Manish Chakravarty's Blog

14 years of loving Linux and Virtualization - all on a Mac!

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 07:48:13 GMT

14 years ago I got my second computer [1]

It was a Macintosh LC 475, fondly called the pizza box.

Here's a picture:

I was used to live in Patiala then and we had to drive to Chandigarh - a good 60 kilometers to buy a computer. We went to this "computer expo" ( I forget the actual name, it's been 14 years after all) and the choice was between an IBM PC running Windows 95 and an Apple machine running Mac OS System 7 ( that's a good 9 versions before Snow Leopard! ).

As a kid I remembered seeing "Mission Impossible" and all the good guys used Apple machines while the baddies used IBM machines
I wanted the Apple machine. Dad wanted to buy the IBM machine for two reasons:

1. It was cheaper
2. The dealer promised me that "Windows 96" was right around the corner ( Yes, you read that right "Windows 96 - the next version of Windows 95" )

I insisted on having the Apple macs and after a brief fight and a one-month long waiting period, we got the Apple Mac LC 475. It ran a Motorola 68040 CPU running at a mind-boggling 25Mhz with 4MB of RAM and 256kbytes of video memory and a whopping 640MB of hard drive space. I still have this machine in my house in Kolkata and it still boots :)

I started writing programs with HyperCard and while it was cool, I didnt see any command prompt to type in cool commands like "Computer network security override". Of course I didn't know what a command prompt was then, but I knew I wanted it.

After all, System 7 used to look like this

While Tom Cruise's Apple machine used to look like this:

Clearly the UI was different.

Then I came across a PCQuest. It used to be a geek-focussed magazine then - it's a boring CIO focussed magazine now. In article written by Atul Chitnis I read about something called "Linux" [2]. And most importantly, PCQuest came with a CD of Slackware linux. I cannot recall the exact version. But I remember that Slackware was for the x86 architecture and thus it could not run on my Apple Mac.

A year had passed, I got good results and I got a PowerMac 7300

It had a top-of-the line Power PC 604e CPU. It was also the time when Apple was in the midst of its first transition, from the Motorola to the PowerPC architecture.

It also had a CD drive and I bought my first VideoCD - "Terminator 2: Judgement Day"

What is important however, is that the PowerMac came with a very interesting piece of software from Connectix (later acquired by Microsoft) - called the "Connectix Virtual PC". It could emulate the x86 architecture on the PowerPC, enabling people to run MS Windows 95/98 on the mac

(Note the System 7 Tabs underneath the windows task bar and the ethernet / hard disk lights. Virtualization on SOHO segment computers is nothing new - I had this in 1998. Mainframes have been doing virtualization long before I was born - from the 70's )

Once I got Windows 95 running the Mac, I remembered that the Slackware CD from PCQuest came with detailed instructions on how to setup Slackware on a "PC". Since I had a Virtual PC I decided to give it a shot.

After around a week of effort ( it was 1998, I was in Class Xth and I had no internet connection) I managed to install Slackware on my box. It would be one whole year before I got (what I used to call) "X Windows" running on my machine with Tabbed Window Manager running on my mac. This is how TWM looks:

While it took me a year to get X running, it wasn't without it's joys.
I found out what modelines were, how to write my own X configuration files ( and running X -configure multiple times). I learnt how to compile the kernel, load and unload modules. I would watch compilations all day long. And since this was a virtualized environment, I rarely got any benefit of the long and slow complies. But I loved the "make config" and the "make menuconfig" scripts. ( one would run the kernel compile configuration in console and the other in an ncurses type interface )

My biggest achievement was writing my own man page. Slackware shipped with a package which had the entire The Linux Documentation Project's HOWTO's tarballed and that was an education in itself. I decided to write my own "man page" ( a Unix Manual page ) and started reading through the offline copy of the Man-Page HOWTO that shipped with the distribution.

The day before my Class Xth board exam I wrote an man page for a shell script that I'd written using nroff

My love affair with Unix had started.

========
Footnotes:

[1] My first was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +

I was around 10 years old then. The first thing I did after getting the computer was to type "What is the population of the world" in the BASIC prompt. To my dismay it did not give me an intelligent answer; it said it could not recognize the command. I thought computers knew everything!

[2] = Many people prefer to call it "GNU/Linux" as well.

