brahmana blogs

Should Indian farmer think of his family's hunger or the country's?

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:07:00 -0700

This is the type of condition the typical Indian farmer currently is in. When I say typical Indian farmer, I am referring to those lean hard working people who sweat out the whole day and yet just have a hand to mouth existence, that too if they are lucky. I do not have to substantiate the last part of my previous statement as the state of our farmer is well known. No matter how hard the farmer tries, how hard he struggles, the first person to gain from that is the middle-man, with whom the farmers are compelled to park their annual produce. The reason for that is another story in itself, probably some other time. Anyways, focusing on the topic of this post, let me try and tell you why I think farmers today are faced with this question.

We all know Indian population is growing faster than any other thing in the country with an unbeatable consistency. This directly corresponds to heavily increased demand & consumption of food. Good news is that the country's agriculture is able to meet this rising demand pretty well, thanks to the technology. With improved variety of seeds and fertilizers, increased proliferation of irrigation, some education to farmers, better knowledge of weather behavior and so and so forth, the throughput per acre of land has increased, in almost every variety of cultivation. So the farmer now has more goods to sell every year and get more revenue. But sadly this is has not transformed into increased income to the farmer yet because of the ever increasing input costs. The seeds have improved, but they cost more, a lot more. The fertilizers are better, they reduce the time to grow, but they really push the farmer deep into the pit of debt. Its the same story with irrigation equipments, modern cultivation methodologies, etc.. (Government is trying various policies and subsidies, but still the costs are higher and have increased substantially). As a result the farmer is still poor and leads a hand to mouth existence. Not only that, he now has to invest a higher amount initially (which most farmes do by taking a loan from the middle-man) and hence is taking a bigger risk, because in case of a failed crop he has a much bigger debt to repay. The trade off / inequality / tragedy is clear here. The farmer is the one who is providing the country's ever increasing population with the food supply, by putting on more risk on himself and yet he earns the same as he has been earning. All that he can think of doing is to have proper meals for himself and his family, in other words - bare survival. If he starts thinking of proper education for his children, or a proper house in place of the generations old dilapidated building, he invariably has to go for a loan again. In such a situation it is but natural for the farmer to think that whether the extra risk that he is taking every year is really required? If we put ourselves in his position and think about the question the answer stands out clearly as NO. And fortunately or unfortunately this is what the Indian farmer is thinking now.

He is thinking of securing his home first. He is not thinking about the national crisis it may cause and he can't be expected to think about that either. But the government has started to see this. It also has realized that if the farmer goes his way the country will soon be facing a huge food crisis and huge imports will be inevitable. I am not sure if imports is the right word here, it might as well become begging. With us (our country) in a such needy state all our policies will be influenced either by the one who will be lending us the food or the west (Europe and US) in general. That might bring a stop to the magnificent growth picture being painted everywhere in the country now. The government knows this all and it obviously can't let this happen because anything like this will instantaneously put them out of voters' favor. So the government has already started taking measures to counter this. Currently it is not very aggressive in its approaches. It is trying to convince the farmers to grow more and work towards increasing the yield instead of just thinking of survival. Though it does not appear plausible, we might just see a rule mandating a minimum yield/unit of land coming from the government. Or to be farmer friendly we might just see government going in for huge amounts of subsidies. I do not know how the government will handle this but I think the best way is to make arrangements for farmers to get a fair value for their produce, which means getting rid of middle-men. That is a very hard thing as every activity of the farmer is linked to the middle-man and hence there has to be an alternate system in place to replace the middle-men. Lets hope that the government will think of something that will feed both the country and the farmer well and equally.

Camouflage in full action -- Totally mind boggling

Srirang (Brahmana) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:54:00 -0700

Even the makers of the bond movies did not think of anything as crazy as this. This was a real stunner for me.

April 2009 - Appraisal

Srirang (Brahmana) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:00:00 -0700

This was making rounds as email forward. Just could not laughing for a loooooong time..

You and Your BOSS

Attitude -- Totally enviable

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:55:00 -0800

This is how knowledgeable you should be and also equally confident.

Amazing pitfall, you will laugh

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:01:00 -0700

This is one of those funny videos for which I really laughed... Watch this and let me know if you did not laugh...

Specially, the lungi is the added attraction.. :D

Something good even duirng these rough patches in market

Brahmana (Srirang) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:23:00 -0700

Value Research: The Complete Guide to Mutual Funds

This website, valuereasearchonline, comes up with some analysis that is new to me almost every time. This is particularly stuck me because, the tool mentioned in this article and the message that it drives has got something to do beyond the markets.

If we can have a method to take advantage of the current volatility, irrespective of whether the markets go down or up, then we should remind ourselves of the good old statement: "Where there is a will there is a way".

Just read this up and you will feel better after the big downfall of yesterday and today. :-)

Basic sciences coming alive in applets

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:13:00 -0700

Math, Physics, and Engineering Applets

We as children always loved the science experiments which had some funky colorful stuff and not those which involved a lot of thinking and imagination and ultimately just gave us some number or a colorless water like liquid. Also mathematics with plain numbers and formulae has always been for just geeks. But almost everyone loves any activity based on some math concept, something that did a simple trick to create wonders. Visual things like this are always appealing to children. Such things can drive in the actual concepts in a much better way than the regular black board with white letters. I was just searching for a website with a Java applet and I came across this interesting page which has some nice good applets for basic science concepts. Look at those and I am sure you will feel like a high-school or at the max and engg student again.

Happy appleting, ;-)

And I became the nomad...!!!

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:48:00 -0700

Bachelors -- A very bad title for the people with a career line like that of mine. It is that state when they are doomed to all sorts of miseries and the only best part being the freedom - for every aspect of life and the feel good factor being the last stage in life where we stay with friends. But seriously apart from this its all crap, totally. And just for the record, by my career line, I am referring to a typical average student, scoring some ok level marks, getting a job in some software company in BENGALOORU and starting this doomed life first by starting to look for a place to stay. Its all good in the beginning when we go out for treats and parties often and don't really lead a REGULAR life. But once things cool down, once we are no longer FRESHERS, thats when the trouble starts. We no longer have friends calling us for parties on the occasion of they joining their first job. And sometime later even the first salary treats get over. Then we are just the NORMAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER. And don't even get me started on what that means. In short, as mentioned before, it is this doomed life.

I personally escaped this for nearly an year now. Luckily my doddappa (Uncle) was working in Bangalore and I got a chance to stay with him. But again, this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. I was supposed to stay with a few of my closest friends from college in a rented house in Indiranagar. But that location was not good for me as there was no direct transportation to my office from there. I had to travel in two city buses, though the distance was just 7kms. Also I got so used to the easy life at my uncle's place that I was not really willing to move out and start staying on my own. Well man it was really heaven when I compared myself with so many other colleagues of mine who were the "Bachelors". But this obviously had to change. I just could not continue to stay there forever. At one point or the other I had to move out and face this partial-hell.

There were a few triggers for this either in the form of Doddappa's transfer or they moving to a different house at the north end of the city (FYI, my office is in southern bangalore) and some more. Somehow those just passed by and I stayed there for 1 ful year. I recently joined Akamai, and these people are moving further south and the new office is even farther and I might require close to 2 hours for one way commute which is certainly insane. Totally insane. So I had to move out to a place nearer to my new office.

There were different plans and different ideas, and as usual, only one worked out. I decided to stay with my college friend Abhijeet aka Kolya. As he was in a hurry to find a house (and I am lazy), we could not roam around a lot and check out lots of houses and find an awesome deal. We had to settle for one of the inital houses. Its pretty good, but I have this feeling that the rent we are paying is pretty high. Anyways I was sort of under limitations. The rent is not the point here, the point is that I finally moved out and plunged into this "DOOMED LIFE". Though the shifting, that too just the first phase, happened just today I am already feeling like a NOMAD. At the end of the day, when I see the
office getting empty, I get a thought of going home. But then again, there is a sort of reluctance. I don't know why but I become averse of going home. For me its still a friend's place, not yet my home. I try to reason out and find a valid reason to go home and find none. As of now my new home is like some 'yet another place'. Earlier, I had this push or force that I am going home, where there are people waiting for me to come and we will have food together. And probably later watch TV or just chat or have gyaan transfer later. All this can happen even at the new place also. Relatives replaced by friend(s). But that is yet to sink in. It will take some time, probably a little more in my case.

Whatever it may be, as of now, I am a NOMAD --- I have become the nomad.

A simple and practical green way of life

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:49:00 -0700

Read this: greenbook_public

We have all been hearing about the global warming and the ill effects caused by pollution, how we are depleting our energy sources very fast and soon will find ourselves in a very grave situation wherein we have to hunt for energy resources. At the same time there are people who are not just cribbing about the problems but coming up with solutions. People like Al Gore have taken a lot of trouble to drive in the message that we are "creating" this beast which will ultimately eat us. They have suggested alternatives and big schemes to be implemented by the governments to bring the situation under control. By their very nature, government policies and schemes will take their own time to come in place and a little more time to actually deliver the fruits. We need to be patient about that. In the mean time there is a need for some quick action also. And again, by the very definition, quick actions are generally smaller ones and mostly happen at the individual level. You will already be knowing a lot of them and probably even practicing them. Yet again, the link provided at the beginning of the post takes you to a green book. It has some simple practices which everyone can perform. If not all of them are applicable to each one, you will surely find out that there are a lot of them that you can relate to.

So do read all the pages. The book is nicely crafted and is beautiful. Read it at least for the sake of looking at beautiful creation if not for the valuable suggestions inside.

Regards,
Brahmana.

Aren't you proud to be a programmer?!

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:24:00 -0700

Read this: Lucky to be a Programmer : Gustavo Duarte

This blog was circulated in my organization and it is really awesome. This is something every programmer/software engineer must read and really be proud about the work they do. Of course everyone must be proud about the work they do, if they are really doing what they love. Now that's a totally different argument about following one's passion and doing something else for money. May be someday I will have a write up about that. As of now, the blog post linked here in itself is pretty long and I do not want readers to be tired by the time they finish my "introduction" ;-).

Go ahead and read that one.

Regards,
Brahmana.

A search engine nearing extinction

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:24:00 -0700

Ask.com turns over its online mapping business to Microsoft - BloggingStocks

I am not sure how many companies have gone out of business ever since Google has started creating waves in the internet industry, specifically in the search area. Today I happen to come across this news. This was a pretty big one but has been losing market share ever since the biggies like Google and Microsoft entered the space. This domination is something which will not be good for any of us except the company promoters. Dominance will reduce growth and quality improvement. As the saying goes: "Its only the competition that brings out the best", the fear of being outdone by an competitor will always keep the companies at their toes and forces them to innovate and come up with newer and better things. With dominance, I feel, will creep in a sense of complacency. The so called "Market Leaders" will start setting the rules. And any error or not so desired thing that they come up with will become the standard. We will not be able think beyond. These dominating companies will become our horizon beyond which we will not even care to think. But of course there has to be a winner always. I am fine with that. Its just that I want the winner to change often.

The best thing to happen is another company coming up and overthrowing Google and Microsoft and becoming the market leader. Then after a few years yet another company comes up and overthrows this one and this saga goes on to make the world a better and better place to live. Because as our teachers said: "There is always scope for improvement".

I wish good luck to all those budding researchers and entrepreneurs in the several universities of the world waiting to take over the mighty "leaders".

-- Brahmana.

