Older blog entries for vivekv (starting at number 60)

Work

Been working all through the weekend. No breaks! Its been a tough thing to complete the work. I am hoping that it tapers down next week.

Open Source

I need to spend some time and work on adding some enhancements to CVSPermissions. I have put down all the requirements sent by one and all as feature requests. Now I just have to implement them :-)

Open Source

Folks, LDP stylesheets needs a maintainer. dyork who was maintaining it cannot take up the work load. Can someone who knows XLST take it up?

Work

Work is very busy now. Involved in proposing a multiyear deal that is sucking up a lot of my time. Hope to finish it by monday

Life Life - or the lack of it is very evident. Work is sucking up most of my time.

Work

Work work work... too busy nowadays. I am writing this entry at 11:47 PM on my PC clock after finishing a costing exercise for a proposal.

Open Source

Sarovar is working fine. I managed to copy a temporary "coming soon" page on the cvspermissions website. Raj is very helpful there.

ISP

My new cable connection is sorta OK. I dont get speeds > 28.8 K modem equivalent (this is supposed to be 64K :-( ) but the always on helps. So I dont have to run up huge phone bills.

Open Source

The Sarovar.org website is not working fine. Yay! I can actually host the source code in CVS on the server. Now the interesting part is how to make my public key, SSH and WinCVS working with each other - hmm... will keep reporting progress here if anyone is interested.

OK, I am back after a short haitus. Why the gap? just lazy I guess. DIdnt have much to write - actually that is not true. Here are events not in a chronological order

Technology

Got myself a cable modem connection in India. Nowhere close to what I have seen in the wonderful internet world of US of A. Atleast will keep my phone bills down. Cant seem to use it to talk to my wife though :-(

Open Source

India has a new opensource collaboration site similar to sourceforge. Take a look at sarovar Seems quite mature and wonderful. I plan to host my CVSPermissions tool over there. Possibly even the poster but I am not sure if anybody would be interested in such a small app :-)

They guys at the site are also very responsive and helpful. Hopefully they dont go under

Work

Life is a little relaxed nowadays. Work is OK, we are going live for sure so that is out of the way. NOthing new coming up which is a little sad.

Life

This is the wedding season in southern india (Actually these months are considered auspicious so everybody plans wedding during this time :-)) so I have been attending a few - colleagues, friends etc.,

18 May 2003 (updated 18 May 2003 at 01:08 UTC) »

Open Source Tried the tip that ade told me about to manage timezones for my advogato poster. Didnt quite work. Something I must have done wrong. It posted all the entries from my past diaries in one go! I am deleting all that and re-writing this one again.

Open Source

ade thanks for the tip. I will try to make the changes and see how it works out. Does anybody know where the advogato servers are located? I need to know the timezone. Secondly, will the XMLRPC call return the timezone information also? Apparently Apache's java client is not working right so I am not sure what the advogato interface returns.

13 May 2003 (updated 13 May 2003 at 17:34 UTC) »
Open Source

OK its official. I have my Advogato poster published on freshmeat. Now I will hopefully get a few hits :-)

Life

Planning to go with friends to a resturant called Cascade in Nungambakkam tomorrow evening for dinner. They serve good chinese food and I am looking for a change. A big group we have become - about 15 of us in all.

Life

My sister in law, husband,kid and his neice came over. They were running late so I had to cancel out on a wedding party that I had to attend for friends at work. Went to "Fruit shop on Greams road" again. Gawd! its going to turn into a habit :-)

Software

Spamihilator seems to be working - atleast it is actually only filtering out SPAM atleast most of it. Good! It did consider slashdot mails as spam and I had to tell it to be nice to slashdot mails.

Open Source

Nobody gave any feedback on my Advogato poster. I dont think anybody cared :-). I have decided to make a release on freshmeat. Maybe that will attract more attention :-)

Sun, May 11, 2003 Test Driven Development

Spent the whole day saturday trying my hand out at test driven development to get a feel of how easy/hard is the whole thing. I keep hearing varied opinions that I had to find out for myself what is the effort involved. I started out to write a partially non-greedy string searching algorithm that would help me match patterns to search and replace on source files. Here is what I found

  1. The initial time taken is high - I would suspect the real cause of this is that - its been a while since I had actually written anything non-trivial in Java plus I had to learn JUnit API, setup the environments etc., I would assume that this is not an issue for a competent developer. Took me nearly 3 hours to write the test cases and code for basic string searching.
  2. The benefits I got by being able to revisit my code so many times to "clean" it up (as I learnt new classes in Java API) while making sure that every combination was still working was worth the trouble. What the test cases gave me is what poets would call as "artistic license" the leeway to keep tweaking the work but still deliver acceptable goods at the end - a luxury that I didnt have in a while.

I actually read a paper about this somewhere I forgot the source. The paper claimed that we are actually writing "legacy" code nowadays as we build an application - basically the article went about defining "legacy" as anything that developers would not touch with a stick simply because they are afraid of breaking something somewhere. What a good suite of automated test cases give us is the ability to keep refactoring code all the time since we have the safety net of test cases to verify the functionality continuously. Today I think I agree with the author. I am liking this TDD paradigm.

Life

Friends came over saturday evening. Went to the beach and found a delightful juice shop on Besant nagar beach near the temple (next to the bus stand) called "Fruit shop on Greams road". Greams road ?? Besant Nagar? I didnt bother to ask. They did serve extermely good and fresh fruit juices with zero additives - a rarity. A bit expensive but real nice in the summer.

Software

I badly need a spam filter. My mail account signal to noise ratio has degraded so badly that today I received 20+ email - all spam and one from my brother in law. I am getting sick of viagra and free porn mails!

I searched the web and found an open source Win32 version called Spamihilator distributed on GNU GPL. Seems quite slick and complete. I have set it up. Now I have to see what it catches.

Sat, May 10, 2003 Open Source

The poster is now behaving strangely when it works across different timezones. Interesting problem this. When I query advogato for the last posted date, it responds with a date/time information. This is converted by the apache XMLRPC client for java into a Date Object. This date object for some strange reason has my local timezone embedded in it instead of the timezone of the server. Since I live in a timezone that is about 12 hours ahead of Advogato, strange things happen when I use this date to decide on what local files should be posted to advogato. Anybody has any ideas on this? Please drop me a note - vivekv at magic hypen cauldron dot com.

I am hosting the software on my site. Please look at the link called Advogato Poster under the software section. Except for the one bug mentioned above, I think the software works fine.

Life

Spending a relaxed weekend at home. Too hot to attempt to go anywhere. My siste-in-law and family will come over tomorrow. Planning to go to the beach to cool off in the evening.

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