There is no beginning, no end.

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:53:13 GMT

There is no beginning, no end.
There was never any more inception or culmination
Than there is now.

Nor any more youth or age
Than there is now.
And never any more perfection or fallacy
Than there is now.

Nor any more heaven or hell.
Friends or enemies.
Darkness or light
Than there is now.

This is the time as good as ever to continue our journey
There is no better time
Than there is now.

Simple productivity tip: Reduce distractions, use web apps!

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:05:00 GMT

At any given day, we have a lot of applications - even when we are working/pairing
Here's my typical scenario:
- Multiple IM accounts. Google Talk ( personal ) , Yahoo ( friends from TW and previous companies ) , TW's internal chat ( based on Jabber ) and sometimes IRC when I need geek-help. ( I am on IRC all the time outside of work, though )
- Multiple email accounts -Like most people my TW Mail account is open all day. And like most people I check my personal email from time to time.
- Yammer - We have an internal Yammer account for collaboration
- Facebook - not open all day but I check it multiple times a day , like most people
- Mingle for project management

Applications that are usually open all the time during work:

Adium - All IM accounts and sometimes for Facebook chat as well
Colloquy - For IRC
Mail.app - for my TW and personal GMail accounts
Yammer.air for our internal Yammer server
Murmurs.air for reading/posting murmurs to the project's Mingle instance.

And last and definitely not the least Growl which gives us notifications for all of these apps above!

I noticed things were clearly going out of hand and I needed to optimize - so I came up with this rule -
"Stop using desktop clients & rely on the web apps"

This is my current setup.

Safari set as default browser during working hours. TW Mail is typically open on it
Chrome for all personal work - typically have my personal GMail account open in it
Firefox for all web development work - I like to not use Firefox for casual browsing. Firebug and Web Developer toolbar are my friends. I know you can do almost all that these plugins provide i

Falling in love with Black and White photography

Sat, 21 May 2011 15:12:08 GMT

I have always loved black and white photographs. They seem more.. "expressive" to me than color photographs though I really cannot explain why.

The Lonely Guitarist

This is my all time favorite picture. I was passing through Place D' Arts metro station in Montreal and I found this old gentleman playing the guitar ( And he was playing really well )

A flight of stairs at St Joseph's Oratory
I went to St Joseph's Oratory of Mont Royal and found a bunch of stairs at the side of the building, leading towards the top.

This picture would have made a very ordinary color photograph - but it looks much better in black and white

Jacques Cartier Bridge Montreal
This photograph was taken while I was sitting on the front seat of a running taxi. The iron-alloy pillars and support structures give some depth to the photograph. I had taken this picture in color mode initially , but when I converted it into black and white the "effect" of the depth really came out:

Pier 21 - Halifax Harbor front
Millions of immigrants passed thorough this port to enter Canada. This is Canada's Ellis Island. I wanted to capture the notice in the foreground with George's Island in the background - did a poor job at it.

====================

Most photographs of static objects and people look more beautiful in Black and White than in color. Or maybe it's just my perception

Setting up a JRuby on Rails 3 + NetBeans dev environment

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:25:14 GMT

Aim: to get a dev environment up and running for what would be a mixed-mode Java/JRuby project using NetBeans as the IDE.
If NetBeans is your IDE of you choice then this blog post should help you out.
I have done these steps using a macbook pro / OSX Leopard with NetBeans 6.9 - steps should be pretty much the same on other platforms.

==========

Download JRuby from here and extract it in a directory of your choice ( I used /Users/manish/Desktop/jruby-1.5.2 for this example )

Fire up neatbeans
Go to Project - > New Ruby on Rails project.

We will now attempt to point NetBeans to the latest version of JRuby that we downloaded.

Click on the "Manage" button

In the Ruby Platform Manager, browse and point to the "jruby" binary in the "bin" folder :

We will now attempt to setup the ruby-debugger.
Download the jruby-debug-base gem from here and save it.
Install the gem locally.
Here's the command-line trace

% ./jruby -S gem install -l ~/Desktop/ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java.gem
Successfully installed ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java...
Couldn't find file to include: 'VERSION'
Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java...
Couldn't find file to include: 'VERSION'

Now pull in the ruby-debug-ide gem

Here's the command-line trace

% ./jruby -S gem install --ignore-dependencies -v 0.4.6 ruby-debug-ide
Successfully installed ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6...
Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6...

