three in the morning. Veres comes in a few hours later, looks at Guyer’s notes in the logbook, the pictures he has taken on the analyzers. And he instantly knows whats wrong and how to fix it. They make a marvelous debugging team, but only when not working together.”

Burn-out
It happens. To even the best of us. Accepting it seems to be the best way to deal with it.

• “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

Being distraught, yet being happy
Theirs is a tough industry. To put it in the words of the author, the industry’s short product cycles lend projects an atmosphere of crisis.Computer
engineering is arduous in itself, and this makes it more intense. Hours are long; emotions get taxed. The technology changes every year and its hard to keep up with the kids fresh out of school. A long-term tiredness can easily creep over by your thirties.

The fun part is that these guys still discover things that keep them going. Be it messing with each others’ files, programming ridiculous AI onto each others’ terminals or getting yourself an unencrypted copy each time your boss sends something encrypted to his server.
Masochists they are, but that doesn’t stop them from being fun people to be with.

Random Musing – Of computers, engineering and life

• The protagonist can lie to himself     – “I gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I ll go mad.”
• Time in a computer is an interesting concept. When I sit in front of the logic analyzer, twelve nanoseconds is a big deal for me. And yet, when I realize how much longer it takes to snap my fingers,I have lost track of what a nanosecond really means.”
• “She’s romantic, foolish, unrealistic – everything an engineer’s not supposed to be. But I like her.”
• “He could write two to three hundreds lines of code in his mind, but he had a hard time remembering his own phone number.”
• “I don’t care how computers get sold. I just build them”

You could say I am infected.  Seldom do you find a book which makes you fall in love with every alternate line.  For the reader (again, if existent) who bothered to read it all the way up to here – here is a list of books next on the infection spree (oh yeah, I am pretty free this semester or at least thats what the assumption is ) – It would be great to hear from you if you have views on the below list or other recommendations -

• The Pentium Chronicles
• The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
• Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley
• Portraits in Silicon
• Pirates of the Silicon Valley (DVD)
• When Genius Failed
• Fire in the Valley – the making of the personal computer

Why OE should apply as mentoring organization for GSoC :

1. Lots of good ideas needing implementation
Chris ‘kergoth’ Larson came up with an interesting compilation of tasks and concerns list for OE [0]. Another current source for ideas is the uservoice page, though most agree that it needs more promoting [1]. So yes, there are lots of things that could make up for interesting OE project ideas,though we need a better compilation.

2. Better exposure for the community
GSoC is an ideal place to get prospective developers and possibly do some good community propaganda.

Why OE makes for a good organization suitable for acceptance in GSoC :

1. In 2006, OE was a part of GSoC under handhelds.org. The community and project are now large enough and well-supported to apply independently.

2. The prime requirement an organization should meet for GSoC acceptance is good ideas and good mentors. The latter, I am confident, are abundant in OE. From my experience as a GSoC student with an (unofficially) OE project, we have a large number of people in the community who would make amazing mentors. Some of them have already been mentors earlier, either for other communities or in 2006. As to good ideas, as mentioned earlier, we have some head-start,with a couple of places describing what is needed. What we need is a perhaps a page on the OE wiki, putting them all together. Ideas could be segregated into two categories – the recipe based ones (though there might be issues with this) like a gnome OE port and the ones which involve python hacking/working on the bitbake core.

What needs to be done :

1. We need to set up a Wiki page or some space where we can call out for mentors and prospective ideas.
2. Figure out whether GSoC projects involving just recipes would be acceptable to Google and if we have good enough ideas for that category. My own project last year was of that kind, but then as rightly pointed out by someone, I was just lucky. Projects that involved hacking on the bitbake core will surely be well-received.
3. Are there other open-source projects that OE could act as a umbrella organization for ? Being an umbrella org for smaller projects with good ideas greatly increases the chances of acceptance.

With organization applications typically starting in the first week of March, we have about a month to go to do the above. If you are an OE developer reading this, comments/suggestions /flames are more than welcome.

Disclaimer: I am keen on seeing OE get accepted in GSoC this year,but that has nothing to do with any aspirations of applying as student/mentor. A summer intern with Microsoft Research implies that I will be officially out-of-touch with open source/GSoC. I do however have vested interests in the sense that, I would love to see OE reaching out to more people and perhaps some OE contribution from my univ. and country.

