Codecracker 3.0 stats

Codecracker 3 was a major success among the three seasons of codecracker. Firstly, we went ahead to support four programming languages C, C++, Java and Python and secondly I was the admin . This time we broke all the records of the past with the number of registered teams which rose exponentially to 195 , with teams from 40+ engineering colleges including several IITs, IIITs, NITs and other engineering colleges.

Though many teams did not turn up to solve even a single question, may be because they were too difficult for them. Teams from IIITs outperformed everyone. Teams from our college could not participate properly due to pathetic internet, however they are no match for IIITs, still would have loved to see ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS from NITD.

Active meter showed 5500+ page loads.

Here are some stats that we collected from Google Analytics.

Codecracker 1.0 stats: http://sites.google.com/site/debayanin/codecrackerintlstats

Codecracker 2.0 stats: http://roshansingh.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/codecracker-stats/

Update

It has been quite some time that I have blogged. I am now a Fedora packager, have packaged three applications – GScribble, Artha and opendchub. All are available in the updates repository . Apart from that I made the Mukti website (http://mkti.in). I must confess that it does not look that good because I am bad at designing.

I have a lot of work to do again, new version of GScribble is now ready with support for spell checker. I tried a lot to make an editor with support for visual editing, though have not succeeded till now. I will release it very soon.

I have added patches sent to me by a Debian packager for Opendchub. This project needs real attention. However I have not been able to do so till now, just fixed random bugs on it. I have noted that it gets almost 10 downloads per day which is very good considering the natue of the software.

Apart from all this I have decided that I have to learn Drupal theming properly so that I may work as a professional to make some money.

Mukti 2010

It is that time of the year when we at NIT Durgapur celebrate our FOSS festival called Mukti. Mukti is the FOSS festival of NIT Durgapur. With the sole aim of promoting Free Software, some contest, games, workshops, talks etc are conducted during Mukti. It brings together the FOSS enthusiasts, newbies and corporates together under the same roof.

Like every year we will have a number of events and workshops to feed your hungry minds.

So if you are somewhere near and want to have an awesome experience, come to NIT Durgapur, we are waiting for you.

Link: http://mkti.in

Twitter: http://twitter.com/mukti_nitd

Automated testing with JUnit

I have learnt some automated testing with JUnit. Junit is a java package which lets you write test suites so that you can simply run them when you program is done. It is good for software development as you can re-run the same tests again and again, and you can save some time and even avoid human generated error as missing out a particular test that happens with me over and over as I tend to forget cases.
Learning JUnit is extremely easy if you have some Java knowledge. However I noted that the official website has very less tutorials available and you wont find much information on the internet also (please direct me if you happen to know any good tutorial).
I grabbed “Pragmatic Unit Testing” by Andrew Hunt and Davis Thomas. This book is really helpful as it starts with the basics and goes through every details of JUnit. You can find a copy of the ebook if you search a little.

Setting CLASSPATH for Java in Linux

This was really tough for me since I had never used command line for compiling java programs, I always used Netbeans for coding in Java. Recently I started learning JUnit for which I decided to use command Line.

Whenever I googled for its solution I got
$ export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:

But this did not fix my problem. Eventually I landed up on some websites and finally here. Though it is mainly written for Windows but can be used likewise for linux also.

So the thing to be done is either add all the jar files explicitly to the classpath or put all the jars in a directory (/home/roshan/jars for me).

Now run this command:
$ export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/home/roshan/jars/*

The wildcard ‘*’ fixed the problem. Now you can make this change permanent by adding this command to your .bash_profile in home directory or /etc/profile to make system wide changes.

Running topcoder applet behind proxy

Somehow the default Iced Tea Webstart throws NullPointerException which I dont know how to debug. I downloaded SUN JDK and installed on my machine, you can use your package manager also. It usually gets installed in /usr/java/jdk-<version> and /usr/java/latest links to the latest version installed, so it is better to use the later. Then download the ContestApplet.jnlp and simply sun the following command to get it working.

$ /usr/java/latest/bin/javaws ContestApplet.jnlp

It uses default system proxy to download the content from Topcoder needed to execute the arena. When the arena is open set the proxy and use HTTP Tunnel A or B. For us Tunnel B works.

proxy in xmlrpclib

This is just an extension of the example shown here http://docs.python.org/library/xmlrpclib.html#example-of-client-usage .

import xmlrpclib, httplib
class ProxiedTransport(xmlrpclib.Transport):
    def set_proxy(self, proxy):
        self.proxy = proxy
	self.puser_pass = puser_pass
    def make_connection(self, host):
        self.realhost = host
        h = httplib.HTTP(self.proxy)
        return h
    def send_request(self, connection, handler, request_body):
        connection.putrequest("POST", 'http://%s%s' % (self.realhost, handler))
    def send_host(self, connection, host):
        connection.putheader('Host', self.realhost)
	connection.putheader('User-agent', self.user_agent)
	# Check is proxy username and password is set
	if len(self.puser_pass.strip()) != 0:
		connection.putheader('Proxy-authorization','Basic '+self.puser_pass)

p = ProxiedTransport()
proxyUsername = 'proxyuser'
proxyPassword = 'proxypass'
puser_pass = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (proxyUsername, proxyPassword)).strip()

p.set_proxy('proxy-server:8080', puser_pass)
server = xmlrpclib.Server('http://time.xmlrpc.com/RPC2', transport=p)
print server.currentTime.getCurrentTime()

A similar code has been used in my blog client GScribble.

Pidgin 2.6.1, troubleshooting

I installed pidgin 2.6.1 today to check if it was working for me. But as soon as I started a voice conversation, it either crashed or game me the following error:

“Could not start rtp muxer session”.

The solution is to move your current ~/.gstreamer-0.10 to somewhere. Let pidgin create a new one. Then I made a call to one of my friends. He was able to listen whatever I said but I was not able to listen what he said. I still dont know why ?

This is where I found the solution http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6622.

TO-DO List

GScribble

1.Better editor for posts (Bold/Italic etc)

2. Proxy support Added HTTP Proxy support

3. Blogger Support

4. Release new rpms

openDChub

1. Release new version and rpms

Posted from GScribble.

RPMs for GScribble released

Today is another big day for me, I have made a new release for GScribble along with RPMs for Fedora. I take this opportunity to thank my seniors Debayan Bannerjee for all round support that he gave me during the college, Shreyank Gupta who did the artwork for GScribble and Rangeen Basu who helped me with packaging.

Being the first release the app is missing a lot of basic functionalities which I will provide later on. I will try to release as soon as I make some changes so that I keep myself involved in it.

I remember when I first started using Twitter I lost my patience to blog, then I realised that it was TwitterFox which was the main reason, I then tried to search for blog clients. Eventually I could not find any nice app. Since then I had decided that I would write an app for me.

I would also like to thank Srijan technologies who provided me sufficient free time during my internship that helped me a lot to work on it.