Revelations

Open positions at Intuit Bangalore

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:32:05 +0530

I would like to announce some open positions that we have at Intuit Bangalore.

Position: Principal Engineer

7-12 years of software industry experience
5+ years of hands-on experience with C++/VC++/java/C# object oriented language
Proven Desktop and Online development experience
System integration & web app development and deployment experience

Position: Senior Software Engineer - QA

5+ years experience in software testing/development with at least 3 years in QA
Proven experience with test automation
Significant experience with tools such as Silk, WinRunner, LoadRunner, Test Director and Quality Center.
Scripting experience is needed for automation.

Position: Senior SCM Engineer

7+ years hands-on experience
Experience handling SCM responsibilities for multiple projects
Experience in Windows/C and C++/Perforce OR Clearcase OR CVS
Thorough knowledge of SDLC

If you are looking for a career change and if you find one of the above positions suitable, let me know (by dropping a comment). I will be happy to refer you at Intuit. You can also reach me at 'mailto (dot) george (@) gmail (dot) com.

p.s. The views expressed herein are my personal views and are not intended to reflect the views of my employer.

Broadband nirvana in Bangalore

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:04:15 +0530

I recently got myself an Internet broadband connection through Airtel. So far, I am quite satisfied with their service. I opted for their 8 Mbps plan (something that is unimaginable a few years back) for 1299/- per month. Ten years back, I got my first taste of Internet through a phone modem with a speed of 9 Kbps - and yes, I was using a text based browser. 8Mbps is a far cry from that!

To give you an idea of how much bandwidth I am 'really' getting, I have captured a screen shot of 'Aritel speed test utility' running on my browser over my home WiFi.

As you can see, I am not really getting 8 Mbps :) Following is their tariff:

Hope this helps in making your decision on choosing a broadband provider in Bangalore.

My first month at Intuit Bangalore

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:08:21 +0530

I just completed my first month at Intuit and I should say that I am thoroughly enjoying it here. There is lot of focus on innovation, both customer driven (something that Intuit has pioneered) and technology driven innovation. All of us have 10% unstructured time, where we can work on anything that is passionate to us. We also have 'IdeaJam', where we spend one full day hacking something that is really useful and cool! I have great colleagues who are passionate about what they do and are really fun to work with. I also get to learn a lot of new stuff - all in all a great place to be in!

p.s. The views expressed herein are my personal views and are not intended to reflect the views of my employer.

A new start (after 7 years...)

Thu, 01 May 2008 23:21:36 +0530

Yesterday was my last day working in Philips. I throughly enjoyed the last 7 years that I spent here where I learned a lot of stuff, from my mistakes as well as from the new technology/areas that I explored. Also, I made a lot of good friends, who had a very good influence on me, and I will always cherish the moments that I spent with them. And now, the time has come to start anew and to face new challenges. I am joining Intuit Bangalore as a Software Architect. I am quite excited about this opportunity. From all the interactions that I had so far, Intuit look like a very promising place to work.

Comments missing in Movable Type!!

Thu, 01 May 2008 21:16:04 +0530

When I logged into MT after a long time, I was surprised to find that all the previous comments were missing!! After some googling found that the problem was caused by a corrupt mt_comment table. I tried to do a repair by issuing the following command.

REPAIR TABLE mt_comment

But this didn't help. I then used MySQL Administrator (GUI tools) and selected repair on the table with the following settings.

This fixed the problem.

Got an XBox 360 Elite

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:20:06 +0530

Yes... I finally got my XBox 360 Elite. My brother helped me get this from Europe. So, it is PAL version, and the DVD region is 2. The region setting of XBox cannot be changed even once. This would mean that I will not be able to play any regional DVD movies on it :(

XBox 360 Elite is available in India exclusively through Indiatimes shopping and the price is Rs. 34,990. So my decision to buy this from Europe was well worth it.

While I was a student I used to playing Quake 3 Arena. Though I am not much of a gamer, I bought Halo 3 and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I have also taken a one month free subscription of XBox live. My profile on XBox live is here.

