tuxmaniac’s blog

After successfully managing to resist the temptation to join twitter for more than 6 months now, I gave in to identi.ca

Follow my microblog at http://identi.ca/tuxmaniac

After killing two dogs, I just managed to reach Cafe coffee day (Blame my ISP for no internet for continuous 3 days) at 2100 hrs on July 12th 2008. But then, the topic read “Session starts at 2130 hrs”. Wtf! I was early.

All these dramatic prologue apart, the session started of with me welcoming all the participants and taking them through what was coming in the next few weeks. Yes! We are planning quite a few interesting online sessions and a few surprise ones too which will be announced on the Ubuntu India Mailing list as it gets finalized. These online sessions, I must admit were inspired from Kushal’s amazing work at dgplug (more on that later as a separate entry). After the brief round up of whats coming, the agenda of the day was put forth. It was mainly on Bug Squashing basics. People were asked to create their own Launchpad accounts and a briefing of what LP is all about was done. Later Parthan took over the stage along with Onkar, to describe the basics of Bug Squashing. They started of with what a triage is, then moved over to explain the severity levels of bugs, bug life cycle, responsibilities of a bug triager, etc. During this time, I was busy collecting some basic bugs which could be thrown at the participants for practical exposure and helping both of them to answer a few questions that were being asked.

I was sure the session was a success when quite a few folks suddenly started disappearing from the channel when bug 247861 was thrown at the participants for triaging . They returned to cheerfully say that they have reproduced the issue. Great! Most of them were becoming greedy for triaging and confirming bugs, when we realized that it was already past midnight and it is better we “officially” stop the session here before the greed becomes uncontrollable.

The logs of Day 1 have been updated in the wiki page here and today is Day 2, where we will be concentrating on packaging related issues. Onkar has already mailed the list with some details. Looking forward to it and be there at #ubuntu-in-classroom by 2100 hrs IST. As usual a plain “Hello” is most welcome!

You guys must have already heard about the Global Bug Jam that is planned around the month of August. If you haven’t yet read about it, Go Read it NOW!!! As a build up to the mega event, we the Ubuntu-IN folks are organising a Basic Bug triaging session this weekend. If you want to start squashing bugs or help out others be there. Or you just wanna say a Plain “Hello” to the folks, you are most welcome too!!
Venue: #ubuntu-in @ irc.freenode.net

Date: 12, 13 July 2008 from 2100 hrs.

More details are here -> http://ubuntu-in.org:81/wiki/Events/BugJamPrepSessions

Flew from Mumbai (BOM) to Chennai (MAA) on 9W469 Jet Airways today. The Air hostess reset the in flight entertainment system and lo and behold I see the above screen. I managed to catch some specs too. It runs on one of those AMD Geode procs with 256 MB of RAM. Uses Redboot as the boot loader. More details when I travel next or feel free to add to the specs as comments if you have more details.

Its always the “first” things in life that stand out in your life. Be it First Love, First Car, First House, First Salary… Bosch happens to be my first job. Joined way back in June 2005 as a Associate Engineer. Yesterday was the day when I had to leave the campus as a Senior Engineer. It is June 2008, 3 long years and so many people I have met, so many friends I have made. It was a difficult time but as the saying goes “Life moves on”. I never expected the entire floor to be present during my farewell, but it happened.

I will be leaving Bangalore shortly in less than 48 hours to Chennai were I will be on a break doing random stuff I like and eating Home food for the next 2 months. After that it will be yet another farewell. This time it might be even more difficult as I will be leaving my family, country for quite some time. Yes! I will be heading to Europe, Switzerland to be more specific, for my Masters in Electronics at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) If you find me committing more than usual to the free software projects that I am part of, hanging too long on IRC, its because I am unemployed at this moment

Neverthless, It was great working in Bosch and I will miss everything when I am gone. But, you need to sacrifice certain things to fulfil other interests and ambitions in Life. Oh btw, I got a very cute little Penguin soft toy as one of the gifts. Photos of all my other gifts later.

Free Software updates

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

Off late, all blog rolls seem to be talking on the OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian based systems. Well, I took it a bit lightly given the lazy goose I am. But some of my work for the weekend threatened to come to a grinding halt as most of the servers which I access, disabled my blacklisted ssh key. So had to regenerate the keypair and re upload to all the servers. Man!! I seemed to have access to shit loads of servers. I recommend this article by tonnere which gives a very nice gist of the actual problem and the affected systems.

Also the Debian folks have released a package to check whether your key is vulnerable or not. If you are on any Debian based system, just run “sudo ssh-vulnkey -a” to check for all existing key pairs to find out whether they are blacklisted.
Simple steps to update your ssh keys

1. $ssh-keygen

2. Copy the ~/,ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server you wish to update your ssh key.

3. Safeguard your ~/.ssh/id_rsa private key.

I am back after a really nice relaxing weekend at Wayanad. Stayed back at the Resort for most of the time. Flickrd all the pics already. Some samples are put below. I feel so rejuvenated after this trip.

Will begin digging out all my mails shortly and slowly reply to all you folks who have bombarded me with your thoughts

Complete flickr set

I am off to Wayanad for the weekend. No emails, IRC and the likes! Its gonna be just relax and enjoy nature! See you all later with nice pictures.

For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.