Whats up with Hatim!

I have been working in a group of 8 student developers for my Agile Devlopment in teams course. Since this is a process course, the focus is on practice and not on results (one would hope). For second week of work session I volunteered to be the tracker. The main problem which I observed so far was that the documentation was all haphazard. I am not used to working with papers and a previous experience of mine with time tracking is also a big motivation (I really hate to pinpoint time tracking, but it is useful in some scenarios).

At the beginning of each iteration we have a bunch of user stories. Each user story has atleast a description and a set of acceptance tests. These acceptance tests have description and an expected result. Then each of these user stories have a priority for the current iteration. Each user story can be devided into tasks, but this is some thing best done by the programming team. Each User story has an estimate and so does each task. The estimate is usually in number of man hours but it can be less (and it is certainly in our case) In XP since every thing is done in pairs, therefore each task (and probably all with the same user story) go to a particular pair based on bidding (who so ever bids the least time gets the task).

After completion of a task/user story, some one from the team (probably the customer representitive) has to check each user story against it's acceptance tests.

Each week any two personnel from the teams act as Customer representetive and Tracker for the project. The tracker is suppose to keep track of all the metrics involved in the project. The idea is to make a simple web/desktop based software which can do all of these simple things with no hassle. And since this course is all about agility this software should be up and running over the weekend.

I am thinking of using Ruby on Rails. This would finally be my chance to work with RoR. Perhaps all the facilities are readily provided by other  open source software like Trac, but there are many features like time tracking (like in basecamp) which I would like to see in an Agile Devlopment Tracking software. This is just an idea  for now , lets see if I am able to cook some thing nice :)

I have a CentOS server in my home for linux practice. I have nicknamed this server as tivoserver as I plan to make it a TiVo box. I will later put MythTV on the system and station it in my family home in Abbottabad. But for now I had to install my D-Link PCI Wireless card onto CentOS 5. There are no linux drivers available for it so I searched for alternative solutions. Foryunately this card is supported by Ndiswrapper. I used the following two links to get it setup.

• HowTo: Install Ndiswrapper on CentOS
• CentOS Wireless configuration

I downloaded ndiswrapper source and compiled/installed it. Then i put in the D-Link driver CD-ROM and got hold of Win2k/XP SYS file for the WiFi driver. It loaded itself easlity. I put in the configuration into

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

and every thing worked smooth untill i got some errors due to differnet channel selection.

The thing is that even though I explicitly say to the server to use channel 9, it some how was using channel 6. Ofcourse I am using the wireless connection in Ad-Hoc more for peer to peer communication. 

It saddens me to blog about it but I guess it has to be done. As of July 16th 2007 I am no longer part of Summer of Code 2007. I started off working quite late on the project, some of it has to do with my present circumstances with job, but alot of it has to do with my time managment. i did learn some thing from this experience, but in the end this project was a failure. But no harm done, its all part of learning process in life. Projects fail ..and infact lots of projects in software engineering fail.

I have been busy as hell in the past few weeks. but I did find some time to install Fedra Core 6 and Ubuntu 7.4 on my home machine. The primary reason was just to try the thing out. I was expecting alot of new goodies since I last tried these out and my expectations were met. First thing which I was pleased to find was the correct automatic settings of X for my intel motherboard. Both of the X configurations in question were 3d enabled. Other things which impressed me was the new 'Desktop Effects' option of Gnome. With the integration of Beryl/Compiz componenets in Ubuntu and Fedora desktops, one can now have the same kind of eye candy which is only found on Vista or MacOS X. 

Although new Fedora Core comes out in a few days, I will probably stick with Core 6 for the rest of summer. I have decided to stick with Ubuntu on my laptop for the followin reasons.

• What ever you do , there are still issues with products on fedora , which get easily installed on red hat entrprise linux. fedoa != red hat.
• Ubuntu has become a ditro of choice at many places including Google. It is also being preinstalled on Dell laptops, soon it will be on other laptops
• Ubuntu has server and 64-bit editions of their distribution (I even got 64-bit version CDs shipped this time)
• Last and most important, Ubuntu gets shipped free, no one can beat that.

 

Solaris was my first direct interaction with UNIX(first college lab session for introduction to computing in which we were taught how to send/receive our email through pine). Since then I have always been fascinated with Sun machines and Solaris. It may be long time before I own a kickass  Sun Server for my own personal use, but with Solaris_x86 in picture, I can play with one of the most advanced operating system on the planet on my old P4 box (I also plan to install Minix, *BSD, and lots of other open source OSes).

I ordered a free Solaris Express DVD of solaris from Sun's website. I was surprised to get it within 2 weeks as normally these things reach pretty late in my locality. I popped it into my Intelx86 machine and fired it up. It booted kind of slow, but that could have been my DVD drive. It was not pleasant to find out that the default X server which the installation DVD loaded was not showing up on my Intel D865 based vga.

I booted again in text mode and started the installation process. After a reboot I looked into how to configure X and network. I was unable to get both working in the first try. I went to Sun's support chat site and I was mentioned the hardwae compatibility link. I tried the Solaris device detection java webstart applet. Every thing checked out (except for my bt878 based tv tuner card). The JNLP mentioned a link for third party network drivers, which I later downloaded (but was only able to get working after some beating around the bush)

Then I decided to visit #solaris on irc.freenode.net (from my other machine)and boy was that an eye opener. First this I learnt is that Solaris is not Linux ( I knew that, but if you even mention name of Linux in #solaris you get flamed easily), second #solaris has lots of rude shrews. They help less and try to establish that their  "brain size" is more than yours since you asked a question. Although looking up on google before you ask a question is always recomended, but it is possible to not find answer to a simple question from a Google search. Any ways I decided NEVER to goto #solaris. I would like to leave the self contained so called UNIX admins to their own sad lonely existance. I went to #opensolaris where people are friendly and enthusiastic (like any open source project).There I got some good pointers.

Solaris has two kinds of X servers;Xsun and Xorg. Xsun is probably a good choice for Sun machines, but Xorg produced better results on x86 machines. The problem I encountered was that the default configuration produced by X -configure was only good for higher resolutions. A utility called kdmconfig lets superuser choose between the two servers. The configuration of Xorg is similar by the use of 'xorgconfig'.

Solaris x86 express edition comes with alot of goodies which include StarOffice 8, Netbeans 5.5, Sun Studio Enterprise, Gimp, Firefox to name a few. It has two desktops CDE and Gnome. Gnome based desktop looks quite polished (just like Ubuntu).

 

 

 

Overall my first impessions of solris are quite positive. But these impressions are superficial and very cosmetic. In reality I am more interested in knowing more about the internals of Solaris (Kernel and TCP/IP stack and things like DTrace).

 

On my job I have been hitting my head with configurations of Net-SNMP, OpenNMS and Asterisk. Asterisk v 1.4 has introduced some SNMP support into their core. I used this tutorial from VoipMagazine.com to get SNMP/Asterisk working for me on my Gentoo box at work.

Next step was to make collection of statistics from OpenNMS. OpenNMS lacks polished documentation and things are rather scattered. After some playing around with the configurations I have been able to make OpenNMS work on my local network. There are still issues some issues involved namely the addition of an Asterisk category to the front page, auto discovery of SIP and monitoring of  statistics  which are not provided but have to be computed (ie. no of bridged SIP channels on any given system).

I will hopefully post a detailed HOW-TO on gentoo-wiki very soon.