Learning from others project --- One big opportunity at VTU

Brahmana (Srirang) — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:34:00 -0700

VTU students are very aware of the way final year projects are done. I having completed my bachelors, am fully aware of the practices for the 8th sem project. But it appears that the same thing happens with our post-graduate students also. And this realization was made possible by none other than loafer Sethji . It was his brother's (elder of course) M.Tech final sem project. Sethji arranged (bought, actually) for a network based project. The project was about "Frame Relay Networks". The people who sold the project are not some scientists. So there document also had a lot of similarity with Wikipedia (no wonder). The code wasn't really that complex as it was Java (managed programming). Its not these technicals because of which I am writing here. Its the learning that the project gave me in course of me trying to stuff the concepts through the heads of setu, so he could eventually pass on the knowledge to his brother.

Not that Setu is a bad or slow learner, but the process took more time than I initially expected. Initial explanations by him made me think that things are pretty simple. Some of my initial assumptions about a few things being hard-coded did turn out to be true. But I never understood why anything like this was required. After some 3 hours of googling, reading and other eye/brain straining exercises I finally got some things stuffed into my head first, which were subsequently passed on to setu. As of now I assume that he has got hold of the concept, but I am not entirely sure what he will explain to his brother as he already seems to be pissed off with working on his brother's project (which is totally fair considering that fact that he himself worked for 3 days on his own final sem project).

Whatever the story or the background or the future might be, I must be thankful to Setu's brother for having made Setu get a project without which probably I would never have know what a "Frame Relay" is. Now about the technicals of the concept/project I have another post on another blog with a set of links to articles/documents from where I read about it and a bit of my own documentation for the laymen (aka me).

Now whats interesting about such practices is the opportunity that it provides for opportunists. In this case I happen to learn about this technology when I was no where near it from any angle. There will be many such opportunities, its just a matter of cashing them. This dialog from a Hindi movie makes perfect sense here: "Har minute ek bakra paida hota, aur two usko halaal kane ke liye" which essentially means for every dumb guy out there there will two others ready to exploit.

If there are guys waiting for someone to help them, there will be someone ready to make him a cash cow. So quickly decide what you want to be.

Sensible policeman --- An excellent showcase of presence of mind

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:52:00 -0700

India ranks pretty good in corruption ratings, and I am sure which "good" I am talking about. Things can get really over-whelming sometimes in some places of the country. And one of the departments thats deeply into competition is probably the one that should protect the people -- "The Police Department". Or at the least that is what the public (including me) thinks so, and we might as well be partially wrong. But whatever it may be one thing is sure that Bangalore Traffic police is really doing a good job. Now do not blame them for the bad traffic and long jams. Thats the work of the infrastructure people, which the police are not. Police manage the traffic in the currently available infrastructure.

Now what makes me write this specific blog is a set of two incidents that I recently came across and here they are:

We have a very small but extremely busy junction in Malleshwaram near Nataraja theatre. We pass through this junction almost everyday. Very recently when I was travelling with my one of my colleagues a little late in the night, we got stuck at that junction. The reason was that there was no policeman manning this junction and hence everyone was trying to find a way for himself wthout considering anyone around them, except for the ones who might hit them. The result, an obvious chaos with all vehicles being stand still because of a dead-lock. Afer waiting for a few minutes my colleague said, in a totally frustrated way, "Couldn't that police be here at this time??! If he was here we could be in our homes by this time. Damn it!!". So it was clear that the presence of a policeman would have brought in a lot of discipline.All of us might blame them, curse them or say anything, but its ultimately true that 80 - 90% of discipline on the roads is because of policemen.

Now the second incident:

Again, another day on my way back home from office, I was on a bike with my colleauge, waiting at the signal in front of Chinnaswamy Stadium. We were in the right half on the road and there were two lanes of traffic to our left. The traffic was all piled up and I suddenly saw the policeman, who was manning the signal, let go the two lanes of traffic to our left.I was like: "What the hell is this man doing??!!!". It was only a few seconds I realized the motive, when I heard the Ambulence siren. The ambulance was stuck in the traffic and was in the lane to our left. So the policeman moved the traffic to make way for the ambulance. And of course after the ambulance passed the signal, those two lanes were again stopped. See, policemen do a lot of good and necessary jobs.

So all tax payers, don't think that ALL the tax paid is going waste. In fact a large amount is being used very well. More about our government and the reality about the government workers in another post very soon.

Till then, just respect the traffic police, you can respect the others later after my further posts. :-)

Regards
Brahmana

Face the worst first and get rid of it asap.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:34:00 -0800

This is yet another discussion with Doddappa (Uncle). It’s a pretty simple thing yet a lot of us do not seem to remember it and practice it. I do not remember how this one came up, but its here. This is one of his philosophies which have been appreciated by others. The idea is about prioritizing the things/to-dos of the day. There will be a lot of days in every person’s life when there will a few “good” to-dos and a probably a couple of “not so good” or “difficult” to-dos also. And these difficult ones will generally be such that we will be hesitating to carry out them. And, as a result we generally keep postponing them as we would be afraid to face them. Also nobody would like to start the day with something bad, because of a strange belief that the rest of the day would also be bad. But what most of us forget is that these unwanted responsibilities keep eating our resources – time, thought and energy, until we get rid of them. This directly results in a reduction in our efficiency even when we are doing something that we love the most, because the fear of having to do the unwanted will always be eating us from the inside. We do not get rid of the unwanted even when we know that it is something that we ultimately will have to face. So to avoid all the losses or resources the best thing would be to finish of the most unwanted and most feared task of the day as soon as possible in the early hours of the day. This will ensure us a successful and more productive day ahead of us. So just get rid of the unwanted and feared things first and that will allow us to enjoy the things we actually like to do.

Nostalgia and the movie next day

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:10:00 -0800

Date: 29^th December 2007

Since few days, because of some unknown reason, I constantly wished to be back in my 3^rd year of engineering with all my friends at hostel, specifically the L4x series of rooms along with the 3 CSI seniors. That was probably the best part of my engineering life. The amount of learning and amount of fun was highest during this time. I guess, if given again, I would enjoy that part of my life at any moment and any number of times. Now as part of the co-incidence series of posts, this one will also present another instance of co-incidence.

Yesterday when I was going to office, I saw a boy with a bag running to catch a bus. He reminded me of Harish Bhai and an incident when me and him had raced casually after lunch. I once again wished to be in one of those CSI meetings under the chairmanship of the Harish Bhai. After this when I reach office and logon to Gmail, I see Harish Bhai online after so many days and I talked to him for a few minutes.

Today being weekend I got up late, only to find two Kannada movie CDs on the table in front of my bed. My Doddamma (Aunt) got it from a neighbor here. As I was absolutely jobless (in one sense) I decided to watch one of the movies as it was a long time since I watched any of the new-age Kannada movies. Of the two I picked up one and seeing that Sudeep (A well known Kannada actor with a commanding voice) is the protagonist I started watching it. The movie was really good and I enjoyed it like anything. Now the co-incidence part is that the movie was about the protagonist recollecting the past – his school days, college days and initial days of his work, at a time when he was deciding on the list of people whom he wanted to invite for his wedding. He wanted to see all these three spheres of his life together once again for one last time. Every scene was beautifully portrayed (of course except for the songs) and each instance in those scenes reminded me of some instance that had happened in my life. I too have three sets of friends, in fact four including the colleagues at office. I could correlate several parts of my life with quite a few scenes of the movie. The only outstanding difference was that the protagonist has “FOUR” girls in his life where as there are typically none in mine. But nevertheless I have much bigger group of friends and above all a lot of them are still in contact with me and we talk frequently enough.

I suggest any person who has lived a hostel life to watch this movie. By the way, the movie is “My Autograph”. A really good movie (would have been much better without songs). I wish science was advanced enough for me to afford a minimal time machine, without any accessories, at least.

Need of Exposure To Open Source Community

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:21:00 -0800

Ever since I have been associated with Mozilla community I have been interacting with a lot of people involved in the development of the Mozilla products, mainly Firefox web browser. I have learnt so many things from the community and have interacted with several extremely modest people who despite being extremely knowledgable and busy too, often helped me with my stupid questions. And in several occasions I see people younger than me who are so bright and have contributed much more than what I have done. All these situations just keep reminding me that no matter how much of Computer Science I know, how much of coding and design I have done there is still so much to learn and there are a lot of people who are simply better than me. The second part especially motivates me and always keeps ringing in my head in case I start thinking big of myself. Not that I am boasting about myself, but it’s true that I was a pretty good programmer back in the college. I was one guy who did a few things others did not do or others did not consider doing, though there were several who were way ahead of me in knowledge and intelligence and had much more capacity than me. Basically I am trying to say that I was somewhat good amongst the guys in the college. And this had given me a feeling of satisfaction (to some extent) that I have indeed learnt something and achieved something. I knew that a lot of real good punters lurked around in the open source community through my frequent visits to IRC. That to some extent kept me glued to earth and prevented me from being complacent. But I always carried around a thought that I am some good.

That was clearly a crappy thought. And it became more and more clear when I was formally involved with an open source community and interacted with the folks there more and more. I, like any beginner in the community (Mozilla community), had several things to learn during the initial stages and always had a lot of questions. Probably in my case it was a little more than any other beginner. Luckily I had several people in the community helping me out and always ready to answer my questions. Whenever I came across a new nickname in any channel I am observing I would just try and find out more about the person. That way I got to know about different people pretty well. I came across people who have been there right from the time Mozilla originated or even before when it was still NetScape. But none of them carried any air of pride and were very modest all the time. The credentials of the person answering my question used to be so high that I often feared asking anything thinking that I would just get some scolding for putting in a silly question. But such a thing never happened. Be it a regular developer or QA guy, employed or a volunteer, young or old, they all helped me. It’s not just the modesty, but their technical knowledge also is worth speaking. They were so precise, they considered situations that never occurred to me, they thought of performance, usability and several such things simultaneously and every word of theirs carried weight, every bit of it was informative. Sometimes things went way above my head and I had to ask them to explain the same things again and again and in simpler words. They did that almost every time. If I was not ready to understand what they were talking about someone would point me to a nice document which would clearly explain me the basics, after reading which I could understand the discussion easily.

All these things always told me one thing: World is really big and it has some really big people, so be modest and be ever receptive. This means that there are a lot of heights yet to be scaled by anyone and hence one should never stop learning because there is always something new to learn. It is in this OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY that I realized what computer science and programming is. It is because of the PEOPLE IN THIS COMMUNITY I realized that there is so much to learn. If not for this community I would probably have been a complacent guy who would have shut his doors for new knowledge and considered himself a "GOOD PROGRAMMER". Thank you OSS.

That is why I would say that exposure to the open source community and affiliation with one of those is mandatory for any computer science student who aims at being a successful and worthy programmer. It is here people will get a look of the ocean named programming and the several software applications that are churned out continuously. I hope this becomes the order of the day very soon and every computer science student will learn programming real world applications right when he/she is in college. This would also lead several success stories coming from our Indian academic institutions and we will be leaders, intellectually, once again.

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna.
Hari Om.

