Archive - Tag - Mihir Soni

Wrapping Up: Last Commits to Ubuntu Touch

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed bug 1438910 on Calendar today — almost exactly two years since I first showed up to help close out bugs on the Calculator app back in July 2013. Between those two dates: a full app rebuilt from a half-finished blueprint, an Ubuntu Membership, a lot of design arguments over IRC, more Autopilot test debugging than I ever expected to do for a phone calendar.

The Calculator I Helped Ship Is Getting a Reboot

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Riccardo’s writing up the Calculator app reboot — scientific mode, a favourites/history feature, a cleaner design, all built on MathJs. Feels a bit strange in a good way: the app we scraped together the first release of back in 2013 is outdated enough now to need a proper rebuild.

He signed off the post with:

“If you need help, or have feedback, write me a mail or join #ubuntu-app-devel on Freenode and ping me (rpadovani) or Bartosk (gang65) or Mihir (mihir).”

The Bug That Followed Me Across Six Projects

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed DesignFixDefaultWeekView-5 today, but the thing that’s actually eaten most of my week is bug 1362962 — “Calendar icon usually shows the wrong date.” Sounds trivial. The little calendar icon in the launcher is supposed to show today’s date, and sometimes it just doesn’t. Except the fix touches indicator-datetime, ubuntu-ui-toolkit, qtorganizer5-eds, and a few other projects besides Calendar, and it’s been sitting near the top of the importance list across all of them for weeks now.

CI, Autopilot, and the Unglamorous Side of App Dev

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed dateSelectNewEventTest today, a day after calendarTestFix — both aimed at making the Autopilot suite actually reliable instead of flaky. Together with filesRestructure from last month, reorganizing how the test files were laid out, it’s been most of the last six weeks.

Not all of it is glamorous. Back in July I spent a good chunk of a day figuring out why Jenkins wasn’t triggering on a merge proposal at all — turned out the contributor needs to be added to the developer team first, something popey sorted out for me. Same week, David Planella walked me through .desktop file naming so the app actually deploys right from Qt Creator onto a device. There was also bug 1334833 — duplicated event bubbles showing up in the day view — that took more than one pass to actually pin down.

Designing the New Event Page (and Naming Things Is Hard)

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Posted screenshots today of the new dialog we’re building for repeat options on the event page — moving them out of the main form and into their own dialog, similar to how Google Calendar’s mobile app handles it. Nekhelesh and popey jumped on it in #ubuntu-app-devel almost immediately — popey pushed back on calling it “Repetition,” said it read confusing next to “Repeat,” and he’s right, going with the simpler word.

Building the Ubuntu Calendar App, Branch by Branch

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed bug 1327262 today, closing out the most heads-down stretch of Calendar work I’ve done so far. Three branches mark the spring: a fix for bug 1292076 back in April, the NewEvent-Refactoring branch in May, and now this one.

The new-event refactor was the big one. The original event-creation screen had grown organically as features got bolted on — repeats, guests, reminders, all-day toggles — and it needed to be pulled apart and rebuilt properly rather than patched again. Everything else this year is going to sit on top of that rebuild.

Becoming an Ubuntu Member

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Got approved as an official Ubuntu Member today. It’s not tied to any single project — the Membership Board looks at whether your contributions have been sustained and meaningful, in whatever form they take.

Nine months in now: closing out the Calculator app’s first release last year, then most of this year rebuilding the event-creation flow in Calendar. Part of putting the application together was rounding up testimonials on my wiki page — David Planella, who runs developer relations for Ubuntu, added one a couple of days ago saying I’d “been key for core apps such as Calculator and Calendar to be available on Ubuntu phones, tablets and desktops.” Generous, but it’s roughly what membership is supposed to recognize.

Someone Else's Take on Why We Do This

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Riccardo published a piece last week on why people should contribute to Ubuntu Touch, and he name-checked me in it:

“After I have joined the calc team I met also mihir_ (Mihir Soni) and boiko (Gustavo Boiko): Mihir is another community contributor and we worked together to create the final version of the calculator which is the default in Ubuntu Touch, a very cool app!”

From Calculator to Calendar: Switching Core Apps

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Joined the Ubuntu Calendar Developers team today. With Calculator in a stable place, I wanted to pick up something with more open ground, and Calendar has plenty — the blueprint for it has barely gotten past the display-event view, and the edit flow is still mostly unbuilt.

It’s a different kind of work than Calculator. That was bug triage on something that mostly worked; this is building event creation, editing, and recurrence from a design spec that’s still being argued over in the #ubuntu-app-devel channel on Freenode. Expecting a lot more time in QML and Autopilot tests than I was spending before, and a lot more time in IRC hashing out UI decisions before anything gets built.

Shipping the First Ubuntu Touch Calculator

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

The Calculator app is closing in on its first real release, and the last few weeks have been about closing out the high and critical bugs standing in the way. Nothing glamorous — crash bugs, layout issues, edge cases in the calculation engine — just the grind of getting something from “mostly works” to “ships.”

