Donations

Made my yearly donation to Wikimedia Foundation just a few minutes ago.

Remembering 26/11/2008

A flash mob was organized at Mumbai CST to to pay a tribute to the people who lost their lives on 26/11/2008.

Judge Beat Own Daughter

Judge William Adams used to beat his own daughter. Not good. He allegedly used to abuse the wife or mother in the video too. Not good either.

Note that the video is quite graphic.

RIP DMR

The first thing I came to know (from Ashish) when I woke up this morning was that Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie had passed away. Not an untimely death, I suppose, but still, a very sad day. He will be missed.

Photograph taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dennis_MacAlistair_Ritchie_.jpg

Gnote Performance

Gnote becomes slow at creating, renaming and deleting notes if you have a large collection of notes, and users find this annoying.

So I spent some time this weekend trying to see what is actually going on and came up with a couple of patches — 660653 and 660663. I will be testing these over the next few couple of days to make sure that I did not break anything, and hopefully things will be much more snappy now.

We deserve better leaders

Recently, someone pointed out this thread on the ILUG Bengaluru mailing list to me. I completely fail to see the reason why the original poster turns antagonistic in the fifth mail of the thread:

Debayan, How exactly is this even relevant to the question I asked. I 
answered to your nit-picking about the word “company” in my first 
email, that’s all. Please refrain from taking threads off on a tangent 
if you dont have an answer for the original query. Much appreciated, 
Thanks

I don’t find anything in Debayan’s previous two mails which would indicate that he is deliberately trying to derail a constructive discussion. If I knew the author of a piece of code and there is a question in a mailing list (or IRC channel or any such public forum for that matter) related to it, this is exactly what I would do if I did not know the answer. I would try to get the person asking the question in contact with the author. Granted, that in this case the author might not be the only person qualified to answer the main question, but he is one of the many who can answer.

As for the whole issue about Freedom Matters being a company or not, what is wrong with sharing an anecdote or pointing out a minor (might be immaterial) detail about something with which we have been associated or seen first hand? We all do that. If the original poster had put this question in person to a bunch of people standing in a corridor and someone did make a remark like Debayan did, would there be any reason to start a fight or be offended? Hell, no. After all he did point you to someone who, he thought, can authoritatively answer the question. Maybe Terence Monteiro actually did not know the answer, but even then, Debayan did try to help.

This is just common sense. Some codes of conduct define this as “assume people mean well”.

I have been on the Internet long enough to have seen such nonsense before and I would have happily ignored this only if the original poster had decided not to call Debayan a jerk and a bully on her blog. This is especially alarming because she associates herself with LinuxChix and the issue of sexism in FLOSS. I believe the world deserves better leaders and role models, and given her behaviour in this context she has lost her credibility in my eyes.

Fun is over, let the hacking continue

I am back in Helsinki today (actually I returned late last night) after a thoroughly enjoyable Desktop Summit. Apart from the Beach Party and the Island Party, which were great, I also met a bunch of interesting people — Murray Cumming, Jonathan Jongsma, Tim-Philipp Müller and Alexander Patrakov (he has written a DTS encoder). I also ran into Arun Raghavan after may years and he got me a Collabora key ring.

Sometime during the Island Party, after Daniel went looking for more food (yes, he is alive and doing well, although his latest antics on his bike had left him with a badly sprained ankle), Michael introduced me to Adam Dingle and Jim Nelson from Yorba. It was nice to see that they somehow knew me as “the guy who wrote Solang” and we discussed at length about the possibility of using GEGL and Tracker in Shotwell. I must confess that I used to have a hard time grasping the significance of the phrase “the awesome Yorba guys” until I actually met the two of them. They are amazing people.

In fact, I think this conference was more about meeting people whom I only knew from IRC and planets more than anything else.

Now that the fun is over, I have a got a few things that I need to work on. Apart from some pending work on Telepathy and Gstreamer, I am planning to do a couple of other things. Not sure what will come out of them, but still.

One is adding support for the NateOn protocol to Telepathy. Joone says that the Pidgeon plugin does not work and that there is a Qt client which is now unmaintained. He has sent me a couple of emails that will hopefully help me understand the protocol.

Secondly, I will write a Gstreamer element for Alexander’s DTS encoder. I am not an audio geek by any stretch of the imagination, so I personally have no use for it, but I will do it just for the kicks.

Desktop Summit Berlin 2011

I am currently at the Desktop Summit in Berlin. This being my first Desktop Summit (or GUADEC for that matter) I have been keeping myself busy with putting faces to lots of IRC nicks.

