started yesterday cause the bugs assigned were not accessible earlier. However once i had access, started off.. i'm working on the ifolder product & my mentor has assigned to me some three bugs.. Managed to locate the problem in the first one by afternoon after some effort..

anyway, have to still complete the other two...

* Its really a sad scene no updates on the main page (gnomebangalore.org) since Dec 12 2005 ;)

* I keep my self updated with blogs from Nat and Michael.
* Some times I visit Novell's site ..

am really happy now that finally after a long struggle for more than 6 weeks am finally done with the compilation of evolution.

well open suse 10.1 from LFY june issue missies soo many devels that are needed for compilation of evolution.

1)nss-devel
2)inttool (it`s too old)

ahh am done with it now have to start with bug fixes.

I have send my application form on Feb 01,2006 for joining in NOSIP. But so far I haven't received any mails or e-mails regarding this. Why is it take so long? Can any help in joining this?

Finally managed to do a account level search (just search all the folders in the current account). Well the core functionality is over and now for the major UI based work.. like showing/hiding widgets … enable/disable widgets …

But this wont be able to make it to Evolution 2.7.3 release … Needs a lot of testing and lot of code reviews… There is around a week of work before it becomes close to 'stable'. Happy that the core functionality is done …

good news ,
i got permission from college to work with NOSIP.initially i am looking forward to join for 6 months.
i will be sending the requisits soon to the office and hoping to contribute to the EVOLUTION project.
gud bye for now.

I have an experience of 2+year on .Net. I want to be the part of this open source community . I want to know that how I can contribute to Mono project carrying my job even and when can I join this.

Name: Maria Victor Aloysius J

College : Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Kurla

Branch : B.E Information Technology

Start Date : 15th-Dec-2005

End Date : 25th-March-2006

====
Tasks
====

====
Misc
====
Added a feature for displaying the number of events in a day-view (calendar) next to the date.

Added a feature for displaying and hiding the toolbar items from the toolbar by using a checklist.
Added few buttons to the toolbar

Added a column called "Sender" in the message list which displays the name of the Sender. If there is no name for the sender then "Sender" column just displays the email address.

Filed 334056 Mnemonic of Locat_ion to be changed to _Location.

Studied evolution-galago.

Name: Oswald Rodrigues

College : Don Bosco Institute of Technology, Kurla

Branch : BE Information Technology

Start Date : 15th-Dec-2005

End Date : 25th-March-2006

====
Tasks
====
332347 mnemonics: Add to Addressbook Menu in mail view doesnt work
328515 Event / Task editor do not open attachment bar
310856 UI issues with searching for mails
219343 Keystroke type ahead scrolling in Contacts
262950 Search "clear" clears field as well as the parameter
320168 inconsistant labels with contact's mail addresses

Miscellenous
Created a checklist to Show/Hide buttons in the toolbar for Mail/Contacts/Calendar/Tasks/Memos(part).

Studied evolution-galago.

Hello everyone. I was wondering why I wasn't able to make my NOSIP experience successful. Ofcourse, it was a wonderful experience. But, an unsuccessful ending would make the whole experience a nightmare. Not that i am bad in programming. I am still considered a better programmer among 'The Oxford College of Engg. ' NOSIPIANS. I had all tools required to make my experience as a NOSIPIAN wonderful. But didn't know to use the tools. There are a lot of tools that would prove useful in enhancing the OpenOffice.org like grep, cvs, build utilities and GDB. The material over these tools available on Internet is either too basic ( less descriptive ) or full of jargons for a newbie. Even after reading these materials on cvs and gdb, i failed to read the output messages of GDB or wasn't able to setup CVS properly. Which later proved as my failure to accomplish the tasks assigned or that i myself took up. I would like to, in a short span, start again from scratch and be a part of successful NOSIP group. Love to be NOSIPIAN. :-)

Being given an opportunity to have a project in Novell Software, my joy knew no bounds to build evolution. With a dial up internet connection at home i soon found out that it is a time consuming process. As a result, i took my system itself all the way to Bangalore by bus and got connected through WLL phone and started my work with sheer enthusiasm and in right ernest.

But as providence have it the very next day (sorry to convey my personal problems) my grand mother whom i was looking after at my home passed away and i had to return back to vellore and in this process valuable time got lost. However evolution has to be built up and i was in search of broadband connection in my home town. It was available but to my dismay the connection could not be sourced at my home since it is situated out of municipal limits. Then i had to get the connection from a house inside municipal limits. But even the Airtel company, the internet provider did not assure me that it is linux compatible. The service Engineers of that company expressed their inability in configuring the net connection to the system through ethernet, as they were new to the linux based internet connection. 'u have to take the risk', they told.