Switching back to netbeans, give your project and name and choose the correct platform as shown below:

Configure the DB - I would strongly suggest using SQLite or MySQL unless your team has a good reason to use a different database. In the example I have used derby but I do not recommend it.

We now go to the installing rails page:
We have three action items - I have marked them with blue arrows

Click on the "Install Rails button" - you get the following dialog once it gets done:

After this I also installed Warbler and JRuby openssl.
Hit next and let netbeans complete the project creation.

Now that we have a JRuby on Rails 3 project created on the site, lets find out how to debug this application inside of netbeans.

Firing up the debugger ( Command-F5 ) - Netbeans tells me that it's downloading the glassfish debug gem - I am not sure why this is there - but I let it go ahead nonetheless.

Turns out I was wrong - I changed the server preferences to webrick.
Right click on the project name in the left pane , select "properties" and select Webrick server from the drop down as show below:

You would also need to comment out the entry referencing the sqlite-ruby gem in the Gemfile ( Line #8 ) as show below:

We now need the activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter ( we commented out sqlite in the previous step )

The command line trace on my system is as follows:

% ./jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter
Successfully installed jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054
Successfully installed activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java
2 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054...
Installing ri documentation for activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java...
Installing RDoc documentation for jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054...
Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java...

Hit F6 to run your app and voila!

==========

Further reading:
1. JRuby Debugging
2. JRuby and Rails 3 ( This information in this link is a bit outdated though )

RIM: Make it easy for us to develop Blackberry Apps

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:30:13 GMT

I want to develop a Blackerry App for Mingle Murmurs

Here are RIM's terms and conditions for signing up for the App World:

Administration Service Fee

There will be an initial $200 USD administration service fee in order to complete registration and submit applications.

In the event your account is not approved, this $200 USD administration service fee will be refunded.
This initial fee will allow for ten (10) application submissions.

If you have used all ten (10) application submissions, an additional $200 USD administration service fee will be applied on your next submission, adding another ten (10) application submissions to your account.

Multiple versions of the same application will not count as separate submissions. (Example: An application might have a version for the BlackBerry Storm and the BlackBerry Bold)

An upgrade to your application, resulting in a submission of new COD files, will be counted against your ten (10) application submissions.

Resubmission of a rejected application will be counted against your ten (10) application submissions.

Removal of an application will not affect your remaining balance of application submissions.

All I want to do is to write a simple free BB application. Paying 200 USD for it is too much!

Solaris no longer free: The FUD around OpenSolaris

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:12:24 GMT

There have been many articles posted on the demise of OpenSolaris now that Oracle/Sun made Solaris a paid download.

To clear up

1. Solaris GA releases ( Solaris 10 u1 - uX ) were never open sourced.
2. Solaris code base was open sourced under the CDDL. The Solaris Express and OpenSolaris distros came out of this
3. Belenix ( http://belenix.org/ ) is a distro created by Moinak Ghosh and Sriram Ram Naraynan ( who is from ThoughtWorks ). It is built on the OpenSolaris code base
4. The word "OpenSolaris" itself means three things a. The distro b. The code base c. the community
5. Most of the OpenSolaris code base is available at http://src.opensolaris.org/source/. This is the source belenix is built on.
6. Thanks to the CDDL, Belenix development can go on.

For any further questions, post to the Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group at mailto:ug-bosug@opensolaris.org

First Ever RubyConf in India - Organized by ThoughtWorks India

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:42:05 GMT

RubyConf India is being organised by the Ruby community in India and actively supported by Ruby Central. It will feature keynote addresses and talks by Chad Fowler, Ola Bini and other key figures in the Ruby community.

Sidu is our point man here.

Visit http://rubyconfindia.org !

An nice distribution for my netbook – help!

