Harsh J

Randomize: Some Programming Quotes

Harsh — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:25:17 +0000

Scripts vs. Programs

Couldn’t be put more simpler than this.

A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience.
– Larry Wall, the creator of Perl

So, do you know what programs written in scripting languages really are?

Recurring Recursions

You’re on Step 2, which asks you to do Step 1?

In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
– Unknown, multiple sources

Stack overflow.

Smart Debugging

Damn!

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
– Brian W. Kernighan, the K in K&R C Book and AWK

Where would you draw the line?

Deficit Obviousness

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
– C.A.R. Hoare, the inventor of Quicksort

Obviously no deficiencies in understanding which way to choose.

Add your favorites in the comments, if you wish to.

Sorting entries in a QStringList Case-insensitively

Harsh — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:24:20 +0000

This post is simply a snippet-post for the users of Nokia’s Qt C++ cross-platform toolkit.

While writing some C++ code (after 2 long years since I last wrote them for academic reasons), I had this simple issue of sorting a QStringList in a case-insensitive manner. Normally, there exists a QStringList::sort() function that does the sorting of the strings stored in it in a case-sensitive manner, and is very fast at it. But Qt does not provide a way to perform the sort in a non case-sensitive manner, although it has hints on how to in the class’ documentation.

Being mostly a PyQt/PySide user who uses inbuilt Python lists to do all list-work, here’s how its apparently done in Qt/C++, using a QtCore class called QMap:

#include 
#include 

void sortNonCaseSensitive( QStringList &sList ) {
    ///  Sorts the passed sList non-case-sensitively.
    ///  (Preserves the cases! Just doesn't use them
    ///  while sorting.)
    QMap strMap;
    foreach ( QString str, sList ) {
        strMap.insert( str.toLower(), str );
    }
    sList = strMap.values();
}

That’s it.

Color Hot-Tracking in Smooth Tasks Plasmoid

Harsh — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:55:02 +0000

Polishing your K Desktop never seems to stop. First its the Desktop appearances, the plethora of widgets available to choose and use from for the desktop and the taskbar, the hilighting schemes in Kate/KWrite, it keeps going on. Maybe a bad thing – you never settle.

I was trying out the kde-extragear-plasmoids AUR package yesterday on my ArchLinux’s plain KDE installation and I came across this wonderful plasmoid known as Smooth Tasks. While nothing innovative in itself, its a simple plasmoid that apes the Windows 7 taskbar. Provides icon views of the applications running and allows peeking into them when hovered upon, and if grouped – lets you switch using the previews. I’ll leave the screenshots to do the rest of explanation.

What I liked most about Windows 7 is its ability to color the hover-glow on the icons in the taskbar based on the average computed color of the icon itself. This feature, as explained by Long Zheng, “delivers some sentimental value by making it easy to identify applications by color.” I completely agree with that point. However, Smooth Tasks missed this feature, and the built in light feature didn’t move entirely with the mouse pointer as well.

I cloned the code today to add, at least an initial working version, the color hot-tracking to Smooth Tasks and it was done by the afternoon. I’ve pushed the changes to the Smooth Tasks fork over at Bitbucket (which is a great site, by the way) and the image below describes how the initial work looks like. Notice the soft color glow. Here are some more pictures, with other icons.

Color Hot-tracking in Smooth Tasks on KDE

Now all I’ve to figure out is a way to enhance the glow or another component of the effect to give it a more polished look. Windows 7 also colors the border of the taskbar item with the average color but that’s not possible with the way the KDE’s glow around items work, as far as I know. Please let me know if am wrong.

The case of the non-exiting Mozilla Firefox

Harsh — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:32:11 +0000

Being a KDE user has its ups and downs. The ups are that its beautiful, has a very wide and usable range of applications, updates often for bugfixes, and is generally very customizable. The downs are a few – with the Firefox+GTK integration being one of them. It makes your browser look UGLY! Of course, there are Qt-friendly browsers like Opera and Konqueror, even Arora, but these hardly work well with many sites, especially those of Google (Wave, for example). I’m not gonna delve into that subject, since this post is about using Firefox on KDE 4 (version 4.3.x).

