FIAT Grande Punto 2013 Test Drive Experience

Dear Reader,

Today i finally got a chance to TD this beautiful, lovely, bubbly car. I had asked the SA (Sales Assistant) of Vecto Motors, Hosur Road, to get me Pearl white 90 Hp car for the TD. Thanks to Vecto for that.

Note:

1. I am no Experienced/Good driver. So far have TD Etios Liva, so i compare most of the experience with it.
2. Below said experience is my personal opinion and no way influenced by any body.
3. I may be wrong with some experience, but feel free to correct me
4. High speed is very bad!

Story:

As already been said enough about this beast by every body, so ill try to keep it short and crisp.

So SA kept bugging me for past 3 days to get me into this car for a TD. Finally today it happened. He was there on time as he promised. He was very understanding, helpful, informative to me and to my father overall.

He arrived around 1030. First 15 mins briefing about the car. Felt the car in and out. Into the boot, into the engine bay. Did not feel like not to see any part of it. Then my father sat at the back while i drove the car. I took the car for spin in my area then to uttarahalli on to mysore road then to race track : The NICE
Did took the car in all worst roads, the SA was very supportive and was encouraging me to test the car for body rolls, suspensions and corner handling. Uttrahalli road had few curves and bends where i pushed hard to see how kool cornering is and how steering is responsive. As usual, father alarms kept ringing from back but still SA let me do it and feel the beast. IMHO i am impressed. The cornering, the power, the pull, suspensions are brilliant. Love you FIAT

Race time baby…Entering the NICE. Revved the engine to 130. The car rocketed like any thing. Felt the VGT kicking in. I was in full love with it, the whole race. Finally back to my place.

My father who was most of the time a passenger is really impressed about this car. I liked it but dad kept cribbing about the cost , while i was in full love with it and did not even bothered to hear about the pricing discussion between dad and Madhu.

Noticeable Improvements in 2013 Refreshed Punto:

1. Gun metal Alloy : Not very shiny, but looks beautiful if kept clean. The TD car was not cleaned and it was dirty, hence alloy wasnt tat attractive.
2. Pearl White : Again looks very nice but has to be kept always clean. Better than BNW? Not sure. Experts comments please?
3. Chrome strip above glove box : No idea in what way it makes a difference. To me it was looking OK OK.
4. Remote control for Audio system : SA says not available in earlier (2012) models.
5. Gear Ratio improvements : Did not feel any delay or slowness responsive in 1st or 2nd gear. The car did response well. Even the SA acknowledges that it has been improved.

Liked:

1. Interiors are fantastic.
2. Seat color combo with red stitching is superb.
3. Gear stitching is kool too.
4. Power, performance, handling, cornering, suspensions.
5. Gear ratios and smoothness
6. Cheesy clutch
7. Pulls good in 2nd gear too with 3 folks inside car. Very nice.
8. Body quality, unquestionable.
9. Looks? : What else can i say about Bellucci? She is Mind blowing, jaw dropping
10. Low engine noise
11. At 130, noise inside cabin is very low.
12. Powerful AC
13. 6 speakers are worth but not that effective or powerful for metal heads like me
14. Spacious and good leg room.

Dislikes:

1. Chrome grills. I hate it. I wished for a black
2. Small botol holders
3. No AC vents inside glove box.
4. Some what boring Audio system interface on dashboard.

Final Verdict:

I am still high from the Love, Touch, Ecstasy, Thrill, etc. of this beauty. I am just drooling to make it my own
Definitely going to book once SA gets back with an offer soon. Price is a bit more. On Road quoted price is 9.X L.

Hope i have not missed out anything. Thanks for reading.
Good day,
Zen

Related articles

• Etios Liva G Test Drive Experience (adventurouszen.wordpress.com)

Etios Liva G Test Drive Experience

Dear Friends,

Just wanted to share my first TD experience with you all.