FOSS.IN/2007 – The most exquisite FOSS event

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 06:38:00 -0800

In an earlier post I mentioned how much Mozillians have influenced me and that will surely give an idea as to how much eager I would be to meet any of those people. Well it finally happened this year during the FOSS.IN/2007 as IISc in Bangalore. I was looking forward for this event even before Mozilla was a part of this. I had missed it in the last couple of years and this year I was very keen on attending it as I was in Bangalore itself and the venue was so close to my residence. I sometimes even thought of bunking office for all the five days and have some real good time with all the open source freaks from different parts of the world. As crazy the idea seems to be I was able to attend the event only for one full day and a part of another. That apart, my interest in the event doubled or increased by several times when I found out that Mozilla was one of the projects for Project Days and few of the folks that I had talked to over IRC were coming down to speak at this event. I was very much excited and followed the event very closely. I completed my online registration the day it was announced, I subscribed to the RSS feed of the FOSS.IN/2007 main page, looked at the schedule when it was posted, read about speakers and what they will be speaking when that was put up. Basically I made sure I did not miss out on any detail. Another thing that caught my attention was the Google summer of code BoF (Birds of Feather) that was proposed and also accepted. This was another chance to meet fellow countrymen involved in the development of FOSS. Altogether this was something really big and was close to one of my all time dream of being amidst full time geeks and computer science pundits.

I was getting ready for the event and unfortunately cold and soar throat struck me a couple of days before the event. Nevertheless I asked for a sick leave on the first day of the event and thanks to my manager who granted it immediately. I quickly got ready by noon after some extra resting in the morning and took my uncle’s laptop and moved to IISc to meet the OSS freaks from different parts of the country and the world.

As I was late I missed out on talks related to extension development and a couple of other dev stuff in the Mozilla project days schedule. When I went there it was close to lunch time and almost everyone was moving to the dining area. As I was not completely healthy I had restrain myself from enjoying the FOSS delicacies. I just roamed around the event area looking at the various corporate stalls that were put up there. A couple of days before the event I had met a friend’s brother, who was going to launch a product of his company in this event. I went and met him and looked at the various products that were out there for exhibit. This got over pretty quickly and I had to find something for me to spend time.

Fortunately the event area was Wi-Fi enabled. I utilized the lunch break to update my Mozilla repository on my uncle’s laptop and also to submit a patch which was waiting in my inbox. The wireless connectivity was really good and the speed was well worth mentioning. By the time my repo was up-to-date the afternoon session had started. Then I moved to Satish Dhawan auditorium where the Mozilla talks were being held and spent the rest of the day with the Mozillians. More about the time spent with Mozilla folks in a later post. But I must really thank Team FOSS.IN which made it possible for me to meet the Mozilla people and have some good time with them.

On the whole the FOSS.IN/2007 experience was awesome and memorable. It was very well organized and at the end of the day I saw Atul Chitnis (One of the main men behind the success of the event) hanging around with the volunteers. The sleeveless jackets that the volunteers were given always made me feel that I too should have been a volunteer. ;-)

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna

Hari Om.

My First Hangout with Mozillians

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:40:00 -0800

As I am involved in the development of the Mozilla Firefox web browser I have always thought of meeting the actual full time Mozilla developers and spending some time with them. As most of them are in US, in a normal scenario this would have happened sometime when I was in US. But luckily for me this happened in India, right here in Bangalore where I stay. It was today, the 4^th of December 2007, during the FOSS.IN/2007 event at IISc.

On account of being sick during the event I was not able to attend all the talks. I missed out on all the morning talks as it was already lunch time when I went there. So I started with the afternoon session where Axel talked about localization, Chris Hoffman talked about Testing and Krishnakanth talked about accessibility. Though these were not the talks that I was looking forward to listen to, I just spent my time in the auditorium waiting for an opportunity to speak to Myk, who was the only developer guy amongst those who had come. All the talks got over at around 6:00pm and it was announced that interested people can talk to the Mozillians. Though Myk was already caught by a couple of Akamai guys, I went to him and introduced myself with the “Resumable Downloads” tag. Though he did not remember me he remembered the feature and that made it easy for me to talk to him. Moreover I was wearing my GSoC shirt, which luckily my father had got it from home just a day before. That carried some recognition too.

Then me, Myk, the Akamai guys and another person interested in XUL and Thunderbird talked at length about various things involved in Mozilla development. The Akamai guys asked me if I am interested in joining them when they realized that I knew Mozilla stuff, after they heard me speaking about debugging release builds of Firefox using remote symbol server. Then we exchanged contact info and they asked me to send them some info on that debugging thing. There were a couple more incidents like this where in I met different people from different companies, small and big, who were doing some work related to Mozilla.

Then we carried the banners and posters to the store room and that was when I got introduced to the other 3 Mozillians present there: Mary, Chris and Axel and also to other Indian developers, a couple of NIT-Jaipur students and a RV college lecturer. After we deposited the banners and stuff in the store room, I asked Mary about their plans for the rest of the day and she said, “We are going out for dinner to some place nice and you are coming with us.” I was like “Me???!!!” She said, “Yes you. Lets go, the cars are here.” I was so surprised and did not know what to say. Luckily the RV college lecturer and the NITJ students were also coming and that made things a little more comfortable. I and the lecturer agreed to go on his bike and the rest of them came in cars. We went to an Italian restaurant named “Sunnys”.

We spent nearly 3 hours there eating and talking. A few of them had some nice Italian wine and other drinks. I sat next to Myk, with Axel and Mary in front of me. We again talked about the various things happening at Mozilla. The OS conflicts, views of different people and who is working on what. It was during this discussion that Myk told me about Timeless’ secret project at Nokia, where he was involved in development of a Mozilla based browser for Nokia N810 tablet. I also got to know about several other such things. Mary told us about her driver running over a dog and several other things that they find so very surprising about India. For instance, traffic was one of them. They even took pictures and video recordings of the traffic to show it to people back in US.

Overall it was a nice time and I learnt that the employed folks are also as fun loving and easy going as us. I got to know a lot about the internals of the Mozilla and some of the current affairs. It was basically a start for me to get more known in the community so that people would identify me with my contributions when I talk in IRC. I guess this motto was achieved to some extent. At least of the 4 I am sure Myk remembers me. After that me and the NITJ students went home and it was the end of a memorable day. Hope I get more of such days.

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna

Hari Om.

One deadly enemy today’s youth is facing

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:23:00 -0800

This is another thing that swamiji told us during the gyaan transfer. The earlier one was about us all being so lucky. This post is about one of the several reasons why today’s youth is going haywire. As you would hear from any other staunch Hindu or a strong supporter of ancient ways of life, the first reason mentioned by swamiji was “Westernization”. But this term here was not against “Globalization” or international exchange. Swamiji also believes that there are a lot of things that we have to learn from the west and yet a lot more that we should not. But here are a few things that he said about modernization and how it has affected us.

Recent technological advances have almost removed the barrier of distance for communication. This has lead to increased and more frequent talk to our kith and ken. But this is what swamiji said “This technology has increased “Samparka” (communication) but has drastically reduced “Sambandha” (relation)”. This is very much true. With increase in communication the feeling or urge in us to visit our parents or relatives has come down. But this again is a choice. There is nothing like free meal, everything comes at a cost.

Coming to the enemy that we are facing, a surprisingly simple fact which is neglected is that in most cases the starting salaries of the current youth are very close to the retirement salaries of their parents. Though we can argue that the value of a rupee was much more than what it is now. The world has been through inflation and all that. But despite any inflation, a rise to the extent of retirement salary becoming starting salary is a steep one. This is not just alone. There are strings attached to it. The earning age is lesser than what it used to be and the responsibilities are lesser. All these result in superfluous money staying in the hands of not-so-mature and the so called adventurous youth. This combination of lack of knowledge and excess money is the deadly enemy that today’s youth is facing.

After listening to this I have realized that I should keep a check on my expenses, by which half of the enemy is under control and do lend my ears to elders to deal with the other half. Hope I am successful and so are the others in the same league as me.

Hari Om.

So many of us are so Lucky; but not all are so.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 03:36:00 -0800

Sometime in November I had been to been on a bike trip to Mysore with Pavan.A.C and a couple of his friends. Though I really liked to go on a bike trip to Mysore, this one is something that I will not look forward to have again. The lack of preparation made me really tired and not to mention the dust, the hot wind and the charred faces at the end of the trip. But this blog post is not at all about the trip or the adventure. This is about a discussion that we had with Swami Maheshatmanandaji during our late night debates. Well actually this was more of gyaan transfer than a debate.

This is one of the several things that he told us. When we were discussing about the facilities provided to us as V’Shala in comparison with students outside we simply agreed that we are a lot lucky than several hundreds and thousands of children studying in other schools. At that time swamiji said that we are way too well off and blessed than what we actually think or just said. It’s not just the extra facilities or amenities available to us that make us the fortunate ones. The very fact we could live a “Student Life” during our childhood is something that a lot of unprivileged and unfortunate children do not get. This was something known to me and did not appear like some hard truth, but the gravity of the words was way stronger than I could imagine. To justify this he cited an example.

During the last vacations when he had been to bus-stand to see off some students going home, he saw a child in his early teens drunk and swaggering on the road. Well this is the treachery of the nature, I thought. Not all the fingers are same. But the treachery actually runs deeper than this. Swamiji continued and told us that it’s not the boy’s fault at all. The boy, by birth, has every right to be a student, to play like any other child of his age would do, to learn, to experience the joy of learning, to dream of great and big things and make every possible attempt to achieve them. He is deceived of all these. Instead he probably became an unskilled labor doing all sorts of small and petty jobs to earn his meal. Fortunately or unfortunately he got a little extra money which he used to purchase illicit liquor and now he is on the roads, unchecked, unadvised and without and help.

I protested to this saying that it’s the law of the nature and about he being unadvised, I said that he surely would have been told by someone about leading a healthy and successful life. Swamiji sapped back at me suddenly in strong disagreement. Here are his answers for my protests:

It’s not the responsibility of the nature. Is it nature that has taken care of us till now? Well it stuck me that parents/guardians are the ones who come into play here. They are the ones who nourish us, take care of us and make sure that we reach good heights and make us capable of leading a respectable life. This is probably what is missing in that boy’s life. Either he is not privileged enough to have a life with his parents or he is not fortunate enough to have parents who can give him a life. And about the advice, only words will not suffice and all that he would have got would be just that. As Swami Vivekananda said “Don’t advise hungry stomachs, they can’t be receptive”, this boy should be first shown some light and then advised to reach that light.

Then I realized what he earlier meant by we being way too privileged than what we talk or think. The only solution is to set a balance in nature and that would be possible only on a one-on-one basis with the privileged youth standing up and deciding to take care of one underprivileged. More about that in another blog post. As of now just realize that if you are reading this you are one of the most privileged in the mankind.

Hari Om.

WaterWays - An amazing way of transfer

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:22:00 -0800

Water ways - The most cost effective transport system:

This is the outcome ofyet another discussion with Doddappa(Uncle). We were actually about varied careers and how one can be successful and not be yet another engineer or a doctor. Though we came up with a lot of options like being a scientist after doing a masters in pure science or may be be take up journalism and many more, but the one that stood out as an extremely lucrative one was Merchant Navy. Then my sister asked the typical youngster question: "What do these people at Merchat Navy do??!!". That was what my uncle was precisely waiting for, an opportunity, and he started the gyaan transfer.

Though most of what he said was known to me, there was one thing which struck me like anything. He said that a large part of mass-goods transfer i.e actual large scale business hapened through water-ways because it was the cheapest mode. Though I knew this bit of fact the reason for this interested me more than anything. It is very simple. For roadways we ave to "maintain roads", for railways we have to "maintain rails", for airways though we do not have to "maintain air" its really a costly affair to maintain airports, the air traffic control and hence makes air-transport an ultimately costly choice for transfer of all regular mass usage goods. But with waterways there is no such thing at all. Ships move on waters and seas and oceans take care of that. Traffic control is a lot easier than airways. From what I know fuel is also much cheaper compared to the extremely high quality air-fuel. (So much of comparision with airways is because the others cannot be used for transport across the globe)

So all that we need to worry about is ports/harbours. i have heard about natural harbours and hence I guess even those costs are partly taken care by Mother nature already. This and so many other things make water ways the obvious choice for shipping large amounts of goods. may be other modes of transport will make transportation charges itself more than the actual cost of the goods being transported.

