Personal

Moving back to blogger

Vagmi Mudumbai — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:36:00 GMT

I have moved back to blogger. Please update your subscriptions. Inconvenience regretted. :-) Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Happy Diwali

Vagmi Mudumbai — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:13:00 GMT

This post is for all the indians both in India and abroad who crib about the situations there. These two clips show more than what I would like to say. It is time for all of us to accept this progress and enjoy it. Yes, we do have our problems. We still have incidents of communal riots. We are still bombed by terrorists. Much of Rural India is still to get the taste of this improvement. But we are living in an age with comforts that our previous generation could have only dreamed of. So be happy about it and do your part in making it better.

India before
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKJSDYvxHzw&mode=related&search=

India Now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_j-N3QkaVE

Happy Diwali and Id Mubarak. Jai hind.

Printing 42 - A not so straightforward Boo way

Vagmi Mudumbai — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:30:00 GMT

I was recently working with Reflection and Boo and thought this was funny. Hey.. nobody told life is simple right. So, here it goes. :-)

i as int
i=i.GetType().GetMethod("Parse",[typeof(string)].ToArray(typeof(System.Type))).Invoke(null,["42"].ToArray())
print "Answer to the question of life, universe and everything is ", i

The "South Park" me.

Vagmi Mudumbai — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 17:37:00 GMT

I came across an interesting site to create SouthPark style cartoon characters. If I had been a SouthPark character, I would have probably have looked like this.

Revisiting Linux

Vagmi Mudumbai — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 01:41:00 GMT

After a hectic schedule, I decided to give myself a break. So I decided that I will install Linux just for fun to refresh my memory on the linux front. It is also a small bet with my colleague that I could be productive and have fun with Linux just the way I work with Windows. I was arguing on the fact that there is no better learning platform than Linux. I've worked only on RedHat 7,8,9 distros that are distributed with magazines. There is this old joke about Open Source communities vs. Closed source vendors . It goes something like this. "Commercial vendors sell software but give away free T-Shirts. Open source communities give free software but sell T-Shirts."

So, here I am blogging from my linux (yeah!!!) machine. It has been a long time since I had worked on any of the linux distros. I tried downloading Fedora, but it was just too big. So is Novell Desktop Linux. I've got the bandwidth and everything but shelling so much space for it from my hard disk did not seem worth it. Who needs so much stuff anyway. So I settled for Ubuntu. Ubuntu still retains the open source passion that makes it attractive. The installation was lightweight and text based which suits me. I do not want any fancy graphics for the installation. Ubuntu installed GNOME by default and to my surprise had disabled the root account. I first felt a little uncomfortable running as a non-privileged user. We've all got used to running as administrator on our windows machines. People would laugh if you said you did not have administrative privileges on a Windows Machine. But on a linux machine it is normal that you are a restricted user. Everytime I used Nautilus to copy files I was reminded that I was running under a non-privileged user login. Although I could launch Nautilus itself with sudo, I used the command line. I still remembered basic linux commands. That was quite a relief.

Unfortunately, I was not able to listen to LaunchCast and I miss my MSN Radio already. :-( Apart from that I am pretty happy with the distribution. It seems to be pretty stable. I have installed (rather extracted) Eclipse, the latest Java Runtime and the pydev Eclipse plugin. It is a pretty neat. If time permits, I will try to write a small sudoku puzzle solver in Python on my Linux machine. And finally, just for the pure visual treat and to prove that everything is working, here is the screenshot of my desktop.

My Nerd Score

Vagmi Mudumbai — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:01:00 GMT

This morning I was working on something and my mind kept wandering. So I just went blog browsing and I saw the link to a nerd quiz. Not finding anything better to do, I took it. Here is the score.

Guess, I am not that nerdy after all. Okay, time to get back to work. <SMILE />

Love is in the air

Vagmi Mudumbai — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:17:00 GMT

Its Valentine's day again and love is in the air. I found this interesting link while browsing. Very cleverly written love letter by a programmer absolutely head over heels in love with .NET.

http://weblogs.asp.net/palermo4/archive/2005/02/14/372170.aspx

Of Grief and Death

Vagmi Mudumbai — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 21:53:00 GMT

This festive season had nothing to offer other than grief and death. I was in Chennai on the morning of December 26th. The D-Day when the sea battered the land carrying thousands of people into its watery grave. There were a lucky few who survived but were others were swallowed by the angry waves. The death toll is now posted at several hundred thousands. The survivors are stranded without food or water and are facing the danger of an epidemic as the relief authorities are reeling under the sheer number of the bodies of the victims that they have to cremeate.

