The evolution of Mooshabaya

Mooshabaya is a Mashup generator for XBaya workflow composer of Indiana University. Mooshabaya is implemented by a team of four, and Mentored by Dr. Srinath Perera and Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana of WSO2 Inc. As the team members we have had several online chats and informal meetings with our mentors. This post will mention only the formal meetings we had regarding the project.

May 22nd [WSO2/Dr.Srinath/All members]: Initiating The Idea : [10 a.m - 11 a.m]

The team meets Dr.Srinath Perera offline. This was the first meeting we had with Dr.Srinath, regarding the project. The project idea was first developed to form to considerable level. Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana was also present in the meeting.

We decided to implement a mashup generator for the XBaya workflow composer. Currently the workflows are exported as jython scripts or BPEL. Our project will export them as mashups, combining the mashup and workflow domains, including a considerable amount of research, hence this project has not been implemented before. The services will be found from WSO2 Registry and the generated mashups will be deployed into WSO2 Mashup server. It was mentioned that the current implementation of XBaya uses several other components from the Extreme! Labs of Indiana University, including XRegistry.

June 4th [WSO2/Dr.Sanjiva/Dr.Srinath/All members]: Combining the groups : [10 a.m - 12 p.m]

We, with the other group of 4 WSO2 interns, decided to have a merge between the groups and met Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana and Dr.Srinath Perera. After discussing several ideas and possibilities, the project was finalized.

The other team will be developing "Scalabale and Hierarchical Tuple Spaces". We discussed a use case where our project will develop scripts which can be deployed in browser. That will become a common scenario for both the teams as the other team will have a use case to have a tuple space that runs in a browser. Hence both the teams will be a loosely coupled combined team [M2SC]. Mora Middleware for Scalable Computing (M2SC), will have two independent components those can be developed without much dependency on each other team's component.

July 17th [WSO2/Dr.Srinath/All members]: Further Discussion regarding the use cases and usability :[11 a.m - 12 p.m]

Since Mooshabaya - our project will be based on XBaya source code, we had to install and run XBaya. For XBaya to be running, we needed WS-Messenger. We have installed both WS-Messenger and XBaya. We discussed about XBaya, Messenger, and the other Extreme! Products that are involved in XBaya including XRegistry and XSUL. Discussed further about the requirements. Some basic design constraints were discussed.

July 22nd [CSE/Dr.Srinath/All members]: Discussion on XBaya and Extreme! Labs products : [9 a.m - 9.30 a.m]

We discussed the issues we faced in monitoring workflows using XBaya. After the meeting and discussion XBaya is successfully installed and configured to monitor the workflows.

Supervised By:.....................Group Members:

Mrs. Vishaka Nanayakkara.......060081B - De Alwis, K.D.B.C.

Dr. Srinath Perera................060286H - Malinga, A.S.

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana........060372T - Pradeeban, K.

.....................................060527B - Weerasiri, W.A.D.D.

[SPAM] Life is always like that

Chain letters are the letters or email that induce the recipients to forward the letter or the message to some or all of them in their contact list, which often try to convey an engineered story or spread a rumor to a huge set of audience, with or without a harmful intent. Currently printed chain letters are becoming extinct, and it is transformed into the form of email, facebook wall posts, or similar social media communication. Some chain letters contain viruses and trojans which may affect the recipients once opened or executed the downloaded attachment.

People tend to forward chain-letters without analyzing the validity of their claims. Some chain letters try to appear as a letter for a good cause, such as a mail which seeks help to identify a missing child, or alerting the public or educating them on something important and urgent. It should be noted most of these innocent appearing mail too are hoaxes.

Some email claim that they will donate a considerable amount of money to a charity for the number of recipients the mail is forwarded, which can never be true as the number of times a mail sent can't be tracked down as it is claimed. Forwarding a chain-letter without confirming its validity is a bad practice, which should be avoided at all possible means. Confirm using Snopes or Hoax-Slayer, before spreading a message, as most of the messages are listed their with their validity, whether they are genuine or just hoaxes. Also make sure to report any new hoax to those sites, to help prevent these messages spreading.

The messages that are forwarded with the tag "for each copy you forward, this baby with this dangerous disease will get 50 cents!" - No one actually bothers to trace the number of times the mail is forwarded. Why should they bother to pay 50 cents for the fact that you forwarded that shit email? It is really irritating, when we get these mails even from software professionals and undergraduates, who are smart enough to consider these facts.