Today morning i did a TD for almost an hour in various kinds of roads (Plain smooth to pit holed 1s). The TD car was well maintained. I called up Nandi Toyota, Kanakpura Road, yesterday and booked for a TD. The SA (Kaushik) was on time with a good looking white colored car. I should appreciate him for his prompt nature. I could not wait to take it for a spin.

Note: Below are my personal opinion and no where biased (no fanboyism), also i am no expert in driving. So few may be wrong.

Exteriors:
The so called new diesel version G variant released recently by Toyota is no different than the old one. Its 95+% same to the previous ones. So have seen it on the roads and not that catchy impression but neither repellent looking as well. The TD car was well maintained (looked very new tho) so the exteriors was looking good and clean (ya white color). I immediately asked SA is there any changes done exterior. He said nope sir. Noting. Only interiors changed. I immediately noticed no alloy wheels. Bummer!! Probably a bit of turn off for me on that. But hey if i think hard i guess price for this car suffice no alloys, i guess.
The wheel size is 14inch. No idea if its a bummer or not. GC is just 170mm. Thats a big big problem guys. I just passed a regular speed breaker with 20 speed and it touched the ground. SA was like oh my. I felt a bit bad of testing GC this way. Immediately said sorry.

Driving:
I took the car for a spin for atleast like 30 mins. As already said did drive in all kinds of roads today purposfully. Small narrow roads to bit wide highway (not NH’s). The steering felt good and responsive. Breaking seems to be good. Did drive fast and suddenly applied breaks and all such. SA was calm and he was supportive. Thanks to u dude. Suspension was smooth and not that hard. Looks like anti-roll bar was missing, i dont know. I sat at the back and still felt comfy suspension. Need to see in other cars as well. Could not feel the anti-roll bar support. Or perhaps i did not drive that way. Infact the data sheet doesn’t mention that. The gear shift looked bit hard.

Interiors:
Dashboard has been completely redesigned. It doesnt look WOW as others have, but OK. The speedometer display is shifted to center than in the drivers side. Looks like Toyota designers intended both the rider and driver needs to be aware of speed. For me it was a bit difficult to shift my focus from straight road to center position for keeping constant alert on the speed i am going in. Dashboard is now mix of beige and brown. Looks awkward and boring. Doors are full beige and even seats. The old thin sporty seats are gone. Seats now have been improved. Felt very comfy though. One good thing i liked is the the glove box did have an AC went inside which can be closed or opened. Very good to keep stuffs low temp. I liked the idea. The plastics felt good. Seats can be adjusted height wise, steering height adjustment is present. I like this too.

SA claims there is a 3 years or 1L kms engine warranty specially given by Toyota. I am not sure how far this is true. The on road price for top end was ~7.8L. No VGT/FGT present as per SA. Could not cross 50 so dont know if Turbo was present or not really. Door felt very light. Back side space is quite good and so is the leg room.

My verdict?
Cant say i wud choose this unless i try other 2 (Polo and Punto). However ATM all i can say is probably value for money but for old people. The young generation folks who are wild and adventurous i feel it doesnt add that heart touching feeling nor very impressive to be in it.

Hope have not missed out much. Please feel free to add comment.

Happy Driving,
Zen

Progress Modal Dialog Launch from another Thread

Dear,

Today i encountered a problem to fit one of the use case, so i went ahead to develop a prototype. Because of rest of the layering architecture i had to take a bad design decision. I had to launch a progress dialog as modal dialog on top of the main window but do not block the main window thread from further data processing. So i had to launch this progress dialog in a different child thread and make the main window as its parent. The main thread shall do alot of processing and notifies the progress dialog about the updates. Basically the below layers in the main thread calculates some data and informs it to the UI  for displaying. To accommodate this i tried couple of ways and reached dead-end. Referring to couple of stackover flow threads also did not give me complete answer, but they indeed gave me some insights. Thanks to those guys.

