One of my friends just screwed up her linux boot record by installing M$ Windows 2000 Professional on top of it. Luckily she didn't delete any of her partitions. This blog is for her and others who have done similar mistakes, unknowingly.
1) Reboot your system using the Linux bootable CD.
2) Choose "Rescue system" or similar option that would take you to a temporary shell.
3) Follow the steps mentioned in the link given below.
Well, I thought of writing all the steps to setup grub again, however, a google on "setting up grub" revealed this link here, which explains the steps to install grub quite comprehensively.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Scored Top
Thanks to "Google" to give me the top most rank among others. Well, those of you who are confused with my first sentence, look at my previous blog here.
A google search on "veerapuram varadhan" shows the link to my blog as the first hit.
A google search on "veerapuram varadhan" shows the link to my blog as the first hit.
Lights On
Today, got sometime to think about my real life. Well, it is quite evident from my blogs that I am hardly paying any attention to my personal life. Last 3.5 years have changed me a lot. Have become more work-aholic than ever. Because of which lost few good friends, well, not really but typically; yes. My FAQ stack on my mind gets overflown by questions like...
What happened to me? What made me change like this? What happened to my hobbies, interests etc?.
Few reasons popped up as answers and the prominent one being "staying alone". Yes, in Delhi, though I stayed alone, had very good, fun-filled and hilarious friend circle. We used to go out on a long drive every weekends. Never missed any movie that got released in Delhi till I was there.
Bangalore has totally turned my life upside down. Have I become more responsible? Would that mean no more such fun and joyous moments? Well, I think I am missing good partner(s) to hang around, kill time, chit chats etc. Most of my friends have got a registered partner for them, making my request to hang-around an invalid one. Though few things that my beloved-friends suggest which would bring a difference to the current way of my living and they are:
1) Go to office on official office timings and
2) Do not awake past MIDNIGHT
Lets see how soon this light brings brightness to the dark-side of my life.
Its around 4:40 AM now, which I have been trying to avoid for months together now.
What happened to me? What made me change like this? What happened to my hobbies, interests etc?.
Few reasons popped up as answers and the prominent one being "staying alone". Yes, in Delhi, though I stayed alone, had very good, fun-filled and hilarious friend circle. We used to go out on a long drive every weekends. Never missed any movie that got released in Delhi till I was there.
Bangalore has totally turned my life upside down. Have I become more responsible? Would that mean no more such fun and joyous moments? Well, I think I am missing good partner(s) to hang around, kill time, chit chats etc. Most of my friends have got a registered partner for them, making my request to hang-around an invalid one. Though few things that my beloved-friends suggest which would bring a difference to the current way of my living and they are:
1) Go to office on official office timings and
2) Do not awake past MIDNIGHT
Lets see how soon this light brings brightness to the dark-side of my life.
Its around 4:40 AM now, which I have been trying to avoid for months together now.
"Deja vu"
Two days in a week that I don't really like:
1) First working day after the weekend and
2) Last working day before the weekend.
Reached bangalore around 4:30 AM and had a sound sleep till 12:00 noon. Reached office on time ;) and had lunch. With a great determination, started to trace back the roots for the annoying 310461 bug. Yet to form a suitable patch to fix it. It was around 10:30PM, nags pinged me on IM to make me realize that I would miss my dinner. Packed my bag and rushed to my favourite Annapoorna hotel and got a parcel of 6 Idlies and 2 Chappatis.
Reached home, did sandhi and finished the dinner. After a very long time, today did lot of orukut found few of my friends. Tried hard to make vpn work with the tortoise connection (Reliance's rconnect) work, but, didn't get through. So, started reading through Joshua's semweb library to read/write RDF files. This would give me a break through to enter into Beagle land with something nice.
1) First working day after the weekend and
2) Last working day before the weekend.
Reached bangalore around 4:30 AM and had a sound sleep till 12:00 noon. Reached office on time ;) and had lunch. With a great determination, started to trace back the roots for the annoying 310461 bug. Yet to form a suitable patch to fix it. It was around 10:30PM, nags pinged me on IM to make me realize that I would miss my dinner. Packed my bag and rushed to my favourite Annapoorna hotel and got a parcel of 6 Idlies and 2 Chappatis.