And my guide Mr.Madhan Kumar came to my rescue, and staying over night he burnt the midnight oil in getting the net connection. At this juncture i cannot forget the invaluable help and suggestion rendered by Mr.Varadhan in getting the net connected.I again reinstalled linux with all the packages and net got connected atlast. The broadband provider told me that i was the first person in vellore to work in net through linux platform.

Building Evolution:
--------------------

After getting a proper net connection i started building evolution, i know that it was not an easy process to build evolution as a beginner easily without getting an error. First it told that ssl.h file missing, so for getting that correct i need to update packages from net, i started that process by 8.00 p.m and completed it only by 3.30 a.m the next day. But i haven't given up the hope of building evolution, i again started building it, i thought that this time everything wil be perfect, but got the same old error. I don't know what to do, after that i went to irc for asking help, Rajeev helped me in solving this problem, he told me to check for the package mozill-nss-devel in my packages updated, it was the only package missing in my system, after that Rajeev gave me the url to download that package into the sys. i downloaded it and started building evolution again. I was happy now bcos there was no such error displayed. But again got a new error 'configuration error', so i referred the faq page to solve this problem. Accordingly i configured both evolution-data-server and evolution with nssr and nss, and started continuing the process of building evolution.(Two days had passed by now)

I was really very very happy now, after seeing the word 'sucess' in terminal after 4.1/2 hrs. Now i wanted to see the Evolution window to check out the version to be 2.6.0, but how? again i went to faq page to sort out this problem, given the cmds shown there, i was eagerly waiting for the window to be opened, but alas i again got an error 'system configuration does not match the evolution built',
again tried out the solution given in faq page, it was not working. What to do now?, the best solution out is go to irc. ya, i did that
after that i told the entire problem to Andre and Varadhan, Varadhan told me to follow some new steps(i.e cmds) which has not been updated in faq page, i did that, with God's blessings atlast i built evolution successfully and got the version 2.6.0 to be displayed.

So with my experience gained in building evolution, Darwin's Theory of Evolution that 'Only the strongest of the species will survive' proved correct. Thank God!

Can I use this blog as a Daily Journal entry??? I don't know...

Morning was hectic today.

Wrong figures = Wrong stats
Wrong stats = Wrong report
Wrong report = Wrong judgement
Wrong judgement = Wrong output
Wrong output = Boss in full blast over MIS.

(sigh......)

What to do, this is life...

1. We tend to shout on people who listens...
2. Pressure mounts on the person who overcomes it...
3. A valid Input is more important than the ultimate Output...

A old Story Retold...

This was the time when the Concept of Cooperative was developing for the first time.
This was promptly spread in the milkmen community and it was decided that each one of them will contribute a 'pau' (1/4 ltr.s) of milk in a milk pot kept in the center of the village.
The place was in the front of the village temple and was more or less a secluded spot.
As it happens eveywhere in India, the practice went for a week smoothly without glitch and then came the greedy ones.
One particular greedy fellow thought, "If I put a 'pau' of water instead of milk, who will get to know?", and he immediately put a 'pau' of water in the community milk pot.
Unknown to him another dishonest member of that village was watching him, and he repeated the same act after the first one, which was observed by another one.
This practice slowly spread...
As with the other bad habits, this one also spread quite fast...
AT the end of Second Week, it was observed, the community milk pot is upto the brim in water without a sign of milk.

Conclusions :-

1. A single wrong entry can crash the whole project.
2. A single person entering that wrong data can put the whole team into deep shit.
3. Its ultimately not only a person or a team/community or a project that suffers, its rather the idea & effort invested that gets lost...

* Solaris is bit different in terms of using it. thankfully i am able to get the gnome desktop (solaris 9 is having it) ..which eased a lot.

*There are always few things that one learns or get used to from past. Ex from redhat-->suse I missed "locate" a lot.
similarly I missed linux-> solaris I amm missing "top".

though these things are available as additional install from few sites but ....

* Similarly, find out what this does prtconf, prtstat, vmstat, prtdisply.

* How to use the plumb of ifconfig. and create virtual IP address for same interface. and use it with lot of application.

* Did some learning on oracle 10g on solaris. It was really tough one without having the manual ...esp they removed SYS account (this one was the only account that was written in the post install manual). thanx to search engines like google ;)

* Another interesting thing was instead of having mysql like commands there are few things different
Ex: MySql> show tables;
On oracle it is something like
Sqlplus> Select table_names from ALL_Table;

There are similar small issues that I learned.

* Learning PTHREADS from book "programming with POSIX Threads" by David R. Butenhof. Initial 4-6 pages were interesting ...will write more about the book after I read it completely.

Well this is my first blog .... "Better late than Never".

I have decided to make this blog useful for newcomers by writing
some of my experiences when I had started in NOSIP.

