What's up with Hatim?

For the past few months, I had been trying out Windows 7 exclusively on my laptop. After the intial good impression, I started noticing the cracks. The system would become super slow after a day or two, which is typical of a windows system doing alot of computing. I am still not sure what is the actual reason but it takes ages to fire up simple applications. 

Since Google decided to put Chrome for linux in beta and it has some mixed reviews (compared to Windows version) I decided to go over back to linux (that was actually in December, but writing about it now) but this time on 64 bit. Working with 64 bit has been problematic for me in the past as one would need to figure out lots of things. Fortunately lots of the issues from my previous experience with 64 bit ubuntu have been now resolved.

The first problem I ran into was bad performance of Spotify sound under Wine. This was easily solved by moving to wine-1.2 instead of wine. Another problem that I encountered was crashes of browser  when I started an Adobe Air application after I started the browser. This is also solved by first starting the Adobe Air app and then starting the browser. 

I also used Adobe's 64 bit pre-release version of flash which solves alot of issues of dancing around 32 bit libraries on 64 bit system. I have actually forgotten about lot's of issues I fixed during the move, for which I need to put a note to sel: blog when its happening, not weeks later.

 For the past one year, I have not done much development on my linode machine. When in Pakistan I needed to have a machine which could act as my IRC client as well as my blog engine, email server and a back up drop box. I have been using Linode for over a year now and I am pretty happy with their service. But the problem is that I am under utilizing this service. I can probably get a cheaper or even free service to do all my hosting.

My base line would be some thing which would cost me less than 0.027 US$ per hour. Amazons elastic cloud services might be the way to go as I would like to play around with those services. Renting a dedicated server is probably out of my reach at the moment and will not be needed for my minimal footprint activities. However there are certain benifits of using a mid size provider such as linode (a hint would be that big provider's IP segments are some times blocked by digital TV aggragators....enough said).

The reasons for moving away from linode would be mere change. I have not been keeping up with server technology for some time now and I don't necessarily get a chance to play with new things at work. I might as well just try out Amazon AWS for a month and just check it out if its even viable and if it's not, I always have a realiable VPS to come back to. In any case I would stroing recommend Linode to any one looking for a VPS.

Edit: I have looked up the cost of using Amazon AWS cloud, it costs almost double for the smallest instances, but at the same time offers double the power in terms of memory. After looking into my schedule I have decided to not tinker with my current setup till the next LTS of ubuntu comes out, after which I plan to stick with a production server for the whole lenght of LTS and it also turns out that by the time next LTS comes out I would need to update my system any way.

(30th Dec)Edit:  I have piad one more month of dues to Linode. I am on the lookout for a better VPS. If my finances permit I would prefer to go for cloud system (or atleast a bigger VPS for my Java needs).

 Windows XP is known to the most of the world as "Computer". It's every where, even Microsoft can not escape it's popularity. As a chalmers student we are allowed to get a free Windows copy for personal use, So I decided to use mine to power my home Skype box instead of Ubuntu. The reasons are rather practical,  as one cannot get Skype version more that 2.0 on Linux and the latest version for Windows solves all kinds of issues, from incoming Full Screen calls to better audio management.

In Pakistan one cannot use other VOIP services easily for now. May be even skype gets blcoked in the future. i will try to investigate a better solution. 

The only other thing besides Skype that i am running is VNCServer and DynDns update client to be able to log into the machine. The dyndns client is not very rasilaint as it does not detect IP changes.

Infact I am sitting more and more on my windows 7 installation out of necessity as it's video chat in skype is better than what I can get in Linux at the moment. Here is a screen shot of skype video chat with advanced statistics enabled. In this you can see various statistics for a call made to Pakistan from Gothenburg (with one way video). The green needle in the bottom says that the call quality is good (which is rare actually) 

One cannot do multiparty video chat with skype. I have found a nice new application called TokBox for that which does if for free. Another utility is from oovoo, but it's not free for multiparty video chat. This might be enough to push me into writing some thing of my own on top of already available SIP clients.

My desktop was getting really messy, so I decided to do a fresh install of Ubuntu. After a fresher install of 32 bit ubuntu on my shiny 64 bit system I decided to consolidate all my email accounts on one box. The problem was that there were no straight instructions on how to get IMAP and SMTP working for student.chalmers.se accouts since their move to outlook.com

Personally I don't mind MS Exchange based email servers as long as they are configured to run in some what standard mode. To my surprise I could actually get email out of the system, thanks to a French blogger.

