To Smoke or to Smoke

Nah, I am not missing a "not" in the title of the post. This post is about the two huge ideas that went from smoke to smoke. Here's what happened:

After quite a bit of ramblin' over the topic for THE project that we are supposed to do at the end of under-graduate degree, we finally had come at a fork in the road.

The "we" was made of THE TWO guys of IT department in my college plus me. Sure, you can easily run a word-count on the words I spoke at college and still not hit anything more than a few thousands, but it seems whatever little I said have given me some recognition. The other two were vociferous when it comes to voicing anything. Sriram krishnan and Balak are the two best brains that you can have around if you are planning a brainstorming session. I was definetely out-of-league here. I take in things bite-by-bite and come up with something...in the end.

Me and balak were fascinated by p2p and network related research stuff, while the microsoft employee sriram wanted to do something that will give "instant-gratification" to the masses. My suggession was that we do something with BitTorrent to alleviate ordinary web servers' bandwidth problems. (Yeah, I like BT). Initially, my focus was on eliminating slashdot effects. Then I wanted a one-code-to-solve'em-all thing. I had planned to write a replacement web server and a replacement webclient (actually, a browser) which would incorporate all of BitTorrent goodness in it.
Then when I actually sat and talked about it, sriram wasn't exactly sure people would like to change their web servers "just because a bunch of undergrads told'em so". So we sat down and refined the idea and pointed it at a slightly different but more appropriate angle. Since not a lot of them do podcasting and videocasting, we may as well provide a distribution media for them. But for a more short-term focus, we chose text blogs. Thus was born "Smoke". Read all about it in sriram's blog posts here.

(There's a running gag that if balak or I were asked "Why name it Smoke?", that we would reply with a "Ask sriram's GF" ;) )

Sriram was more into employing intelligent search engines, retro-fitted with intuitive visualizations and putting that behind a MS-legacy-usablity-for-the-masses UI. But now he wanted to build a machine. A machine so powerful that...ok, it's a virtual machine :)

I was not in favour of doing a virtual machine. Partly because I wasn't sure I could crank out something as big as a virtual machine, and mainly because I wanted a p2p project in my resume. But later, I accepted to be a builder of the virtual machine, partly because I knew sriram had no problems with doing a p2p thing so I shouldn't have one working on a VM, and mainly because neither me or balak was able to come up with a project worthy p2p idea.
One interesting idea I came up with involved "TorrC"s, or TorrentContainers which are just Torrent files containing hash of torrent files. Basically, my idea was to give the main tracker server the abilty to make a tracker out of the peers, dynamically and transparently. I hoped that this would halt the tracker server shutdowns for some time and give the BT sites more robustness and more bandwidth. I didn't really go into the details as this seemed too small a project and was dropped. Recently, I found that the BTHub project (@isohunt.com) is a similar, but more centralized, implementation.

So, thus began the construction of this awesome machine. And it was thus named ....(wait for it).....Smoke! It even has a proper little home at sourceforge.net. Sriram follows the building of the SmokeVM at his end in parts: Here's First, second, third and fourth parts (for now).

Since sriram was the authority on programming languages, virtual machines and stuff like that, we let him split the workload amongst us. Sriram enlisted more help from the outside. Aarthy and kaushik were invited to join the coding work force. Before long, each one of us were assigned our task. Sriram would muscle with the main smokevm engine, while balak and I would produce a python-to-smoke compiler, kaushik would produce the parser that reads-in the smoke code file and Aarthy would script out a Lisp-to-smoke compiler.

Not before a month passed, schedules changed followed by our plans. So, in the end, we wound up having to dump the Lisp compiler and post-poning a few of the ambitious goals for the college project deadline. I wound up coding the Python compiler, while balak wrote the project documentation (for the college version of the code). Though we got it all planned and stuff a full three months early, the entire code and documentation that was submited to the college was done in less than three weeks.

The entire project was filled with a lot of everything. I was helpless as I listened to a LOT of geek noise between the head-geeks (sriram and kaushik) both in chat conferences and in the smokevm mailing-list. I had fun coding something and sending it over to sriram for checking it with the VM, who would check it out immediately and reply. We were initiated to the world of cvs through this project. I had my own moments when I n00b'ily created a few modules on the cvs tree and sriram had to "patiently" delete those. I had great fun constantly updating my compiler code once I finally got the hang of the cvs thingy. I experienced responsiblity when I started creating Change logs for all my coding updates. We all had our own goof-ups in the project and I believe that we learnt a great deal from this.

I remember being baffled at the very thought of coding a compiler for a language that I hardly knew existed (python). But after I wound up learning that language, I was happy to write the compiler in Python itself. In retrospect, it only seems perfect to write it in python because it has excellent library support to examine it's own bytecode output. I had promised a be-all-end-all python disassembly guide after I am done with the python compiler and it will be posted.

Throughout the project, sriram was kind enough to ask me to have fun doing this python stuff. I really was having a good time.



PS:
There was another project we were considering at that time but it never had a definite goal to it. It was for the Microsoft Student Project program 2005. It was basically a contest where you can register your final year project with microsoft and compete among other students from other colleges for the best project. The winner also gets a chance to enter the Imagine cup 2005.
We had a [Search engine + Blog + p2p = Cool!] theory that we wanted to make a project out of. Since I got to register the project, I whipped out the name DEBIAN, a retronym for Distributed Enhanced Blog Itemiser And Navigator. A cool insult to microsoft if the project was awarded the best. I had to endure quite a few words from sriram before he tried to forget what name I gave the project (being a pro-MS guy that he is).