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:49:58 GMT

I've a Acer Aspire D250
It's got WinXP SP3 + Android in a dual boot configuration ( preloaded / factory option )
My review of it -> http://manish-chaks.livejournal.com/103322.html
My usage:
This netbook is going to be my travel machine. I use the "reliance netconnect broadband+" datacard to remain connected to the matrix.. err. the internet while I'm travelling.
While XP SP3 was fine initially, I'm beginning to miss Linux on this machine.
The Android OS is pretty good, but it lacks
- anyway to recognize and dial the data card - so no connectivity in places without WiFi - the biggest deal breaker
- Apps for organizing / editing photos
- other native apps that I use less frequently but would be good to have while travelling
XP SP3 has pretty much everything I require, but
- As I install more software, it seems to be slowing down ( Standard windows problem)
- Lack of a good CII
- It's windows.

What I want:
I want to install a nice, "lightweight" distro , which
- works flawlessly with all the hardware I have - sound, wifi , datacard and hibernate/sleep are a must
- doesn't hog too much RAM.
- a good-to-have would be that the distro is compiled specifically for the Atom CPU, so that I can extract the maximum out of this netbook ( I'm open to cross-compiling Gentoo for this , if that helps )
- KDE4 would be a good-to-have, although I can live with fluxbox + some basic apps as well.
- Good power management - I'm not sure how good/bad linux is with power management as I mostly use it on my desktops or inside a VM on my mac.
- Please dont suggest Kubuntu - anything Debian or RHEL/CentOS based would be desirable - I dont mind not have the bleeding edge software - I can compile what I want - I want stability above all else - irritated with breakages in the Ubuntu/Fedora world. [1]

Any suggestions?
( posted from my notebook from the train - from somewhere in the middle of nowhere )

[1] - I've had Ubuntu and fedora kernel upgrades breaking sound, VMWare modules and Wifi amongst other things. Used Debian for a year on another laptop ( till mid 2009 ) and never faced any problems

Review: Acer Aspire D250 Netbook with Andriod

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:42:11 GMT

Since I am travelling a lot, I bought I needed a light netbook – bought the Acer Aspire D250 for slightly less than 18k INR

Tech Specs:

Intel Atom Processor N280 – 1.66 Ghz, 667 Mhz FSB
1 GB Ram ( will upgrade it to 2 GB Shortly 0
6-cell Li-ion battery ( has been giving me 5+ hours of backup )
160 GB HDD
Card Reader
Android OS as a standard dual boot option - more on this later

Initial Feel;

The keyboard felt nice – I am very particular about keyboards and this one seems to be pretty nice initially. The laptop itself is pretty small though and your fingers will cramp up after long hours of usage ( I started having problems after 4+ hours)
The 6-cell battery gives me 4-5 hours of backup on my usage ( more on usage below ) – I’m more than happy with it.
Atom processor is powerful enough for my usage on this machine
The display is glossy and nice. The area around the display is prone to fingerprints though
The laptop is really light – around 1kg and thin, Though nowhere as thin and light as the Macbook Air, it’s pretty good and light for my needs and it’s in my budget :)

How I use it

I made a conscious decision to keep the software stack on my machine as light as possible. I use windows XP SP3 on this ( came preloaded ) along with Android OS ( more on this below).

Firefox is the primary application that i use on my machine. I try and use web applications where ever possible. Which means I used GMail and Google Apps (for my TW Mail ) instead of using a Outlook 2007 as my mail client. I did try using Windows Live Mail , but I found the web interface the best deal.

I use Pidgin for all my IM needs – it’s got all my accounts ( my Y!, Google Talk and TW Jabber account) linked to it. Sometimes I use meebo as well. The heaviest application that I use on this machine is Eclipse – it’s way slower than my Macbook Pro – but then netbooks are really not meant for heavy development work. Java6 + Eclipse do really drain this machine – also because it’s got just 1 GB of RAM.

The only other development that I’ve been doing on this laptop is Firefox extension development – the laptop seems more than adequate for this task - Notepad++ being my editor of choice for this work.

I also have Emacs for windows installed on this machine – though I’ve been rarely using it.

The machine did not come with the windows XP Home CD/media with it. Acer provides a software for backing up the laptop into disks/DVD’s. I havent bothered with it cause I am going to get rid of windows and install Linux on it once I get back to Bangalore anyway.

The Android OS

When I bought the netbook, I noticed the “Android ready” logo on the right palm-rest area. I thought it was marketing shill till I installed/activated the Andriod OS ( you can do this from within windows – very cool ) and booted into it. Android asks your for your Google Account credentials and then syncs with it. All your Contacts / Calendar / GTalk friends list etc are automatically synced. It lacks some essential (for me at least) apps such as Twidriod but I assume you can install it somehow – need to explore more once my travels end and I get back to Bangalore.