It’s the first time I’ve taken an open source project from active bug triage through to an actual release, working entirely in public on Launchpad, with review from people I’ve never met in person. Riccardo in Italy and Boiko, who’s deep in the telephony app, have both been steady presences in the channel the whole way through — feels less like a project now and more like a small, scattered team that just happens to talk mostly through a chat window.

Translating Ubuntu Into Gujarati

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Joined the Ubuntu Gujarati Translators team on Launchpad today. It’s a different kind of contribution from the Calculator app bug-fixing I’ve been doing — instead of QML and merge proposals, it’s Launchpad’s translation tool, going string by string through Ubuntu’s interface and deciding how something like “Settings” or “Cancel” should actually read in Gujarati, not just what it technically means.

It doesn’t get anywhere near the attention app development does, but it’s the difference between Ubuntu being usable for someone comfortable in English and someone who isn’t. My own family runs on a mix of Gujarati and English at home, so it was an easy thing to want to help with.

How I Fell Down the Ubuntu Touch Rabbit Hole

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for years, but this month I actually started contributing to it. Back in February, Canonical put out a call for community developers to help build the core apps for the newly announced Ubuntu Phone — apparently over 1,500 people expressed interest. The Touch/CoreApps wiki page has been the entry point since: pick an app, join its team, get involved.

How to Enable the New Facebook Timeline Now

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:28:49 +0530

You’ve been hearing about all the wonderful new Facebook features, and like most of us, you’re probably eager to get started with them.

If you’re willing to go through a series of eight steps, you can get into the brand-new Facebook Timeline right now.

Just follow the instructions below, and suddenly you’ll be basking in a new world of Facebook goodness, just like the developers are. Follow carefully, and good luck.

jQuery Notification After Postback in ASP.NET

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:33:17 +0530

Hi all,

I read in several forums that developers were struggling to show a jQuery notification message on a page after a postback. This matters a lot for making a website’s UI attractive nowadays.

Here’s a simple tutorial to solve that.

I’m using the jQuery showMessage notification plugin for displaying the message.

Here’s the code for the ASPX page, Default.aspx:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
 <title>Jquery Postback demo</title>
 <script src="JS/jquery.showMessage.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 <script src="JS/jquery.showMessage.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 <link href="CSS/style_msg.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
 <script type="text/javascript"
 src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"
 charset="utf-8"></script>
</head>
<body>
 <form id="form1" runat="server">
 <div>
 <asp:TextBox ID="txtFirstname" runat="server" />
 <asp:Button ID="btnSubmit" runat="server" style="height: 26px" />
 </div>
 </form>
</body>
</html>

I’ve just added one textbox and one button to the page — here’s the code for the button click event:

New Life Began

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 12:36:47 +0530

I finally started my job on June 6th, 2011, at Maxim Integrated Circuits as an IT engineer. An awesome experience. On my first day I was introduced to my colleagues and went through all the HR formalities. For the first time, I’d get paid for work I love doing. I got my last-semester result and would soon get my (provisional) degree certificate 😉 — done with studies. No more exam tension, no more assignment submissions, but a bit more responsibility at work. Currently working on C#.NET and ASP.NET.

Angry Birds Hack for Chrome Browser

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 15 May 2011 10:30:31 +0530

Hello,

A few days ago Angry Birds launched their browser game, first released for Chrome — originally it was only on iOS and Android.

They did a fantastic job — it plays just like the mobile version, and they used HTML5 and CSS3 extensively.

I was playing and trying to three-star every level, but no luck. 😛

Last Semester Internship

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:20:29 +0530

Hello,

I haven’t blogged about myself in a while — where am I, what am I doing these days? Well, I’m currently in my last semester of my master’s, which is an industrial internship. I was recruited by PMC for an internship in Baroda (Vadodara), so three of us from my class went. Two classmates were from the same city, so they weren’t worried about accommodation. I’m from Ahmedabad, so I had to find a PG. I found one near my office with help from Anish, my classmate and now colleague at the company. 😉

Auto Generate Data Dictionary from SQL Database

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:31:43 +0530

Data Dictionary Creator is a simple, free tool that helped me immensely with SQL Server database documentation.

It stores all the information in Extended Properties, so it’s easier to keep the documentation in sync with the database as it changes. I was able to generate a data dictionary with just a couple of mouse clicks after entering the connection string. The dictionary can be exported to various formats: Excel, XML, Word, and HTML. Check the reference for a step-by-step tutorial on using this utility (the current version supports SQL Server 2008 too). You can download it from CodePlex.

Stuck Configuring IIS-7 Express in Visual Studio

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:58:59 +0530

Hello,

I was trying to configure IIS7.5 Express with Visual Studio 2010, which shipped with the first release of WebMatrix.

Somehow I ran into an error, like the following screenshot:

I finally found a solution — just follow these steps.

First, open Control Panel from the start menu, then go to Add/Remove Programs.

