Sunday Fixing

That would be the best and shortest way to describe my day. Right from 12:00 am in the morning, I have been fixing various issues with the devices I own. These include the new Dell Laptop, the Xoom tablet and the Galaxy S2. The galaxy S2 didn’t have any issues as such, but I was just trying out various different ROMS on the device and then pretty much lost it with the MIUI. Very very annoying and ugly interface for me, thankfully I had done a nandroid backup of the CM7.1 nightly I was running. So that was that. The SGS issues were at 4:00am.

Now coming to the windows installation on my machine, that is the new dell laptop, I had blown up the MBR. What happened was that I wanted to try out the MAC OSx on my laptop. But do go ahead with it, I first had to remove the linux installation on the machine and reclaim the drive space. Once that was done, it was all easy, atleast supposed to be easy to just boot into windows recovery using the Windows Home Premium boot disk that I had. But somehow it just wouldn’t boot into windows. I was quick to give up on it and downloaded an image from the web which could be made out to a Windows boot disk. Turns out, that image was only for installation of windows 7 and not for any recovery activities. Annoyed me a lot, but then, I had to go back to the earlier disk and it finally worked. So when all this was done, it was already 3:00am and so started playing with the Galaxy S2.

And finally, the Xoom. This was in the late afternoon today. I was using this tiamati Rom on it, which pretty much labelled the tablet as a Verizon Xoom and any update that Google pushed to it would brick it. So I just went back, i.e. tried to go back to the earlier stock build of Xoom which I had nandroided. I was in for a surprise when I did this, the wifi wouldn’t just start, let alone scan and connect. So I again went online to look for a stock rom. Found a rooted one, downloaded it but sadly, this one had another issue. Again it was with wifi, the drivers installed or something about the wifi module was so wrong that it would scan the networks but never accept any DHCP ip addresses and also wouldn’t let me set any on the tablet. So downloaded the retail copy of the ROM from the Motorola Dev site and then had to manually flash the system, boot and other images onto the Xoom using fastboot. Fortunately it worked alright.

So till the internet from plusnet is properly installed here, have to stick to the 3 unlimited internet plan. Bad weekend, but on the plus side, 28 more work days till I finally get to back HOME!

Installing Mac OSX 10.8 Lion on my PC

These are not the instructions needed to install, but actually something that I wanted to do. Turns out, all the instructions which I read online were for installing the Mac OSX Snow Leopard on a PC. This was for dual booting the machine into Windows 7 (the existing installation) and Mac OSX. Turns out, since the Lion version of Mac is pretty new, the guys at Hackintosh are looking for ways to directly install from the thumb drive provided by Apple. Till then, we have to install Snow Leopard and then update to Lion as per the instructions given on the various site dedicated to this topic.

So to go ahead with this, I was facing a lot of issues. The main ones were that I already have Linux installed on a partition, which I wanted OSX to replace. But I have also managed to somehow install the Grub bootloader on the MBR rather than the linux drive itself and then use EasyBCD. So to fix this, I first had to fix the Master Boot records. But then again, couldn’t do that, because I needed a Windows boot drive for the same, something which I thought I had, only to realise that the installation drive had indeed gone corrupt. So now, I am downloading the Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit boot disk, using which I will fix my boot drive.

After that is done, I have to a lot of time installing Mac OSX snow leopard on the laptop, also probably increase the size of the partition to 60GB from 40 and then finally move on to installing Lion from the official media that I have bought. The wait is killing me…..

Porting applications...

Regardless of what the open source community thinks about Microsoft, they do make some really awesome IDEs for software development for their platform. Granted, in the previous years, these IDEs were a costly affairs but lately, Microsoft have made many amends to their earlier offensive stand against the Open Source community. They have the website spark programme and the express editions of the development tools which are available for download free of cost. Also these IDEs are very intuitive in helping the developer with the development, he can now find references easily, even while debugging the code, just hovering over the object can tell you from which class its being inherited from. This was something very much evident in the recent porting of the application that I have been performing for my own understanding.

I found this application online which is a bit torrent client (as I had mentioned in a few of my earlier posts, btpeer is what I am talking about) made solely in VC++. So since I don’t have Visual Studio 6 (the project for which was made available), I just opened that project up in Visual Studio 2010 which I happen to have, and lo behold, the project was just converted to the new standards. I have to say that the OpenSSL errors were present but that was simply because it couldn’t resolve the dependencies. This, I solved by just downloading and installing OpenSSL, downloading the source code, adding the directories to the include and lib paths for Visual Studio and the program just compiles as it should.

Anyways, I’ll go off to work on it..

Yet Another Bittorent Client

So, I want to learn C#. I have access to the Visual Studio IDE for writing the code in C#. So I though, the best way to go about it is to start writing your own application, a windows installer, which will obviously be open source. Now I wasn’t sure what kind of an application should I create. Then I thought of using the most widely used application on my machine after iTunes. This would be the Bit Torrent client. This is the official client; which obviously follows the latest protocols and all. This isn’t open sourced. They stopped open sourcing their app after version 5 or so it seems. This I've read from Wikipedia.

So, to make my bit torrent client (which for now I would like to call Yet Another Bit torrent Client - YABC), I needed to first understand the architecture that is usually used by these apps, and most important of all, understand the bit torrent protocol. This wouldn’t be easy. So I had a better idea, I thought, rather than investing time in understand the protocol as of now, I might as well borrow the code for the protocol from some other app which is under FOSS. But then again I had a problem.

All the apps which are currently popular and available are all written in python. The trouble is that python is a language I am totally not familiar with as of now. Also, I was planning to make an app through and through in C# and .NET. So I just Googled the best I could and lo behold – I found this - http://www.alhem.net/project/btpeer/index.html. This is the btPeer client which is solely written in C++. Now the thing is, I work in C++ full time and know the language well enough to be able to port an application from it to C#. Another plus is that there is already a project readily available for Visual Studio, thus I will only have to port the application directly to VS2010; using which, when I build the project, I should have to project ready.

I will register the project at SourceForge or Google Code and also maybe github so that the configuration part of the project is handled well. More on this as things progress. Later.