Thursday 28 June 2012

Status update

Hello!

First of all: I'm going to DebConf :D and I really want to say a big "Thank you!" to every one who made this possible.


So, here's what I've done recently:

I spent some time putting everything in order for the departure to Nicaragua, things like finding a plane ticket through a route that does not require a Visa, making a new Passport, now all is in order.

I've integrated the changes for listing available ESSIDs, in order to close #637128 [0] into a separate branch , which can be found here [1].

The plan is to have only one new template which lists the available networks and which has a option for entering the ESSID manualy. In order to do so, a simple scan is performed on the wireless interface, and the configuration for a particular network resulted after the scan is kept if that one is chosen. The enter manually situation is treated exactly as it was before.

Furthermore, last week (or the week before) I've done some coding style fixes again in a separate branch [2], nothing very fancy, just trimming trailing white spaces and changing some tabs to spaces, where spaces were mostly used. I've also noticed some inconsistencies, regarding white spaces between functions names and the parenthesis. However I think I'm overreacting a little, those matters are not really that relevant, but when I'll have some free time I'll get to this as well.


Next in line: Issues

Testing is still giving me some troubles, the show essids part is not yet fully tested, so I couldn't say for sure if everything works as planned.

Apart from the classical: write the image to an USB and reboot method, I'm using Virtual Box for testing. I've managed to create a passthrough for the wireless interface, but now I have troubles with some firmware. Hopefully I'll solve this as soon as possible since it would really make my life easier.


Future plans:

I've realized that I've underestimated a little what the project implies and the amount of information that is new to me. I feel that I have learned a lot and that there is still a lot to learn and I'm very happy that it is so. I've now started documenting regarding IPv6, beginning with this [3]. We haven't decided yet what the next task will be exactly.


[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=637128
[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/show_essids
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=d-i/netcfg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/people/sorina/coding_style
[3] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/

Tuesday 19 June 2012

Birthday present

Hello!

Yesterday was my birthday, I am 21 years old now :D

Here's what my friends got me as a gift:


One alternative explanation that I have received for this, apart from working on unstable, is that... women are generally unstable :P

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Testing

Hello!

Here comes my short post on the blog for this week :D

Thinks are going better now, in the last days, I have done some testing and I do believe that now I should not have anymore problems with debconf and that I am on the right way. What I have tried was to scan the wireless interface and list all the available networks names. After that I have tried to do this while using debconf to display the messages. Everything worked just fine for this part, but it took me a while to figure out how to scan the interface. Now I think I've got it.

I have done separate tests for cdebconf and scanning and after that merged them into a third test, containing the scanning part with some basic, very simple templates just to get an idea of how it should/could look in the end. It's not in its final version yet, but I think it will work.

I have pushed all my attempts into some personal repository on github, but do not expect much, those are just some tests. You can find it here [1].


[1] https://github.com/sorinasandu/testing

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Almost there


Exams period has almost come to an end, only one more to go, tomorrow morning. Thinks were quite busy during this period and my time was fairly limited. Multitasking did not go as well as I had expected, will consider this in the future.


I've spent the last days reading documentation, code and tutorials, which were very helpful, but I did not manage to do much. The Go Back button (#636211) is now done but there are still some fixes that need to be done on the link timeout (#610752). That one took me soooo long, and it's not like there was much to do, I don't know exactly what the problem was :).


One sad way to describe the way thinks worked during this period is by using a quote: "progress coming slowly, if it comes at all". That's from Lord of the Rings, but it's a bit modified (s/progress/change). Ok, that's overreacting. I do feel that I have made some progress, it's not necessarily visible (as in patches, features) but I feel much more confident about what I am doing.


Short post, now back to study. Programming Paradigms (last exam), here I come :))