A mail asking for a kidney AB+, dated back to few months back being forwarded to at least 300 people. Mere forwarding doesn't mean you have done some good job. Ask someone personally if you really care, or give yours promptly! If you are not up for the help, don't expect the recipient of your mail to be so. 

It is just wasting the online resources, bandwidth, storage and everything with that html spam with all the baby images [That baby is still in her age of 5, since 1995, seeking your divine help]. I would better suggest thinking of the alternative ways of helping the poor people, rather than forwarding emails for them. In the long run, forwarding unsolicited junk mails like this, will definitely cost more than that '50 cents'. Thank God, most of these spam mail are now listed. Before forwarding 'help this child' email, do a simple google search with the mail subject. You will get a hit with the fact that the mail information is FALSE [or TRUE, in rare occasions of chain mails]. These email hoaxes are gruesome and more than enough to spoil the receivers' mood with the false claim. Latest Email hoaxes can be found here.

HTML mails, the other irritating factor! Even for a "hi, nice to meet you" note, I usually get an HTML message with all the graphical signatures, colours, and dancing monkeys, where a simple text format is nice and appropriate. Please send ASCII mails whenever possible. Most mail groups have even banned the HTML emails. Unnecessary attachments also should be avoided. Attachments in proprietary software format should always be avoided in a FOSS environment.

Emails having the threatening message similar to "Send this mail within 15 min to 15 people, else a stray dog will bite you" becomes the highlight of all. Funny to see, still people bother to send 15 mails as demanded in the spam. Some will have this line, "Pls forward this back to me as well, else I will feel sad." The same trend continues in social media networks such as Facebook in the form of wallposts or status updates.

Sending unrelated message to a mail group, then someone will reply, "why the hell did you send this here." The sender will apologize for that serious mistake in tears. Then a flow of +1 and -1 to both the people. The initial problem is solved; the mail thread is running for months. Let's ignore the mistakes and smile more.

VirtualBox

I have installed VirtualBox OSE in my Ubuntu Jaunty and installed Windows XP as a guest operating system. Installed guest additions, and started the guest operating system and added some shared folders from the Host operating system file system. Then with the windows XP [guest OS], Tools -> Map network drive, now I have the common location writable from both the host and the guest operating systems. 

This made my GSoC testing easy, as I no more have to copy the executable to Windows machine from the Ubuntu one, which is used to cross build it. Build once. Run from host and guest from the same location. Virtualbox (or the similar available Virtual Machine software) guest operating systems are the cool way to have multiple operating systems with the possibility of simple file sharing.

Mooshabaya SRS - 31st of July

We submitted the Software Requirement Specification for Mooshabaya this night. Just created a site for Mooshabaya here, so that we can create the documents collaboratively in a wiki. The project can be found here in sourceforge as well.

Log in Screen Issue - Ubuntu

Last night I was working with some Localized applications in Tamil Language in Ubuntu 9.04.

For that I had changed my keyboard settings to ta-IN using System > Preferences > Keyboard, and choose Tamil India. For the first time, I forgot to switch back to the English Keyboard before I log out.

Today, at the log in screen, I tried to enter my user name. To my bad, it was entering Tamil characters, which made logging in impossible. I changed the language there at the log-in screen, but it just changed the log-in screen interface language, not the input language.

I tried to recover using CD, and failed. Similarly when I tried to go to the console using Alt+Ctrl+F1, still the keyboard input to the username field must have been in Tamil, thus giving diamonds instead of the letters. Finally in the Grub, I choose somewhat earlier version of gnome-terminal before the update to the later Ubuntu version, as the log in option, where I was unable to log in, yet still able to log in using the console (Alt+Ctrl+F1), as the keyboard was still EN-US there.

Then after some serious examination of the web and bugging my pals, I found the solution.

In /etc/default/console-setup

I found the two parameters were set to refer to India and Tamil.

sudo vi /etc/default/console-setup

I modified them to refer to EN-US.

XKBLAYOUT = "us"

XKBVARIANT = "en"

After saving the console-setup file, I restarted the computer. Then I was able to type in EN-US, and I successfully logged in.

Now I will make sure my keyboard settings is not Tamil or Arabic before I log out, to prevent this issue repeating again. Seems sticking to EN is mostly the safe.

[Update as on Nov 2009]

Since Ubuntu Karmic Koala has the input language and keyboard as a setting option in the log in window itself, it seems this issue has been fixed for Karmic Koala.