[0]: Tasks: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/112715/Documents/OpenEmbedded%20Tasks.html/index.html
One more here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/112715/Documents/OpenEmbedded%20Usability%20Concerns.html/index.html
[1]: http://openembedded.uservoice.com/

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.

“Finally some progress…” she said to herself as the logic simulator reported success for her latest design. Wistfully thinking about what possibilities awaited this new design, she almost dozed off on her desk. A shrill sound and a jolt woke her up. Her communicator screen flashed violently. Sleepily she connected to the screen. “Morning sweetheart”, a familiar voice brought a smile on her face. When was the last time time she had heard this voice? She didn’t have to think too much. Her father was on the screen physically 300 million miles across was quick in reprimanding her. “Six months and no news of you. You care more for your machines because they aren’t as dumb as us, don’t you?” “That’s not true father”, she cringed. Two lines into the conversation and Zora was reminded of the work she had, before a meeting later in the day. She had to get back to it, there was no time to talk, but she had no heart to tell her dad the same. A glance at the cupboard and she knew the answer. “Julien is a genius”, she thought to herself as she reached out to the expression simulator her fellow-scientist had built for a hobby project. Video conferences were good – only that they required you to be facing the other person all the while. If you had to speak to someone you couldn’t avoid, you had no other go but to let go of work and talk facing the other person. Julien, the artificial intelligence genius of eureka, had solved this issue on a free weekend. He build an expression simulator which took as inputs a large number of pictures of the user’s face at various angles and bits of conversations from the same user. Then it learnt how the user’s gestures and facial expression  changed as he/she conversed and simulated the same. After a few training sessions, the user could just go on working at a distant place talking on a conference as the simulator gave the other persona a fake impression of him being present and all attentive.

Zora ticked away on her computer, rehearsing her presentation mundanely as her virtual counterpart animatedly conversed with her father. 300 million miles away, a father’s heart cried in agony as he silently cursed technology for taking  his daughter away from him. Zora had been using the simulator for many of the recent conversations with people back home and though Julien’s code was brilliantly perfected, it was easy for a parent to make out his child’s face from a virtual rendering. He had been trying to look into his daughters’ eyes longing for some affection being reflected in them. All he found was a sequence of repeating facial gestures.

Zora’s father finally decided that there was no point in continuing further. He passed on a virtual kiss to her as he abruptly terminated the connection, much to her relief and surprise.  “We love our families but then, most human interactions are so redundant…” Zora recalled a discussion with Julien as she hurried away to the chamber entrance.

“Hey, what’s up ?” a familiar face peeked in. This man possibly has telepathic powers, Zora though as she welcomed Julien. “Nothing, just packing your pet project after some good use”. Zora pointed to the simulator. He seemed very different today. His was face the kind most women of his time would dismiss off as that of “yet another geek”. Zora wasn’t among them. To her, the face radiated an unsatisfiable thirst of learning, the eyes reflected a hunger for new invention and this enchanted her to no end.

They exchanged a couple of quick notes on something they were working on together. Julien left in a hurry that was unprecedented. Zora returned to her desk, but her thoughts cluttered her brain as fork-bombs that cause computer systems to hang. She finally decided to give up on work, and meet the person whose memories were disrupting her brain as they often did.

Walking up to Julien’s office, she wondered what he was up to. A figure that seemed well-prepared to be heading for a space-craft astounded her.  “You never told me about this?” she questioned Julien. “I was came to meet you regarding this, but had no heart to say goodbye”, Zora nearly fainted. The next minutes witnessed Julien giving her a lightning-speed description of their latest discovery of alien life in a far-away galactic cluster and how he was headed there for an indefinite period of time because bringing the species here was likely to kill them on the way. They had found life, but of a very delicate kind. Zora’s next thought was something Julien knew immediately. “If you are wondering why I am bothered with this extra-terrestrial life stuff being an artificial intelligence guy, it’s because these creatures have an intelligence system far different from anything we could ever imagine. If we can dissect it and figure out how it works, I am sure it will aid the development of AI like nothing ever has.” She shuddered as she though of him being thousands of light years away for God only knew how long. “We can always talk” he said, sensing her thoughts like he always did. “No, I can always talk to your simulator.” she muttered to herself as she felt insanely guilty of what she had done a few minutes earlier.