Reached home, did sandhi and finished the dinner. After a very long time, today did lot of orukut found few of my friends. Tried hard to make vpn work with the tortoise connection (Reliance's rconnect) work, but, didn't get through. So, started reading through Joshua's semweb library to read/write RDF files. This would give me a break through to enter into Beagle land with something nice.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Evolution Mail-remote plugin sharp
Today I commited a fairly stable glue-code for the mail-remote plugin bonobo interface that I mentioned in couple of my previous posts. My first commit actually broke the cvs and I had to tweak the glib-genmarshal stuff a little bit to match the source tree structure that we have in evolution-sharp.
I learned quite a few things, though small, but significant. Errors in makefiles are cancer cells that eat your time like anything.
A major part of thanks goes to NotZed for his cons(is)tant support with couple of reviews and suggestions in IRC channel.
The todos are
* a test program
* simplify complex glue-APIs
* bug fixes. ;-)
I learned quite a few things, though small, but significant. Errors in makefiles are cancer cells that eat your time like anything.
A major part of thanks goes to NotZed for his cons(is)tant support with couple of reviews and suggestions in IRC channel.
The todos are
* a test program
* simplify complex glue-APIs
* bug fixes. ;-)
Monday, August 08, 2005
A Perfect weekend
Boarded the bus on Friday with an intention to complete certain pending tasks over the weekend. If I had known the plans of my parents for my weekend, perhaps, I wouldn't have taken my laptop all the way to my native place.
It all started with an heavy discussion with my auditor in filing my tax returns. Ugh, taxes are a RPITA. Apart from what has been deducted by Novell and my previous employer, I had to pay around 37K, which I paid last week. Though, my auditor got back with a new figure of around 39K and that means another 2K. Hope that chapter ends there.
Once I finished with my auditor, my cousin called me up and told me that he had setup an appointment with a property-broker, well, in Chennai (2 hrs of bus journey). So, accompanied by my father, I reached Chennai around evening. We saw three properties out of which only one appeared to be okay. However, lot many things have to be verified before signing-off a deal.
As mentioned in this post, real-estate business is really coming well. Hope to close that deal in time.
Met my cousin, after long long ago and spent good time with them. Chennai has changed a lot since my last visit (4 yrs?)
And the day of rest, Sunday, passed just like that with enough rest and nice homely-food.
It all started with an heavy discussion with my auditor in filing my tax returns. Ugh, taxes are a RPITA. Apart from what has been deducted by Novell and my previous employer, I had to pay around 37K, which I paid last week. Though, my auditor got back with a new figure of around 39K and that means another 2K. Hope that chapter ends there.
Once I finished with my auditor, my cousin called me up and told me that he had setup an appointment with a property-broker, well, in Chennai (2 hrs of bus journey). So, accompanied by my father, I reached Chennai around evening. We saw three properties out of which only one appeared to be okay. However, lot many things have to be verified before signing-off a deal.
As mentioned in this post, real-estate business is really coming well. Hope to close that deal in time.
Met my cousin, after long long ago and spent good time with them. Chennai has changed a lot since my last visit (4 yrs?)
And the day of rest, Sunday, passed just like that with enough rest and nice homely-food.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Interviewing skills
For the next three working days including today, I will have to attend interviewing skills triaining program. Yesterday I attended a video presentation on various factors involved in interviewing.
Will write in detail after the training. However, the quality of the material used in yesterday's video presentation was really good. If an interviewer follows the tips/tricks/strategies/etc mentioned in the material, I would say, he will never ever pick a wrong person for his/her company.
Ok, feeling sleepy, will fill-in more at the end of each day's session. :)
Will write in detail after the training. However, the quality of the material used in yesterday's video presentation was really good. If an interviewer follows the tips/tricks/strategies/etc mentioned in the material, I would say, he will never ever pick a wrong person for his/her company.
Ok, feeling sleepy, will fill-in more at the end of each day's session. :)
Block diagrams to Wireframes
Yesterday, I, finally managed to complete an outline-sketch of the functional working of the mail-remote plugin glue code. After a couple of hours sleep and a good lunch, got NotZed on the evolution channel asking for his views about the outline-sketch.
He was ok with the approach that was taken in the outline-sketch, however, wanted to refine and trim some of the functions/assumptions. He explained me the facts about the data that are passed from the mail-remote plugin (server interface). Also, he suggested few things like defining structures for the interface types exposed in the IDL file and emitting individual signals for each type of "change_type" instead of a single signal with multi-parameters.