Tools used for DotSVN - Resharper

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:28:11 +0530

I have been using a trial version of ReSharper for my DotSVN project and I should say that I just got hooked to it. I would not have made this much progress without it and that leaves me wondering what I would do once the trial expires!! A tool with this ease of use is needed to improve the design and code without any hesitation to refactor. ReSharper's code navigation capabilities are also extra ordinary. You can read more about it here. I have also used dotTrace to fix a nasty performance issue. Overall I am very satisfied with the product.

Performance of DateTime.Parse()

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:40:11 +0530

I would like to write a series of posts describing the various performance issues I faced while implementing DotSVN.

In this post I discuss the performance penalty of using DateTime.Parse().

During my testing, I found that DotSVN was running quite slow. I used a trial version of 'JetBrains dotTrace 3.0' to analyze the problem. The following is a screen-shot of the dotTrace session.

As you can see, 26% of the time is spend on the method call 'System.DateTime.Parse()'. This was unacceptable. After some investigation I found that the performance of the DateTime Parse method can be improved if we give some clue on formatting of the date string. This can be achieved using the ParseExact() method.

note: I have updated the code to re-use the CultureInfo class.
AlexKucherenko - Thanks for the comment.


private static readonly CultureInfo en_us_Culture = new CultureInfo("en-US");

// Parse in the format [2007-09-06T10:20:26.689093Z]
private static readonly string dateTimeFormat = "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.FFFFFFFZ";

public static DateTime parseDate(String dateString)
{
	DateTime parsedDate;

	bool parseResult = DateTime.TryParseExact(dateString, dateTimeFormat, 
							en_us_Culture, 
							DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal, out parsedDate);
	if(!parseResult)
	{
		SVNErrorMessage err = SVNErrorMessage.create(SVNErrorCode.BAD_DATE);
		SVNErrorManager.error(err);    
	}
	return parsedDate;
}

The performance gain is quite obvious with the following figure, which shows the dotTrace session after applying the above fix.

As you can see, DateTime.Parse() is no longer a hot Spot. This also shows the power of dotTrace, and how it helped to quickly narrow down the issue.

Announcing DotSVN.Net site

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:26:28 +0530

I have registered the domain dotsvn.net. This will be the new home of DotSVN project. I will continue to host the code in google code itself. The site is pretty empty right now. I am planning to get some content uploaded during the weekend. I have also hosted the DotSVN Asp.Net sample at code.dotsvn.net. This sample demonstrates basic functionality of browsing any subversion FSFS repository. My target is to make this as functional as bsSvnBrowser. You can see a live demo of bsSvnBrowser here. Once this code becomes feature complete, I will be using the same for the nTrac project.

Connecting to SVN repository using DotSVN

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:48:37 +0530

In this post I would like to highlight how easy it is to connect to SVN repository using DotSVN.

Steps to follow:
1) Create an instance of ISVNRepository using the

SVNRepositoryFactory


// The path to the root of an SVN FSFS repository
string repositoryPath = "file://" + "SomeValidPathToFSFS";

// Creates an ISVNRepository driver according to the protocol 
// that is to be used to access a repository.
ISVNRepository repository = SVNRepositoryFactory.Create(new SVNURL(repositoryPath));
repository.OpenRepository();


2) Now that we have a connection to the repository, we can get contents using the GetDir method.

// Dictionary to receive the SVN properties
IDictionary<string, string> properties = new Dictionary<string, string>();

// Now we call GetDir to get the contents at the specified path
// Here we specified an empty string to get the contents of the root
// Second argument is the version, -1 indicated the latest version
// Third argument is the property collection
ICollection<SVNDirEntry> dirEntries = repository.GetDir("", -1, properties);


The SVNDirEntry representation of a versioned directory entry, It contains

	The Entry name
	Entry kind (is it a file or directory).
	File size (in case an entry is a file)
	The last changed revision
	The date when the entry was last changed
	The name of the author who last changed the entry
	The commit log message for the last changed revision.
	