You might have heard of the GTK engine that themes for Qt, known as gtk-engine-qt on most distributions (or with -kde4 suffix, if thats how they’ve integrated). This helps all GTK applications look great on KDE by providing *near* native look and feel. So I install that and smile, happy that my entire K Desktop is as I want it – dark, without gloss and perfectly usable with certain plasma widgets. That is until I notice my Firefox simply does not close itself when asked to, and hangs instead.

At first one would think its due to a plugin, or an extension, probably something added on that is causing it to hang when its supposed to terminate. Even the KB article at Mozillazine supports that fact. Perhaps its a popular reason, but I tried and it didn’t solve the issue for me. I jumped a few steps out of frustration and went on to move my .mozilla directory to a different name, just to see if it was a profile-related issue, and it still refused to close, driving me mad having to `killall firefox` it each time since it always hung at exit. So I switched to Opera and used it with horrible colors – Pages appeared normally as they would be rendered but the forms and other things just didn’t go well with my dark color scheme (Eclipse), making it appear like the image below, unreadable and thus untypable upon.

Unreadable, Unseeable - The form elements as they appear in my Opera (While using a dark color scheme in the DE)

The browser’s great otherwise, its fast and very customizable, but I couldn’t make any changes to these colors. I suppose one can achieve it by writing their own userstyle.css file but that is too much work. Used Opera until today, when I finally found this (pretty old) bug in the gtk-engine-qt project tracker. Uninstalled gtk-engine-qt and lo, all was normal again, closed fine and opened fine. Re-installed all plugins and extensions, and said bye-bye to Opera.

All I now miss is a native-looking dark theme with Oxygen icons, as my K Desktop contains. I’m making do with the Black Stratini theme as of now, it’s beautiful but I like the Oxygen icons better. 440 words for just the choice of browser on a dark theme, tch.

Septectic!

Harsh — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:05:44 +0000

Am mixing a lot of words ain’t I? This is for September + Hectic.

There’s the college technical events coming up on 14th, named ‘Pragmatics’. I’m responsible for the code event under it, and can almost smell the deadlines. Then the next day I leave for the college-provided tour across Kerala and a part of TN itself. All nicely ending with the Indian Python Conference 2009, around the month end.

Router Options

Harsh — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 05:04:35 +0000

Since my first Modem+Router died (Was a Huawei SmartAX MT882), I got a newer one called UT300R2 by UTStarcomm. It looked sleek and all that but the landing page of the router seriously lacked options, giving only stuff like WAN config (For PPPoA, PPPoE, Bridged modes, etc.) and LAN config for DHCP, and almost nothing else.

I’m someone who requires port forwarding, virtual servers, etc. a lot for my daily work, and the lack of that option was a really bad thing; plus, being so attached to the internet, I didn’t want to go looking for a firmware upgrade solution and risk bricking it. Now, after about 2 months of getting this router, I realize I was stupid not to look beyond the landing page. It did have all the options, just not on its index page!

The feeling of being ultra stupid swept over me as I went to main.html via the history URLs (the old router’s landing page was main.html), and there it revealed all the options of the router, including some more from my former one! All I had to do was to go to http://192.168.1.1/main.html instead of simply http://192.168.1.1/, which I usually type. Gah, their simple cleverness worked against me!

Arcoveries

Harsh — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:35:47 +0000

Finally got around to re-installing ArchLinux onto the new PC and it was a long irritating week with GRUB errors, FS corruption, etc..

I must’ve caused the GRUB 22 error by extending a logical partition on Windows via its Disk Management tool, after deleting another. I tried fixing it with whatever solutions I could find, including reinstalling the whole bootloader but it seemed like the partition table itself was misaligned after the change. Both of my linux partitions turned Primary and thus the issue. So it came to the time of Reinstallation #1.

This next time I ran into an FS corrupted error after performing the entire net-install again; no idea how that happened and none on fixing it manually either, which was what it kept asking me to do. So I popped the disk back in and let it do an install again, bleh.