Now there might be some environmental considerations that need to be taken care of. Because recently when some American or French ship was coming to Gujarat port for scrapping there was a lot of opposition as it was hazardous and leading to pollution big time. But still cost stands a big deal. I hope our good scientist fellows will soon find a less hazardous and pollution-free shipping ways. :-)

So businessman and would be businessman, watch out for your shipyard. And also learn how to swim, just in case, you know. ;-)
Hail Water-ways, Hail mother Nature... (Thank god I can swim :P )

Theory X and Theory Y

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:24:00 -0700

This is yet another discussion that I had with my Doddappa(uncle). The title seems to be a very interesting and something exciting. Even I felt the same when my uncle first mentioned it. But it eventually turned out that it was a very much common and known thing. Then why the hell am I writing about this here?? Well the answer is, I did not know that such a common thing could be documented so well and that it would be on of the most important management theories.

There is a nice Wikipedia article about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y and hence I will not be writing anything about this here.

In short Theory X is the pessimistic view and Y is the optimistic view about the people you are managing. But in reality people at any place are really a mix of this and are generally somewhere in between these two extremes. So the manager needs to shrewed enough to identify and categorize people and manage them accordingly. Because X-type of management will piss-off the Y-type of people and may result in resource loss. The reason is that self motivated and creative people want freedom and do not like to be persistently nagged. On the other hand Y-type of management for X-type of people will result in zero or close to zero output and the manager's neck is on the blade. The reason simply being that lazy people who are at work just for money and exploit all facilities will just do that and refrain from working. So managers and people aspiring to be managers, though this is a very common and old and also a sort of outdated philosophy my guess is that it still is an important one.

Basic Planning Gyaan

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:31:00 -0700

I recently completed my graduation in Computer Science and Engineering and started my career at National Instruments R&D as a Software Engineer. There are a lot of things that I learnt here in first few days. Of course I cannot put all of that here. But I can indeed put some most generic things, things mostly known to all or at least a lot of people. This post has something like that. The freshers here (one of whom was me) had a meeting with our manager for a particular thing. We discussed a lot of things out which I found few interesting and have put them here. These are mainly management related stuff like how a professional should lead his/her professional life. Pretty simple but very important things. These things are very essential for any organization to be successful.

Don't push things , rather take things on. Take Responsibilities .
-- This is the good old thing which told us not to put the blame on someone else when we do not succeed. Its just put in a different way. Whenever we have task facing us we should always go for it rather than shun it away waiting for someone else to take it. We should realize that the more we work the more we grow. Its always a +ve things to take up responsibility than to drop them or avoid them.

Always Under Commit , Over Deliver .
-- The previous point tells us to take up work. But what it does not speak about is that whatever is taken up must be completed in time. When accepting a job, when committing for something we should make sure we got enough room for this new thing and it is not going to affect our previous schedules and commitments. And also when finalizing deadline we should think of unforeseen situations and obstacles and plan accordingly. Have some buffer time reserved. Hence we should always under commit and try and work hard to over deliver. This point might seem contradicting to the previous one but both are to be balanced well to go up the ladder.

Don't randomly oscillate on days . Divide your day properly.
-- This is the discipline part. Every day has to be productive. At the end of each day when you ask yourself about that day's outcome you must have a valid answer. And this can happen only when we properly plan the day. Planning plays a crucial role even in a day's work. So instead of spending the day trying to do a lot things, we better plan the day. Tools like post-it reminers, or an online dairy or a calendar or some other form of To-Do list will come a long way in making the day fruitful. So the first thing you got to do when you move in daily is to list down the tasks you plan to do that day. Something like 5 to 10 minutes should be sufficient for this. Be sure to note these things so as to verify later. Start work as per plan. Note down any new thing that you come across in the middle of the day. Then close to the end of the day, say around an hour before you leave verify whether you accomplished all the listed tasks. If some critical things were left out then complete them before you leave. Or may be you can postpone the less important ones to a further date.
What is more important to a plan to work is that it should be followed. So once you have a plan for the day follow it. And follow it as closely as possible. Do not oscillate between multiple things at a time. For example - if you are focussing on something very seriously, just don't start browsing. That will put you out of the frame(of course unless you have some real good control over thoughts and mind).

Plan everything well for the time you spend out of the office as well.
-- Our personal life affects our professional life almost in every aspect and the converse is also true. If we can't get things done on time in office we end up staying late and that annoys people at home. They start cribbing, telling us why we are late daily and all that stuff. That obviously makes us angry and we lose the mental balance. And when we are in office with such a mind we do things in a much worse way and the cycle goes on. So we better plan things for our personal life also. Just to make sure that we are successful everywhere.

These are a sort of Golden Rules for anyone who aspires to be successful. At least that is what I feel. I of course have started following these and it has helped me a lot.

Learn to say NO , Learn to be harsh

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:12:00 -0700

Doddappa & General Dyer

This is one of the several discussions or talks that I had with my Doddappa (Uncle). It was during and after supper (during mine and after his.. though we started together). He just started with the JalianWala Bagh incident which happened before Indian Independence. Just to recall, a large number of Sikhs had gathered in this place JalianWala Bagh for a religious meeting (from what I know). At that time General Dyer had issued a notice that no public meetings could be held, as it was a sign of freedom struggle and the British always wanted to avoid a full fledged opposition to their rule. When General Dyer became aware of this religious meeting he came with a troop of gunmen and positioned them behind the Sikhs covering the only the entrance to the enclosed JalianWala Bagh ground where they had assembled. He gave a warning telling the people there to clear before his countdown ends. The Sikhs did not budge and the General ordered the troops to open fire on the people. He killed almost all of the Sikhs present there. Some say the number was hundreds and some say it was thousands. Whatever it is, I am pretty sure it was big number.

There was a lot of opposition and revolt after this incidence in a lot of places in India. Also there was a great big opposition in England also, about the action of General Dyer. So the British, fair in governance as they few call them, formed a committee to investigate the matter. The committee had Indian(s) too.

It started with the General Dyer being questioned. When he was asked for a reason to take in a troop of gunmen inside that enclosed area, he said "The entrance was too small for my tanker/automated firearm weapon to move in. Thats why I had to finish the job with few gunmen". This might enrage the Indians, but there is a lesson to be learnt here.

Never in the interrogation did he confess that he did a mistake. Never was he sorry that he killed so many people. Not even through out his life. Any time he was asked about that incident he said "I was just protecting the queen. I was following my orders. I just did my duty". Never did he regret that action of his and he always considered that he had discharged his duty properly.

Each one of us will face a similar scenario in our careers. We will come across situations when we are supposed to make harsh statements or we receive such harsh comments. In either cases, it that was the need of the hour then we should never regret about the situation. Sometime a senior of ours may scold us or make certain negative remarks. If those are justified then all that he has done is his job. He would have failed in his duties if he had not done that. This justification is again a very difficult thing. Not all would be ready to accept any such thing told. The very first reaction would be think that its wrong. But a proper thinking with a cool mind will sort out the things.

On the other hand there might be a situation when we are supposed to speak like that or make certain hard decisions. If that is in the best interest of all then we should never hesitate to do it. The person at the receiving end may consider us to be rude, but we know we are not. All that we have done is dischared our duties. This is the harder part. And this is what we have to learn from the above mentioned incident in the life of General Dyer.

IBM Internship: Part I: The Interview

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:15:00 -0700

This is the second post regarding my internship at IBM. Since the prologue did not contain any information about my interview here is a bit about it. It was my first corporate interview and I guess I did fairly well. Before the interview I went out with a buddy to get print outs of my resume. He was one of the volunteers coordinating the selection procedure. He revealed to me that the IBM folks were selecting just about 3 or 4 students. This was certainly not welcoming information and it brought some concerns.

I did not top the written test and hence I was later in the list. So I watched people go in and come out at an interval close to 20 minutes. Pals like SI shared questions and even suggested answers. A couple of those finished their interview came out jumping, literally, and were totally sure that they were in. This raised certain doubts in my mind. I started imagining scenes where I and a few others would be just sent back without even being interviewed. Luckily IBMers were pretty patient and nothing like that happened. And then came my turn. I went into that same interview hall, which our senior Harish Bhai had shown as a place where he got his job.

A person named Suresh interviewed me. He started with typical questions which SI had told us earlier outside. The first one was the television and the remote control question, where in I was asked to design a system which will enable interaction between the two devices, just the object oriented (OO) software (no hardware details). My design was a little ok I guess. Then he went on to as me about some other design questions closely related to OO. Then it was my college and CSI senior Gautham Pai, who in a way is one of my gurus, who interviewed me. He looked at my CV and started asking me about the paper that I and my friend Ashwin had presented. We divulged into several discussions regarding authentication and authorization and how they differ and all that. It was all good and smooth. Then finally I was asked about the UNIX style access control system.

With this came an end to my first interview and nearly a 45 minutes wait to the next candidate. It was a good experience for me as my performance was satisfactory to me. This was confirmed when the list of selected students was announced and my name was the first. The first thing I did was, obviously, to run to the phone booth and inform my parents. Well I had officially started earning and 12K per month was a good enough deal to be happy. :-) After that I called Doddappa and a few others to inform them about the beginning of this success.

After this followed verbatim recitation of my interview and casual talks and finally the PARTY. More about the party and other happenings in another post. After all, Success Story has just started. ;-)

Mozilla @ SJCE -- Contributing to Mozilla informally - Final semester student projects

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:14:00 -0800

Along with the attempt to introduce Mozilla as a formal elective at SJCE I have been working on getting some development work started informally too. The current final year students are enrolled under the central university - VTU and hence cannot be offered any new subject. However they are expected to do a project as part of the course completion. I thought of using this to get students to do their final semester project with Mozilla. Also Mozilla labs organizes this program named Design Challenge where enthusiasts -- students, teachers, academicians, software developers, etc, are invited to submit innovative ideas to make the Firefox web browser a better software and the Internet in general a better place. This has received tremendous participation from the student community across the globe. The best part about this program is that this is not just a competition. The selected students are trained on various Mozilla related technologies by the very Mozilla developers who are developing those technologies. After such mentoring the students can start contributing code to Mozilla and products based on it. And not to mention the wealth of knowledge they stand to gain and how much of positive influence it will have with prospective employers or while applying for higher studies. This suited very well for the final year and also the pre-final year students.

So when I visited my college last Saturday (14-Nov-2009) to meet my HoD and the coordinating lecturer, related to the Mozilla elective to be offered, I decided to talk to final and pre-final year students and motivate a few of them to participate in the upcoming design challenge (Nov - 09 to Mar - 10) and also take up Mozilla work for final year projects. I talked to the coordinating lecturer (Shri P M Shivamurthy) and asked to him make an announcement regarding this and have the students assembled in one of the classrooms or the seminar hall. After going to the college I got to know that the pre-final year (5th sem) students would not be available as they have their internal assessment tests starting from Monday. HoD suggested that I should stay back till Monday evening and address the 5th sem students on Monday after that day's tests. That was not possible for me and I decided to visit the college again on the next Saturday for that and I would talk to the final year (7th sem) students for now. As a result I decided to stick to the final year project only. Things were set up in the Network Lab and there were about 30 students.