After Julien left she could no longer bear her head overflowing with various thoughts and aching like never before. She suddenly realised how indifferent she had been to her family back home, not event bothering to talk to them properly. She had always dreamt of stuff that turned humans to machines and yet as Julien today was about the move on the same path, she felt sorry for the species that was likely to be sacrificed for this purpose. Cries of despair followed and resounded across her office….

In a totally different space-time setup, Diana woke up with a start. Her cries awakened Norman at the workstation nearby. Diana apologised for disturbing him. “Thank god you woke me up” Norman said, his expressions till reflecting his shock. “I had a horrible dream”. Their shock only magnified as they spoke to each other about their dreams, and found out that they had been having the same nightmare. “This can’t and won’t be true”, Norman got up to hug and console his colleague as he still gained poise himself.  “I doubt that for I am still experiencing it”, Diana said as she looked over at Julien, who had an eerie resemblance to Norman, while still in Norman’s embrace.

“You weren’t dreaming” Zora had also appeared by then. “We are you from an alternate world, and this was our way of warning you about what your choices could lead to. We made the choices you are toying around with now, and were successful at all that you now dream of. But we lost everything in the process – from life to family and finally each other and ourselves.. and the resulting void made us decide that we need to speak to you” Zora took a deep breath.

Still stupefied, Norman ad Diana looked over at their pet project on the desk as Zora and Julien vanished. They looked at each other, both engulfed in a storm of disturbing thoughts…

http://kstars.wordpress.com/

Firstly, I would like to extend a BIG thank-you to all the following people – without their guidance and support, this project would have gone nowhere. Its a long list, since given the nature of my project – I had a chance to look closely at many of the finer aspects of both Maemo and Open Embedded and get inputs from a lot of people. (I hope I am not missing out on any names here.)

• Florian Boor – for being an amazingly patient and supporting mentor, for bearing with my cribbing about things not working and helping me get through the sticky parts, offering quick suggestions which worked wonders wherever/whenever I got stuck. He also played a big role in helping decide the roadmap further especially when we made significant changes in what we wanted to achieve next. Not to forget being always present whenever I needed him, juggling my rambling with his busy schedules.
• Carsten Munk aka Stskeeps from the Mer project – who was always there to help me out with the minutest issues that I brought out. His experience with the Hildon environment and the many tiny vagaries of maemo glib/gtk helped me out a lot. The same holds true for David Greaves aka lbt also from Mer. The Mer project was a lifesaver in many ways, since I used patches from Mer extensively for my project and intend to continue doing so to maintain this project.
• Valerio Valerio or VDVsx – our program co-ordinator for making the whole process go smoothly, making it a memorable experience for all us Maemo GSoC-ers, especially for promptly providing me any sort of help whenever I needed – like getting me in touch with Hildon developers. Robot101 and Gordon Williams for their inputs during my work with Hildon Desktop.
• Texas Instruments for the cute and awesome Beagleboard I got from them to test my work on. Also, Mike Turquette from TI whom I asked for advice now and then.
• Members from both the communities – Open Embedded and Maemo, whom I bugged on IRC channels and got insights from. Kergoth, Laibsch, Woglinde , Crofton, Pb__ , Khem and many others on #oe, discussions with whom gave me nice insights on OE features I was unaware of.
• Fellow GSoC-ers and other mentors from the Maemo community – I completely second Zach’s views on this which he mentioned in his report Its really inspiring when your fellow-mates are upto such cool stuff and to have them to look upto for various skill-sets and abilities.

A little bit of discussion on my project-

I was working on Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded, the details of which can be seen here. As against creating a filesystem image for the tablets as mentioned in the initial proposal, we choose to get a maemo software stack running on another base, as suggested by many Maemo community members then, mainly due to issues with closed source components at the lower layers. The current status is that the Maemo platform from Maemo-Glib/Gtk onwards to Hildon desktop and Maemo apps can be ported on top of any distro as a base upto X11/Xorg.

What this means for developers-

The osso/hildon libraries of maemo5.0alpha versions are now integrated in OE, and also a few fremantle-extras applications as a proof of concept. So any hildonised application can now be integrated in Open Embedded, and used on top of an existing distro. My current testing is with Maemo applications on top of Angstrom. Devices which use Angstrom or OE-based distros should hopefully benefit from this. The arrnagement is in the form of an OE overlay which can be seen here:

http://github.com/rkirti/maemo_angstrom/tree/master

What this means for end-users-

The current images have Hildon desktop (prealpha fremnantle since the later ones have closed dependencies) and a bunch of useful applications. The UI has some Ubuntu Mobile (UME) components too, but there is some way to go before this UI can meet end-user expectations. Screenshots and links to the recipes/filesystem images can be found in my previous blog posts.