So i came up with a prototype with a simple winform main app having a button which again creates a progress dialog as modal in a separate thread then update progress bar values from the main thread. Below is rough diagram of how it should be:

So after exhaustive effort for a day, i came up with below code which seem to work out well as per the stated requirement above. Below is the code:

public class MainForm1 : Form
    {      
        int counter = 0;
        Thread progressDialogUIThread;
        bool stopProcessing = false;
        ManualResetEvent resetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(false);
       
        ProgressDialogForm2 progressDlg;

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {           
            progressDialogUIThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(InitializeDialog));
            this.Enabled = false;
            progressDialogUIThread.Start();
           //Wait till child thread creates and initialize the dialog instance
            resetEvent.WaitOne();
            UpdateProgressData();
        }

        private void InitializeDialog()
        {
            progressDlg = new ProgressDialogForm2();           

            progressDlg.cancelButtonEvent = new EventHandler((s, e1) =>
            {
                switch (progressDlg.DialogResult)
                {
                     case DialogResult.Cancel: 
                        stopProcessing = true;
                        progressDlg.Close();
                        break;
                }
            });

            resetEvent.Set();
            //Cant pass owner here, since child thread so throws cross thread excep.
            progressDlg.ShowDialog();
        }

        private void UpdateProgressData()
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)//Range of Progress bar is 0-100
            {
               //Closing dialog window on cancel button click, hence flag check. 
                if (!stopProcessing)
                  //If not checked, then window is closed and below invoke throws exception.
                {
                    progressDlg.Invoke(new Action<int>(progressDlg.SetProgressValue),
                           new object[] { i });
                    //Just to put some delay in updating progress bar for visiblity purpose
                    Thread.Sleep(500);
                }
                else this.Enabled = true;
            }
        }

        private void Form1_Activated(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
           if (progressDlg != null)
            {
                if (!stopProcessing)//When dialog is closed, nothing to update.
                    this.Invoke(new Action(progressDlg.BringToFront));
            }
        }
}

public partial class ProgressDialogForm2: Form
    {
        public EventHandler cancelButtonEvent;

         public void SetProgressValue(int value)
        {
            this.progressBar1.PerformStep();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            this.DialogResult = DialogResult.Cancel;
            if(cancelButtonEvent != null)
                cancelButtonEvent(sender,e);
        }
    }

Hope it was helpful.

Happy Coding
Zen

Cheese fails to load

Hello,

Today on my linux box i tried shooting Cheese app after many days. Apparently to my surprise it failed to load couple of times. Immediately launching the same app via Terminal shows me that it cant load shared library libcogl.

The error shows like below:

libcogl.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

On googling, i came to know i need to re-compile x11-libs/xm package. Which i was unsure of why i should :O

To my surprise the solution is very simple and yet i failed to rectify it myself. Below is the solution:

1. Log in as root (via command line also no problem)
2. Run below commands:

ln /usr/lib/libffi.so /usr/lib/libffi.so.5
ln /usr/lib/libcogl.so /usr/lib/libcogl.so.5

Thanks,

Zen

Windows cannot find devenv error – Win 7

Dear Reader,

Today on my Win 7 (VM install guest on Zenwalk Linux) VS 2012 RC expired. Hence i had to uninstall it. Unfortunately after it uninstalled, it did not clean up all the paths and links and corrected the changed paths of some too, in this case devenv command path (Beta build yea!). Though i restarted the VM twice, still the problem persisted. Hence i could not launch VS 2010 from Start -> Run or even from command prompt.

After googling for a while, i did end up with nothing apparently. So searching to fix this issue had to fiddle with the stupid windows registry.

So if you also face the same issue, here is the path for it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\devenv.exe\

Short and Hope it helps.