Standing in front of them I blabbered a bunch of things about Mozilla, Open Source software, how engineers graduating are not really industry ready and the fact that they do not have any experience on working with real world applications with huge code base and contributions from a large number of developers and finally how participating in Mozilla would help them fill that gap. I also told them the vast amount of options that Mozilla provides in terms of technologies and that they could find some work or the other which lies in their area of interest. At the end I asked if anyone had any questions and as expected nobody did. Then on asking how many would be willing to try something like this I saw something like 3 to 4 half-hands rising up in the air. This was certainly not a good sign. So I started with the "motivational" speech. "This will really help you guys to be ahead of students from other colleges. You will be industry ready where as other will require a lot more training and mentoring. This is all HoD pre-approved... and on and on and on" for a few more minutes. That really did the trick. After this I had about 10 - 12 hands, full ones. Quite satisfied I told them to get my contact details from PMS sir and contact me for any queries. Till now I have received emails from 6 students (one of them representing a project group of 4 students. so 9 students actually). I have sent them a couple of links to start reading. None of them have responded after that. But I am still hopeful.

A little later I was talking to some of the students offline and I got to know some facts which would have been very useful to me in positioning this Mozilla project idea in a much stronger way.

1) Campus recruitment is pretty bad this time. Only 6 students in Computer Science have got job offers, compared to a daily average of 20 - 25 students a couple of years back. --- I could have talked about how open source development experience will help them with jobs. It did help me.
2) Project teams (generally of 3 to 4 students) have already been formed and a guide (a member of the faculty) has been assigned. This has two effects:
a) Some teams have already been given the project work, which is a small part of the guide's doctorate thesis/research. The guide will now not happily approve of students under him/her pursuing a difference project. -- We could talk to HoD and reason out with the guide. I could have told the students that such a thing is very much possible.

b) In a project team of 4, generally one or two students are the smart ones and others will be banking on them for the project to be completed. I had told them that in Mozilla it is generally individual contribution or a team of 2 at the max. The teams, like those mentioned earlier, cannot be divided as the dependent folks will get into a problematic position. -- I could have told them that Mozilla does not bother if the work done by one student is present by 4 as a team work. So let the team enroll for a Mozilla project. Either all or a few in the team will work. If its all of them each one will have a bug assigned or the bug will be assigned to one guy with all of them working on it. If it is just one or two of them then there are no issues.

c) On a related not to the above two points, some students told me that they would like to do a Mozilla project in addition to an already assigned final semester project. This really delighted me. But it also was, sort of, a matter of concern, as it appeared to me that people were desperate to do something like this with the hope that it will add a line to their resume and help them get a job. I might be wrong and I wish and hope I am. Students doing open source development just out of pure interest and not part of any course requirements is the best thing. But let me see what it turns out to be.

3) I did not make an announcement about the design challenge because the mentoring classes for that goes on from Dec-09 to Feb - 10 and these guys have their exams in the second half of December. But I later got to know that no mentoring classes will be held from approximately 21st Dec to 4th Jan because of the holiday season in the US. So I talked to a smaller number guys, those who stayed back to talk to me, about the design challenge and am hoping to have 1 to 3 ideas being submitted.

I am going to use these points during my next visit, this coming Saturday.

Mozilla @ SJCE -- Modern teaching methods are still a stigma and considered unreliable.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:50:00 -0800

In my effort to get open source development into main stream academics at my engineering college SJCE, I have been working with the Mozilla Education team for some time now. With our college getting the autonomous status and also with great help from the MozEdu folks like Prof David Humphrey and Frank Hecker and after considerable persuasion (more about that in a different post) I could get an elective named "Learning Open Source Software with Mozilla" added to the curriculum of the 6th semester students. We (me and the members of the college faculty) decided to roll out this elective in the year of 2010. The next step for me, I thought, was to get at least one lecturer trained with the curriculum and in general get that lecturer involved with Mozilla development and practices. Also with Prof David making the videos of his lecture sessions available on the internet, freely for everyone's use, my plan was to give the lecturer a head start (w.r.t students) so that with the beginning of the next semester he could start teaching the students those parts which he has already learnt. In the mean time he himself can continue his learning by going through David's lecture sessions and other resources that would be available on the internet. I would be visiting the college on alternate weekends. I thought, may be I could take a couple of hours of classes on Saturday for both students and also the lecturer(s). I could have used my presence to answer the queries that the students and the lecturers had, or at least I could point them in the right direction. Apart from these fortnightly visits I planned to be in touch with the college folks continuously on the internet -- email, irc, skype, etc. I would be actively involved the first time this subject is taught. After that the lecturer would be considerably capable and also the subsequent batch of students would have their seniors to help them out. At that point the program will not greatly depend on me and will be sort of self-sufficient with people directly talking to the Mozilla developers and the community in general. As a bonus the students who studied this subject would get to carry out their final year project work with Mozilla, either in terms of some feature implementation or certain bug fixes or any such task. It appeared like a sound plan and I had even decided that we would try to get about 15 students for the first time and gradually increase the number.

Last Saturday (14-Nov-2009) I went to meet the HoD and the lecturer who was coordinating this from the college side to get things started. The meeting was a big disappointment. Our HoD made it absolutely clear that the this elective will be offered only if 50% of the students (which translates to about 70 - 80 students) take up the elective. So the idea of first starting with a small number so that coordinating things on the internet will be easier and all that was just blown away. The reason for this is apparently because there are not enough class rooms to teach more than 2 groups of students from the same semester.!! It has to be a 50-50 division between two electives. So though there are 5 or 6 electives available to the students, they actually have to choose from just 2 of them, based on the majority and not interest.

Well my plan was not killed completely, yet, as the ideas in it were sort of the perfect solution for "the lack of classrooms" problem. I put forth the rest of my idea saying the remote teaching and a lot of learning on an individual basis (by reading up the resources on the internet and interacting with the Mozilla devs) would virtually the necessity of a full blown class room teaching always. But the HoD flatly rejected this idea and said that he understood what I was suggesting but there are rules saying classes must be conducted for a fixed number of hours for any subject offered and it has to be the traditional way. Also the idea of training the lecturers in a, sort of, asynchronous manner was also not acceptable. He would want a training session to be conducted - typically a week to a month long session, may be with a certification at the end of the session. Moreover currently I have one lecturer ready to take this up but department mandates at least 2 or 3. Now I have an additional task of motivating at leat two more faculty members. For this I have to prepare a write up explaining what the lectures stand to learn/gain by taking up this new thing. After that if any of them express their interest in taking this up, I will have to train them and probably it has to be in the traditional way - not sure yet.

Another problem is the pace. The next semester will be starting some time in Feb or Mar 2010 and my HoD keeps saying "Lets go slowly at first and see. If not in 2010 we will offer this in 2011" !!.. :-( . I hope we can get this thing started in 2010 itself. Another year of idle waiting might just terminate the interest that I currently have.

All in all, the wall between open source and my college is appearing to be more and more thick. I intend to meet the HoD the coming Saturday again and try to convince him to give his approval for the "internet based learning" approach. Lets see how it works out.

Apart from this I talked to a bunch of final year students about carrying out their final year project with Mozilla and also about participation the upcoming design challenge. More about that in another post.

Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) survey -- My inputs

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:27:00 -0800

I just finished the MDN survey and here is what I said in that last box which was put there for the people like us to pen down our rants. ;-)

Project documentation needs improvement. It has improved and is improving, but a lot still needs to be done specifically about the oldest lines of code.
I hear from some of the core developers that there are lots of hacks which make the code not entirely predictable. These need to be removed and replaced by proper, reliable code. Again the cleaning is going on, am just saying that it is really important so that there is some sort of SLA based on which people can develop applications.
Consolidation of the content on MDC and MozEdu so that we can have a "The Mozilla Book", which any beginner can go through and dive into Mozilla related development -- either the platform or the browser or the add-ons or anything.
Finally, making various Mozilla components available in the form of easily pluggable library modules and step by step guides telling us how to use them.

I do not know if any of this is useful to anyone else in the community, but for me, these appeared to be very important based on my association with Moziila for about 2.5 years now.

Incrementally building Mozilla/Firefox

Srirang (Brahmana) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:59:00 -0700

Mozilla code base is really huge and has variety of files which are built in a variety of ways. It was sort of always confusing for me to figure out where all I should run make after I change any of the files. I generally asked on the IRC and someone just told me where to run make.

Today it was the same thing. But I also thought I would as well learn the logic to decide for myself the next time. Here is the chat transcript of NeilAway answering these questions.

The MDC page (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Incremental_Build) has almost the same content for the native code. Neil here explains it for all the types of files involved.

Also to add to the following things running : "make check" from the objdir will run the automated tests.

For xul/js/css/xbl it usually suffices to find the jar.mn (it may be in an ancestor folder) and make realchrome in the corresponding objdir
For idl you're often looking at a full rebuild, depending on how widely it's used
For .cpp and .h you obviously have to make in the folder itself, and then look for a corresponding build folder
Except for uriloader where you use docshell/build and content, dom, editor and view use layout/build
If you're building libxul or static then this is all wrong
You don't look for a build folder, I think for libxul you build in toolkit/library and for static you build in browser/app

Changing the start up directory of command prompt -- The safe and simple way

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:26:00 -0700

By default, the command prompt window (cmd.exe) starts in a particular directory which depends on quite a few factors. Specifically, the env varibales %HOMEDIR% and %HOMEPATH% matter the most or these are the ones which ultimately decide the location. There are some registry values also, but they are not in the game by default. This leads to the command window to start up in something like C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ which is not particularly useful as this location is rarely used for anything useful. It can get worse. In a corporate environment it might so happen, more often than not, that your home directory is set to a shared network drive using a group policy and the command prompt starts in that remove drive location.. ! The pain can be aggravated if you are on VPN or something similar.

I personally feel that command prompt, which is mainly programmers tool, should not start in %HOMEDIR% as there are rarely (mostly never) any programming related files are kept. Anyways, there are many ways to solve this problem.

The first of them and the most dangerous is fiddling with the registry. It is mentioned here : http://windowsxp.mvps.org/autoruncmd.htm
The problem with this is that it will screw up make based build environments which spawn multiple child shells (aka command prompts), because the command prompt will start in this changed default location instead of the location where the make had to run.

The next is fairly simple and also elegant. You can create a shortcut to the main exe (C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe) and in the properties of the shortcut you can provide the directory to start in. This good for mouse users. However for those (most programmers) who start command prompt from the run dialog (by typing cmd) this will fail.

The third solution is to deal with the previous solutions shortcoming. You can just create a batch fail in any of the locations where the run dialog looks into. I prefer C:\Windows\systme32\. Put the following line in the batch file: C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe /K "cd <path-to-dir>" . Just replace the <path-to-dir> with the path where you want the command to start. I generally put it as C:\.
This will start a command window and execute cd <path-to-folder> and will stay for further inputs. I have named this batch file as sh.bat (obviously to get a linux feel :P ). So now when I press the Windows + R key and type sh, I get the command prompt started in C:\.
Done.
And yes, this is totally safe and will not affect any other application using cmd.exe. :)

OpenSSL base64 filter BIO needs an EOL and memory BIO needs to know about EOF

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:23:00 -0700

I recently started working with the OpenSSL library to do some https stuff (sort of obviously). OpenSSL apart from having an implementation for the SSL encryption part, it also nifty algorithms for certificate handling and more importantly an abstract I/O layer implementation called BIO which probably stands for Basic I/O or Buffered I/O or something else. I do not know, I could not find it. Nevertheless, the items of interest here are the BIO_f_base64() -- The base64 encode/decode filter BIO and the BIO_s_mem() -- The memory BIO, which can hold data in a memory buffer.

