Posted by hatim
Fri, 02 May 2008 07:27:00 GMT
I tried Ubuntu 64 bit Alternate Installer on a brand new desktop with core2duo and software RAID (i previously wrongly reported it as Ubuntu Server). The installation was a brreze but for some reason I was not able to install GRUB out of the box. Once I realized what I was missing I staright away copied the grub files (stage1 stage2 files etc) and installed grub and I was on my way.
Installing RAID on ubuntu is easy with server installation, but one has to make the software RAID partitions manually before the install. I also made the unused space after RAID as part of LVM so as to utilize the disks effeciently. I also installed webmin through a deb package, I realize that its not very secure, but from webmin one can learn alot of configurations and can supplement some user based managament of the server.
As for Ubuntu's latest offering, I am fairly impressed. This distro is getting better with every release. The other day I was having a discussion on #opennms about using customizable distros like "Gentoo". I think I have done good by trading in felxibility for stability so I can concentrate on the real problems at hand. One learns alot on Gentoo, but one could also learn much stuff on gentoo as well becuase kernel and other packages are essentially the same.
I have yet to install Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 on my laptop but I think I will probably wait for Ubuntu 8.10 to come to make the swicth. With summer of code and other devlopment activities, I dont have the time to meddle with new installations.
Edit: I did install te 32 bit version on my laptop for a test run and was not convinced of its stability. I would be sticking with 7.10 for some time now. It atleast works.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, ubuntu | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:21:00 GMT
I have been selected for Google Summer of code for the second time. My writing skills and my socilazing on irc has paid off well and now it time to concentrate on my software devlopment skills. Like last year I witnessed the irc party on #gsoc @ freenode. There were almost 900 people in attendence and Leslie was trying to calm every one down by frantically typing, 'calm down' , 'chill', 'patience' every other second :). I have so far gotten emails from both Google and OpenNMS. here is an excrept from Google's email
Dear Applicant,
Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your
application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please
check your student home page in the SoC web application at
http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of
your applications was accepted.
Over the next few days, you will be added to a special members only
......
If you cannot take part for some reason, please email us at
gsoc@google.com as soon as possible so that we can allocate your slot
to another student.
Other questions and concerns should be send to gsoc@google.com
Thanks for taking part; we're very excited to see what the Summer will bring!
Congratulations once again,
The Google Summer of Code Progam Administration Team
and here from RangerRick (Ben Reed from OpenNMS)
== Hello ==
So I just wanted to send out a quick note to welcome you to the OpenNMS
community, and to thank you for getting involved in Summer of Code!
This is our first time as a mentoring organization, so we'll be learning
alongside you how to do things. If you have any questions, please don't
hesitate to contact....
.....the next month, it's "Community Bonding" time. Time for you to get
to know us, for us to get to know you, and for everyone to get familiar
with interacting, checking out/building/working with the OpenNMS
codebase, and all that fun stuff. Get on the mailing lists, join us in
IRC, introduce yourselves, and most importantly, have fun!
- --
Benjamin Reed
The OpenNMS Group
http://www.opennms.org/
I am already a part of the Google Student mailing list and have updated my profile for this year's project. I aslo see that this year there is some one else working on Internet2 Java OWAMP project and hopefully they will succeed this time. As for me I will be start the tasking of my project as of today (ie identifying the small tasks for the migration).
Wish me luck :)
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:04:00 GMT
I wanted to setup Trac on my server, but haven't found a recepie which only uses nginx for Trac and SVN componenet. So I decided to go for plain Webbased SVN application. I chose WebSVN because it uses PHP and is easy to setup, it's used by KDE project for their SVN view and most of all, its readily available in Ubuntu :). I found a nice tutorial from HowToForge.com for setting up svn and websvn on Ubuntu. My websvn repository can be found here.
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, linux, svn | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:47:00 GMT
I was looking inot making my own spring-mvc project through maven and found the archetype:generate command. I was pleasently surprised to find app-fuse stuff within the realms of maven. These projects (maven and appfuse) are different but related projects and some times cause confusion. Appfuse basically allows devlopers to quickly setup an application for a Java EE project with the option of using state of art open source Java EE frameworks (Spring, Struts2, Tapestry). Where as maven is a build tool (like maven) with a flexible project model. It even has its own integration server by the name of continuum (which can tell devs if a build is broken).
I only ran mvn archetype:generate command and rest of the SpringMVC-Hibernate application was setup by the framework it's self. It even made it's own database and put in the required tables. It would be interesting to see how it does all of this with maven.