I wonder if I can do the same for hotmail (well it's already being forwarded to my gmail account :)

 I have to come clean, I am posting this blog from Windows 7. I do have a very good excuse, my clients, my boss and my parents all require me to be in a windows machine. 

You will ask how come? As I have previously mentioned that I have a DIY video conference system in my parent's home. Apparently with Skype 4.0 which is not available for Linux yet, you can have a much better video call quality. It may also have to do with the webcam driver for my laptop, which is not at par with the windows based driver. 

My clients (or to be politically correct, my boss's clients) are mostly on windows and require help with windows based systems as well as expect windows native solutions (so even working with Java based technologies, I am still expected to come up with .exe files and installers)

But it's not that bad. I am coming back to windows after a very long time and after good changes in it. Windows 7 is actually a very slick system, but it does lack the raw power of any linux system. Hopefully I will be able to own a second machine in coming future to have as a windows only machine (I am thinking about Nokia netbook with 12 hour battery life). FYI I have a genuine windows dvd, thanks to Chalmers academic alliance with Microsoft.

One thing which I discovered while on my new system is that my extended screen was flickering rather bad. I  googled (binged?) it up and found that it could be my battery or the charger. Taking out the battery did solve the problem, I have yet to get my charge cable checked to see which problem is it (battery or charger). But while digging up information on battery health I came across page from BatteryCare(which I discovered thanks to lifehacker) detailing proper laptop battery usage guide. I had never really read up on battery care before so I will try to follow these suggestions from now at least.

I now have a battery wear level of around 30% on my laptop which considering my usage and the life of the battery (18 months almost continuous use) is not that bad.

My fifth quarter and third semester at chalmers has started. It´s only been a week and I already feel the load. Between my half time job (as a system integrator/software developer) and full time studies, I don´t think I would be able to find time to do any thing.

This quater I am taking two courses, Fault tolerant systems and concurrent programming. Both fit very nicely in my goals of becoming a better software engineer. Concurrent programming is especially interesting. In the past few months I have encountered various blogs, podcasts where it is frequently said that no self respecting programmer can claim that he can get concurrency right (for all the cases) it's a very hard problem, and people who think they know how to do it have no real idea what they are in for. 

Fault tolerance is some thing which is very crucial in any highly dependeable systems. There was another course being offered with the title of Software Engineering using Formal methods, but I decided to not take it as it deals with lots of formal theories and I have a feeling that it won't be much of a use for me (being on the practical side) I will howere try to attend a few lectures of that course (regarding concurrency modelling).

It's been ages since I have even logged into my blog , let alone SVN update it. Signs of the busy time. Well I am back in Sweden after 3 months of roaming around (which included a trip back home, a short stay in Germany and work trip in Belgium for 6 weeks). I am glad that I don't have to leave my room for a new one for  at least next four months.

While in Abbottabad, I linked up my Mom's Sony Bravia TV with a 35Euro second hand Pentium 4 box  and a 14 Euro A4Tech camera(with builtin microphone). After installing DynDNS client, OpenVPN, Skype and Vino server on Ubuntu 9.04, I have my self a remote box which I can use for video conference. Since I am a big fan of Star Trek (especially DS9) I would like to have a linux distribution, whose sole purpose is to serve as a video communication terminal. What I fail to understand is why isn't this technology (builtin cameras and mics in tv with internet connectivity) already built into TV screens.

I will post more details of my setup on the blog later, first I need to find an easy to use SIP/Video call client which can take calls automatically and show video in full screen. 

It's been long since I have blogged any thing. The primary reason is that I have been working non stop during the last 6 weeks for my summer job (kind of makes me wonder, how much free time I have during school year :S).

I am posting this blog entry to chronicle my new endeavors in software development. These days software development is all about the cloud and web/Internet development in general. At the same time there is this notion of renisnace in software development with upcoming languages and paradigms (some thing I am totally psyched about). I have been fortunate enough to get a taste of some of these new languages through my course work at Chalmers and plan to continue on learning advanced features of languages in coming quarters.

In the last few weeks I have come to notice things coming out of SpringSource, namely STS, Spring ROO and Grails.