The BIO man page (or its online version present here: http://www.openssl.org/docs/crypto/bio.html) give a nice introduction. For now just consider BIOs as black boxes from which you can read or write data. If the BIO is a filter BIO then the data will be processed whenever you read or write to it.

The name, BIO_f_base64, says it all about the functionality of this BIO. If you read from this BIO, then whatever data is being read is first base64 decoded and given to you. OTOH, if you write something to this BIO it will be base64 encoded and then written to the destination. These BIOs can be arranged in the form of chains to do a series of processing on the data that you are reading or writing, all by just a single call to read() or write(). Its all abstracted. Saves a lot of time.

I was trying to decode some base64 encoded data which I had in a buffer, a char [] to be precise. So if you read up about the BIOs it becomes obvious that you first have to create a memory BIO, which will hold the actual encoded data. Write the encoded data to the memory BIO. Then you chain that memory BIO with a base64 BIO and read from that chain. Any data that you read from the chain will actually come from the memory BIO, but before it reaches you it passes through the base64 BIO. So essentially you are reading from the base64 BIO. As mentioned in the earlier paragraph, when you read from a base64 BIO it decodes the data and gives it you. So the base64 encoded data present in the memory BIO is decoded and presented to you. That's it. base64 decoding is done in one simple read() call !

But there is small catch here. For some reason, which I have yet partially understood, base64 requires that the data it is handling be terminated with a new-line character always. If the data does have any newline character, meaning all your data is present in a single line then you have to explicitly tell that to the BIO by setting the appropriate flag. Here is what the man page says:

The flag BIO_FLAGS_BASE64_NO_NL can be set with BIO_set_flags() to encode the data all on one line or expect the data to be all on one line.

That's about the base64's EOL. Now the other BIO involved here,the memory BIO, is also an interesting guy. When the data it has gets over, it doesn't say "Hey, its over, stop it!". Instead it says "Dude, you got to wait for some more data to arrive. Hang on and keep trying". !!! This is very much suitable, probably when you using the BIO like a PIPE, where you keep pumping data from one end by acquiring it from somewhere and some other guy consumes that data. But in a situation like mine where the data is all fixed I simply want it to tell that the data is all over and I need to stop it. To do this again I will have to explicitly set an appropriate flag and here is what the man page says:

BIO_set_mem_eof_return() sets the behaviour of memory BIO b when it is empty. If the v is zero then an empty memory BIO will
return EOF (that is it will return zero and BIO_should_retry(b) will be false. If v is non zero then it will return v when it
is empty and it will set the read retry flag (that is BIO_read_retry(b) is true). To avoid ambiguity with a normal positive
return value v should be set to a negative value, typically -1.

And this same thing is explained very well here: http://www.openssl.org/support/faq.html#PROG15.

I thank Dr. Stephen N Herson of the OpenSSL project for helping me out in understanding this. Here is the mailing list posting that taught me this thing : http://groups.google.com/group/mailing.openssl.users/browse_thread/thread/f0fc310c1bc6ec65#

Happy BIOing. :-)

Return value from system() is not reliable

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 08:15:00 -0700

Recently I happen to use this nifty utility available on the Linux platform to perform some maintenance work, a bit of housekeeping, before my application starts up. The need for this is not really important. Essentially, the environment needed to be configured for my application to start up and start functioning properly. This, ideally, should have been done by a configuration/setup script, probably written in Python or a similar programming language, which are meant for such tasks. But unfortunately I did have that privilege and I had to do every bit of it from my C-program. The task were simple and very regular, like clearing a workspace directory, setting appropriate permissions and the like. The initial thought was to use the dirent family of functions aka OS system calls to read the filesystem and modify it programatically. But doing that whole thing was a big PITA. Hence I took the easy route and simply used the system() function, which will execute shell commands.

The problem with this easy approach is that tracking the operation's success is really hard. The system() man page says that the function will return the actual value returned by the command that we pass to it to be executed. But sadly this is not how things are, at least on the Linux 2.6 machine on which I am developing and running my code. The return value from this system() function is highly unreliable. In fact the man page also puts it in there, but in a very subtle way. Here is a quote from the man page:

 The <b>system</b>() function returns the exit status of the shell as returned by
 <b><a href="http://www.manpagez.com/man/2/waitpid/">waitpid(2)</a></b>, or -1 if an error occurred when invoking <b><a href="http://www.manpagez.com/man/2/fork/">fork(2)</a></b> or
 <b><a href="http://www.manpagez.com/man/2/waitpid/">waitpid(2)</a></b>. A return value of 127 means the execution of the shell
 failed.

I am not fully clear with the process semantics, but from my observations when I execute a command using this system() function the command would have executed successfully, as in, the corresponding operation would have been completed, and yet the return value would be -1, telling me that the execution of the command has failed somewhere but it does not tell me where. For example, if it is a command to clear a directory and create some other directory structure there, all these tasks would be completed. The old directory would be gone and the new ones created. I see that when I just navigate to that location from the command line, but system() would have returned -1. I initially was checking the return value to handle the failures and was taking some fail safe steps. But all that was happening even when it was all good. The logs repeatedly told me that the operations were failing where as it was all good actually.

The reason for this is not known to me. It probably lies in the quote from the man page that I have put above. As it says -1 can be returned for any of the errors, be it error from fork or wait. Now if the error was from wait, which I am guessing is the case, it makes a little sense. I think the fork and exec went through properly and the command performed the required action without any error. But later the wait failed and the system() could not collect the exit status and hence returned -1. This is the only thing that I can think of. Nevertheless bottom line is, Return value from system() is not reliable.

Getting the size of an already loaded page (from cache) in a Firefox extension.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:33:00 -0700

Today this question came up in the IRC (moznet, #extdev). One of the add-on developers wanted to get the size of the page, either bytes or number of characters. The most obvious thing that came to my mind was progress listeners for definitive answers or the content length from the channel for not so critical scenario. But then he said he wants it for an already loaded page. And he further said that the information is already there somewhere as it is shown by the Page Info dialog (Right Click on a web page and select View Page Info). He was indeed right. Somebody in the code is already going through the trouble of calculating the data size and we can just re-use that. And I immediately started the quest to find that out.

As usual to figure out any browser component I opened up DOM Inspector. That tool is improving, which was against my earlier perception (Sorry Shawn Wilsher), though the highlighting part is still screwed up. Nevertheless, locating that particular label "Size" and the textbox in front of it containing the value was not difficult at all. I got the "id" of the textbox containing the size value. (Its "sizetext" :) ).

Next it was MXR (http://mxr.moziila.org/) in action. I did a text search for the id and got a bunch of results, one of which was pageInfo.js with this entry : line 489 -- setItemValue("sizetext", sizeText); . It is here. The very line made it apparent that it is the place where the value is being set and hence it is the place from where I can get to know how the value is being calculated.

Once I saw the code it was very clear and straight forward and pretty simple also. We have the URL. From the URL we get the cache entry for that URL. (Every cache entry has a key and that key is the URL - so neat). We try to get the cache entry from the HTTP Session first and if that fails we try FTP Session. The cache entry has the size as an attribute on itself, so its just getting that attribute value. DONE.

I am not sure how this will behave if we have disabled every type of cache. AFAIK, there will still be some in-memory cache as long as the page is still loaded. Probably good enough.

That was the end of a small but interesting quest. :-)

Getting Open Source/Mozilla in my college - SJCE - Part I

Brahmana (Srirang) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:59:00 -0700

Earlier I had written about my first Mozilla Education Status Call in which I mentioned my interest to bring Open source software in general and Mozilla in specific to my college, SJCE. Well, good news, it did not stop at that blog post. Actually speaking it had not started with that blog post either. It has been a long standing wish of mine, even from my college days when I participated in the Google Summer of Code 2007. (More about it here). Back then there were a lot of short-comings, both from my side and the institution's side to actually make this idea into reality. Nevertheless, past is past and no point in brooding about it now. The good thing is that now both I and my institution have overcome our short-comings and we have started working towards making that idea into a reality.

Now for some background aka story telling (which I like the most :) )

As stated earlier nothing happened about this idea when I was in my college. Then after passing out of the college and having worked in the industry for about 12-18 months it hit me, very hard, that I did not learn a lot of things during my life as an engineering student which otherwise would have helped me a lot in my professional life. Also I learnt that I was not competent enough as an engineering graduate as compared to some of my foreign counterparts and also those from some of the "famed premier" engineering institutions of the country. It was not just one thing or two, but I saw differences in many aspects, both theoretical and practical. Gradually it occurred to me that these two aspects are inter-related. Since we did not have proper practical experience and exposure to real world software development we never really appreciated the basic theoretical concepts of computer science, which formed our regular syllabus. Note that here I am saying "we" and not "I". This part of the story talks about the state of most of my classmates and that is the worst part. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is the good old philosophy of teaching that the theory and practice should go hand in hand.

Now there is another part to this story. Before I start with it let me tell you that whatever I am putting here is based on what I have perceived. I may be wrong, but I personally don't think so. And this is absolutely not about boasting about myself. So the other part of the story is that, my association with Open Source development communities, Mozilla to be specific, has greatly helped me in my professional life. I am not going to give examples, but it has really really helped me a lot. Also it has sort of put me ahead of several other capable classmates and most juniors of mine (with the difference being considerably more in the case of juniors). The only differentiating factor between me and them was my exposure to developing a real world application, Mozilla Firefox, and the various lessons that I have learnt by being a part of the global developer community. I am also certain that I could have been a much better computer engineer if I had started working with Mozilla at a much earlier stage, say 2nd year or early 3rd year of engineering and had dedicated more time to it. I still continue to learn a lot of general computer science and software development concepts (concepts not specific to Mozilla development) even now whenever I try to fix a Mozilla bug or even when I try to answer any query on the IRC, many a times even when I just observe few people conversing on the IRC.

Ok, enough of story telling. Now is the part for moral of the story. Here is what I inferred from these experiences:

1) Engineering students, specifically Computer Science engineering students, must get exposure to real world engineering (aka application development) to understand and appreciate the theoretical concepts they learn.
2) Open source software development communities provide a suitable environment for students to work with real world applications. Suitable in terms of - opportunities, cost, mentoring and certainly a few more good things also.

With these two points, it was clear to me that we badly needed open source education/exposure for students in my college. I knew that once this happened the possibilities were endless. Every time I heard/read about some of the classic Free Software implementations done at Universities abroad, I thought that our college can at least have several continuous contributors to currently existing open source projects, if not have creators of some totally new world class software projects. We could be having several different groups of students working of different types of software which operate at various levels (which translates to contributing to different open source software). Then they all could be interacting to help each other in troubleshooting problems. I thought of scenarios/discussions like this happening in the hostel corridors:

Student_1 and Student_2 are working on the Mozilla Download Manager (and here goes the conversation)

Student_1 : Hey, I want to test my new implementation for Mozilla Download Manager for HTTPS downloads. I am unable to configure my test server for HTTPS. You got any idea?
Student_2 : No dude, never done any server side stuff. Lets ask Student_3 from the Apache team.

Then Student_3 comes and sets up Apache for HTTPS within minutes (because that's day-to-day kind of stuff for him) and Student_1 continues testing his new implementation.

After some time:

Student_1 : Oh man, SSL handshake is taking too much time. I need to talk to Student_4, he knows the SSL library code base.
Student_2 : Yeah, I talked about that to Student_4. He is coming up with a patch to reduce the handshake time. It will probably be ready by tomorrow, I guess. Apparently it was a race condition causing the delays.