Happy Coding,
Zen

Madikeri Trip

Dear Reader,

Below are the pics from our recent madikeri trip on 19 Oct 2012. The places we visited were

• Kushalnagar
• Madikeri
• Abbey falls
• Mandalpet

Our first landing was at kushalnagar just around 30Kms from madikeri. We had to visit our friend reception ceremony. The event went good and it was fun to be part of this event. We did enjoy with lil bit of wine and dine and at last a bit of dancing

Next visit was to abbi falls, and it was wild and good. One pathetic problem is the human dirt (plastics) were all over the place. Damn! Then we stayed overnight in madikeri, nothing much we did at madikeri except visiting raja seat place for a good sunset. Then nice food and an over night stay in a good home stay was worth it for that night. Next morning we planned to visit Mandalpet.

Mandalpet, a hill-side place with  an awesome view of the beautiful nature aka western ghats.  It’s the most stunning view one can except. It’s very peaceful and mind-blowing. The road to this place is pathetic and hence its suggested to hire local jeeps available on the way. For 5 of us, 800 INR was charged. I must say the money spend was total worth it. This hill-top view was spectacular, and then wind was blowing madly. It was total fun standing still and enjoying the view. I am sure images does speak more than words.
Do note that, some of the scenes from movie Gaalipata (kannada) is shot at this place.

Following noon, we departed from coorg towards bangalore. On the way we visited kaveri nisargadhama and then dubare forest for some water fun. That night back to bangalore. Damn the funs over …

Njoy the pics then yea!

hmm…New style of waiting for Miss. Right

ello paining…

yea the style king..

A beautiful area outside mandya

AnnaBond bandru, Jaga bidi

…

Another purpose of our trip!

Lovely couple

4 eligibles

Single….

3 Eligibles

K, Good photography

Hmm…good

Fantastic view + Beautiful Sunset + Chicks – Beer = 1 step to heaven.

Chasing never stops!

Spectacular View

On the way to mandalpet

Road to Mandalpet

Road is very pathetic. Don’t prefer own vehicles

Forest officials office





I did really wish to settle down

Hmm..Was very windy



Starting point to heaven

Point where forest territory starts

Take 1

Take 2



Ready for water

Off to Row

Enjoying swim

Free style

Tired and then departing to hell (bangalore)

Couple of videos shot at these places:

Okey folks, thats all for now. Hope you enjoyed as much as i did.

Thanks & Happy Diwali ahead,
Zen

Software Industry humor

Its really funny and at the same time very weird and pathetic how the industry has turned out to.

Zenwalk 7.2 is a bliss

Dear Reader,

Today i am very happy to write about the upgrade i did on my laptop last night. As always, upgrading my boxes to the new version is an exciting thing to me. Not just because its super easy, it’s because the new things i am going to experience about it and the post tweaking stuffs i am supposed to do. It’s always brings excitation on the table. I must say, i am proud zenwalk user since past 4-5 years, and ever since it always kept me happy and made me proud user of it.

Anyways, zenwalk 7.2 released after almost 7 months or so. So i previously had 7.0 which had xfce 4.8 on it. XFCE 4.8 infact had very good interface and good application as well. It was fast, slick and snappy . But hey common, who doesn’t need a new version every now and then? But for me it was never a mandatory to look for an updates. I was very happy with the performance of XFCE, Zenwalk, Kernel 2.6 and its total performance.

So downloaded the new ISO file (700MB), this is one of those reason i love about zenwalk. That is, its philosophy: “One App per Task”. However, in the new 7.2 Live version this has been ruled out, hence live version is available only on DVD style. Anyhow, once downloaded, backed up all my tweaking settings and even had to brainstorm a bit to remember what ever else changes done. Once all done, off to installation.

Installation is pretty much the same old style (CLI) since zenwalk 6 or earlier, but amigo, do not make a weird face reading this line. Though you might think WTF about this, but still its very easy to install and very simple. I again applaud for this great job done by the zenwalk folks. One such screen shot is below:

Courtesy: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/04/13/zenwalk-7-review/

The new version installation is done almost within 20 minutes or so (didn’t calculate accurately though). Once installation is done and remaining configuration is done, the system restarts within 21 secs approx till login screen on my i7, 4 GB laptop. That’s a pretty much surprise and happy news. I never estimated it with 7.0 earlier, but with 7.2 its definitely better, faster and i am happy about it.

