Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

Its the close of September. And just a week ago I turned 16: in hex, that is. Although I do distinctly remember how I wished coming back to being a 16-decimal-year-old then…

So, how does it feel being one? I’ve barely begun to feel it. There has been a lot of distractions to keep me from contemplating too much about $age:

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Today marks the end of mentor/student surveys for the Google Summer of Code.

However, its just another day for me to work on OSDL’s Sendpage. The Perl lessons that I’ve learned from it have been invaluable to me, and have allowed me to see beyond what I have previously understood of software engineering. I’ve also learned some things the hard way (like getting the testsuite done first (yes, get the testsuite done first!!!))

Thanks Kees for the great fish!

Ah, well. I’m such an errant blogger, being focused in doing actual work. But here are some updates:

• Summer Of Code: Sendpage - My code formatting patches have made CVS, and now I’m working on finishing the testsuite. Almost done, hehe
• Debian NM - Still at Philosophy and Procedures 1…
• Ubuntu PH: Picked up where Ealden left off as the PhilippineTeam Leader and LoCoContact, and with Jerome, taking care of the new, Drupal-powered portal for Ubuntu-PH.
• School: I’m loving Philo 173!

In the past few days, I’ve been rather quiet, since I started ripping Sendpage to shreds. After a few days of reading Sendpage::Device and Sendpage::Db, as well as the corresponding design documents, I’ve decided to try coding the few redesign I have been holding up my mind all this time. For now I’m putting my mods inside RCS working with CVS, thanks to Emacs VC-mode.

I’ve put up my first status report for Week 1+. I am also currently dist-upgrading to Dapper, Sid, and Eft chroots… while discovering Perl Design Patterns.


05:42 * zakame can't believe he's building Perl from source
05:43 < ajmitch> sick man


My dead-trees grokking is paying out I’m observing a lot of stuff here and there in the code that needs my love…

• Hmmm… Sendpage::Device has code that is unsurprisingly similar to Sendpage::Modem. It would be nice if I can combine these together into just one module, then let users import the objects via export tags.
• A lot of variables get made inside the various functions (again, look at Sendpage::Device) that are actually just aliases to hash entries (taken from args to the functions.) I suppose this made the code a bit clearer, but nontheless there’s still a lot of scratchpad pollution going on there :-/
• Docs are lacking… but this is hardly unknown.
• The usual Perl metagoofs: no use warnings and use strict.

There’s still more, soon to come.

Google’s Summer of Code is on! And I’m a part of it!

I’ll be working with my mentor, Kees Cook, on improving the Sendpage alphanumeric pager software for OSDL’s infrastructure events reporting, especially on getting the various modules of the software communicate clearly, improving the documentation, and updating the packages on Debian, Ubuntu, and others. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fulfill my goals for this project, as well as even extending it further for the long term.

/me is now happily grokking the dead-trees version of the source...

Update: You can see my project proposal.