And so on.

Something like this is really possible. In fact many things much bigger than this are possible. But only if our students start working with and for open source communities.

So this set of thoughts made me work towards getting Open Source into my college. Now that's the background and the story. In the next part I will write about the first set of steps taken towards this, how many of them worked and how many were dead even before they started. And just FYI, the next post too will have some story telling (Obviously since this is just a record of my experiences and my (our) actions).

Vim -- Restoring cursor from previous session

Brahmana (Srirang) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:58:00 -0700

I am sure every Vim user needs this. Its just so frustrating to open a source file to see the #includes (the first few lines) in the file when we actually will be editing many hundred lines later. Today specially I was juggling with several source files, adding something to the .h file and then come back, do something in the .cpp file and then again go to some .c file and so on. Every time I opened a file the cursor was at the first line and every time invariably I had to search for the function I was editing and cycle through the matches to reach it. So I set on a "Search Mission" - A mission to search for the appropriate .vimrc settings to make Vim remember the cursor position from the previous session.

I got a lot of links. In fact there is a separate Vim Tip - Vim Tip #80 for this. But it has so many code lines and I was a little wary to put all that in my .vimrc file. Continued search revealed me a simpler way. Just two lines solution and it is here : Some Mr.Gopinath's .vimrc file. Its very big, but the lines concerning me are:

" VimTip 80: Restore cursor to file position in previous editing session
" for unix/linux/solaris
set viminfo='10,\"100,:20,%,n~/.viminfo

" only for windows [give some path to store the line number info]
"set viminfo='10,\"100,:20,%,nc:\\Winnt\\_viminfo
au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 1 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | exe "normal! g`\"" | endif

Looks like he also picked this up from the same Vim Tip #80 but was smart enough to take out only the necessary part. Nevertheless, this works for me. Thank you Mr. Gopinath.

Happy Vimming :-)

Edit:

I read the Vim Tip #80 again and it made more sense this time. I picked up the last line for a user comment. Now the cursor is put back on the same column too.

Recursively rename files in windows

Srirang (Brahmana) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:16:00 -0700

My friend Prasanna B P asked me to solve a bunch of problems that he was facing with his computer. One of them was fairly common and there was a very easy and straight forward brute force solution. But coming up with a "smart" was really interesting.

Essentially some malware had renamed all the movie files that he had to carry a .jpg extension. His initial solution was to associate those jpg files with a movie player like Mplayer123 or VLC and the file would be invariably played without any regard to the extension. But this made the genuined jpg pictures to be opened with the player.

The obvious solution was to rename all the files and change the extension. Manually doing it from the GUI is the brute force idea that I earlier mentioned. And it is a totally crappy one. Next I can rename all files in a directory from the command line. But here the movie files were in directories of their own and hence I would have to move to each directory manually and run the rename command. This makes it as good as the GUI approach. In fact the extra effort of typing the commands might make it worse.

The I searched the internet a little and got to know that the windows command shell supports a "FOR" statement which can be used to recursively traverse directories, amongst many other things it provides. Using that I found this command:

FOR /R %x IN (*.jpg) DO ren "%x" *.avi

from this website : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210413/command-line-recursive-renamemove-in-windows

People used to Linux Shell scripting might think of this as a wierd syntax, but yeah thats the windows choice.

It was good to do some Windows Shell scripting too. :-)

Profiling (timing) the firefox build process

Brahmana (Srirang) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:50:00 -0700

Its been nearly 2 years since I am building Mozilla Firefox myself on my machines - various machines of varying capacity.

Initially it was a desktop having Intel Pentium 4, Single Core (obviously), 2.6Ghz, 256MB RAM, running Slackware 11. It probably used to take about 1.5 to 2 hours (I do not remember it now). I never profiled that at that time. Getting a mozilla build itself was a big achievement for me.

After that it was another desktop having Intel Core 2 Duo, Dual Core (obviously, again), 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, running Windows XP. This generally took about 45 minutes. AFAI Remember, I had several other programs running when firefox was building.

And this discussion of amount of time taken to build firefox came up a few times in IRC and I myself had this wish to time the build process. Off late, that is from about last week this wish became very strong and today finally I did time it, that too on two machines, my laptop and my desktop. This blog post is the result of the these two profiling tasks. Here are the results.

Note: By profiling I did not do any complicated or intricate. I just used the "time" utility which tells how much time the command takes.

1) On my laptop. --- Build was the only application running apart from the services.
Specs:
IBM Thinkpad T60p. (The one which heats up a lot)
Intel Centrino Duo, T2600 @ 2.16GHz, (Dual Core)
2GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP2.

The results shown by the "time" utility are:

real 36m33.476s
user 4m17.776s
sys 4m36.271s

The build was done in the MingW shell that the mozilla build system provides. I am not sure to what extent these are reliable, but the real time is pretty much acceptable.

Edit:

Today I ran the build command from the history and hence the 'time" prefix got in automatically and the build was timed again. Surprisingly today's times are way away from the last one. Here are the times:

real 74m26.484s
user 9m53.015s
sys 8m18.365s

Well this time a lot of other apps were running. Firefox (2 instances), Chatzilla, Outlook, Several command windows, Komodo Edit (which again is like another firefox), notepad and a couple of explorer windows. So the time being doubled is not a surprise. Guess this just gives a perspective. :)

2) On my desktop --- Apart from the build process, FF with Chatzilla was running and several instances of bash (Terminals) were running.
Specs:
DELL Optiplex 755 (Sleak, powerful, sometimes fragile)
Intel Core 2 Quad, Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM
Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon

And the results are:

real 20m40.497s
user 19m4.320s
sys 1m17.885s

The two sets of times are a little confusing. But real is all that matters as that is how long I have to wait for the build to be ready.

If you are planning a build then this info might help you plan things accordingly.

Happy building.

Making firefox use a little lesser memory

Brahmana (Srirang) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:42:00 -0700

A lot people tell me that firefox uses a lot of memory and it grows like anything when used for a long duration. From the discussions developers and some blog posts/forums it appears the prior to FF3 it was memory leaks which formed a major part of this. Apart from that one of the important features "bfcache - Back/Forward Cache" which, arguably, makes back and forward navigation very fast, uses a lot of memory. In on the pages I read apparently it can be up to 4MB per page. This cache essentially keeps the parsed HTML of the mark-up in the memory along with the Javascript state. Sometimes, or more like most of the times, this can very taxing. You might be the kind of person who does not really uses the Back-Forward navigation and in case you do it you are OK with a slight delay (which may not percievable with a good conenction). If indeed you are that kind then disabling this "bfcache" will probably make your firefox eat lesser memory.

The setting/preference that controls this behavior is : browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

By default it is -1, which is no limit. Setting this to 0 (zero) will disable this cache completely. Essentially you are telling Firefox to not to store the state of any document in the memory. If you want to have this feature with a saner limit you can set it to an integer representing the number of pages you want to be saved in memory.

Like any other pref not exposed through the Options dialog this has to be edited by visiting the page about:config. Open this in a tab and key in (or copy and paste) the preference string. Double click it to edit.

May be you can now lose lesser hair as your other applications will run smoothly. :P

Hari Om.

Undo "Always display images" switch in Gmail

Brahmana (Srirang) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:21:00 -0700

Gmail has this nifty and very useful feature to avoid mostly annoying images being displayed in our incoming emails. Whenever we get an email containing an embedded image, it is not displayed by default. Instead there appear two links at the top of the email saying:

"Display images below"
"Always display images from <this sender's email>"

The first one is a one time thing and the second one is a setting for that particular email id.

I once clicked on the second link accidentally and had unwanted images cluttering my email view. I looked for this thing to be turned off in the settings page, but found nothing. I had a very hard time undoing this accidental setting. Finally I discovered the solution also accidentally. The switch to undo this setting is "hidden" under the "Show Details" link for the email header.

The right end of the very first line of the email, which contains the sender's name/email id", has this "Show Details" link. This shows the email header with several details. At the end is the link saying something like this:

"Do not display images from this sender".

Just use this switch to go back to the good old times of emails without images. :)

My first Mozilla Education Status call

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:20:00 -0700

Mozilla is the only open source community which I have understood a little and also to which I have contributed a little. I always wanted to make my college a sort of Mozilla hub with several contributors and many feature developments happening out of my college. It actually started with an idea of a "Complete Open Source Hub", but it got reduced to just "Mozilla Hub" (either because of my laziness or because of lack of resources). Anyways I did not take any proactive steps towards that wish of mine, until recently when our college got the "Autonomous" status. That is when I realized that bringing open source software development in the course mainstream has become a lot easier as the power to form the syllabus and conduct the tests and examination rests with my college itself and not the University.

Just when I thought of doing something tangible, Mozilla came up with their "Mozilla in Education" program. This is a brilliant idea to drive open source into the student community and also give the students opportunities to work on real world applications. I was impressed by this program the very moment I read about it. I decided to present this idea to my HOD at the college and get him to start working offering Mozilla education to students in my college. I started reading more about it and today I also attended my first Mozilla Education status meeting conference call, which happens every week. I got a wealth of information.

This week we had Pascal F presenting to us about the "Design Challenge" program organized by the Mozilla Labs. He talked to us about the way in which they organized this program. It was all very inspiring. They had nearly 30-35 people from different parts of the world (literally). In this contest the students initially submitted mock-ups of their ideas, nearly 40 of them. Amongst those, 30 fully completed mock-ups were chosen for the second level, in which the students got mentoring by some the well known names in the Mozilla community. The mentoring consists of 10 Webinar sessions conducted using WebEx, over a period of 3 weeks. This is going on currently and will end at the end of this month. These mentoring sessions aim at converting those mock-ups into working prototypes. At the end, the best prototypes are given honors.

During the presentation Pascal mentioned some interesting things. Of the students from various countries, it was the students from so called "2nd World Countries" (like Romania, India, Argentina, etc.. ) who showed a lot more interest than their US counterparts. There was tremendous enthusiasm in them where as the students from US expected -- in his own words -- "being entertained" and "spoon-fed". Though this is an alarming thing when viewed from a global perspective, I was personally very happy that Indian students, my fellow country-men, have shown such dedication. Pascal also mentioned that they were so interested that they were up in the middle of the nights for the webinars. All in all, I am even more motivated to bring open source in general and mozilla in particular to my college.

I decided to take this program as an example and present it to my HOD this Saturday and try and make him accept this and similar programs as official ones and the projects done in such programs be considered for the completion of the course goals.

Thank you Pascal, thank you Mozilla. Lets hope to have a Mozilla India Center, at least an unofficial one at my college SJCE. :-)

An official full-fledged Firefox Add-ons dev guide

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:41:00 -0700

Having done a little work on Mozilla Firefox and extensions for it I have always felt the lack of an official, step by step document for extension development. I do accept that there are a lot of resources available on the internet. Innumerable number of blogs and tutorials explaining the process step by step. But most of them become outdated with newer versions of Firefox and the authors are not really keen about updating the info. That is why an official tutorial or guide from Mozilla itself would be the right thing. It will make sure the contents in the guide are up-to-date and worth reading for developing an extension for the currently available version of Firefox.

There are documents for extension development on MDC like the various links present at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions but it was either scattered or pretty brief in most places though it did touch most parts of extension development. Nevertheless a wholesome "official" guide was needed and here it is now. I went through the guide and as the blog post says it is still in BETA with a lot of "TO-DO" tags in there. In spite of that it is very much usable. Do visit it and post back your feedback to make it a much better guide.