As a matter of fact, the values that are passed to the callbacks, registered in the glue-code to handle signals from the plugin, assumes a particular order and the same should be maintained.
So, with those suggestions, the mere outline-sketch has transformed into a more-or-less neat sketch that clearly defines the shape of the glue-code. (Now the sketch spans to multiple-files.)
He was ok with the approach that was taken in the outline-sketch, however, wanted to refine and trim some of the functions/assumptions. He explained me the facts about the data that are passed from the mail-remote plugin (server interface). Also, he suggested few things like defining structures for the interface types exposed in the IDL file and emitting individual signals for each type of "change_type" instead of a single signal with multi-parameters.
As a matter of fact, the values that are passed to the callbacks, registered in the glue-code to handle signals from the plugin, assumes a particular order and the same should be maintained.
So, with those suggestions, the mere outline-sketch has transformed into a more-or-less neat sketch that clearly defines the shape of the glue-code. (Now the sketch spans to multiple-files.)
Epitome of absent-mindedness
Absent-mindedness is one of the common states of human-brain during which it is completely preoccupied by something like a single-big-monolithic process running on a "non-multitasking" system.
Why am I talking about absent-mindedness?
Ah!! its about the result of a recent "preoccupied" state of my brian. As you might know that I am working on writing wrappers and lately started working on writing a bonobo-client/wrapper for the mail-remote plugin. It is this *thing* that occupied my whole brain because of which I forgot to sleep yesterday. Ugh?
After fixing-up that gapi stuff, I disconnected the dialup and was taking a deeeeeep-stretch, there was this sound "trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrringggggggggg", well, my alarm-timepiece shouted loud (7:15 AM), making me realize that I actually forgot to sleep. :)
(BTW, it was around 7:15 AM)
Why am I talking about absent-mindedness?
Ah!! its about the result of a recent "preoccupied" state of my brian. As you might know that I am working on writing wrappers and lately started working on writing a bonobo-client/wrapper for the mail-remote plugin. It is this *thing* that occupied my whole brain because of which I forgot to sleep yesterday. Ugh?
After fixing-up that gapi stuff, I disconnected the dialup and was taking a deeeeeep-stretch, there was this sound "trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrringggggggggg", well, my alarm-timepiece shouted loud (7:15 AM), making me realize that I actually forgot to sleep. :)
(BTW, it was around 7:15 AM)
Thursday, August 04, 2005
I am one among the top three
A google on "Varadhan" showed my blog link in the first three search results. :)
Soon will reach the pretigious No.1 position.
Soon will reach the pretigious No.1 position.
Mail-remote plugin glue code and GAPI
After adding that LastModfied support to the ECal# bindings, I continued my journey of providing wrappers for the mail-remote plugin. With the enough homework that I did during the day time, started with writing the base prototype that exposes four signals, two for session, one for store and one for folder.
Defined functions to lookup and initialize all the necessary callbacks. We connect to signals provided by the listeners process them and emit our own signals that will be handled in the managed-code.
make && make install went through. Now, the final step, generating C# code for the mail-remote-glue object. *BANG*, gapi spit out something like
store_changed struct _EMailRemoteGlueClass {GObjectClass parent_class;void (*session_shutdown) (EMailRemoteGlue* emrg, gpointer data);void (*folder_changed) (EMailRemoteGlue* emrg, GSList* added, GSList* removed, GSList* changed);}; at /usr/bin/gapi2xml.pl line 881, line 92.
Tried few combinations of typedefs, positioning of "*" in a declaration etc. Nothing helped. Finally, opened the /usr/bin/gapi2xml.pl file to see what is happening in line 881. It clearly mentioned that it is failing while decoding/creating "Signal" definition.
With that clue, I read through the code once again and found out a typical "copy & paste" error, that resulted in the "registration" of same signal twice, which GAPI promptly pointed out.
I fixed that and GAPI and my glue-code lived happily thenafter.
