Day 30 - Metakgp meetup to meet the candidates for Maintainer Election March 2017

Today, we had a Metakgp meetup to meet all the candidates in our upcoming maintainer election. So, to be clear, we are not looking for a maintainer for one of our projects, rather we are looking for a maintainer for Metakgp. Their roles are diverse but would include day-to-day management, resolving conflicts between members, making the right decisions with inputs from everyone in the community and pushing the community towards a consensus if the community can’t find it on it’s own, and finally fascilitating an environment where new people would feel comfortable joining and contributing. This role is much better described at the Metakgp:Governance wiki page.

We have a lot of candidates this year. And the process... Read More

Day 29 - MISSED; Waiting for The Winds of Winter (GRRM);

I have made very very less progress with Handmaid’s tale. It’s not that the book is not good, it is Good, but it’s confusing and highly taxing to read. The story keeps shifting into either a flashback, or an abstract comparison with something from Offred’s previous life, and it gets rather hard to keep track if you are travelling or something. I hope to make a lot more progress in the next few hours. I am going to install Abaqus (Ansys is installed, but Abaqus apparently is something that people are more familiar with), so that should give me a few hours of solid reading.

This post was again missed, I keep thinking about whether I should start using Read More

Day 28 - Short post; Nothing here, move along

I don’t really know what to write about. It’s been about 15 minutes since I opened this file and edited the header. No idea has really occurred to me, yet.

The next issue on Github that I am going to target is the subjects.json inconsistency that is bound to happen between all Metakgp repositories.

Basically, subjects.json is meant to be a JSON file that maps subject courses offered in IIT Kharagpur to the name of the subject. Right now, there’s a JSON file that’s used. I can’t be sure that the same version of the file is used in these projects: mfqp-source, gyft. These are the only two projects I can find which use... Read More

Day 27 - MISSED; Some python and regex written for Gyft

ARGH! I missed yesterday. It wasn’t even too tiring a day or anything, anyway, I am going to make the best of this. I am about 8 hours later than when the usual post should have been.

I have not been writing a lot of code, and I hadn’t submitted a pull request in almost 20 days! That’s unacceptable, Jimmy, UNACCEPTABLE.

I decided to remedy that situation today. Gyft is a set of python scripts which lets you login into your IIT Kharagpur ERP account, get your timetable for the semester from there. Before my patch, the only option was to put this timetable into your Google Calendar. You generate a client_secret file and... Read More

Day 26 - Communication on Slack;

Today, I wrote this

START REPOST

Other important things I learnt along the way

Listen to others, think before you start typing

Slack and IM make communication easy … and complicated. Let me explain:

1. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have a common goal, and are putting in a non-trivial amount of effort into keeping the conversation sane, unblocking themselves and getting to that common goal.
2. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have conflicting goals, but listen to the other party and are willing to change their stance if reasonable, technically sound arguments are posed.
3. Communication is easy if the parties communicating have opposite goals, are unwilling to change their stance, but would still comply... Read More

Day 25 - Quarter of the way there!

I am 25% there. That’s one part in four, I just need to do the thing that I have already done, 3 times over. Sounds doable, from here on atleast! I just wish I don’t miss a day in between. I missed one day in between till now, and that was not even the day I was most tired on. In fact, the days that I was most tired on, turned out to be the challenging ones when I struggled to write the 500 words and git add and git commit and git push.

I would like to talk a little bit about the encrypted FS setup that I have got going on, in... Read More

Day 24 - Rambling about the Ubuntu 16.04 bug a little bit more

I didn’t watch Revenant, actually. In the day 21 post, I said I would watch it, but I couldn’t watch it. I started watching it, but they weren’t getting to the point. I had a similar reaction to Avatar when I saw it for the first time, I loved it afterwards. So, I will try again some time soon.

I started the day with this tweet which I thought indicated the end of my troubles with the left click on the mouse not working with a new Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation on a Dell laptop. It was not, I faced the problem again about 12 hours after the tweet, and I tried this but the problem didn’t fix itself. Interestingly,... Read More

Day 23 - Indian Railways DOS based systems (?); A great trip to Calcutta

Today was a trip to Kolkata for Biswa Mast Aadmi. It was a a GREAT SHOW! And it was a wildly succesfuly trip also. Generally, my plans are foiled because of one thing or the other, today everything worked well. There’s a first!

On my way to Howrah, I had the chance to look at the screen on which the people behind the ticketing counters in the KGP Station find ticket availability between different stations, at different dates and different ticket classes (Sleeper, 3AC, 2AC, etc)

Ticketing is done on Text User Interfaces. Which apparently run using the VT220 Terminal. I discovered this from this incredibly unhelpful answer on Quora.

There are a few... Read More

Day 22 - Thoughts on Programming Language design

I was discussing Cloudbleed with my friend, Kalyan Kumar. He had this to say about it:

And then … The final problem was that the generated C code didn’t have proper checking for the pointer that breaks the code. Now this kind of stuff are the biggest problems with C.

Secondly, most of the code currently at the core of the system is C. Take anything, finally it will be converted to C, or uses some code that is C.

I don’t understand one thing. People keep blaming C for how it manages most stuff. But when any kind new programming languages, structures that people make, they use C at their heart to work. The new things are... Read More

Day 21 - S3 Outage and Cloudbleed post mortems are out; Revenant!

I am happy to report that the MP3 files not being recognised by Rhythmbox was solved after apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras. I wonder what “extra” packages that package contains that need to be restricted. It definitely installed ffmpeg which is a great CLI utility to cut videos. Anyways, that problem is solved. I am still holding off on installing gnome-shell and trying that out because the mouse thing seems to have sorted itself out (?). It happened only once today.

This great article about Amazon Data Centers is right on point! This comes in the wake of that great S3 outage a few days back. The post mortem for that outage is out, and it... Read More