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Swati Sani: Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve

Thu, 19 May 2011 13:56:19 +0000

Tigress approaching waterhole.

This was one vacation I was really looking forward to specially after the fiasco of plans to spend a weekend in Pench. 17 years of togetherness, friends and jungle – nothing beats the combination and we did have whale of a time. NH7 was a pleasure to drive and I averaged 60km and covered 180 km distance in 3 hours. That meant driving at 140km/hr for some distance but then the roads were clear and smooth and Innova lends itself wonderfully to highway driving.

We were at the park in peak summer and the heat was unbearable (mid day temperature was about 44° C) and there was very little water available -so most of the wild action was at concentrated around the water holes.

A tigress came to the water hole with four of her cubs to quench her thirst and cool herself down while down the same road another water saucer, made by the forest department saw a barking deer patiently waiting his turn to drink water while the bigger grazer, a Sambhar deer quenched his thirst.

In smaller puddles birds frolicked in territorial displays and fought with each other while the butterflies that were mud puddling became meals of the fly catchers. We saw one handsome orange headed thrush in an extremely bad mood shooing another one of his own species till a white-browed fan-tail fly catcher got better of him and claimed the place as his own territory.

Hierarchy : Barking deer waiting for his turn.

Not far away was another family of tigers, two adults, a male and a female with two cubs frolicking in mud and playing tag on the bund of a small water body.

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Originally published at Swati Sani. Please leave any comments there.

Rusty Russell: “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”

Thu, 19 May 2011 05:39:05 +0000

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy. Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software means you’ll encounter such people. You may have to work with them. You may have to argue with them (and they may be right).

Quite some time ago I was horrified by the private behaviour of a hacker I deeply respected: malicious, hypocritical stuff. And it caused an internal crisis for me: I thought we were all striving together to make the world a better place. Here are the results I finally derived:

Being a great hacker does not imbue moral or ethical characteristics.
Being a great coder doesn’t mean you’re not a crackpot.
Working on a great project doesn’t mean you share my motivations about it.

This wasn’t obvious to me, and it seems it’s not obvious to others. A-list actors endorsing Scientology doesn’t make it a good idea. Great FOSS political work was done by a certain obnoxious LWN-haunting nutball. Julian Assange may or may not be guilty of crimes in Sweden. Many of my kernel coworkers believed that GPLv3 was somehow a radical change from GPLv2. Some sweet code has been written by gun nuts, lechers, holocaust deniers and (in at least once case) someone who believes that fasting will cure cancer.

In any walk of life you have to work with all kinds; having to do so in my dream job as FOSS hacker was a hard lesson for me. It’s great to work with people whose skills you respect, but don’t expect to like them all.

Swaroop C H: Passionate Programmer book review

Tue, 17 May 2011 09:13:27 +0000

Every once in a while I get an email like this:

Sir, I am a beginner to python and programming. I started with the C++ and found it hard so one day via google I found your perfect tutorial “A byte of Python”. I read the whole tutorial in one day because it is so interesting and helpful. Sir, I have created the script to backup files from directory as you mentioned. Please see the script once and tell me if I have chances in programming career. Sir I am final B.tech student and I love programming. But I was rejected by every company during campus placement because of my poor communication skills and due to this my confidence level is very low. Sir I have also created a web based application using PHP, MySQL and Kannel on Debian based server for intra-college communication. Sir, I am regular reader of your blog and I respect what you are doing to help freshers like me. Sir I would like to know if you have any advice for me.

And like this:

I want to thank you about this great book . I am a 20-years-old student in computer science from Bulgaria and i found this book very interesting and helpful. I’ve been programming in python for half a month. I had little experience in C from the university and I wanted to learn a high level language with simple syntax like Python and then learn C++ and start writing useful programs. I send you a solution of the problem in the end of the book that is just a demo version. Can you give me a hint what i got to improve to make the address book program better and give me the source code of your solution? I really want to become a programmer so any advices especially from a man with your knowledge would be highly appreciated! Thanks.

For a long time, I used to scratch my head for every such email because I really didn’t know what advice I have to offer. I did end up writing How Fresh Graduates Can Grow which a lot of students have liked.

In the past couple of years, I have started replying with just one line - I ask them to read The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler. I happily recommend this book knowing that if they actually do read and apply the principles in this book, they can’t go wrong.

I had read this book in its first edition when it was called My Job Went to India and I read it again when the renamed second edition came out.

The title of the book is self-explanatory but what makes the book special from other regular career books is that it is geared specifically to the art of software programming as well as explaining networking and many soft concepts/human aspects in a for-geeks “53 recipes” style.

