May 21st Report - CTS Conference

Last two weeks, i was preparing for the cts 2008 conference. I had to prepare for my talk and the demonstration. I had to struggle with the new Dell laptop to get the demo working, simply because of the incompatibilities in the software and the necessary drivers. After tweaking some configurations, I was able to install Fedora 7 and ROOT. However, the demo started giving some unpredictable behaviors.

The conference went well, did my talk and did the demonstration as well, the demo crashes few times though.

During the conference, the power went off for the Irvine area and we had to stay without power for almost 16 hours. The organization committee worked hard to get the conference going with some emergency power, and the speakers had to shout the audience since we did not have power for the audio equipments.

After all, it is a very fruitful experience for me. My first talk in a large conference. The keynote speeches and the panel discussions brought a lot of insight into the future of the Collaborative Technologies.

Here are the slides for my presentation.

A ROOT bug when using DLLs

I have been trying to convert the ROOT & C++ program that extends the NaradaBrokering's publish/subscribe functionalities to ROOT users to Windows. I was able to convert the pure C++ part of it and the DLL works fine in Windows.

Then I tried to use the wrappers for ROOT with the generated dictionary. Code generation and the compilation all worked as expected but when I try the DLL the ROOT crashes printing garbage characters.

I track down the problem for two days and was able to reduce the problem into its minimum form.
It simply boils down to a parameter passing problem related to string values.

I then ask the question from the ROOT Talks and one of the ROOT devs, Bertrand, helped me to track down it further.

Finally, the resolution is a bug in ROOT 5.19.02. From my experiments, I know that it was also present in ROOT 5.18 as well.

Here is the full resolution in the ROOT Talk.
http://root.cern.ch/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=27702#27702

According to Bertrand, there will be a new release tomorrow and the bug seemed to be fixed in this release.

Hope it will fix my problem and also no more bugs in my way :))

May 7th Report

Posters for the CTS Conference

I have created two posters for the CTS 2008 conference. After a week of crash learning Adobe Illustrator I was able to create them in the way I need :)

Here are the two posters.