Woot..Passed the mid-term evals

After a week’s waiting my mentor informed me that I had passed the mid-term evaluations. (he said that my performance for the first phase exceeded his expectations. ).

Its been a long time since I actually blogged about the progress. After I got the Freerunner in my hand (muhuhahahaa), it was more fun since there were subtle changes in the way the code ran on the device. Tracking down segfaults was uber awesome.

Plugins are now written *entirely* in vala. Earlier, this used to be an ugly abomination of hand-written and vala generated C code. Now, where good ol’ C is necessary, .vapis’ have been added that wrap around code written in C.

Additionally plugins for rtc, input and led were added. Input plugin is incomplete though. The code isn’t perfect yet, so need to refine them and make them a bit tight in some places. rtc and led especially needs some tweaks.

I guess most of the second phase will be spent on syncing with frameworkd. Now, the python device daemons have been integrated into a single daemon with odeviced as one of the subsytems. (Earlier this was separate). The python daemon is uber-cool by itself, but imagine a C implementation of the entire frameworkd. Light on resources and excellent in performance, if done right.

Git repository here.

Funday Sunday

Sunday’s are fun. Even more, when you get together with your school buddies for a long chaat.. Burp!

I haven’t seen most of these guys for a looong time. So it was fun reliving the school moments. As for me, I was mostly silent having my mouth full with “Dahi Puris”. Seriously, Adayar Ananda Bhavan in Tambaram makes a good bunch of them. Its an ecstatic experience, when the “puri” breaks in your mouth releasing dollops of fresh sweet yoghurt with an assortment of tingly sauces. Try it when you go there. Highly recommended.

It would have been awesome if the entire class turned up. (That way I could have eaten more )

And special full credits to vidhya for bringing a camera that didn’t have batteries. Now, we have to be satisfied with crappy pics taken from even crappier mobile phones.

Also, my mentor is happy with my GSoC performance, so looks like I will pass my mid-term evaluations. Yay! What a weekend…

Finally, The Freerunner is here..

Wow, DHL dudes are fast. They took just 4 days to ship the device considering there was a sunday in-between. Thanks to Daniel for sending the devices to the SoC’ers.

I don’t have a dedicated camera, so pics are a bit sucky

(Evil maniacal laughter) Here are the pics…muhuhahaha

odeviced: More sysfs abuse (Screenshot attached! :P)

A few days gone by, and endless wrestling with git wherein I was not able to push code. Turned out, I was using the wrong URL to push ..doh!

But anyway, the code is beginning to stabilise a bit (Read no unexpected segfaults, only expected ones..). The last few days were spent in changing the method names in accordance with OTAPI naming conventions after my mentor went through my code.

There is also another important change. The sysfs nodes for backlight and power plugins were hardcoded in their configuration files. So, I came up with some helpers that creates DBus paths automatically based on the device class which they belong to. Here’s a picture of today’s code in action,

Notice the d-feet DBus debugger towards the lower left? It shows all the automatically created DBus object paths based on the device class which the plugin stands for. And the terminal to the right shows some debug messages. Note how odeviced spits out the current battery status viz. “Charging, Discharging”. The corresponding “battery-status-changed” DBus signal is emitted as well (along with “low-battery-warning” signal which *ahem* is emitted when battery is low).

For more follow this thread..

I got a job at Google *glee* (honest)

I am pretty sure my friends would go “WTF, you are too dumb for Goog” by now.

Guess what, I am a full time employee of Google now!. (*ahem* for three months).

I was more of an impression that I was technically an intern for three months. But after reading Aju’s post, it turns out all Summer of Code students are technically full time employees. (Anyone thinking otherwise please comment).

This means I get uber bragging rights.

What happens after 3 months when I am jobless again?

Simple. Just tell everyone “I quit” because they refused to send me another t-shirt.

Speaking of GSoC, the progress report of my project can be found here. For some strange reason I was not able to push code to the git repository. Find today’s snapshot here.

BhootKiddo..

As the summer holidays progress, I am finding myself become a nocturnal being. My sense of a “day” has changed a lot.

Wake up at 1200 or 1300 hours and fall asleep at around 2-3 AM, in a position as in the above photo (taken from my mobile which has a crappy camera). Back against the window, legs across my cot only to find myself waking up late in the afternoon sun with an excruciating pain in my back. Its great in a way, since both my parents leave for work early and I have the entire house to myself (na, I don’t run around naked).

