Whats up with Hatim!

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

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.

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

OpenNMS got selcted for Google Summer of code 2008. It seems that making enough noise on IRC and mailing lists does work :). I have also got my slef registered as a part time student in Virtual University of Pakistan as a Masters leve certificate course student, so it seems that pieces are falling into their places. I am thinking of applying for OpenNMS hibernate implementation coding. Right now I am just applying and I have hope that I will make it. But unlike last year I think I better take some time off from my full time job as I wont be able to juggle between job, course and SoC. For now I better post samples of hibernate coding on my site (possibly running under jetty)

A friend of mine got married this month. His marriage brought unnecessary pressure from my parents on the subject of my own sentecning :) I told them there is time for it and ofcourse I don't have time to find the girl (with all the procastinating I do). Any who this was the first ever complete Pakistani marriage I have attended in my life. I went to a pre-Mehndi function, Mehndi, Barrat and Walima. The highlights were meeting few friends after 5 years and sharing old memories.

Here are some pics from different events.

I found a link to screen shots of Red Alert 3, it looks stunning. Red Alert was my favourite game  back in the day when I was a hard core gamer. I have been in retirement since last 2 years , but this title may lure me out of retirement :). Now I also have a Vista box with me which could run this game, but I would like to play this title on PS3 instead.

more pics here

A friend of mine who was coming to Pakistan from USA for vacation was kind enough to order an Acer Aspire 7720-6604 laptop from newegg.com. I have previously used newegg.com and like their service. Initially I had waited for the launch of Apple Mac Book Pro with Penryn processors, but after the launch I was not very impressed with the specs. It was same MacBook Pro with a little better processor. I searched for the first few laptops and decided to buy this Acer machine for my self.

This laptop comes with Windows Vista Ultimate and an HDMI connector, but it does not come with a BlueRay. I am suspecting that with the recent new of impending demise of HD-DVD, upcoming high end Acer laptops will come with BlueRay as an option.

Overall I am satisfied with this laptop. It has a nice exterrior and an OK interior. Its finish is not as bad as it looks in the pictures. The real deal is in the specs. It has whooping 3 gig of RAM. I have nver worked on a machine with this much RAM before so it would be intresting. It also has 512 MB Geforce 8600 GT graphics card which would be very good for PC gaming. But I am no longer interested in gaming.

Windows Vista comes with trail/crap ware, alot of games from Oberon media with 60 minutes demo. The first thing I did was to uninstall them. They left their shortcuts, which I would delete once I log back to Windows. Windows Vista has neat looks, but Ubuntu's compiz is way much more configurable.

After having few hours with Vitsa, I wasted no time and installed Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy on to my machine. Apprently the 64-bit version of live CD was not able to work properly so I selleted for 32-bit one. Every thing worked fine except for sound driver. The sound card in this particular is based in intel high definition audio. I tried few Ubuntu recipies here and there, but I guess the real problem was that snd-hda-intel module had to be loaded with correct parameter, which was essentially one small line at the end of /etc/modeprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel model=acer

I chose for Ubuntu (and not Kubuntu) because of its better integration options (in terms of compiz and multimedia). I plan to make a Gentoo machine out of this laptop, but frankly Ubuntu fulfills most of my needs.

As for the bads of this laptop, I really don't like its keyboard. Perhaps it is because I am used to keyboard of previous laptop. Also this laptop get heated to some extent. I always thought that upcoming chips would probably produce less heat as they consume lesser power, but it is almost the same. I would recommend and one who has a need for a serious devlopment machine to get this laptop. I actually got it for a very good price (1368.51 US$, or around 83000 Pak Rupess at the time). Hopefully this laptop would be a good investment.

I went home to Abbottabad this weekend to help out my Dad with some construction work. Apprently the quality of constuction of our house roof was of bad quality. The architect of the house had not concieved that this house would witness alot of snow in the winters as it did this year. The whole roof had started leaking and the carpet in my room had gone all wet. So my dad decided to redo the roof. First he got hold of a roof treatment company which makes the roofs impenetrable to water. Then the tougher part was to cement all the roof, We called up 25 day labrours. First thing in the monrning before they even start working is that they ask for breakfast. I ran to the local Tandoor to get 35 naans for them to be served with tea. Then they started their work.

I was amzaed to see how these guys worked. They had formed their specialities. One guy operated the machine, other guys poured in sand, cement and crushed rockes to form concrete. Few other people formed a supply chain and one mason did the actual filling. The whole roof was done in a matter of 4 hours. There was one hitch when it started raining in the middle of it, but it only lasted about 15 minutes. I will post few snaps of the construction work here.