If this were not enough, our team mate expired in an accident. He had got married only on the 19th of December and had gone with his wife and his friends to Yercaud to welcome and celebrate the new year. I pray god (if there is one) to stop creating so much havoc and concentrate on *his* job. I got a stupid mail this morning stating that the Tsunami was the effect of God's anger as we commercialize Christmas. What kind of a sick guy would say something like that.

One more thing, I have started blogging in my native toungue. For all who can read Hindi, please visit http://vaags.blogspot.com.

Configuration Data is such a Pain

Vagmi Mudumbai — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 23:16:00 GMT

I have finally got my computer to my new house in Bangalore. I dont have access to the internet, so I will essentially by offline. I am yet to install SharpDevelop and .NET Framework SDK v1.1. Hopefully, I should be able to get it done today. I had some time today morning but I was too busy playing NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and Quake 3. (No real souls to frag. Only bots. )

Currently one of our installation packages does something that it should not be doing. It is handling configuration data for several applications. Clearly this created several issues during upgrades. Now, for the next schedule major release, we (the packaging team) decided that we would let the applications handle the configuration information. This was duly presented as a proposal to other "application development" teams in a meeting. The people were a little hot under the collar during the meeting. Other development groups suspected that we were doing this to brush off our responsibility. I am sure that other setup developers would also have faced such similar predicament.

I was recently browsing through the InstallShield Community forums and found that mosth setup developers were invariably including configuration data as a part of their installation. I even saw one post where a setup developer had used a VBScript custom action with the FileSystemObject and tried to replace certain place holder texts in the installed configuration file. I am sure that many of us, who have burnt their fingers with VBScript and FSO, would agree with me. Logically speaking, there is nothing wrong with this approach. But we have to realize that we are introducing a element that can go wrong. Having deferred VBScript custom actions with FSO is a lot of fun while debugging.

My recommended approach would be to have a small configurator utility, which would accept command line parameters and perform the same tasks. This serves two purposes.

The configuration data is effectively taken out of the MSI. You can avoid slicing and dicing the CustomActionData property to get the desired values. There is one element less in the project that can go wrong.
The user need not run the installation, if he has specified incorrect configuration. He has the option of configuring the software after installing it. While installing on locked down environments, the setup author has to ensure that the permissions table is authored such that the current user has no problems writing on the the specified resources. This should'nt be a problem for registry keys or folders as their permission tokens can always be altered by the installer.

Finally, Riko is back. It seems that he is going to submit his tallow source to the community. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

My 2 cents

Vagmi Mudumbai — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:18:00 GMT

If people were following the the WIX-Users Mailing list, they would find that it has been a little hot recently. The first instance (as far as my knowledge goes) was with Michael creating a validation tool for the WIX Toolset called 'smoke'. I personally found it very useful as it could easily be included as a part of the build process. The output is in a structured XML format that makes it easier for us to crunch and build reports. But, some of the members in the group did not share the same level of enthusiasm. Michael seemed to be put off by that and included a disturbing update to his blog entry. Rob immediately acknowledged it and posted a blog entry about being thick skinned.

Recently, history repeated with Marc Bogers starting to ask about the ICE 33 warnings as Tallow populates the Registry table instead of the Registry Tables group. Firstly, Tallow is only a helper utility and is anything but perfect. It is useful but does not exactly produce usable WIX code. Heck, it doesn't even write to a file. Rob had said that ICE33 warnings can be ignored as it created some "strange behavior". More precisely, the resiliency associated with advertisement would prompt the end user for the media when Windows Installer detects some inconsistencies with the CLSID registration. Michael dismissed the argument that it arose from sloppy authoring and had nothing to do with MSI itself. Follow Michael's blog entry on COM registration for more information.

As we all know, Rob does not agree on a lot of things like inserting GUIDs while generating output with Tallow, using the Registry Tables Group and so on. I am sure that he has good reasons behind them. I am also sure that many people (including me), have modified Tallow to suit their requirements. Some people are using Riko's Tallow that does write to the Regsitry table's group using the Class and TypeLib elements. (On a totally different note, Riko, when are you going to release that code of yours?) I have a version of Tallow that creates components with GUIDs and names them appropriately. I am pretty sure that I am aware of the consequences and I have written code to persist the component information for future reference.

This freedom is the inherent beauty of open-source software. People can use their own ingenious imagination to tailor the tool to best suit their requirements. Of course, some of our opinions differ and we need a healthy debate to analyze these opinions and make the best of it. We should refrain from flaming and should try to embrace new ideas. Rob may be the BDFL for the WIX Toolset but I am sure that he would like the WIX Toolset to be successful and that helps developers create better installers without breaking much sweat. I tried hard not to write about this topic but after reading Michael's blog and comments with certain conspiracy theories, I wanted to voice my opinion too. I am sorry if I have hurt anybody's feelings.