The redesigned login screen was pretty much a surprising thing to me as soon as first reboot was done. And i am happy to share the screen with you. I am sure you shall love it

Once logged in, did couple of tweaking as per my needs. Next step was to wander around and see whats working and whats not in the new version. The first thing i noticed was the new revamped interface design of XFCE 4.10. The design, theme and icons, etc. are really awesome. I just wandered around it for a while. I must say great job folks.

Next impressive change is network app. Both wireless and wired interfaces were configured automatically and loaded by the network manager. Immediately i noticed that in 7.2, zenwalk team has chosen network manager applet for managing networks and i must say its way better than WICD used in the 7.0 and earlier. WICD did give me some pain in the ass moments when i was in 7.0.

Zenwalk 7.2 comes out with Firefox 15 and immediately i upgraded to 16 from the repos. So its pretty good to see a support for the latest version of my favorite browser. Next few things i wander around and noticed was my graphics chip recognized and working good compared to 7.0. So by default zenwalk 7.2 supports nouveau driver, but i still preferred official nvidia driver and hence installed it because it provides a configuration app for me to do some tweakings.

Next step was to see if sound is identified and voila, it’s there and working kool. So immediately i see if music app provided or upgraded is good? Yep there it was Gmusicbrowser, I must admit that i never used it before though i remember it being supported in the older versions, so i always preferred exaile so far. But this one seem to provide same kind of features and the whole UI is highly customizable, so its kool. My touchpad is now officially recognized by the kernel and appropriate driver is loaded as well as XFCE provides more mouse/touchpad options for it, hence again its kool .

Last but not least, one problem i found is that my bluetooth isn’t working OOTB (Out of the box). I have reported to the zenwalk team and hopefully i shall get a solution soon, but it’s not a show stopper issue. So i am not left disappointed.

There is a lot to say, but at this moment i am still exploring. So far i could see a lot improvements in terms of applications, artwork, performance, memory, etc.. Almost all apps i came across so far is upgraded to the new versions and they have their own improvements in terms of usability and bugs fixes.

Hence all in all, i am very much impressed and again happy. All hail to teams of kernel, zenwalk, xfce and other apps. Kudos to all of them for their great hard work.

Thanks & Happy Linux-ing,
Zen

Related articles

• Zenwalk Live 7.2 Has Linux Kernel 3.2.5 (news.softpedia.com)
• Distribution Release: Zenwalk Linux 7.2 “Live” (distrowatch.com)
• Distribution Release: Zenwalk Linux 7.2 (distrowatch.com)
• Zenwalk Linux 7.2 aims for “100% Slackware compatibility” (h-online.com)
• Zenwalk Linux 7.2 Wants to Be a Really Fast OS (news.softpedia.com)

Better if feature wise subclassing

Dear Reader,

I am working on a legacy code base which not only is quite challenging but troublesome as well, sometimes shit, sometimes pleasant, all in all its a roller coaster ride for me. So lately i picked up a task of implementing a feature where in had to provide a functionality of Import and Exporting some data by other indirect means i.e no manual user intervention. Based on my analysis, i found out that this feature is already present for one particular type via GUI intervention. Now i need to replicate this feature as a background activity.

Yes it might sound like what is the big fuss to blog about it? Right, even before writing this blog i though of this point many times. But i did face 1 challenge in solving this problem w.r.t design issue which i am going to share it soon. But before let me give you a brief overview about the current design and then later i shall share how i got stuck for like half day thinking about possible best solution.

Below image shows the current class design:

As you can see from the above hierarchy design structure which looks pretty much good, but for this feature which i am implementing poses a challenge because this feature which is already provided via a manual invocation via GUI menu is only supported for Master Types specifically supported for MasterC type. But unfortunately the earlier developer didn’t see this through well and implemented all the code in base class i.e BaseType.

