tracking patches and information overload

If you want to get into linux, in deep, then you must subscribe to different mailing lists. I have been a member of atleast a dozen mailing lists for sometime and you know what its almost impossible to read all the mail that comes your way.

This is where gmail-foo needs to save the day!

1. Organize by labels. Have labels for everything possible - patches, different mailing list, different topics etc..
2. Then use gmail's search to the extreme. Search for labels, unread mails, from: and subject: in combo. Read only what makes sense! Mark everything else as read or just delete them!

Even then its impossible to read all email. 

Updates - Nov 17

1 News

1.1 Links

• Real Catapult for Angry birds using Bluetooth - http://armdevices.net/2012/11/02/angry-birds-bluetooth-catapult-with-arm-cortex-m3-and-sensors/
• Gentoo forks UDEV http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.project/2262. The actual fork is available at https://github.com/gentoo/udev-ng. Also see Linus's point on UDEV. IMHO, the tying up of UDEV and systemd is a problem for Ubuntu and other distros that don't want to use systemd but something else like upstart or even SysV init.
• LDT (Linux Driver Template) posted to LKML. This is really worth looking at for any new drivers that we need to develop - https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/11/13/531
• Here's something that Assembler programmers will enjoy reading. Raymond Chen shows how he hard patched MS Money -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/11/13/10367904.aspx

1.2 Releases

• Pendrive linux users will love this - SLAX 7 RC1 is out - http://www.tomas-m.com/blog/19139-Slax-7-release-candidate-1.html.
• Its five years since Android was announced. The original announcement was made in 2007 - http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/press_110507.html. After Cupcake, Eclair, Froyo hit the mainstream in Aug 2010. That was followed by Gingerbread in Dec 2010 and Honeycomb, ICS and JB following those. A couple of days ago, Google announced the availability of JB SDK - http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2012/11/introducing-android-42-new-and-improved.html

1.3 Industry

• Aptina announces new Sensors for the Auto market - http://www.aptina.com/news/press/new_image_co-processor_platform_powers_aptina_hdr_automotive_image_sensors?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PressReleases-AptinaImaging+%28Press+Releases+-+Aptina%29
• Exynos5 based dev board - Dual-A15 $249 - http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
• Likewise, a Snapdragon 8060 based dev board - Dual-Krait $498 - http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard.aspx
• Microsoft has shared their roadmap for Embedded - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Features/2012/Nov12/11-13EmbeddedRoadmap.aspx
• With ARM announcing that their 64bit devices (Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53) http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a50/index.php, Linaro has also announced the creation of an ARM exterprise/servers group - LEG http://www.linaro.org/news/release/industry-leaders-collaborate-to-accelerate-software-ecosystem-for-arm-servers-and-join-linaro/en.
• AIA announces USB3 Vision standard that is developed specifically for Vision and Cameras. The standard should have BW of 350 Mbps. I don't have the details fully though - http://www.visiononline.org/vision-standards-details.cfm?type=11 and http://www.packagingdigest.com/article/522674-USB3_Vision_Standard.php are some sources of information that I came across.
• Paper from Dundee University on using Kinect to control optical tweezers - http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.0220v1.pdf

Does constantly compromising make you worse?

That's what Rocky says in his post - http://rockyj.in/?p=248. The corresponding Reddit thread is at http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qi9rd/musings_on_india_and_technology/.

There is one valid point - that we do compromise a lot when it comes to quality in India. As a product integrator, I spend a lot of time pulling in code from others. I do compromise a lot when it comes to the software delivered to me. It could schedule slips, shoddy documentation or just plain bad code. Yet, I take it all in with the hope that it will improve in time. Maybe I should stop doing that.

What I don't agree with Rocky is that there are *only* shoddy programmers in India because we compromise all the time. That's flat out wrong. There are some excellent programmers that I have worked with.

The flip side to compromising, is that I think India is *the* place for you support your customers. We can patch it, fix it, hack it, change it etc all in the goal of getting customers to production. I have seen this often. There is a different skill to getting software out of the door and shipping it to a customer. Its a very special skill to then get that software to integrate and work in the customer's stack.
Its one thing to write software that stands alone, but its a completely different thing to make it work with other peoples code. That's where the India brigade comes in.

Getting the software to work in a customer's world. While shoddy programmers in India will still struggle, the good ones will get that software to bend and work. If it means compromising on longer term quality to get a customer to production, so be it.

Ubuntu Core - Alpha2 with both armel and armhf

I didn't expect it, but armhf seems to be part of ubuntu-core for precise. That's pretty surprising because I remembering seeing a number of packages that didn't build for armhf about a month back.

Nevertheless, its good if armhf and armel is part of ubuntu-core. The only question is whether we will get all the community supported packages on both or only Cannonical ones? I'm specifically interested in not running Unity and much rather have LXDE running. The only question is whether there will be LXDE armhf packages in addition to armel ones.

Aquamacs vs. Emacs

Aquamacs does seem more natural than the standard Emacs.

I'm a new Mac user switching over from a PC and having emacs is a must. What Aquamacs does is make emacs more OSX oriented. While this can be confusing, especially if you are coming from Linux (like, I am) in general things seem ok.

The font is better for sure. More reviews to follow as I test things out.

OSX Emacs Drag and Drop

By default, I find that drag and drop on OSX does not work in the same way that it would on Windows. On Windows, a new buffer is created. On OSX, the file is opened in the same buffer. Googling around gave me - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1850292/emacs-23-1-and-mac-os-x-problem-with-files-drag-and-drop.

Adding the following text worked fine -