Acer supplies its own ‘flavour’ of Android. I didnt use the word ‘distro’ – the Android world has not yet seen the kind of fragmentation the Linux world has, which is a good thing. I plan to install the vanilla Android OS once I get back – hardware support being a non-issue as everything seems to run well anyway

It’d be interesting to try out Chrome OS on this once it comes out – I've a gut feeling that it should work on this machine too many issues.

Verdict

If you are looking for a netbook which gets the job done and lets you play around – go for this one – I’m positively in love with this once I bought it.!

A glimpse of life inside thoughtworks studios

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:57:38 GMT

Thanks Vivek, Jayanth and Thrivikram for you..

For all the pics, go here

Gitk on OSX

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:23:37 GMT

Gitk on OSX
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

While there is GitX available on OSX, I wondered what it would be like
to run gitk on OSX.
I installed git from MacPorts and it included gitk as well.

All you have to do is to launch "gitk" from the OSX terminal. X11 is
automatically launched , followed by gitk.
This is much slower than launching gitx, and I did this just for kicks

Long cohabitation of couples is presumption of marriage , says Supreme Court

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:56:59 GMT

This was a pretty interesting article, particularly this part:

The Supreme Court has held that if a man and a woman are residing together for a long time and have been accepted by the society as husband and wife, a presumption of a valid marriage can be drawn.

"A long cohabitation and acceptance of society of a man and woman as husband and wife goes a long way in establishing
a valid marriage," a Bench of Justices S B Sinha and Cyriac Joseph observed.

Yet, in India, live-in relationships are not looked upon very well by the society at large.

The verdict goes on further to say
The Bench said when disputes of valid marriages comes into question, courts can rely not only on the various material placed before it, but also draw a presumption on the basis of the conduct between the two parties. "In arriving at a finding of fact, indisputably the learned trial judge was not only entitled to analyse the evidences brought on record by the parties so as to come to a conclusion as to whether all the ingredients of a valid marriage as contained in Section 5 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 stand established or not.

This is particularly interesting. If you go through the entire ruling emphasis is given on the relationship between the couple in question and the society.

I had an interesting conversation on these lines with a fellow TWer on friday night. He said that on these matters, taking the views of the society as a whole into account is important as well. The way I see marriage, it's the couple asking for acceptance for staying together from the society as a whole.

I haven't been in a live-in relationship myself but have close friends who were/are. I fully support the right of two adults to live together without marriage.

Sometimes the people around them ( neighbors mainly ) have frowned on the live-in couple and sometimes they have been supportive.

If I may say so, I find the stand of the Supreme Court a little weird. Consider this

1. A guy and a girl can get married without having to take the consent of anyone as long as a. they're above a certain age b. 2 witnesses are present
2. According to the latest ruling, a guy and a girl who live happily together is the presumption of marriage as long as the society accepts them

I see a problem.
1. How do you prove the society likes your living together?
2 You dont need acceptance of the society to marry someone legally but you do need their acceptance if you dont marry but wanna be called married :)

If you're reading this, I'd love to hear your opinions.

PS: I normally dont post non-tech stuff on this blog. I post such stuff to my other blog. This blog is syndicated at blogs.thoughtworks.com ; I would like to hear the opinions of my fellow TWers from India and abroad.

Reliance EVDO :Pathetic speeds!

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:41:43 GMT

I just bought a Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ EVDO USB modem.

I was promised speeds "upto" 3.1 Mbps. You can check the link above for their tall claims.

These are the speeds I am getting in an area with 100% signal strength at 10PM, according to speedtest.com

ping 208ms (to my ISP's server in Mumbai)
dL 0.83 Mbps
upload 0.02 Mbps

Download Benchmark ( again speedtest.com )
mp3 File - 5MB - 49sec
Video Clip 35 MB - 6 mins
Movie 800MB 129 min

Their claim of speeds is basically a lie and a scam.
While i've gotten tricked and paid 3.5k for this piece of junk, I hope you dont make the same mistake.

Cowsay Man page: hilarious!