3) Now we can iterate through the SVNDirEntry collection.

foreach (SVNDirEntry dirEntry in dirEntries)
{
    string DirName = dirEntry.Name;
    System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(DirName);
}



And that is it. We can also call other methods in the repository like
// Gets the Universal Unique IDentifier (UUID) of this repository 
string repostoryUUID = repository.GetRepositoryUUID(true);

// Returns the latest revision of this repository
long latestRev = repository.GetLatestRevision();



FireBug is an amazing FireFox plugin for developers
Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:13:42 +0530
I have been using Firebug Firefox plugin. This is a really useful tool, and I would definitely recommend this for anyone who is interested in Web development. If you are new to this tool, I suggest that you go through this article, as a good introduction. 

I have captured a few scenarios where this proved useful to me.

JavaScript debugging
Javascript debugging is a really compelling feature of Firebug. 



As you can see, you can easily put break-point and step through .js loaded in the browser.

Network Monitoring

FireBug can present a time-line of the various resources downloaded to render a given page. This is very useful for understanding performance issues with a page.



XML HTTP Request monitoring (XHR)

With this feature, we can track the actual request and response between the browser and server.
I used this feature to track the JSON response from the DotSVN server.  

  



The SVNKit influence on DotSVN
Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:38:38 +0530
I used two good references when doing DotSVN. The first is (obviously) the SVN code itself. It is written in C using Apache Portable Runtime (APR). 

What I would like to highlight is the second reference that I used - which is SVNKit. SVNKit is:
... a pure Java Subversion client library. You would like to use SVNKit when you need to access or modify Subversion repository from your Java application, be it a standalone program, plugin or web application. Being a pure Java program, SVNKit doesn't need any additional configuration or native binaries to work on any OS that runs Java.

I used VStudio's 'Java Language Conversion Assistant 3.0' to create a C# version of the SVNKit code. Though it had  thousands of migration errors, this exercise gave me a good idea of the effort involved in  completing DotSVN. I used the skeleton code from the migration as the basis for most of the my classes. 

DotSVN has a different namespace structure (as shown in the figure below):


DotSVN depends more heavily on .Net base class libraries (like Deflate stream, custom Date parsing etc). It also uses generics and collection classes more efficiently.
  



DotSVN progress
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:13:08 +0530
I am personally quite happy with the progress that I could make on DotSVN. 
Using this library, it is currently possible to do the following operations. 

	Open an FSFS SVN repository
	Enumerate its contents
	Retrieve the properties collection of each element
	Get the contents as a stream

I have also added three sample application. One is a console based application. The second one is a WinForms GUI sample that is very similar to the TortoiseSVN repository browser. The third one, is a browser based SVN repository viewer using Yahoo UI controls.

 

  



"Block length does not match with its complement." in DeflateStream
Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:55:25 +0530
I wanted to discuss a problem that I faced while implementing the repository layer of DotSVN. 

When I tried to use the System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream to decompress the repository, I get the exception 'System.IO.InvalidDataException' : "Block length does not match with its complement."



I Googled around an found this article that explains the problem. The feedback from Microsoft on how to fix this issue is as follows:

...skipping past the first two bytes solved the problem. Those bytes are part of the zlib specification (RFC 1950), not the deflate specification (RFC 1951). Those bytes contain information about the compression method and flags.



The zlib and deflate formats are related; the compressed data part of zlib-formatted data may be stored in the deflate format. In particular, if the compression method in the zlib header is set to 8, then the compressed data is stored in the deflate format. This is true in the case of the stream you submitted, which was taken from a pdf file.



Our DeflateStream, on the other hand, represents the deflate specification (RFC 1951) but not RFC 1950. So your workaround of skipping past the first 2 bytes to get to the deflate data will definitely work.

So the actual code would look like the following:

// create a file stream, as before
FileStream fs = new FileStream("file", FileMode.Open);

// skip first two bytes
fs.ReadByte();
fs.ReadByte();

// now create the deflate stream and proceed as usual
DeflateStream l_Stream = new DeflateStream(fs, CompressionMode.Decompress);

  



Significant milestone reached for DotSVN
Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:27:33 +0530
I am happy to announce the first increment release of DotSVN.

DotSVN is a 100% compatible (at the repository level) port of SVN - very similar to SVNKit. It can be used to access or modify SVN repository from DotNet application, be it a standalone program or from an Asp.Net web application. As mentioned here, this project was started to support the nTrac project.



Sample .Net application build using DotSVN, accessing an FSFS file repository using 'file access'.