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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I really feel proud to announce that I have written a client of my own today for posting contents on my blog.
I am really looking forward to fix problems with the interface very soon. As I am new to GUI development, it will take some time till then I ask you to be patient.

The project page is here.

On Friday, the M.D. Mr. Rahul Devan took the entire Srijan Team to a outing so that people may get to know each other and decide what the company’s strategies should be. Though I am an intern over here but I also asked to be a part of the trip, which initially I had thought that I would bunk, but later I decided to go ahead and see it.

Mr Vivek Puri, who had just left IBM and joined Srijan, picked me up from Khanpur bus stop in his car and drove us to ‘Teri Resort’ on Faridabad-Gurgaon Express way. On the way I saw Qutub Minar (which I had been planning to visit since I came here) and Chattarpur Temple (which has a statue of Hanuman which is over 40 feet tall). We reached there at 9:40 AM. As he parked his car, we were taken to the conference room in a battery-driven auto-ricksaw. There was greenery everywhere. I must say they had well maintained the resort.

Then the proceedings for the day began. It started with the introduction of the 22 members of Srijan team. Everyone had to speak about his past, his experience with Srijan and his ambitions for future. I was overwhelmed with thoughts when everybody spoke how they wanted to help society some by teaching kids, opening schools at their respective villages. I would like to mention here are Mr Hari from Andhra Pradesh who was deeply touched by farmers of his village and some other nearby villages who were moving out of villages to cities in search of job, where they had to live on footpaths. He said that at some point of his life he would return to his village and teach them how to use new technology to get better harvest and earn money.

Apart from that I saw some people here are not very well educated but with the help of others they are also progressing. It was also great to see even the peons sat with and told their story.

I must say that in the past month that I have stayed here, I never felt this place like an office, its always full of humour.

Then we had lunch after that we again sat down and decided bout the strategies and points of success and failures of the company. Here they were trying to decide the company’s policy. The M.D. has always tried to make it a democratic place to work and thus he was seeking everyone’s say in how the company should be run. Almost everything from administration to finance everything was discussed. Later in the evening we played Cricket and guess what I dropped two catches

It was really an experience to be remembered.
It was really interesting to see a company shape up.

These days I am quite busy with Drupal and have learnt that Drupal is not merely a blogging software, you can make a full fledged website out of it. You can make modules, themes, customise it, and much more than I used to think initially. Apart from that I have learned to use CSS which is also very important for web development. If you are trying to develop websites use Firebug extension from mozilla firefox, it is very useful and you can make your website look better. I am trying to integrate Drupal blogs module and planet module to make something which would let the client make a site which would give blogs from the site and blogs from wordpress, blogger etc stay together and would enable commenting. Apart from that I learned to use various other modules. In short this time Mukti website would be on Drupal not wordpress.

Apart from that I am learned something about XML-RPC module of Python. I have been longing for a desktop blogging software for Gnome. I tried some but they were not good. Now I think of making something.
In the mean time I have spent sometime with opendchub and have found a major flaw in the software, I think I will be able to fix it by this weekend (the only time I am free these days).

I have also made my first rpm for opendchub. I will very soon release rpms and debs for opendchub.

Lastly, I declare that I want to go to Agra, I need a companion, if somebody is willing please leave a comment . Everyone is invited.