Then just check the following option:

And you’re done.

Thank you. Hope this helps.

Get File Size Information Before You Download

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:03:15 +0530

Hello,

I was browsing ASP.NET resources and found an interesting code snippet for getting a file’s size over HTTP before the download actually starts.

So you can find out the size of a file before you download it. Here’s the simple code:

string completeUrl = "TypeYourDownloadableURL";

WebClient obj = new WebClient();
Stream s = obj.OpenRead(completeUrl);
Response.Write(obj.ResponseHeaders["Content-Length"].ToString());
s.Close();
obj = null;

doctypehtml.in Conference, Ahmedabad — 5th Feb

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:39:44 +0530

Hello,

It was Friday — last day of the week, of course. I came home to Ahmedabad around 9:00 PM.

I’d planned to attend a conference in Ahmedabad on Saturday, with the agenda of introducing and using HTML5 and CSS3.

From a simple web designer to a full web developer, it was helpful to everyone, I think. 🙂

I reached at 9:30, and after a simple registration process, the first talk was on HTML5 by Kiran Jonnalagadda — good, and covered the basic uses of HTML5. After the talk there was something interesting: on the event’s registration website, doctypehtml5.in, they’d been storing everyone’s user agent, and based on that they made a chart of how many people were using which browser.

Motivational Programming Poster

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:50:53 +0530

I’ve been reading around about coding style and how to keep code neat and clean, and I stumbled on some posters to get motivated while programming. 😛

We’ve all been there — sometimes code makes us mad. A project that leaves you scratching your head for hours, late into the night. We wake up early, or sometimes at midnight, with our mind racing about a 1000-line-long method. Sometimes we get angry after seeing countless nested loops. 😅 Sometimes we get someone else’s source code and realize there’s no framework or convention followed at all.

ASP.NET MVC

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:57:16 +0530

Hello,

Since I started my internship in January, I wanted to learn the ASP.NET MVC architecture, so I made time to learn it during my internship training.

ASP.NET provides a great framework called ASP.NET MVC for building MVC applications. It’s not totally different from a plain ASP.NET website, but it’s not compulsory either — it’s up to you whether you want to build your site using the MVC framework or the traditional way.

Third Semester Projects

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:14:48 +0530

Hello,

Since I mentioned my third semester journey in my last post, I’d like to describe my projects separately in this one.

In my third semester I had two projects — one in Software Engineering, and another in Distributed Computing, a.k.a. DCOM.

In Software Engineering, we were put into a team of 7 classmates, decided by the professor, and we had to decide on the project definition ourselves.

We collected ideas from all team members, and eventually landed on something new called e-society, where we planned to reduce the workload of a society’s secretary and chairman.

Since July 2010 to Jan 2011

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:39:28 +0530

Hello,

I’ve been busy with my third semester and placements, so I wasn’t able to write on my blog. I was very tense about my career and placements — in our college, placements started in July 2010, and I was waiting with interest for a company.

In September, a company called Paul Mason Consulting (PMC) visited our campus, and I sat for that company on a .NET profile and was selected as an intern. I still wasn’t fully satisfied, since I didn’t have a proper job offer yet. Then, in the last week of September, I found out that a company called MAXIM-IC was going to visit our campus, and I was excited because it was completely .NET-based. At the time of registration I was told I wasn’t eligible, and I was sad, but somehow I got a chance to sit for it anyway. So I prepared for that company. On the 4th of October, 11:00 AM, I went to the exam hall very tense. The test took about an hour, and after three hours I got the result — I was shortlisted for the interview. There were four panels of interviewers, and I had to face each one, turn by turn. 😅 I successfully cleared all the interviews and got selected at MAXIM-IC as a Software Engineer. 🙂

PHP GridView

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:30:32 +0000

Hello friends,

Once I was developing an auction website in PHP, and I was worried about a gridview. I searched a lot online and couldn’t find anything I wanted.

Suddenly one day I found PHP GridView. I downloaded it and tried integrating it with my website, and it’s awesome. You have to pass the parameters, and just about every function is there — sorting, editing, exporting.

You can also make an edit form directly, and it’s developed in PHP with MVC, so for download just click here.

Anthem Toolkit

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:28:56 +0000

Hello friends,

Today I’m describing the use of the Anthem toolkit.

Anthem is a very powerful toolkit that’s popular for GridView and some other ASP.NET controls.

Anthem Toolkit is completely based on AJAX, and performs all actions using AJAX techniques, so there’s no need for a postback every single time.

You can use the Anthem GridView easily, and this control toolkit is open source.

You can download the DLL here.

Welcome

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:11:15 +0000

Hello friends,

My name is Mihir Soni, a Msc(IT) student at DA-IICT Gandhinagar.

I’ve started this blog to write about new technologies and languages.

I’ll be posting about ASP.NET, PHP, C, and C++.

If you’d like to contribute yourself, feel free to get in touch.

Regards, Mihir Soni.