The roadmap from here -

This project shall continue after GSoC as maintainence in this case is as demanding as the actual project itslef – Maemo has moved from 5.0beta to beta2 and ahead in the course of this project – so a major chunk of the work will be updating the core components like glib etc to keep pace with actual Maemo development.

I would love to hear from you on suggestions on incorporating more features in the hildon UI (while staying away from closed source dependencies and also maintaining the looks as close to the actual one as possible) or if you have cool Maemo applications that you would like to be incorporated in OE and used on a larger range of devices. Work on Fremantle Stars,for instance, is in progress and some of them are already incorporated in the image.
To sign off, I need to thank Google for an awesome summer and the chance to make some really good friends in the two communities.

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.

The first, courtesy a status message by Prakash, one of the institute’s stars in the KDE club  (thank you, praksh!)  is probably the most effective (for me) two-liner I have ever heard of -

” Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work – you don’t give up. “

I like the candidness in the line. Though the essence of it is pretty common, it just seems to stand out from all those routine motivational quotes of this sort, the so-called dozen-a-penny kind – I don’t know why.

The second, a little(?) more elaborate is a beautiful work of Shri Harivanshrai Bacchan. I had heard of this one before, but this time around its just too influential. Its a simple dictum, but for some reasons becomes very difficult to follow at times

I am putting this up here since I didn’t find the full version easily – its there as comments in some places, but nowhere as a proper page. Methinks it would make a nice literary exercise to transcreate it , the challenge being to match the beauty of the original on which a mere translation just seems to throw acid.

“Jo beet gayi so baat gayi ……

Jeevan mein ek sitara tha
Maana woh behad pyara tha
Woh doob gaya to doob gaya
Ambar ke aanan ko dekho
Kitne iske tare toote
Kitne iske pyare choote
Par puchho in toote taron par
Kab ambar shok manata hai

Jo beet gayi so baat gayi ….

Jeewan mein tha who ek kusum
The us pe nitya nyochawar tum
Wo sookh gaya to sookh gaya
Madhuwan ki chaati ko dekho
Sookhi kitni iski kaliyan
Jo murjhai phir kahan khili
Par bolo sookhe phoolon pe
Kab madhuvan shok manata hai ?

Jo beet gayi so baat gayi

Jeewan mein madhu ka pyala tha
Tumne tan man de daala tha
Woh toot gaya to toot gaya
Madiralay ka aangan dekho
Kitne pyaale hil jaate hain
Gir mitti mein mil jate hain
Jo girte hain kab uthte hain
Par bolo toote pyalon mein kab madiralay pachtata hai ?

Mridu mitti ke hain bane huye
Madhu ghat phoota hi kartein hain
Laghu jeewan leke aaye hain
Pyale toota hi karte hain
Phir bhi madiralay ke andar
Madhu ke ghat madhu ke pyale hain
Jo madakta ke mare hain
Wo madhu loota hi karte hain
Wo kachcha peene wala hai
Jiski mamta ghat pyalon par
Jo sachche madhu se jala hua
Kab rota hai chillata hai?

Jo beet gayi so baat gayi ……”

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!

]]> http://rkirti.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/gsoc-updates-hildon-on-angstrom/feed/ 2 Kirtika hildon-desktop-plugins hildon-desktop-vnc-viewer1 maemopadplus-vnc http://rkirti.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/report2/ http://rkirti.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/report2/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:53:38 +0000 rkirti http://rkirti.wordpress.com/?p=118 ]]> 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

Here are some screenshots :

Hildon-Desktop-work-in-progress

Hildon-Desktop-Partial

Sometime back, this would have been a trivial task, given the work done on Hildon Desktop Portability by the previous maintainers. However,since then hildon-desktop has changed drastically to make this obsolete and has also seen some more closed components entering, so thanks to iphbd, its now impossible to get the latest hildon-desktop to build outside scratchbox.The one in the screenshot is the pre-alpha version with Mer patches and some fixes for dbus issues.