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, Java, maven | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:48:00 GMT
These days mutt is my default email client. Even though I still use webmail for my service based accounts (gmail, yahoo) and Evolution at work I would one day like to merge all my accounts under one roof with IMAP, spam control and mutt as my 'Mail User Agent'. The first thing which I wanted to do with my mutt was to make it send PGP-signed messages. I found the following links to be interesting read.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, mutt | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:13:00 GMT
I requested my hosting service to migrate my virtual private box from a User Mode Linux setup to a Xen setup. Xen seems to be the de facto visualization solution for Linux. It has become a considerable part of new Red Hat Certified Engineer's exam as well (for which I am prepping these days). Interestingly I was having troube running jetty plugin on User Mode Linux but now I am ablt to run that plugin (jetty wont bind to port on the local UML machine, now it does).
Posted in Technology | Tags Java, linux | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:44:00 GMT
I had been planning to sell my (crappy)Suzuki Alto VXR ,2003 to some (un)-lucky shopper. I had already put up an ad on the back of my car and received many calls. I was hoping to get 350,000 Rupees out of this car. Eventually I sold it for 338,000 Rs (roughly 200$ less than my asking price), but I think it was a good deal. The car had an accident and was not in the best of shapes but it looked ok. I will be using my Dad's Honda Civic from now ;).
Posted in LifeLog | Tags car | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:33:00 GMT
following is a repost of my SoC proposal for OpenNMS
Synopsis
OpenNMS currently still depends on some PostgreSQL-specific behavior (especially in stored procedures) which keeps it from being database-independent. Although OpenNMS has been slowly transitioning its code to use Hibernate instead of direct JDBC calls, but there is a lot of code still using JDBC. The following is a project proposal for Google Summer of code 2008 to the OpenNMS project. This document gives details of project methodology, time lines, and risks.
in short
- The aim is to complete hibernate transition for the entire OpenNMS project. Author's aim is to complete major tasks by Dev-Jam 2008.
- The deliverable are code, test cases and documentation. OpenNMS installation documentation which deals with OpenNMS install with MySQL and perhaps a few other OSS Databases will be part of deliverable.
- Applicant has been a part of OpenNMS user community for a year now and has genuine interest in Java EE software development(due to his present job and future education and career directions)
- Applicant will be sharing code samples before project selection to show mentors that the applicant has sufficient background in Java EE software development.
Further info and code samples will be available at http://code.hatimonline.com/opennms
Read more...
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:53:00 GMT
Today started as normal Monday for me, I got up early to get in my Dad's car only to sleep my way through the journey from Abbottabad to Islamabad (our weekly Monday ritual). We reached in time , I had my usual breakfast and hitched a ride with my Dad's chuffer to my office as I had left my car parked there. I was on my usual route in rush hour traffic and then some thing happened which has shocked me to my core. A young boy in his teens wearing school unform was on a bus full of otehr kids hanging from the bus. The fully loaded public transport hastily sped and over took a truck. In this process the boy lost his grip and fell down on the road only to be crushed by the oncoming truck.
I just can't describe how horrific it was. I have never seen a person die before, atleast like this.Since that time the scene of that young boy in school uniform getting crushed by a truck has been playing in my mind over and over. There was nothing any one could do. No one knew what that young student could have become had he continued his education. We probably loose so many young people this way. This was just a pointless death, So many people could have done some thing to avoid such a loss. I just can't help but think, what did that young chap deserve to get this painful death. He was son to some one, probably brother to some others. He could have become a sole bread earner for his family, with his death so many hopes and dreams have died. It is true that you can tell the charecter of a nation by looking at it's traffic. Our charecter can then only be described as thugs, rapists and of murderes. It was the guy's fault too that he should have considered his own safety. But I would blame it all on the traffic police.
Why can't Islamabad traffic police stop buses which are over crowded, ban any driver or company who violates these basics of safety. I am not talking about seat belts or air bags, I am talking about people not hanging from the roof of buses and every one having a decent seat to sit on. I am just not going to sit idle on this and will make sure that I make this case heard on every public forum.
Posted in Rants | Tags Politics, sad | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:56:00 GMT
Google's Summer of code application deadline for students has been extended for one week. It's now Monday April 7th 2008. This is good as well as bad. It's good because it gives me one more week to make my application even better, and it's bad because I will be spending now more time in the application process than in actual coding
Edit:
Well I didn't spend more time on my application, but I was able to get Jetty running through maven. Apprently User Mode Linux was preventing Jetty from binding to an IP, but after migrating to Xen every thing works smoothly now. It seems that I would also be able to run OpenNMS now :).
I am currently following the following good links for sample application devlopemnt
http://www.lulu.com/content/1087191 (Set of tutorials to start devlopment with Spring and Hibernate using Maven2)
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/03/01/building-web-applications-with-maven-2.html (Maven 2 Web application devlopment tutorial using Jetty plugin)
I have also found the following book to be useful
Thomas Van de Velde, Bruce Snyder, Christian Dupuis, Sing Li, Anne Horton, Naveen Balani
ISBN: 978-0-470-10161-2
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, contests, opennms, soc | no comments | no trackbacks