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:53:21 GMT

Cowsay Man page: hilarious!
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

This is /NOT/ fiction.. have a look at the screenshot to know more ..
( and yes install it! )
cowsay(1)

                     cowsay(1)

NAME
       cowsay/cowthink - configurable speaking/thinking cow (and a bit more)

SYNOPSIS
       cowsay [-e eye_string] [-f cowfile] [-h] [-l] [-n] [-T
tongue_string] [-W column] [-bdgpstwy]

DESCRIPTION
       Cowsay generates an ASCII picture of a cow saying something
provided by the user. If run with no arguments, it accepts standard
input, word-wraps the message given at about 40 columns, and prints
the cow saying the given message on
       standard output.

       To aid in the use of arbitrary messages with arbitrary
whitespace, use the -n option. If it is specified, the given message
will not be word-wrapped. This is possibly useful if you want to make
the cow think or speak in figlet(6). If
       -n is specified, there must not be any command-line arguments
left after all the switches have been processed.

       The -W specifies roughly (where the message should be wrapped.
The default is equivalent to -W 40 i.e. wrap words at or before the
40th column.

       If any command-line arguments are left over after all switches
have been processed, they become the cow's message. The program will
not accept standard input for a message in this case.

       There are several provided modes which change the
appearance of the cow depending on its particular emotional/physical
state. The -b option initiates Borg mode; -d causes the cow to appear
dead; -g invokes greedy mode; -p causes a
       state of paranoia to come over the cow; -s makes the cow appear
thoroughly stoned; -t yields a tired cow; -w is somewhat the opposite
of -t, and initiates wired mode; -y brings on the cow's youthful
appearance.

       The user may specify the -e option to select the appearance of
the cow's eyes, in which case the first two characters of the argument
string eye_string will be used. The default eyes are 'oo'.   The
tongue is similarly configurable
       through -T and tongue_string; it must be two characters and
does not appear by default. However, it does appear in the 'dead' and
'stoned' modes. Any configuration done by -e and -T will be lost if
one of the provided modes is used.

       The -f option specifies a particular cow picture file
(``cowfile'') to use. If the cowfile spec contains '/' then it will
be interpreted as a path relative to the current directory.
Otherwise, cowsay will search the path specified in
       the COWPATH environment variable. To list all cowfiles on the
current COWPATH, invoke cowsay with the -l switch.

       If the program is invoked as cowthink then the cow will think
its message instead of saying it.

COWFILE FORMAT
       A cowfile is made up of a simple block of perl(1) code, which
assigns a picture of a cow to the variable $the_cow. Should you wish
to customize the eyes or the tongue of the cow, then the variables
$eyes and $tongue may be used.   The
       trail leading up to the cow's message balloon is
composed of the character(s) in the $thoughts variable. Any
backslashes must be reduplicated to prevent interpolation. The name
of a cowfile should end with .cow, otherwise it is
       assumed not to be a cowfile. Also, at-signs (``@'') must be
backslashed because that is what Perl 5 expects.

COMPATIBILITY WITH OLDER VERSIONS
       What older versions? :-)

       Version 3.x is fully backward-compatible with 2.x versions. If
you're still using a 1.x version, consider upgrading. And tell me
where you got the older versions, since I didn't exactly put them up
for world-wide access.

       Oh, just so you know, this manual page documents version 3.02 of cowsay.

ENVIRONMENT
       The COWPATH environment variable, if present, will be used to
search for cowfiles. It contains a colon-separated list of
directories, much like PATH or MANPATH. It should always contain the
/usr/local/share/cows directory, or at least
       a directory with a file called default.cow in it.

FILES
       /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_textproc_cowsay/work/destroot/opt/local/share/cows
holds a sample set of cowfiles. If your COWPATH is not explicitly
set, it automatically
       contains this directory.

BUGS
       If there are any, please notify the author at the address below.

AUTHOR
       Tony Monroe (tony@nog.net), with suggestions from Shannon Appel
(appel@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU) and contributions from Anthony Polito
(aspolito@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU).