You know when you keep on delaying things, it has a tendency to bite back. I was posting drafts of my blog entries for the entire month of December in my laptop. But then I do the ultimate blunder of plainly deleting the folder. Even at this point lesson was not learnt. I was suppose to recover my laptop back to its factory state (ie Windows) and I forgot to backup my private PGP keys. This is the second time within one year that I have lost my PGP keys this way. I never backed them up on my server. I guess the best way to ensure that keys are never lost is to print the private key.

But life still goes on. All I have are few unused public keys on to global PGP servers, but atleast the key which matters is posted on my own site. I really need to look into some good backup solutions (other than online)

I have finally decided with a heavy heart that I won't be buying a MacBook Pro (at least this year) even after the rumors came true and new MacBook pro was released last Tuesday. The primary reason for dumping Mac is price. What ever strings I am trying to pull I will not be able to make a purchase of a new MacBook Pro nearly less enough from its retail 2000$ price. The education discount version comes at a price of 1799$ and that too without a remote control (which is sad as that costs an extra 19$). The only major reason for me to buy a Mac Book Pro was to be able to work on MacOS X leapord, but then I realized that this was not being true to my slef as an open source software developer. Following is a run down of why I am not going for Apple's MacBook Pro.

• It's too expensive. It's not like they put some really cool hardware in it. Infact the model of Acer has more RAM and Harddrive, things which I would require from my portable machine. Also the screen size of MacBook which I was planning to get is some what smaller than screen size of Acer. For programming a bigger screen szie would be helpful.
• I am an open source developer and the OS which is focus of my attention is Linux (I also some times play with open solaris and freebsd). With this laptop I will have a retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate which I can boot just to check how my programs fare on the other side of the force. I could theoretically install Mac OSX onto my Acer, but that would be against the EULA of Apple.
• Laptops dont necessarily die if you use them properly. Although apple computers age better I don't intend to keep my newest laptop for more than two years. So a sturdy Apple Care protected laptop won't do me much good.
• I was expecting that Apple would be releasing a BlueRay based MacBook Pro, but this didn't happen. I am not planning to play alot of movies any way on my laptop. Besides with the money I save I can buy a SonyPlaystation 3.

I have already ordered the Acer Aspire from newegg.com. I will get hold of in second week of March (hopefully). Following are the specs of the said laptop.

Model
Brand Acer
Series Aspire
Model AS7720-6604
Part# LX.ANS0U.011
General
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate
CPU Type Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 2.1G
Screen 17" WXGA+
Memory Size 3GB DDR2
Hard Disk 320GB
Optical Drive DVD Super Multi
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
Video Memory 512MB
Communication Modem, Gigabit LAN and WLAN
Card slot 1 x ExpressCard/54 slot
Dimensions 15.9" x 11.7" x 1.5-1.7"
Weight 8.1 lbs.
CPU
CPU Type Intel Core 2 Duo
CPU Speed T8100(2.10GHz)
CPU FSB 800MHz
CPU L2 Cache 3MB
Chipset
Chipset Intel PM965
Display
Screen Size 17.0"
Wide Screen Support Yes
LCD Features Acer CrystalBrite Technology
Display Type Wide XGA+
Resolution 1440 x 900
Operating Systems
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate
Graphics
GPU/VPU NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
Video Memory up to 1280 MB of TurboCache (512 MB of dedicated GDDR2 VRAM, up to 768 MB of shared system memory)
Graphic Type Dedicated Card
Hard Drive
HD Capacity 320GB
HD RPM 5400rpm
HD Interface SATA
Memory
Memory Slots 2 x DIMM
Memory Speed DDR2 667
Memory Size 3GB
Optical Drive
Optical Drive Type DVD Super Multi
Optical Drive Interface Integrated
Communications
Modem V.92 56K
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11a/b/g/draft N
Ports
Card Slot 1 x ExpressCard/54 slot
USB 4
IEEE 1394 1
Video Port 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x S-Video TV-out
Other port CIR (consumer infrared)
Audio Ports headphones/speakers/line-out with SPDIF support
microphone
line-in
Audio
Audio High Definition Audio support, Dolby Home Theater
Speaker 2 surround sound speakers + 1 subwoofer
Input Device
Touchpad Yes
Keyboard Standard
Supplemental Drive
Card Reader 5-in-1 card reader for optional MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO or xD-Picture Card
Webcam Yes
Power
AC Adapter 90-watt AC adapter
Battery 8-cell lithium ion
Physical spec
Dimensions 15.9" x 11.7" x 1.5-1.7"
Weight 8.1 lbs.
Manufacturer Warranty
Parts 1 year limited
Labor 1 year limited