I met Will Thompson, Sjoerd Simons, Stef Walter and Guillaume Desmottes from #telepathy; Edward Harvey from #gstreamer, Christoph Wickert and Thorsten Leemhuis from Fedora. By some lucky chance I ran into Claudio Saavedra, Ivan Frade and Joone Hur who were on the same Air Berlin flight from Helsinki as me. It was also nice to see a good number of hackers from India present at the conference and lots of new faces at that. Among the old timers it was great to catch up with Pradeepto Bhattacharya and Ritesh Khadgaray.

Helsinki City Run 2011

I finally made it in 2:46:40 hr. Maximum allowed was 3:00:00 hr. Lots of room for improvement but not bad for a first attempt.

Photo taken by Marathonfoto.

Telepathy Idle: implementing Connection.Interface.ContactInfo

Connection.Interface.ContactInfo is an interface for requesting information about a contact on a given connection. Or in IRC parlance, Telepathy clients need this interface for displaying the WHOIS information. This interface was not implemented in Idle, which prevented Empathy and friends from offering the /whois command to the user.

However, this is going to change with the upcoming release of Telepathy Idle 0.1.10.

Clients should invoke the RequestContactInfo method on the ContactInfo interface and pass the handle of the target nick. In return they will receive a list of Contact_Info_Fields, where each field is modelled on a single vCard field as defined in RFC 2426. However, due to the quirky nature of IRC and to fit in all the little variations implemented by the different IRC daemons, Idle uses quite a few non-standard fields.

Here is a brief explanation of each field as used by Idle:

• fn: The contact’s full name returned by the RPL_WHOISUSER or 311 numeric as defined in RFC 2812.
• nickname: The account name of the target nick. On Freenode, a user’s account name and primary nick are the same. This field is only present if the nick has identified itself to the server.
• x-host: The value can have more than one component. The first component is the hostname from which the nick is connected to the server, and the optional second component is the IP address. This field is only present if the user had issued a WHOIS against her own nick.
• x-idle-time: The number of seconds for which the contact has been idle returned by the RPL_WHOISIDLE or 317 numeric defined in RFC 2812.
• x-irc-channel: There can be multiple occurrences of this field. Each field specifies a channel that the user is present in. Any special role played by the user in a channel will be indicated by vCard field parameters. eg., ‘role=@’ or ‘role=+’ to show that the user is a channel operator or has been granted permission to speak on a moderated channel respectively. This information is obtained from the RPL_WHOISCHANNELS or 319 numeric defined in RFC 2812.
• x-irc-operator: True, if the nick is an IRC operator as returned by the RPL_WHOISOPERATOR or 313 numeric defined in RFC 2812. Please note that channel operators are not the same as IRC operators.
• x-irc-registered-nick: True, if the nick has been registered. This is related to the nickname field in that every registered nick might not have a nickname but the opposite is true.
• x-irc-secure-connection: True. if the nick is connected to its server over a secure connection.
• x-irc-server: The value has two components. The first is the hostname of the server to which the target nick is connected and the second is some information about the server. This information is obtained from the RPL_WHOISSERVER or 312 numeric defined in RFC 2812.
• x-presence-status-identifier: Value is “away” if the user has set an away message, otherwise it is “available”. This is meant as a well-known string identifier for the x-presence-type values as specified in Connection.Interface.SimplePresence.
• x-presence-status-message: The away message set by the user returned by the RPL_AWAY or 301 numeric as defined in RFC 2812.
• x-presence-type: Modelled on Connection_Presence_Type, the value is ’3′ if the user has set an away message, otherwise it is ’2′.

Here is a complete vCard returned by RequestContactInfo in Python-like syntax:

[ ('fn', [], ['Debarshi Ray']),
  ('x-irc-channel', [], ['#glug-nith']),
  ('x-irc-channel', ['role=@'], ['#solang']),
  ('x-irc-channel', [], ['#telepathy']),
  ('x-irc-server', [], ['lindbohm.freenode.net', 'Stockholm, Sweden']),
  ('x-irc-secure-connection', [], ['true']),
  ('x-idle-time', [], ['42']),
  ('nickname', [], ['debarshi']),
  ('x-presence-type', [], ['2']),
  ('x-presence-status-identifier', [], ['available']),
  ('x-presence-status-message', [], ['']),
  ('x-irc-operator', [], ['false']),
  ('x-irc-registered-nick', [], ['true'])
]