SEE ALSO
       perl(1), wall(1), nwrite(1), figlet(6)

                                     $Date: 1999/11/04 19:50:40 $

                     cowsay(1)

--
Manish Chakravarty
Blog: manish-chaks.livejournal.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/manishchakravarty
Twitter: twitter.com/ManishChaks
Facebook: www.facebook.com/manish.chakravarty

First Chapter for my selenium book

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:37:21 GMT

I have tentatively called the book "Selenium Internals"

You can download the book from here

please send your reviews, feedbacks, suggestions coming.

Look forward to posting one chapter everyday :)

Writing a book on selenium: Outline

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:26:21 GMT

Chapter 1 - Introduction
Goals
• Introduce participants to each other
• Establish the goals of the program
• Do a “warm up” on selenium
• Setup Environment ( IDE, repo etc )
Architecture

Chapter 2: Selenium Core
Goals
User should be able to…
• Write a simple test case in Selenese
• Demonstrate understanding of core and core-less
• Demonstrate understanding of core profiles
• Familiarity with various JS files
• Demonstrate how to build and deploy core part to Maven
Agenda
• Building the Selenium Core
Outline
• Explain the source tree layout
• Create sample HTML page
• Create Selenese test case
• Include the test case in the actual suite ( conditions configure for
specific browser etc)
• Building the selenium core
• Describe conversion
• looking at pom.xml for selenese ant task
• Describe important JS files which are part of Selenium Core.
• Describe how Selenium coreless creates profile
• Firebug
• Windows Registry
• difference between PI mode and non PI mode ( diff between the JS
files being loaded )
Links
• Starting with Selenium
• Setting up Apache on OS X
• Ajax Testing with Selenium using waitForCondition
• Agile Testing with Selenium

Notes
browser launcher, launcher util, WindowsUtils, creation of firefox
profile and extension, ie registry modification, fire bug extension,
fire fox 3 patch, iedoc.xml geberation with rhino
selenium-api.js, selenium-browserbot.js, selenium-remoterunner.js,
selenium-testrunner.js, different between PI mode loading and non-pi
mode loading of js files

Chapter 3 – Selenium Server
Goals
User should be able to demonstrate understanding of
• the source structure of Selenium Server
• how selenium server and selenium core talk to each other (Incase of
selenese test case – selenium-testrunner.js and driver commands )
• diff context paths in the selenium server
• how selenium server handles requests
Outline
• Talk about source structure of SS ( talk about selenium server =
(SeleniumCore +SeleniumCoreLess ))
• Describe architecture of the Selenium Server
• Describes the commands Selenium Core sends to Selenium Server
( Excercise: Do this with FireBug; involve students )
• How selenium server handles selenese test cases
• How selenium server handles test cases driven by driver
• Talk about SSL certificates.
Notes
proxy handler
static content handler (classpath resources)
cache content handler
selenium driver handler

Chapter 4 – Selenium Driver
Goals
User should be able to demonstrate and understanding of ….
• How selenium converts iedoc.xml XML to Java/ruby/python driver
interface and implementation with iedocXXX.xml xslt & Converting
selenese test case to Java test case with XLateHTML2Java and handling
special conditions while test case conversion
• How to run test cases from Java driver end.
• Selenium Driver <—> Selenium Server interactions
Outline
• From the XML doc generated in Chapter one, we will talk about how
code is generated out of it.
• In case of Java binding , how they are creating Java test case from
selenese test case.
• What if we dont want them to generate the system automatically?
• getEval (“WaitUntilPresent”)
• how to get rid of getEval and extending the Selenium driver
( inheritance OR composition )
• patterns (do, get , is )

Chapter 5 – Selenium Driver
Goals
User should be able to demonstrate and understanding of ….
• Understanding hooks
• Understanding how to extend the selenium core objects
• How things would differ from PI and non PI mode
Outline
• Taking the click and the wait ; such that click implicitly calls a
wait

Chapter 6 – Selenium Modes
Goals
User should be able to demonstrate and understanding of ….
• IEHTA/chrome #Running a functional test case under different
browsers
• Page ranking algorithm
• Multi-domain issues
• How to exclude files from injection
Outline
• Talk about IEHTA and Chrome modes
• Demonstrate running the functional tests under different browsers
Facilitated Discussion – “What are the major cross-browser issues have
you faced in general and with Selenium in particular?”

