Coder's Log

Soon after I announced the release of gupnp- tools / av , someone pointed out that libsoup-2.4 is already out and therefore gssdp and gupnp needs to be ported to the new API. I am already done with the porting of gssdp and most of the gupnp (thanks to Dan Winship for being so helpful) but then came the shock: the SOAP support has suddenly been dropped from libsoup. I blamed my ignorance on me not being subscribed to libsoup ML so I started to dig into the archives but failed to find any mention of this change. I know how to solve this issue and I am sure Dan will help me out in this one as well but IMO APIs should be deprecated first and then removed in the next major release.

If you have recently seen a post by the name "Back to Hel(sinki)", from me, please ignore that. It's just just blogger.com (or is it p.g.o?) punishing me for adding tags to a two week old post. :(

This release features AV Control Point, a simple media player UI that enables one to discover and play multimedia contents available on a network. Hopefully a useful tool to test and debug UPnP MediaServer and MediaRenderer implementations. [Zeeshan Ali] Other changes in this release: - Desktop file for each tool. [Ross Burton, Zeeshan Ali] - New Icons. [Vinicius Depizzol] - Various misc improvements and fixes. [Zeeshan Ali] Download from http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-tools/gupnp-tools-0.3.tar.gz Here is a screenshot of GUPnP AV CP in action:

The first release of GUPnP A/V is now available . GUPnP A/V is a small utility library that aims to ease the handling and implementation of UPnP A/V profiles. GUPnP A/V is free software released under the GNU LGPL.

I am back in Helsinki. Regarding my mom, when we last spoke to the specialist she said the Cancer is at the level 3 (4 is last) and therefore my mother has to go through extensive/expensive chemotherapy sessions which will last for 6 months or so. Now me and my canadian sister has to arrange the money and Saima is supposed to take care of the rest. Other than that, it feels good to be back with my love.

While I was having fun with the extremely slow Internet connection here and other family issues, Jorn rolled-out another GUPnP release . Here is the release announcement: GUPnP 0.8 ========= - New API allowing for subclassing of resource types. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen] - GUPnPDeviceInfo returns subresources with version greater or equal than requested version. [Jorn Baayen] - Servers announce versions less or equal than implemented version. [Jorn Baayen] - Make gupnp_context_get_server() public. [Jorn Baayen] - GError arguments added to all error signals. [Jorn Baayen] - Improved resubscription handling. [Jorn Baayen] - Various other fixes and internal improvements [Ross Burton, Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]. One big reason to roll out a release at this point was to make way for a gupnp-av and gupnp-tools release, which will follow shortly so stay tuned. :)

Last year when i visited Karachi, I talked about Linux+Gtk-based ATM machines being actually deployed and used in my blog . Plenty of people asked me for any pictures but I didn't have any at that time. No worries, here you go: If you are interested, please contact Aero-car which still makes these.

I have been in Karachi for the last one week. My mom is much better now and seems to be recovering fast. The doctor says she still needs a few chemotherapy sessions are there are still some microscopic tumours left but she said this is nothing much to worry about. We just got her an apt on rent in more secure and less polluted area which obviously costs a lot more money but I've agreed with my Canadian sister to only pay the rent and she'll pay the rest of the expenditure. The biggest reason for this was to move her so close to Saima that Saima could take care of her while her children are at school. The most recent event is that yesterday, someone robbed my biggest sister (who also lives in Canada but is currently visiting pk) of her bag at gunpoint while she was travelling in a rickshaw. The bag contained amongst other things, all her documents and cards. Normally she doesn't carry important documents in that bag but since it was her last day, so she made an exception. No

My mom had the tumor removed on last monday but she might still need some chemotherapy. All my sisters are already there and I am leaving for Karachi on Monday morning to be there for two weeks. They say that comedy is the best relief when you are feeling very sad and i think they are right because watching south park every evening really does make you feel better. Yes yes! it sounds very old school to all my western friends but it's not my fault that it was never broadcasted in Pakistan.

If you get a segfault, the debuggers are unable to give you a nice backtrace and g_slice is being used by your code or any library that your code links to, then don't forget to set the environment G_SLICE to 'always-malloc'

As the only male child in the family, it was always considered to be my responsibility to take care of my mom and (mentally disabled) sister, Erum. Implicit in this assumption is another assumption that I will marry a girl that will be a house wife and would happily take care of everything at home while I would be busy making money. I could have made piece with the former assumption but the latter would obviously involve me enslaving another person and that simply goes against my basic principles of morality. When i moved to Finland two years ago, i thought i will be able to live the rest of my life independent and free as at that time it seemed very likely that my mom and Erum will soon be moving to Canada with my sister, Uzma (Api) and her family. Unfortunately, the Canadian authorities denied them immigration an year after i moved to Finland (7 years after the application was submitted) based on the argument that they will be a burden on their social system despite Api's continu

My GUPnP presentation at FOSDEM turned out to be not so un successful after all: Anyone interested in the presentation material can get it here .

If you have been looking for a better reason to go all the way to Brussels to attend FOSDEM , look no further; I'll be presenting GUPnP there. :)

Recently the c't magazine mentioned our dear GUPnP project and published some pictures of my UI (I am hoping to see it tomorrow *if* Stefan remembers to bring it to office). That resulted in at least one person getting interested in our project. AFAIK, everything worked out of the box on his Fedora Core 6 but he was unable to see anything in any of the client-side tools. After a few mails and some help from Christian , it turned out to be the default firewall settings on fedora.

Since my sister was staying at London for a few days on her way back from Pakistan to Canada, I arrived at London around the same time to meet her and her family after 4 years or so. I hung around with her family and some relatives of my brother-in-law for the first 3 days in London and Oxford. The last day, I spent at Cambridge. Mostly it was nice and fun but there were some things that just didn't seem right. It was quite hard to adapt to the "separate water taps for hot and cold water" system of theirs and the fact that you hardly get any water out of the shower when you want warm rather than cold water. I wonder why they take 90€ for a visit visa. Also! I thought Ansku was over-exaggerating when she used to tell me that pubs in Britain close at 11pm but to my surprise We were kicked out of the pub in Cambridge before we could finish our first pint. Err.. Then people say why would someone want to move to Finland.

From the start of 2008, I've been promoted to the role of Lead Developer/Architect in a new team (same organisation, same company). Although I need to prove myself before this appointment is made permanent, I am hoping I'll make it through.

I spent this X-mas with Ansku and her family. I never had such a fun X-mas ever.

As some of you might have noticed, I've started to divide each one of my blog entries into multiple logical entries. This is to allow the readers of my blog to be able to filter my blog better. For example, some reader might be interesting in my opinion on UPnP but not on the death of Benazir Bhutto.

Only wanted to apologise for *unconsciously* creating the impression that I agree with all the points mentioned by Murray Cumming against Jeff. That is not the case and I only agree to what I myself also observed based on my own experience that I described in my blog .

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is the gupnp-av-cp playing a song from my n81 on the coherence media renderer: Many thanks to Frank Scholz and Visa Smolander for helping me in making sense out of UPnP specs, otherwise I still would have been confused on how to implement them. The CP is not yet ready but I will try to complete it before the end of the year 2007. I would like to avail this opportunity to make it very clear to everyone that I have nothing against Coherence project and/or python, in fact I have been using Coherence myself extensively to test my GUPnP code. The reason people get the impression that I am against coherence/python is that I express the following reservations of mine regarding python, quite often and I end-up giving a wrong impression: 1. I do not believe that python is ready for embedded systems yet and vice versa. Both python and embedded systems need some time before they can be happily married. 2. There is also the fact that when I wo