Add-ons Blog » Blog Archive » Firefox Add-ons Developer Guide (beta release) - Calling all Add-on Developers!

Lets hope we will have more and more quality extensions now. :-)

Browsers are undergoing continuous innovation.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:53:00 -0800

It was sometime since I blogged about anything. I have had several things on mind and many of them are presents as drafts. But this one really caught my attention and I felt I should put in my thoughts about this.

Until a couple of years, people rarely looked beyond Internet Explorer for their browsing experience, though they kept cursing it a lot. After that came the Mozilla Firefox web browser with its pack of addons allowing users to actually customize for their needs. They could actually make the browser do what they wanted it to do and not just set some options. The browser wars had started again. At least I started reading about browsers and started following up on things happening with these browsers. Opera and Safari and a few other, actually used, browsers were not really "news" as such.
This was dying off. Firefox had created a sizable chunk of user base and was pretty stable with it. Except for few traditional enhancements like memory optimizations, bug fixes, etc.. nothing big was happening. It was a lot silent.

Then came the next wave with Google announcing the release of its browser with a nice, easy to understand "comic" book. It came with a whole new paradigm for building browsers with the "process-per-tab" concept. It was really innovative. Though discussions about this happened in other browser communities also, Google Chrome was the first one to implement it. Also it boasted of its super-fast V8 JavaScript Engine and also the browser UI, which gave more screen real estate to content than chrome. This was a real big thing and made the browser wave go much higher than what it had ever been. With the Google branding a vast majority of internet users rushed to have a sneak peak at Google Chrome or may be try it or even keep it as their regular browser. There was a lot of noise about this and people indeed listened. Mozilla and IE people were not silent and did responded very well. Mozilla came up with its ultra-fast "Tracemonkey" JS engine, implementing the trace trees and there by making it much faster than V8. IE8 also has the "process-per-tab" and "private browsing" features first presented by Chrome. But like any other sound this too dampened a little after it was created and browsers were back in the silent phase doing traditional improvements and bug fixes. At least that's how I percieved the situation.

[Edit 06-Mar-09 : Shawn Wilsher suggest that Tracemonkey had appeared before Chrome made the pubic appearance. He certainly knows these things better than me and I believe he is right. But still I wanted to keep my original post as it is and instead I put this separate edit note. :) ]

But I was clearly, totally wrong. People have realized that internet is the place to be in the future and thats where a large part of our life will be. With browser being the main and central interface for people to use that internet, it makes a real good sense to make this browser as robust and reliable as possible. New things keep coming on the internet, both and bad, the latter being more often, and the browser has to keep up with all of it. What we thought yesterday as being a good design apporach might just look senseless tomorrow. There just seems no end to it and researchers appear all ready for it. I am coming across so many innovations happening in the browser domain. This article : Researchers Say Gazelle Browser Offers Better Security -- Campus Technology -- gives us an idea about how much effort the scientists are putting in making our internet lives better. The article is about Gazelle, but it also mentions about another experimental browser OP.

This browser Gazelle, uses the Trident rendering engine (used by IE) but builds upon a OS based process architecture where websites form the processes and they communicate by passing messages like IPC (Inter-process communication).

I am not yet sure how this will all work out. Probably the websites need to built with some intelligence so that it can do the so called IPC when it actually has to. But the evoltion in browsers is for sure. They will not be same as they are now. Several things are going on along the UI front. When these things mature and come togther you can have the scenes of your favourite sci-fi movie scenes right in front of you everyday.

Lets just hope these come soon enough for people like me to enjoy, not when I am all grey hair and toothless.

Hari Om.

Changing directory in which command window opens

Brahmana (Srirang) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:39:00 -0800

For some reason my command prompt always opened up on my mapped network drive. That was probably because the network drive was set as my home or something. It was the sys-admins work about which I did not have any clue.

Every time I had to change to my local disk drive and then navigate to the directory I wanted. Also the network drive caused a lot of delay when it was not available, making my PC freeze at times and there by making me very irritated. So I finally decided to get rid of the network drive. But I couldn't and I had to settle for changing the default location in which the command window opens. The link below has all the details for doing the needful. As usual with windows its a registry value :-)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Command Processor
|
|
|____ Autorun =

How to change the default startup directory for Command Prompt?

BTW, It mentions that this setting will render the "Open Command Window Here" XP PowerToy. Nothing like that happened to me, at least not yet. So you can be assured that both of these will work in harmony.

Happy Commanding. ;-)

Image for a statusbar panel in a firefox extension

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:42:00 -0800

I was working on a firefox extension which, like many other extensions, was adding a small button to the status bar. Doing this is very clearly explained here in : this MDC tutorial

I followed the instructions properly but to my surprise I did not see the image on the status bar, but just a square box in the defualt chrome color. I tried forums/web search and the IRC too, but no help. Then I read the statusbarpanel reference page - statusbarpanel - MDC -- completely and it appears that for the image to show up the statusbarpanel has to be of a specific class called : "statusbarpanel-iconic". I just added that and it worked. :-)

Here is my code


<statusbar id="status-bar">
 <statusbarpanel id="graph_status_bar_panel"
 image="chrome://myext/skin/chart_status_bar.png"
 class="statusbarpanel-iconic" onclick="toggleGraphPanel(event)"
 tooltiptext="View Graph Panel" />
</statusbar>

Pictorial representation of blog

Brahmana (Srirang) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:04:00 -0800

I came across this post by Shawn (sdwilsh) and instantly wanted to know what I am concentrating on in my blogs. And here is what my blog has to say:

Here is the link where you can get one for your blog : http://www.wordle.net/

Happy picturing. :-)

Documentation appears by itself -- from the code.

Brahmana (Srirang) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:21:00 -0800

Beautifully Documented Code at Toolness

I am slightly into web and web related development and as part of that I come across various JavaScript (JS) libraries which claim to make my life a lot easier and many of them actually do that. But several times there is a big hurdle that I have to cross before actually things become easy. Its understanding how to use that library. This sometimes turns out to be a pain, often bigger than the one if I had done everything by myself without any external library.

This is probably all going to change. The lack of documentation might just vanish and all the necessary documentation might start appearing from the code itself. And the steps for building this, collating things and publishing on website are taken care of. You just need to annotate your code with the right tags and the JavaScript linked at the top (Written by Atul) will do the documentation generation and will also display it alongside code.

This is particularly useful for libraries providing various APIs as the users can see a function in the raw code and understand its meaning and purpose and the arguments it expects and its return value. All in once place at one time.

This is really cool. Go check out the tool and give the world a better library to use :-)

Happy (auto)Documenting

The best blonde joke ever

Brahmana (Srirang) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:28:00 -0800

I never really blog about jokes, and never for sure on my tech blog. But this one is the best ever blonde joke. Its simple awesome.

Editing remote files smoothly in vim on windows

Brahmana (Srirang) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:02:00 -0800

I have a laptop and a desktop. Desktop runs Ubuntu, by choice, and laptop has to run Windows, by force. But most of my work happens on the Linux desktop itself. So when I am away from the desktop I would login to my desktop via SSH using PuTTy. It works fine when I am still on the corporate LAN, but the problem starts when I go home and get on to VPN. The speed and the responsiveness simply demotivates me and I tend to waste a lot of time specially when I am editing files with vim, because every keystroke has to travel across the network to my desktop and the response is to be sent back to my laptop. Coding really becomes hell with this.

Recently I got to know that VIM has identified this problem quite some time back and has a solution in store. You can open a remote file over SCP, where in VIM would bring down that file to the local system and store in some temp location. You edit that temp file, with VIM running on your own machine. So do not have to wait for keystrokes to be processed by the remote machine. When you write the file, VIM updates the remote file using SCP.

[Note]: If the file is read only, w! will not work. The user account used for SCP must have write permisson for the file you are editing. Otherwise, obviously, remote write fails and VIM will promptly report it.

Look at this page for the syntax and more details.

This would be straight forward on a linux box as both vim and scp come packed with the OS and they are in the shell execution path and everything is set up by default. Things need some extra work on Windows.

First obvious thing is to install VIM. Then you would need a SCP program. And once again PuTTy comes to rescure. They have a PSCP.exe, which makes you feel at home even on Windows. Get it here.

To improve this a little more you can rename the PSCP.exe to scp.exe and place it in "C:\Windows\System32\" so that it will be picked up from everywhere at the command prompt. Also note that you can use your PuTTy saved sessions directly with PSCP.

Happy remote VIMming. :-)

Hari Om

Avoiding seeing your XP in the old pale Win 98 way

Brahmana (Srirang) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:31:00 -0700

How to Fix Windows XP Theme Problems > Tutorials, Bug Fixes, Subscriber Articles, Hosting DotNetNuke at Godaddy > My .NET Nuke Blog - Internet, Blogging, DotNetNuke, Tutorials, Windows, How to Articles, Fun, Free Stuff, Reviews

For some reason when I got my laptop my XP looked the good old Win 98 with the default grey color theme. I thought it was optimized for performance than for visual effects. Later when I actually wanted to see my machine in a beautiful way (Specially after decorating my FF with the Chromifox theme) I realized that the XP theme was not present in the drop down at all. My first thought was that it is some corporate limitation and cursed the rules and restrictions and all that. But I was sure I would not be the first person and hence hit our friend in need - Google. After wading through several pages telling me to download the default XP theme - Luna or a modified version of it I finally landed at the page linked at the top of the post. It gives clear steps to get back the charm on your XP machine and enjoy the beauty of today's computer instead of brooding over the past decade's sober ones.

The particular thing that I had to do was to enable the Themes service. It was turned off and was set to manual activation. I changed to automatic start and voila !! -- my machine became beautiful and there by making my FF a lot more pleasing.
Not jus that almost every application now appears beautiful including the MS-Outlook -- yeah, MS-Outlook.!!!

Chrome multi-process architecture does have heavy costs

Brahmana (Srirang) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:18:00 -0700

Chromium Blog: Multi-process Architecture

The day the Google Chrome comic was released quite a few people pinged and called me to talk about that and what I say about -- not that I am an expert on browsers or evaluating software products. Its just for the slight association with the Mozilla community that I was contacted. When I was talking with my roommate about this I told him what I felt the very moment I read about the multi-process architecture. Right from the first reading I was skeptical about the resource utilization if I were to open a hell lot of tabs in this browser, as it mentioned in the comic that each tab is a process. Though the phrase "process per tab" was more for software laymen with the actual thing being that it is "process per domain" until a max limit of about 20 and later its reuse. More details are on the blog post linked above.

And about the reason for being skeptical is the very basic concept amongst computer users that more processes will slow down the system. Any system analyst or a sys-admin will tell you the same thing when you complain about the very low speed of your computer. From what I know this is mainly because of the increased memory consumption and a possible paging that might happen for moving processes in and out of main memory and virtual memory. Also scheduling will possibly take a hit as there are more processes. Apart from this as I understand there is always an overhead of maintaining process info for every process.

Considering these things for a user like who opens close to 20 tabs always and goes up to 30 a lot of times, the overhead will be considerable. Also creating and killing processes will also be an overhead.

Also my task-manager will list so many chrome.exe processes.. !!!!! Thats so very irritating for me.

When I told him about my spkepticism he told me that the Google folks would have thought about that. I agreed with him and the now they have put it on their blog. In the post linked at the top, its mentioned that the system might slow down with a lot of processes and hence they had to put an upper limit and later resort for reuse. They call this small caveats but I am not sure if it is small enough. Lets see how things evolve.

Until this is proven as small enough: Happy Single-Process browsing ;-)