Some of my favorite recipes/lessons are:

4. Be the worst

Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has a stock piece of advice for young musicians, which is “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.” Being the worst guy in the band means always playing with people who are better than you.

Being the worst guy/gal on the team has the same effect as being the worst guy in the band. You find that you’re unexplainably smarter. You even speak and write more intelligently. Your code and designs get more elegant, and you find that you’re able to solve hard problems with increasingly creative solutions.

6. Don’t listen to your parents

I remember talking to a friend about potentially moving out of this company, and he said, “Is it your destiny to work at $bigcompany for the rest of your life?”Hell no it wasn’t!_ So, I quickly found another job and left.

This movement marked the clear beginning of a nonlinear jump in my success in the software industry. I saw new domains, I worked on harder problems, and I was rewarded more heavily than ever before. It was scary at times, but when I decided to be less fear-driven and conservative in my career choice, the shape and tone of my career – my life – changed for the better.

15. Practice, practice, practice

When you practice music, it shouldn’t sound good. If you always sound good during practice sessions, it means you’re not stretching your limits. That’s what practice is for. The same is true in sports. Athletes push themselves to the limit during workouts so they can expand those limits for real performances. They let the ugliness happen behind closed doors – not when they’re actually working.

Our industry tends to practice on the job. Can you imagine a professional musician getting onstage and replicating the gibberish from my university’s practice rooms? It wouldn’t be tolerated. Musicians are paid to perform in public – not to practice. As an industry, we need to make time for practice.

Practicing may include learning more about your programming environment (APIs, libraries, methodologies, etc.), sight reading (reading new pieces of open source code to improve your ability to read and understand code), improvisation (introduce new constraints in small projects to improve your thinking abilities) and so on. [paraphrased]

32. Say it, Do it, Show it

You should start communicating your plans to your management. The best time to start communicating the plans is after you have executed at least one cycle of the plan. And – this is an important point – start doing it before they ask you to do it. No manager in his or her right mind would be unhappy to receive a succinct weekly e-mail from an employee stating what was accomplished in the past week and what they plan to do in the next. Receiving this kind of regular message unsolicited is a manager’s dream.

Start by communicating week by week. When you’ve gotten comfortable with this process, start working in your thirty~~, sixty~~, and ninety-day plans. On the longer views, stick to high-level, impactful progress you plan to make on projects or systems you maintain. Always state these long-term plans as proposals to your manager, and ask for feedback.

The most critical factor to keep in mind with everything that goes onto a plan is that it should always be accounted for later. Every item must be either visibly completed, delayed, removed, or replaced. No items should go unaccounted for. If items show up on a plan and are never mentioned again, people will stop trusting your plans, and the plans and you will counteract the effectiveness of planning. Even if the outcome is bad, you should communicate it as such. We all make mistakes. The way to differentiate yourself is to address your mistakes or inabilities publicly and ask for help resolving them. Consistently tracing tasks on a plan will create the deserved impression that no important work is getting lost in the mix.

43. Making the Hang

Speaking for myself (and extrapolating from there), the most serious barrier between us mortals and the people we admire is our own fear. Associating with smart, well-connected people who can teach you things or help you find work is possibly the best way to improve yourself, but a lot of us are afraid to try. Being part of a tight-knit professional community is how musicians, artists, and other craftspeople have stayed strong and evolved their respective artforms for years. The gurus are the supernodes in the social and professional network. All it takes to make the connection is a little less humility.

Of course, you don’t want to just randomly start babbling at these people. You’ll obviously want to seek out the ones with which you have something in common. Perhaps you read an article that someone wrote that was influential. You could show them work you’ve done as a result and get their input. Or, maybe you’ve created a software interface to a system that someone created. That’s a great and legitimate way to make the connection with someone.

44. Already Obsolete

You have to start by realizing that even if you’re on the bleeding edge of today’s wave, you’re already probably behind on the next one. Timing being everything, start thinking ahead with your study. What will be possible in two years that isn’t possible now? What if disk space were so cheap it was practically free? What if processors were two times faster? What would we not have to worry about optimizing for? How might these advances change what’s going to hit?

Yes, it’s a bit of a gamble. But, it’s a game that you will definitely lose if you don’t play. The worst case is that you’ve learned something enriching that isn’t directly applicable to your job in two years. So, you’re still better off looking ahead and taking a gamble like this. The best case is that you remain ahead of the curve and can continue to be an expert in leading-edge technologies.

Looking ahead and being explicit about your skill development can mean the difference between being blind or visionary.