UI Issues :

The UI I have got working currently is a messy mixture of various things. Primarily because  the current HD uses non-free packages like osso-icons-default, hildon-home etc.  Any suggestions on how get over this, and integrate the procudure of obtaining  the non-free packages as well in OE would be more than welcome.  The theme used here is plankton  and the startup scripts and icons are  a mix of those from the previous work and from Mer.  I would need to decide what UI to closely follow and the options there would be : Diablo (may get deprecated soon) or Fremantle (difficult due to closed source components and lack of documentation on packages comprising the new UI).

Other things and the roadmap ahead:

I have also added/am adding recipes for some other packages for localization, connectivity sub-system etc.  Testing of the recipes begins this week and by next week, I hope to release a filesystem image running Maemo software on top of Angstrom built with OE. With the current configuration and recipes, it is easy to write a recipe and integrate any hildonized app. into OE.

Thats it from my side for now. Any suggestions on both the Hildon and OE fronts are more than welcome

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

Here is what  I (and hopefully any other average user) would expect from a note-taking plug-in -

1. I write in bullet points – so all stuff should go with bullets.
2. The ‘interface’ has to be natural and intuitive – it shouldn’t require me to explicitly choose something from a menu or add meta-data like tags or commands – or else I could anyways use Word in the former case and Latex in the latter. It should be as natural and transparent a process for me as is switching pens while writing.
3. I should have my insights and ‘Aha!’ moments captured easily and automatically.                                                                                              Random Note 1: You wont know this unless you draw smilies between lines in your notes for the silliest of reasons like stupid mortals (me)  or Goddesses (Ramya K V, Ruta Desai, Rishita Anubhai – the list is long) do.
4. Sections and Headings should be automatic and natural – no tags, no HTML or Latex like business.

(1) and (3) were obviously  kid’s play. (2) was what seemed to be the only non-trivial part of this exercise – but that is before I tried it. When I finally got a workable solution, it was ridiculously trivial. Vim allows the user to define syntax regions – with start,end and patterns to skip – and they are deceptively simple. So I defined my ‘blue notes’ region to be that which starts with a ‘ ->’  and ends at a newline (logical not virtual). Similarly for ‘red-notes’ (really important stuff)   and ‘=>’ bullets.

This is fairly ‘natural’ and intuitive to me as a user, but it isn’t what I wanted when I started out – mainly because it confines me to use specific bullets when I want a color. What I wanted was something like ‘modes’ , for each colour and key-bindings to switch between these modes.

So ideally I would have had something like ‘toggle F1 to keep black pen off/on’ and such. But my study of Vim’s highlighting features tells me it deals with colours only in terms of  ‘groups’ which are specified again with regex-es and  patterns – so I couldnt get my ‘modes’ idea to work here. If you have any insights for  achieving that, I would be more than glad to hear.

A lesson I learnt  – its better to go for ‘syn region’ rather than ‘syn match’ whenever you can, unless you are some Vim reg-ex (its slightly different from normal reg-ex) God. I spent quite some time trying out syn match and getting buggy results  before I realized how it horribly trivial it was to do the same thing with regions. And due to this design, (4) turned out to be easy too – no bullet at the beginning of a line implies a new section, so it highlights and shades that as a heading. Finally I added a couple of  lines for abbreviating horizontal separators and  some   ‘syn match’ rules from the syntax file for Vim’s in-built  help to colorize those.

Random Note 2: The help.vim that comes in /usr/share/vim/syntax is an excellent place for some really clever syntax constructs, since the in-built help has more detailed syntax than any programming language one normally encounters.

I use the user’s git-config to find the name and email ID (‘inspired‘ from here)  and add a small template for each .notes file.  I am happy to note that I can use this stuff not only for easy note-taking, but also for web-log updation if needed, thanks to  TOhtml and for effortlessly cross-referencing my notes, thanks to Vim’s awesome ‘gf ‘ command. The plugin code is available at my github account if  the reader (whose existence and whose having read all the crap till here is a big and mostly incorrect assumption) wants to try.

git clone git://github.com/rkirti/NoteBuddy.git

It only works in gvim for now – since I am too lazy to add cterm attributes for portability. Developing for Vim to automate/simplify routine tasks is fun and I hope to add a post on a veTTi <sarcasm>project</sarcasm> here soon.

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.