Defined functions to lookup and initialize all the necessary callbacks. We connect to signals provided by the listeners process them and emit our own signals that will be handled in the managed-code.
make && make install went through. Now, the final step, generating C# code for the mail-remote-glue object. *BANG*, gapi spit out something like
store_changed struct _EMailRemoteGlueClass {GObjectClass parent_class;void (*session_shutdown) (EMailRemoteGlue* emrg, gpointer data);void (*folder_changed) (EMailRemoteGlue* emrg, GSList* added, GSList* removed, GSList* changed);}; at /usr/bin/gapi2xml.pl line 881,
Tried few combinations of typedefs, positioning of "*" in a declaration etc. Nothing helped. Finally, opened the /usr/bin/gapi2xml.pl file to see what is happening in line 881. It clearly mentioned that it is failing while decoding/creating "Signal" definition.
With that clue, I read through the code once again and found out a typical "copy & paste" error, that resulted in the "registration" of same signal twice, which GAPI promptly pointed out.
I fixed that and GAPI and my glue-code lived happily thenafter.
Was it a race condition?
ECal# provides two types of APIs to get a list of calendar events present in a calendar.
First type is based on "Query/Response" and the other is "Compare-with-last-fetched-items-and-return-the-final-list" sort of method.
In Beagle, the new Evolution Calendar backend that Joe Shaw is working on calls "GetChanges", second-type method, to get a list of what-so-ever-has-happened since last call. Once things are setup properly, GetItems() is called. GetItems() works on "Query/Response" basis and once the query is setup and the Start() method is called, the results satisfying the query are returned immediately, causing Beagle to re-index them immediately.
Where the heck is the race-condition here?
Well, the first-time "results" of the query are the same calendar-events that are already indexed. So, it might appear like a race-condition, but, in reality, it is not. Perhaps, can be called "an unwanted" condition, though, cannot be avoided.
To handle this safely, the new CalComponent class exposes a property called LastModified, with which the first-set-of-results can be compared and avoided from a "re-indexing".
First type is based on "Query/Response" and the other is "Compare-with-last-fetched-items-and-return-the-final-list" sort of method.
In Beagle, the new Evolution Calendar backend that Joe Shaw is working on calls "GetChanges", second-type method, to get a list of what-so-ever-has-happened since last call. Once things are setup properly, GetItems() is called. GetItems() works on "Query/Response" basis and once the query is setup and the Start() method is called, the results satisfying the query are returned immediately, causing Beagle to re-index them immediately.
Where the heck is the race-condition here?
Well, the first-time "results" of the query are the same calendar-events that are already indexed. So, it might appear like a race-condition, but, in reality, it is not. Perhaps, can be called "an unwanted" condition, though, cannot be avoided.
To handle this safely, the new CalComponent class exposes a property called LastModified, with which the first-set-of-results can be compared and avoided from a "re-indexing".
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Bonobo - The Crypted Magic word
I am happy that atlast the time has come to complete one of my long pending (personal) tasks, learning to use bonobo. Thanks to Michael Zucchi (NotZed) for his mail-remote plugin which exposes bonobo interfaces to talk with it.
As part of writing C# wrappers for things in evolution & co, I started writing a client-code in "C" for the mail-remote plugin interface. Thanks to Michael Meeks for his tutorial on bonobo. The sample How-to also came handy to quickly understand and start coding the client. Thanks to Google to find this one, which really helped me to quickly prototype my client.
Ok, here is how my client works. Client has two parts, 1) Implementation of listeners and 2) glue-code.
Listeners: These implements various listener classes and their methods. Also, emits g_signals that the glue-code can connect to and process it.
Glue-code: This is the actual client-code that talks to the server-side (the plugin) interface and exposes signals to the C# layer. Hope GAPI will pick-it-up and create a "nice" code by itself. ;)
Ok, its time to actually do some coding. More later.
As part of writing C# wrappers for things in evolution & co, I started writing a client-code in "C" for the mail-remote plugin interface. Thanks to Michael Meeks for his tutorial on bonobo. The sample How-to also came handy to quickly understand and start coding the client. Thanks to Google to find this one, which really helped me to quickly prototype my client.
Ok, here is how my client works. Client has two parts, 1) Implementation of listeners and 2) glue-code.
Listeners: These implements various listener classes and their methods. Also, emits g_signals that the glue-code can connect to and process it.
Glue-code: This is the actual client-code that talks to the server-side (the plugin) interface and exposes signals to the C# layer. Hope GAPI will pick-it-up and create a "nice" code by itself. ;)
Ok, its time to actually do some coding. More later.
Why a patch review is required?