P.S. This lesson was the reason why I started admiring DHH even more after seeing he is not afraid to include CoffeeScript and SCSS in Rails 3.1

51. Avoid Waterfall Career Planning

The important thing to realize is that change is not only possible in your career but necessary. As a software developer, you would never want to pour yourself into developing something your client doesn’t want. Agile methodologies help prevent you from doing so. The same is true of your career. Set big goals, but make constant corrections along the way. Learn from the experience, and change the goals as you go. Ultimately, a happy customer is what we all want (especially when, as we plan our careers, we are our own customers) – not a completed requirement.

I probably put more excerpts from the book here than I should, but I wanted to drive home the point on some of the non-obvious-but-critical points that the book raises that every software developer should ponder about.

Go buy the book / ebook now!

Update: Also see Top 5 Developer Skills That Will Get You Hired or Promoted

Arun Raghavan (fordprefect): More PulseAudio power goodness

Tue, 17 May 2011 04:20:57 +0000

[tl;dr — if you're using GNOME or a GStreamer-based player, not using the Rhythmbox crossfading backend, and want to try to save ~0.5 W of power, jump to end of the post]

Lennart pointed to another blog post about actually putting PulseAudio’s power-saving capabilities to use on your system. The latter provides a hack-ish way to increase buffering in PulseAudio to the maximum possible, reducing the number of wakeups. I’m going to talk about that a bit.

Summarising the basic idea, we want music players to decode a large chunk of data and give it to PA so that we can then fill up ALSA’s hardware buffer, sleep till it’s almost completely consumed, fill it again, sleep, repeat. More details in this post from Lennart.

The native GNOME audio/video players don’t talk to PulseAudio directly — they use GStreamer, which has a pulsesink element that actually talks to PulseAudio. We could configure things so that we send a large amount (say 2 seconds’ worth) to PulseAudio, sleep, and then wake up periodically to push out more. Now in the audio player (say Rhythmbox), the user hits next, prev, or pause. We need to effect this change immediately, even though we’ve already sent out 2 seconds of data (it would suck if you hit pause and the actual pause happened 2 seconds later, wouldn’t it?). PulseAudio already solves because it can internally “rewind” the buffer and overwrite it if required. GStreamer can and does take advantage of this by sending pause and other control messages out of band from the data.

This all works well for relatively simple GStreamer pipelines. However, if you want to do something more complicated, like Rhythmbox’ crossfading backend, things start to break. PulseAudio doesn’t offer an API to do fades, and since we don’t do rewinds in GStreamer, we need to apply effects such as fades with a latency equal to the amount of buffering we’re asking PulseAudio to do. This makes for unhappy users.

Well, all is not as bleak as it seems. There was some discussion on the PA mailing list, and the need for a proper fade API (really, a generic effects API) is clear. There have even been attempts to solve this in GStreamer.

But you want to save 0.5 W of power now! Okay, if you’re not using the Rhythmbox crossfading backend (or are okay with disabling it), this will make Rhythmbox, Banshee, pre-3.0 Totem (and really any GNOMEy player that uses gconfaudiosink, which will soon be replaced by gsettingsaudiosink, I guess), you can run this on the command line:

gconftool-2 --type string \
    --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/musicaudiosink \
    "pulsesink latency-time=100000 buffer-time=2000000"

On my machine, this brings down the number of wakeups per second because of alsa-sink to ~2.7 (corresponding nicely to the ~350ms of hardware buffer that I have). With Totem 3.0, this may or may not work, depending on whether your distribution gives gconfaudiosink a higher rank than pulseaudiosink.

This is clearly just a stop-gap till we can get things done the Right Way™ at the system level, so really, if things break, you get to keep the pieces. If you need to, you can undo this change by running the same command without the latency-time=… and buffer-time=… bits. That said, if something does break, do leave a comment below so I can add it to the list of things that we need to test the final solution with.

Shanker Balan (shanu): Axxess Steering Wheel Interface And Honda City

Mon, 16 May 2011 15:18:21 +0000

If you have one of these ASWC interfaces and have to get it working with a Honda City, 1729_Auto_Detect.pdf can help. The interface (1729 harness) is the same as the Honda Fit as sold in the US. Thanks to the … Continue reading →

James Morris (jamesm): Linux Security Summit 2011 – CFP reminder: 2 weeks!

Fri, 13 May 2011 02:29:13 +0000

Calling all Linux security folk!

Just a reminder that the CFP for the 2011 Linux Security Summit closes on the 27th of May — two weeks away. Please get your submissions in soon.

Note again that we are co-located with the Linux Plumbers Conference in Santa Rosa, and that all Security Summit attendees, including speakers, will need to register for Plumbers. Earlybird registration is available until 31st May.

Trivia question: which Alfred Hitchcock film was shot on location in Santa Rosa in 1943?

(Hint: click on the image)