Well its no longer a surprise that Google sends out goodies to its Summer of code students before the start of Summer of Code, but it is still a surprise that which title would they be sending. I recieved (with apologies to those who still want this surprise to be secret) Beutiful Code by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson. I had this book in e-format previously, but i would probably never have read it. I already started reading it’s Chapter 20 which is reltaed to a Java based information portal which was devloped for Mars Rover missions. This is an excellent gift for an aspiring Software engineer like me. Thank you Google 
Summer of Code gift from Google
Posting blog from my cellphone
I have finally broken the taboo. I am posting this blog from my Sony Erricson W810i.
Edit: Actually the above two sentences were the only things which i was able to post from my cell phone (this I am posting from my Desktop at work). Yesterday I decided to enable WAP over my cellphone. It was much easier than the last time I had tried. My cellphone service provider is an old memoth and is loosing its customers fast to new rivals, so I guess they have made their customer services much better. Any who I only used it to reply to one messege which i got on my gmail and to post this blog micro entry above. Poisting blog from a cell phone like mine is a big hassle in my opnion, but still its better than not posting at all.
Leave the first comment ▶Debain’s security breach
I had been reading up on the Ubuntu security breach since this Tuesday and was concerned that my system would also have been compromised. A little searching yielded a site which described the venerability in some detail and shows how to exploit it. It also has a bunch of private/public keys which were generated on a 31 core machine (some thing which only a serious computer venerability researcher would do).
I looked up into the keys and I was not able to find my public keys. Perhpas the vernerability is more than it seems (or perhaps lesser). But In any case I have changed my keys
Disappointing Fedora 9
In the last few days I had been reading reviews and hearing some good things about Fedora 9, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the 64 bit version of fedora kde-livecd. The CD booted easily on my Acer Aspire 7720-6604. I was greeted by a dark theme (which is not my taste). I then tried out some preinstalled software and frankly I was not impressed. The KDE version comes with Koffice and Konqueror. Since I have not used KDE for some time now I had not realized that I had grown used to Gnome. Overall there was nothing mindblowing about KDE 4 and it was yet another Fedora release. I then tried to do a dummy install to check that how ext4 support works, again to my disappointment there was no ext4 option available (i later tried with the kernel parameter ext4 but without any luck) I think ext4 is only available on the full installer version.
The lack of packages in precompiled distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora is prompting me to move back to Gentoo (or some even flexible operating system choice). Lets hope that Gentoo guys release 2008.0 before the start of 6th month of this year (its already behind schedule)
Leave the first comment ▶Trying out Google Analytics
I had been feeling the need to store statistics for my website for some time now since I moved off from a Cpanel host and on to a VPS. I asked around and was suggested that I should try out Google Analytics. I had seen Google Analytics being used in a client project as well so I decided to give it a try. It was relatively easy to setup with a google account (I just had to paste some generated java script code into my main typo theme layout file).
There are many thing which I have not even touched in Analytics but they are all geared towards increasing your site traffic (including managing campgains, checking out where are the traffic sources etc). One can also export the reports in XML and PDF (which is good as this means that I am not bound to Google Analytics for ever , if I decide to move over I will use the XML to migrate my data). I now have a measure on how many unique vistors are coming to my site and from which location. I have yet to find in Google Analytics how to check for user IPs though (ping me if you know how to do that)
Google analytics can be described in one word "awsome".
Leave the first comment ▶Accpted to Chalmer University of Technology, Software Engineering
This year I had applied to admission to various programs in Sweden and have been waiting anxiously for their result. Today I was delighted to find out that I had been admitted to Chalmers University of Technology for MS in Software Engineering. This year the admission process of MS in Sweden had beeen centerlized by the swedish authorities by the use of webbased application system which distributted scanned copies of admission results to all the universities. I applied to 8 different programs, following is a list of those programs.
This year’s admission process was a tense and competetive one. It started in Dec of 2007 with the announcement of programs and online registration for web based application at studera.nu. I chose the programs based on my interests, chances of getting a scholarship and reputation of the University (I also made sure that I ended up in Stockholm or Gothenberg). I had applied online in time, but my documents almost missed the deadline (they reached on Feb 15th). I sent my documents a bit late (on Feb 10th) via FedEx and i was promised by the FedEx guy that it will be on its destination in 72 hours. My documents reached Stockholm rather quickly but they were supposed to go to a very unknown town in middle of nowhere (Stromsund where VHS ,the company which manages studera process, is situated). Needless to say that I spent some tense days in Feburary thinking that I had missed the deadline and blown my chances of admission this year. And if my docs had not made it in time that might have been the case.
Then it was a long wait till Mid of march till it was confirmed that all my documents had been recieved and had been sent to the Universities for review. When the time line of April 17th approached Studera suddenly decided to delay the process till 29th April. They again delayed the process till May 8th. Every one I know was extremely frusturated with this delay. I found some comfort in a facebook discussion forum (which was previously a blog entry for a romanian guy. On small scandal on this forum was that some how an Excel sheet of the admission record for Chalmers got leaked on the internet. It really didnt contain much but it was a leak, it was removed quickly from the board. I came to know that people from all over the world had applied to universities and it feels like that this international representation would be strong in the programs them selves as well, which is a good thing.
I was suspecting that my result would be out by May 8th Sweden time but I was deligted to check my studera status as accpted today. I am suppose to start with classes on Sep 1st this year. Hopefully securing a visa will not be a problem as I have already started work on that issue. This is second good news for me this year after my selection in summer of code for the OpenNMS project. I am not very hopeful for SI scholarship for which I am eligible due to my current program, but you never know till its finalized. Also I wont be applying to any more Grad Schools this year as I had initially planned.
Leave the first comment ▶Ubuntu Alternate Intaller 8.04 , Thoughts
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.
Leave the first comment ▶Getting Selected for Google Summer of Code ‘08
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
Setting up WebSVN
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.
Trying out AppFuse
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.
Leave the first comment ▶
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