After waking up, the usual stuff, watch TV for a while and back to GSoC stuff..

Move my butt around at 5 PM to the guitar classes, return back watch Seinfeld, eat, and back to code…

Trust me, fixing segfaults are really fun, but I think I need to go out and play for a while… :/..I find myself lacking a life these days

Battery Plugin and more..

After a little chat with mickeyl, I realised that exposing crucial functions like load() and unload() was not that of a good idea considering how odeviced is supposed to closely interact with the underlying devices. Consequently there has been some changes over the last week,

• No DBus interface for the service.
• Plugins have now access to a set of helper functions. Only two at the moment (Think setting up DBus object paths)
• Plugins once loaded become resident, that is they cannot be unloaded. If plugins are to be disabled during startup, just remove them from the “enable” field in the global configuration file.
• Per plugin configuration. Each plugins now have their own configuration. Makes more sense, since this mean plugins can have greater freedom with their settings. I really like how the newly checked in battery plugin exploits this.
• Freshly checked in battery plugin. Makes use of sysfs for its functions viz. get_current_brightness, set_brightness, get_maximum_brightness.

SysFS (/sys in 2.6.x.x) is sort of similar to the /proc filesystem and acts as an interface for user-space applications to control/access various devices. One of the neat things about sysfs is the fact that all files consist of only a single entry. This means I don’t have to write a separate parser to extract data from them. So a simple fprintf or fscanf or even the seemingly mundane “echo” can be used to control the devices.

I am also planning to work on the python shell for odeviced for a while. This will be really convenient for testing the service. Something like this,

> Wifi is_on wlan0
True


The code can be checked out from here. I can’t wait till I get hold of a FreeRunner to test odeviced out.

The code is in…

Yay. Got the repository for odeviced set up at http://git.freesmartphone.org

Boy, do I love git.

“What motivates you? Motivation”

I will be entering final year in a couple of months and this means…PLACEMENTS!!! yay! (..or the lack of it)

This means more “Mock Interviews Sessions” and “GDs” to “empower” engineering students to get placed in the only 3 software companies that exist in this physical Universe. Infosys, TCS and CTS (Apparently our college is too dumb for hybrid corporates like m$).

And this blog post sort of sums up my thoughts. Highly hilarious, rolled on the floor injuring my mutti.

Especially at this,

“Any actual work experience?
Buying groceries for my neighbour who has this pretty daughter called Gayathri.”

Oh, yeah! I can empathize.

First frigging milestone..

Why Milestone? Nope, I didn’t come up with fancy code or a “beautiful” one for that matter (Came up with a way to unload plugins). Milestone, because today was the first day I was squeezing up my half empty head to work around a teency weency problem. In short, I am happy I was actually thinking today about squishing a segmentation fault which was bringing the whole house down due to dbus and the kinky wifi plugin.

Now a word of warning. The wifi plugin is a circus freak of sorts. Being the lazy bum I am, I found it a drag to manually get into the trouble of coming up with xml introspection data for the “org.freesmartphone.Device.plugins.wifi” interface.

Instead I just came up with a grand plan of letting valac generate wifi.c and wifi.h, which I could modify later. Piece of cake? Sure…

After the wifi plugin is loaded it works pretty well. The keyword being “After”…By the way, check the progress report which I sent to the smartphone-standards list. That should give you an idea of how odeviced works and looks like. In fact, it works pretty satisfactorily discounting the segmentation faults  :D, which is easily reproducible in the following ways,

• Don’t load the wifi plugin on startup, set enable=0 in odeviced.conf. Instead load it manually after odeviced starts up and begins to idle.
• If the wifi plugin is already loaded, unload it and then try to load it again.

Part of this problem might be my arrogance of not to use GTypeModules for dynamically typing the plugins. I need to discuss with my mentor, mickeyl about this once he gets back to business after LinuxTag.

The barely bare bones powercontrol plugin loads and unloads without any problems, but it doesn’t do anything as remotely useful as the wifi plugin!! Just contains an init function that has a printf in it (bleh!, thank goodness it didn’t bail out).

Oh and the all important tarball is here. Highly effective than laughing gas!

…Another gdb session beckons