Life

I had an interview with the Nokia guys on phone three days ago. I had given them the number of Salim's house as there I can easily get some privacy. In the interview, mostly they were asking short questions and I was trying to answer them with long answers (I tried to make it as short as possible though). They told me that they'll contact me in the end. Before they do that, I can't say if it went good or bad, only they can tell. :)

Went to the beach after a while yesterday. It was 2 am. There i was amazed to see a number of tiny blue lights appearing and then decaying. I thought of touching them, but I fortunately approached Salim before actually doing so. He told me that they are blue-bottle (a kind of jelly-fish or something) and told me how dangerous it is.

Gstreamer

I have the aafilter (we can change the name later) element ready for testing. But I can't actually test it out without an text2video. While I was coding that using pango, I came across a totally unexpected problem: The only rendering functions to support rendering to memory are the pango_ft2_render_* and Free Type doesn't have any color rendering. :( It should work for aa but not for caca, so I am looking at what to do next.

I was trying to make a small "hello world" sort of app. using gdk, but I couldn't. Since it's not very big, I'll just paste it here:

#include <gdk/gdk.h>

 
 int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    GdkDisplay *display;
    GdkWindow *window;
    GdkCursor *cursor;
    GdkGC *gc;
    GdkWindowAttr window_attr = {
	    "Hello World",
	    0,
	    100,
	    100,
	    320,
	    240,
	    GDK_INPUT_OUTPUT
    };

 
     gdk_init (&argc, &argv);

 
     display = gdk_display_get_default ();

 
     if (display == NULL) {
      exit (1);
    }

 
     cursor = gdk_cursor_new_for_display (display, GDK_X_CURSOR);

 
     window_attr.visual = gdk_visual_get_system ();
    window_attr.colormap = gdk_colormap_get_system ();
    window_attr.window_type = GDK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL;
    window_attr.cursor = cursor;
    window_attr.override_redirect = FALSE;

 
     window =  gdk_window_new (NULL, 
		    &window_attr,
		    GDK_WA_TITLE | GDK_WA_X | GDK_WA_Y | GDK_WA_CURSOR |
		    GDK_WA_COLORMAP | GDK_WA_VISUAL | GDK_WA_NOREDIR);

 
     gc = gdk_gc_new (GDK_DRAWABLE (window));
    gdk_draw_line (GDK_DRAWABLE (window),
		    gc,
		    10,
		    10,
		    100,
		    100);

 
     gdk_window_show (window);
    gdk_flush ();

 
     sleep (3);

 
     gdk_window_destroy (window);
    gdk_cursor_unref (cursor);
    g_object_unref (gc);

 
     return 0;
}

All i could see was a black window. I tried to play around with different gc options too but that didn't change anything. Can anyone give me a hint?

Serial Port Interfacing

With the kind help of my ex-boss, I finally hunted down the problem, which made my app. miss bytes when it tried to read the card-reader on my serial port. The problem was actually "multitasking" combined with direct hardware access from the user-space. The problem vanished when i nice'd my app. with the maximum possible priority. Tomorrow I'll write a complete driver for it, but in the kernel space of course :)

Why I am having weird problems accessing the card-reader through the ttySO device is still a mystery.