The first doubt that the members of my group and I had was that can we meet the one month criteria?
And is the project very tough ??? Can we do it ???

Well the first day I start off with a lot of enthusiasm and expectations. In my anxiety, I missed out few of the steps in the building procedure and I had hell lot of errors.

I would like to tell the new-comers to stick to this site:
http://gnomebangalore.org/wiki/index.php/Evo. And follow Each And Every Step as given in the "Beginners" while Building Evolution and if any problem refer to the FAQ. Always try to solve the problems yourself first and after tryin if u still are not able to solve the problem, always feel free to ask the doubts on irc (#nosip).

Once Evolution is built it gives a great boost.

Then comes the interesting part of all: "Fixing Bugs"
When I started with this phase, I really doubted myself.Can I fix any bugs ???
But for my astonishment there were so many "Easy Fix Bugs" which really can increase ur morale.

It has been such a good learning experience till now for me. Each time I try to fix a new bug there are some new challenges always waiting, which makes Fixing Bugs even more interesting.

Oh! And once a patch is fixed, it gives such a great feeling....
A sense of accomplishment.

New comers just enjoy being in Nosip. Dont worry!!! You are in safe hands of mentors like Srinivasa Ragavan (srag) and Chenthill (chen).

well I would like to close this blog with 2 of my favouite quotes:
"Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: A desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill."
-Muhammad Ali

"Fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round - remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped."
-James Corbett

Bug 330955 – 'Click to add a memo entry' missing in UI

We are in a UI Freeze and a feature is missing ...
So chen asked me to work on it. I took a look at the code and found that "tasks" and "memos" are smiliar and sometimes they even have the same var names. Looking the code i understood that they use e-tables. Found the hierarchy. Then there was this xml file *.etspec - etables-spec. Implies that it says how the table should be created. Took a look into it and found that it pretty readable.
"Click to add memo" feature was simply turned off. Ithought this would be a easy fix. So i changed it to "on". Hurrah i got the bar . now tried entering the values and pressed enter ... Yes. it crashed ...
Took a look at the stack trace in bug buddy. Launched GDB within emacs. Reproduced the crash.

#10 0x40b030a2 in ORBit_c_stub_invoke () from /opt/gnome/lib/libORBit-2.so.0
#11 0x403ef39c in GNOME_Evolution_Calendar_Cal_createObject (_obj=0x45201458, calobj=0x0, ev=0xbfa199a8)
at Evolution-DataServer-Calendar-stubs.c:171
#12 0x403f7cab in e_cal_create_object (ecal=0x4044ddc4, icalcomp=0x0, uid=0x0, error=0x0) at e-cal.c:4293
#13 0x44846483 in ecm_append_row (etm=0x8362210, source=0x84581d8, row=0) at e-cal-model.c:765
#14 0x4014cd45 in e_table_model_append_row (e_table_model=0x8362210, source=0x84581d8, row=0) at e-table-model.c:102
#15 0x4014db78 in e_table_one_commit (one=0x84581d8) at e-table-one.c:240

Hmmm, that looks suspicious. How can that return null. The nest thing about GDB inside EMACS is that i can directly use etags on the trace. Took a look into the code and found that VJOURNAL is not handled there. So added code there to handle that. Ok looks like everything is fixed. strange i'm able to add data , but cannot save it. I lose it all the time. Hmmm, So i wanted to know how they save and retrive the values in memo-page. haha.. The caption says summary but they are actually put in 'description' and also added in summary.
Opened etspec again and changed the column to be used to description. Every thing looks fine. .. .. Now wen i add data, it again crashes or doesnt add "summary". again GDB *within* EMACS. took a look at the trace.

#0 0x41508dc3 in strlen () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#1 0x40126709 in ect_load_state (ecell_view=0x8485d50, model_col=4, view_col=1, row=0, edit_context=0x0, save_state=0x8309e90) at e-cell-text.c:1270
#2 0x401219af in e_cell_load_state (ecell_view=0x8485d50, model_col=4, view_col=1, row=0, edit_context=0x0, save_state=0x8309e90) at e-cell.c:405
#3 0x4014688c in eti_event (item=0x8423288, e=0x80f8110) at e-table-item.c:2867
#4 0x40bc5d50 in gnome_canvas_marshal_BOOLEAN__BOXED () from /opt/gnome/lib/libgnomecanvas-2.so.0
#5 0x41174637 in g_cclosure_new_swap () from /opt/gnome/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0

yup, somewhere i'm loosing the data. But when summary is used, it works perfect, So compared how summary and description are handled. Almost same ... But in a function *duplicate_value* Description was missed out. Great. found that actually returns a NULL which is the reason for the crash. Added code there...

And tada ... It works :-)

But it wasnt as easy it sounds.. But loved what i did. Learnt a lot.