Injustice to programmers

In every field new professionals are selected by people who are experienced in the field. However, somehow programmers are not given that priviledge of being judged of competence by someone in the field. Programmers are selected by HR people.

It is seriously funny to me that Infosys's campus recruitment programmes do not need much technical knowledge. They take students basing on their soft skills and train them. So they are not looking for bright programmers; they are looking for people who bear the corporate pressure because they lack skills to value. [I don't say that the above statement is true of Infosys people; my point is: this is what logical analysis of their process of selection tells.]

Open Source projects are in a better position in that regard. They leave you with the source code to tinker and mailing lists and IRC channels to contact. You can try adding modules, providing patches and when your contribution is substantial you get into the core team.

Programmers are being meted out injustice and there are complaints of programmers' incompetence. Funny indeed!

Awesome E17

This video is in response to comments to my review of Enlightenment desktop environment. This video shows some ways [rather default ways] of how cool E17 desktop environment can be. [Interestingly, both meanings of the word 'cool' are appropriate.]

Valgrind issue on 64-bit arch linux

A few days back, I was using valgrind on Ertf; when I stumbled upon an interesting bug. On 64-bit Arch linux systems, valgrind 3.5.0-5 was showing a problem with getimeofday(). Finally, I had found a problem with Arch linux [the first since installation.]. However, the very next day,

pacman -Syu

showed valgrind 3.5.0-6, which had the bug fixed. To nail down the bug, I had tested valgrind with a simple program calling ecore_time_get(). The output is below.


==4230== Using Valgrind-3.5.0 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==4230== Command: ./try_timer
==4230==
./try_timer: error while loading shared libraries: libecore-ver-pre-svn-05.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
==4230== Jump to the invalid address stated on the next line
==4230== at 0x426: ???
==4230== by 0x400D604: _dl_signal_error (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x400C70D: _dl_map_object_deps (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4002BA3: dl_main (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4013B6D: _dl_sysdep_start (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x40046B6: _dl_start (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4000A97: ??? (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== Address 0x426 is not stack'd, malloc'd or (recently) free'd
==4230==
==4230==
==4230== Process terminating with default action of signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
==4230== Bad permissions for mapped region at address 0x426
==4230== at 0x426: ???
==4230== by 0x400D604: _dl_signal_error (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x400C70D: _dl_map_object_deps (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4002BA3: dl_main (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4013B6D: _dl_sysdep_start (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x40046B6: _dl_start (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230== by 0x4000A97: ??? (in /lib/ld-2.12.so)
==4230==
==4230== HEAP SUMMARY:
==4230== in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==4230== total heap usage: 0 allocs, 0 frees, 0 bytes allocated
==4230==
==4230== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==4230==
==4230== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==4230== ERROR SUMMARY: 1 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 3 from 3)

E17 review

Enlightenment has been quite interesting to me. It has not even got a beta release so far yet I like to use it. That is because, it does things differently. It is very efficient, keeps the CPU far more cooler than any other desktop environment, has nice effects already built-in, and is far snappier than most mainstream desktop environments [I am not interested in comparisions here; so I won't point to any other desktop environment in particular.].

However, there still are some issues [Actually, when you install E17 and read the about dialog, they clearly acknowledge that it is under "heavy development"]. I would like enumerate a few of them here. These are the ones that have concerned me recently while trying to make E17 my regular desktop environment.

#1. emacs bottom-line problem

Well with auto-hide on, the emacs bottom line goes below the screen. Have a look.

I would rather have it as follows:

I have started a thread in their developer mailing list about this. Apparently, the issue isn't a serious one.

#2. no create file option in file manager

Well the file manager is good; but not good enough at this stage. It open C source files in read only mode in emacs, which I don't like. It does not have options to create new files yet.

I hope this will be fixed soon.

#3. keystroke problem

This was a strange problem I noticed recently in E17. Well I guess the best way to put it is through an example. Suppose I am using chromium. I have multiple tabs opened. After some time, all of a sudden Ctrl+L does not respond. I any streamed video has taken focus. If so, I click outside the streaming video frame and try again. However, no response again. I click on the URL bar and press delete or backspace to clear the field and enter the new URL. No response. Well basically, with some apps, suddenly keystrokes do not get passed to the apps [There could be alternate explanations.]. I am clueless with this issue.

4. with streaming videos temp rises very fast

While watching online streaming videos, I have noticed the temperature suddenly shooting up very fast. With temperatures around 40-50, its fine; but when it rises till 60 it becomes alarming. This isn't very serious though as the temp falls down after streaming; though at a much slower speed.

Overall, E17 is nice. It is nice to note that E17 keeps with latest development in software. For now, it is bleeding edge; however I suggest give it a shot before believing anything about it. Its a nice experience.

Native SDK

Recently, I had been looking into image editting on the client side. I figured it can be done on the server side; but impractical. I am certain I shall have to figure out a way of doing it on the client side. Javascript seemed to be the only option and I didn't want to do javascript as it wont be fast. However, when I found about native client sdk, I thought "This is exactly what I needed."

Social Web

Facebook and Twitter were accepted very fast and were milestones of social web. However, the recent discoveries of bugs raised questions on the security assured by these sites. Orkut at least says its a beta application; while facebook takes it a step further. Facebook users have to allow third party applications. Facebook is safe as the user made the choice of disclosing information to third party vendors.

Till that it was fine; but recently a bug was discovered in facebook chat that allowed users to view their friends' chats. Another bug was discovered in twitter that allowed users to have force followers. Now the web is undergoing a paradigm shift. However, these bugs remind us to remember the basics.

Watch this video to have glimpse of the paradigm shift.


Updates: Facebook issues
1. suspicious email guess
2. cross-site scripting
3. public updates are publicly searchable outside facebook
4. openbook [This should be enough evidence.]

Finally, people seem to notice.

Software development and computer science

Its really funny that we [computer science students] are taught computer science and expected to develop software. We should rather be taught software development or expected to work on theory.

However, the complete mismatch between our course and job is the sole root of our predicament. Many hackers have written about it; yet I have not seen any academician paying heed to them. Courses are still designed anti-parallel to the requirements. Tech-schools are meant to teach us a technology; yet the courses are unable to justify there existence.

Some of the best software developers do not even have a computer science degree. Interestingly, they don't need it. Software development is a technologist job. Its more like an art. You may learn all the theory backing an art; but that will never make you an artist. All you will be is an analyst. You have to do it, indulge in the art form to be an artist. Same goes with software development. You may learn all the theory there is to it; but its only by coding that you learn to code.

IPL schedule

IPL matches are mostly scheduled to be at the home ground on one of the two teams involved in the match. [Well the number of occurances are quite high to be ruled out as incidental.] Apart from concerns of fair-play, we also need to note that this is an essential bussiness strategy to gather crowd and increase sales.

Bootchart on Archlinux

After switching to Arch linux, I thought of charting boot time. I found it to be faster than Gentoo and openSUSE.