Today, I witnessed the reason for doing a patch review. Two days back, I landed a load of changes to the Evolution-sharp cvs along with a stupid change to one of the functions in the calendar glue-code that would cause, actually, caused a pretty straight "crash".
Though, my unit-testing passed with out any error, the crash was very obvious when Joe pinged me on the channel.
This blog would keep reminding me to do a self-patch-review before commits.
Also, a message to myself, "DO NOT COMMIT ANYTHING PAST MIDNIGHT."
Though, my unit-testing passed with out any error, the crash was very obvious when Joe pinged me on the channel.
This blog would keep reminding me to do a self-patch-review before commits.
Also, a message to myself, "DO NOT COMMIT ANYTHING PAST MIDNIGHT."
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
ECal# handles recurrences
Did I say "recurrence"? Ugh, Yes, just did. The show continued to take the pace as the Showstopper was cleared.
I can say ECal# provides recurrence information as well, though, in a similar fashion that of e-d-s. A very minimal ToString() override is in CVS today that returns a "human-readable" string representation of recurrence meetings.
The recurrence part of the RFC 2445 is bit tricky, though, does provides all possible information about a recurrence meeting. This is one of the features in ECal# that took little longer time for me to understand and wrap it up.
More stringifying needs to be done.
I can say ECal# provides recurrence information as well, though, in a similar fashion that of e-d-s. A very minimal ToString() override is in CVS today that returns a "human-readable" string representation of recurrence meetings.
The recurrence part of the RFC 2445 is bit tricky, though, does provides all possible information about a recurrence meeting. This is one of the features in ECal# that took little longer time for me to understand and wrap it up.
More stringifying needs to be done.
The Showstopper
On Friday, 29th July, started my hunt for memory leaks in the recent ECal bindings in Evolution#.
Found a potential memory leak when creating an array of CalComponent objects from icalcomponent and ECalComponent objects. The call to the glue-API that does the intermediate conversion to ECalGlueComponent objects expects the caller to free the returned list of ECalGlueComponent objects but was never freed, instead, the individual fields of this objects were getting freed through the GLib.Marshaller.PtrToStringGFree() method. In order to fix this, I wrote a glue-API that takes the list of ECalGlueComponent objects are unref's them.
Every thing went fine till the new "memory-leak fix" API was called. When the API tried to unref the objects, *BANG*, a sexy segfault occurred.
Spent the whole afternoon trying to nail the culprit in the holy cross, but, didn't. Packed the laptop and caught the 2:30 PM bus to my native.
Saturday, 30th July, 10:00 PM:
Booted to my linux partition. (laptop has got a default windows partition, to be removed). Started hunting for the criminal that actually frees the memory of one of the fields of ECalGlueComponent object. Spent an hour adding all possible g_warning aka fprintf to pring debug messages.
*Voila*, to the epitome of surprise, found the hide-out of the culprit who was doing this - Mono marshaller.
Suppose, if a native call returns a "char*", mono converts it to "string" type by default. However, as an added-offer, it also "de-allocates" the source/original memory.
I am not pretty sure on the behaviour, though.
Expect the unexpected?
Found a potential memory leak when creating an array of CalComponent objects from icalcomponent and ECalComponent objects. The call to the glue-API that does the intermediate conversion to ECalGlueComponent objects expects the caller to free the returned list of ECalGlueComponent objects but was never freed, instead, the individual fields of this objects were getting freed through the GLib.Marshaller.PtrToStringGFree() method. In order to fix this, I wrote a glue-API that takes the list of ECalGlueComponent objects are unref's them.
Every thing went fine till the new "memory-leak fix" API was called. When the API tried to unref the objects, *BANG*, a sexy segfault occurred.
Spent the whole afternoon trying to nail the culprit in the holy cross, but, didn't. Packed the laptop and caught the 2:30 PM bus to my native.
Saturday, 30th July, 10:00 PM:
Booted to my linux partition. (laptop has got a default windows partition, to be removed). Started hunting for the criminal that actually frees the memory of one of the fields of ECalGlueComponent object. Spent an hour adding all possible g_warning aka fprintf to pring debug messages.
*Voila*, to the epitome of surprise, found the hide-out of the culprit who was doing this - Mono marshaller.
Suppose, if a native call returns a "char*", mono converts it to "string" type by default. However, as an added-offer, it also "de-allocates" the source/original memory.
I am not pretty sure on the behaviour, though.
Expect the unexpected?
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