25C3 is over

After Christmas I returned to Berlin to be at the BCC for the 25th C3 in time. I was honored to talk to John Gilmore and the German Openmoko population was also present and we enjoyed talking, reading and hacking away on GSM. From the many things I planned to do I have only finished some but as usual I will work on these round robin... But it is time to leave the black hole and return to work.

This time of the year

Last year around this time of the year I already had resigned from GMIT, figuring out what to do with myself, Thiago finished his new networking classes, Simon integrated most of it into WebKit at around FOSS.IN, we fixed the regressions of the layout test suite and I was tracing down bugs with SSL, a Cookie issue on yahoo mail, a crash on gmail... This year things look awfully similar. I know a little better what to do with myself, I have fixed a funny issue of QNetworkAccessCache (a new class in Qt4.5) breaking JavaScript sunspider benchmark.

If you write code that is using QObject::startTimer and not use QObject::killTimer you leak a timer. But if you manage to call QObject::killTimer twice chances are you have killed a timer belonging to someone else. To be safe you would have to reset the timerId you saved to an invalid timerId. The resulting code will look ugly though, but Qt to rescue! There is a shiny new class in Qt4.0 called QBasicTimer. It should not add any overhead and will avoid the above issue.

libtool must die

What is wrong if someone like me is fighting several hours to link a simple main.o to a library? Right, I'm trying to figure out why libtool is reshuffling my library paths...but now I think I have a pretty approximation of what libtool is doing.


while True:
random_library_path_order = randomize(sane_input)
if not link(stuff, random_library_path_order):
error("Error you are not going to fix, sucker!")


Let us deprecate libtool as fast as possible and let us start by making it an empty stub. I have wasted way too much time with it.


PS: Without libtool gcc is able to link this stuff just fine, so libtool is creating an artificial problem which is against any of engineering practive. It should solve problems but not be the problem... back to school boys!

FOSS.IN and the need for more events

I have sadly missed this years FOSS.in. The goal of this conference is to turn India into a nation of FOSS contributors. There are plenty of people, awesome food!, there is a huge software industry, companies like Tata Consulting are even on Level 5 five of the CMMI model. This means there is a huge potential! But when I get my daily mail on webkit-dev I recognize that it is still a long way from simply consuming, to try to attempt to think, to contributing. And that many more events like FOSS.in need to occur until there is a noticeable difference.

On the other hand with people like Girish, Prashant, pradeepto, Shreyas I have high hopes that the goal will be reached.

Making your own dumplings

If I would be in Taipei I could ask Tick, Jeremy, Erin, Olv, Julian, John to have lunch with me and eat dumplings at one of the restaurants pretty close to the office and lie that it is my first time eating with chop sticks and that my skills are not bad for the first time.... But I'm currently not in Taipei, I have no place to get dumplings. So today was the day to make vegetarian dumplings myself. The process is really simple, you don't even need a fancy bamboo steamer, just don't put too much sugar into it... working with tofu and vegetables is also fun. See you soon in Taipei...

The result:


The filling: Carrots, Pepper, Tofu, Ginger, some Chilli, Garlic, a bit of onions..