Chapter 7 (part 1) XPath
Goals
User should be able to demonstrate and understanding of ….
• difference between XPath implementation in IE and firefox
• how to change the XPath library used for IE
Outline
• Talk about XPath Implementation in IE and firefox
• Attendees will be asked to find out how to change the XPath library
for IE
• Explain the difference between the two javascript implementations
• Talk about the pros/cons of the native IE XPath implementation
( Including issues with MSXML )
NotesChapter

MSXML cannot deal with malformed HTML documents. That is why a
JavaScript library is needed to deal with XPath.

Chapter 8

This Chapter is more of discussions regarding Selenium issues
• Running selenium test cases in parallel (Selenium Grid)
• Slow JS
• Flex Driver
• Selenium-Flash demo Topics to vary wrt to time. Participation from
audience encouraged
Outline
• Demonstrate the stuff mentioned in the goals and talk in detail

Chapter 9: Wrap Up
Facilitated discussions regarding
• Twist

Conducting a traning programme on Selenium. Interested?

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:52:18 GMT

After the last months successful (and first meet ) of the Indian selenium user's group , I have decided to go ahead and hold a selenium training camp at the Bangalore TW office [1]

The meet was really good, there was 50+ attendance and as you know this was the first ever meet!

The outline can be found here.

Feel free to sign up. ( All you need to do is reply to the thread or reply to me directly )

[1] = some people have requested a web-based training solution as they cannot physically travel to Bangalore. I am looking at exploring all options.

Alert! VMware breaks with Debian upgrade + fix

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:57:51 GMT

Alert! VMware breaks with Debian upgrade + fix
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

I have VMPlayer installed on my debian lenny.

Here's the output of "uname -a" : Linux manish-laptop 2.6.26-2-686 #1
SMP Thu May 28 15:39:35 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
After the kernel upgrade from 2.6.26-1-686 to 2.6.26-2-686, the linux
headers are not installed ( if you installed linux-headers for the
previous kernel they stay as is but they are not upgraded)

VMPlayer (or any other flavor of VMWare) then breaks. You need to execute
"sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`" which will fetch the
correct version of the linux headers.

The VMWare starts up, fixes the module stuff ( see attached
screenshot) and then boots up just fine.

I wonder why the Debian guys dont automatically install the newer
version of the headers when 1. The user already has an older version
of the kernel headers installed 2. An automatic upgrade does upgrade
the older kernel.

Snapshot of my desktop

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:27:02 GMT

Snapshot of my desktop
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

My workspace becomes even more crowded......

What I am trying to do is launch firefox from within the code base
using a proxy server ( code's in eclipse)
Firefox has been custom-profiled to auto-load Venkman ( the window
with "JavaScript debugger") and that is being used to control the
recording and playback using the Selenium IDE (top left of right
screen) .. the recording/playback mechanism is behind-the-scenes (and
thus another use of Venkman)

Had a long hard day's work today

Google Chrome on Linux!

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:33:29 GMT

Google Chrome on Linux!
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

Took the latest build [1] of chromium for a swing. (this is not a
review since chrome for linux is not ready for primetime yet)

To test, I got down the latest build of Chromium for Linux.
Installation was as simple as downloading and unzipping the file and
then doing a "./chrome".
Everything looks fine, I have used for a while .. GMail, iGoogle,
Yahoo all opened and worked just fine. Changing the language in
iGoogle from English to Hindi cause Chrome to not display anything in
the browser, this was strange. This is probably some
internationalization issue in Chromium which would be fixed later.

I will spend more time with Chrome and will give you and update after
a while of using it more.

[1] = build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/...

Twouble with Twitters: SuperNews!

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:01:12 GMT

Something malicious going on in gmail chat?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:20:09 GMT

Something malicious going on in gmail chat?
Originally uploaded by Manish Chakravarty

Just logged into gmail .. seeing strange names + the "Kasav" thing..
Are you facing a similar problem?

I'll hold for announcements in OSNews/ArsTechnica/Slashdot for more info on this

Video: Sun's Legacy

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:22:39 GMT

http://video.forbes.com/fvn/tech/sun-legacy

An amazing video.

www.thoughtworker.com

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:39:00 GMT

This is a fantastic site put up by the ThoughtWorks. It sends out a clear picture of who we are and what we do. It gives a very interesting glimpse into the life of a thoughtworker and why you should work with ths.

do check it out --> http://www.thoughtworker.com