Grails is a natural choice if you want to cook up a web based application on the fly. It's power relies on simplicity of Groovy, principles akin to ruby-on-rails, core and plugins which utilize proven Java technologies like Spring/Hibernate, JMS etc and last but not least built in Google AppEngine support.

Spring Roo is a newly released console based system for cooking up a Spring 3.0 application. It's power relies on constructing a base spring application which is flexible (can be detached from spring roo at any point).

STS is essentially an Eclipse based IDE by Spring source, made free for developer use.

In the beginning I took Grails to be an attempt to rip off Ruby on Rails, and to some extent that feeling could be attributed to being a fanboy of RoR. Now you can call me a bigger fan boy of Springsource or some one with skeptical view of rails and 37signals.

The first thing which bothers me about rails is performance. Twitter is visible example with it's massive outages, rails is not the primary contender in the performance arena (but that is probably overrated as likes of Twitter have a really large volume and not every RoR app would reach that volume). The second problem is too much power in ruby. I think that ruby is a nice language, but there are lots of features which are bit too scary for a first time developer, compared to Groovy i think Ruby would take more time to learn (I have to admit that I have been lazy learning both, but in my defense these are both not the primary languages at work or school). Last but not least with Springsource backing Grails makes Ruby-on-Rails the less enterprise friendly choice (in my opinion). There is an interesting comparison done here.

I will be focusing on even newer frameworks and paradigms as time permits, but for now I am stuck with what spring source has to offer. The primary reason is the current projects I am involved with are based on Spring 2.0 and it's evolution is highly coupled within the 'spring family'.

The new frameworks/languages I am looking forward to are Scala(Lift), Erlang, Ocaml and perhaps even F# (from Microsoft). Scala is some thing I have yet to touch (I plan to work on it during my functional programming course this Fall). I have gotten a bit of hype on it from Java Posse pod cast which I have begun listening to (along with SERadio.net) Lift is to Scala what rails is to Ruby. I wonder if some thing similar exists for Erlang.

This year I was not able to secure a place in Google summer of code, partly because the organization for which I wanted to work (to which I owed work) didn't make it through the application process (seems Google is more interested in giving project with social nature more chance). Instead I came across an the opportunity of working along a client of a previous employer of mine on a project in which I had some insights. The project is currently in testing and integration phase and has plans of an open source release this year of which I will be part of. I will fill in the details about the project later, but it is sufficient to say that it's a Spring/Hibernate application :)

So to work closely with the project owner I flew in from Gothenburg to Dusseldrof-Weez and came via train to Antwerp. The journey it's self has some painful stories. I left Gothenburg on 27th of May after handing in my last e-Health assignment (which I passed and got maximum grade in the course). I got late for the city Airport bus and was forced to take another bus which dropped me off 3 kms away from the town. I had to drag my stuff on the highway if it was not for the help of a Swede who drove me off to the airport on his car (some airport employee, nice fellow).

Catching the cheap RyanAir flight  and landing in Germany was uneventful. I had to take a rather expensive transport to the train station in Venlo, Nethrlands from where I got train to Antwerp. But on my way just before Rotterdam I missed getting off on the station (as it was a quick stop) and had to catch a train coming back (there by wasting almost an hour). But all in all I got here safe and sound and was picked up by a colleague.

I have a decent place to crash for the few weeks here (pictures here) I also snapped few pictures of Antwerp and will be posting them here on my Flickr page.

PS: I have decided to stop delaying blog posts for quality, as it means I don't blog at all. I guess quality of blog will improve with time (just like quality of code ;)

It's been long since I put a blog entry and that too regarding my studies at Chalmers. For my fourth Quarter I had on compulsory course of Software Architecture and chose e-Health as an elective course. I will refrain from discussing the courses them selves, but would only mention that e-Health was much better course compared to the other one.

The subjects of Software Architecture and e-Health are actually very hot these days. With a lot of countries investing into electronic health it was time for me to cover some domain aspects. I have plans to continue with this subject and will be posting links to blogs I am following.

One of the most interesting blogs I have come across is Health Care IT guy (by a software architect named Shahid Shah who appears to be of Pakistani descent). 

For now I am finished with my compulsory course requirements and would hope to choose electives with greater learning value in coming Fall.