This time it went well, I installed KDE 4.3 as well overnight and it was done. Except that nasty HAL and PolicyKit issue that makes your blood boil even on the currently non-existant planet Pluto. Its the one which keeps giving you Permission Denied errors (accompanied with the type of Policy and the auth_admin_keep_always messages). I remember fixing it once before on Ubuntu 9.04 by writing my own /etc/PolicyKit/PolicyKit.conf XML file but that didn’t work out well this time and I had to use KDE’s System Settings – Advanced Tab – PolicyKit Authorization applet to let it grant my user proper permissions. The following screenshot describes what I applied to all items under the HAL’s storage section, and it did the work. For automounting on login, I had to add a simple entry to HAL’s policy files giving it a true hint. Messy work, but it’s finally over!

PolicyKit Authorization Settings (For Permission Denied errors)

The next issue I faced was that the music player on KDE, both Amarok and Juk, had long delays before it began playing a file, or between tracks. Plus, I couldn’t even seek the files in it. The solution, I figured, was simple – To switch Phonon (The multimedia framework of KDE/Qt) from its GStreamer backend to XINE. Installed the newer phonon-xine backend and it was done as well. Although I read that GStreamer is much more mature than XINE today, this will have to do until.

That sums up this week, I guess. Besides the ongoing internal tests of course, that’s a whole new post that doesn’t need to exist.

P.s. Windows 7 impressed me. I must be losing it.

Leaky plans

Harsh — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:18:29 +0000

19th August 2009 marked the first death of my reliable P4-based PC. A huge power surge, coupled with the fact that I’d been using it for three years without a UPS lead to its demise. The SMPS conked off, and so did the board; a capacitor in both leaked. And there went my plans of waiting for an i5 based upgrade. In the past 5 years I’ve grown from being addicted to the PC to being dependent on it, and I needed a replacement to continue my daily tasks.

After realizing the board had leaked and was the reason of random boot issues even after replacing the SMPS that very day, I started to decide which is of more value to me – a laptop or a PC itself? The desire for a large screen, plus the cost of a properly customized Dell Studio 15 helped push a PC as the winner.

A round of inquiry later I had my configuration ready to be purchased.

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz (E7500, Wolfdale) Processor
Intel DG41RQI Essential Desktop Board
Transcend 2 GB DDR2 800 MHz RAM
Seagate 500 GB 7200rpm SATA II HDD
Samsung DVD-RAM 22x ODD
Zotac Nvidia GeForce 9600GT PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card
Zebronics 500W Platinum PSU
Logitech Internet Desktop KB/Mouse Combo
Numeric 600 KVA UPS and a black cabinet to engulf all of the above with style.

Got the PC assembled by the dealer, since they had a policy to test the products you buy before they bill it. The total damage was 24,000 INR. Ironically, I haven’t bought a good display yet. Though the budget was extensible to around 35k, I decided to give a two or three month gap before buying a large 22″ or 24″ display, in hopes of better specs and price. For now, its back to the good ol’ SyncMaster 793DF from Samsung. Funnily, the market had only two C2Ds to choose from – E7400 or E7500 (Price difference of 200 INR).

Now am off to try out 64 bit stuff, a desire I’ve had for 3 long years! Ain’t gonna benchmark this, since the results will only be average

Installers on Windows

Harsh — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 04:35:05 +0000

I’m sure if some source code were available for the installing scripts/programs their step loop will look something like this:

for file in some_lengthy_list:
    installFile(file, someLocation)
    progressBar.step()
    sleep(500) # Flux with the user's mind, cause havoc, w00t.

This rant bought to you after spending 4 hours of re-setup.

Anna University B.E. B.Tech (UG) Even Semester Results for May-June 2009

Harsh — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:10:35 +0000

Results for all even semesters B.E. and B.Tech (Engineering Degrees, for IT, CSE, ECE, EEE, ME, E&I, etc.) (2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th) will be out in the coming weeks of July 2009, as most rumours go (Most of which point to a date around 15th~). These are for the exams that stretched from April/May 2009, to June 2009.

UPDATE: Results are out. (Btw, checkout a friend’s website on electronics here)

Here’s a list of potential websites you can check for your results. Comment if you know some other ones!

(I shall keep updating the links once results are out)

More will be added once results get out.