But the similar feature which i have to implement should only be supported by all Master types which is almost similar to already implemented for MasterC, but remember the full implementation is in BaseType which logically is wrong but i am guessing that original developer didn’t had the requirement at that time of supporting all other derived types, but still it was wrong.

Any way, to implement my feature for all Master Types i had this problem of how to override this already implemented code which is in BaseType.  So i came up with couple of possible solution which has pro’s and con’s. Lemme list them below:

Solution 1:

•  Just move the code (marking that method as virtual and override in MasterC type) which is already implemented for MasterC from BaseType to MasterC, because as of now it just only supported for MasterC as far as i know.
• Very simple and easy to do, but has problems.
• Product is legacy, so its high risk to move it. I never know which corner test case i could break.
• Overriding this feature in MasterC, poses another problem where in, the feature which i am implementing should world in the background as well as same functionality (Import and Export) should work when manually invoked via GUI menu for MasterC.
• So overriding this method for my feature will break the manual intervention feature.

Solution 2:

• Implement subclass for this feature for MasterC, lets call the feature as FeatureX, thus naming the class as MasterCFetureX as shown, since MasterC is the odd type here having both features to be supported.

• This way, as thought in solution 1, i can mark that method as virtual and override in MasterCFeatureX to execute a customize version of the same code already implemented for my requirement/feature and when manual invocation is done which is already existing feature for MasterC, then the virtual method in MasterC will get execute. This way, i get what i want and existing functionality is not broken.
• But the problem is, the source where the object MasterC is created based on the menu action is not implemented via any creational patterns viz Factory. If it had been, for this sub menu item action i could create object of MasterCFeatureX an played with it. But since it is not there, implementing such patten at the UI level till business is  huge and very risky because changes and impact is huge in terms of effort and time.
• Another problem is the level of hierarchy could grow more, thus making code maintainability tedious.
• Many test cases are risk to be broken if chosen this way. Hence dropped.

Solution 3:

• Very simple and straightforward but crude and filthy which i myself still do not like. But i am forced, so that feature gets delivered in time.
• The method which is already implemented BaseType takes an argument (some container from another library). So i added a enum type called ViewFeatureTypes which had None, FeatureX, FeatureY, etc. into this container. Now when i am invoking this call for my feature from View, i set this enum type value in the container and check this value in the code in BaseType.
• This enum can be used in various other places where i am sure such design constraints exists. So for future purposes added Enum than a bool member to this container type.
• As said, very safe and simple yet crude and dirty.

Thanks & Happy Designing,
Zen

P.S: Please drop your feedback. I am not a good designer, but see myself there in career. So any suggestions are welcome.

Good_Results = Testing as Experimenting;

Dear Reader,

This is one of the learning activity i went through recently which i would like to share. Lately i am kinda doing testing as part of team effort so that task can be finished off soon and well with in the time line.
Any way, so this module which was tested earlier was given to me for 1 final round of testing before it can be certified as complete and tested by our internal tester. So at first i just though i shall do as simple as a testing person shall do with a testing mindset, hence i borrowed all the test cases already defined.

My testing continued for a while with all the test cases given. As soon as i was finished with all the test cases which were exhaustive, all of them got passed. I was happy that all passed and i did not find any bugs. I actually felt we gonna finish off the task way ahead of dead line. So i took a break for 5 mins and went for a coffee.

This break did really kicked me hard and kept me worrying that i must have missed or i did not do enough testing. Basically i was not contended about the results i got from my activity. Though, i finished off my activity way ahead of time, still i was bit unsatisfied about the outcome.

As i immersed myself into my coffee, it did strike me up with couple of questions which i started asking myself as “what would be the output if i did this?”, “what would be the output if i do that?”.

Basically i started adding a lot experimenting test cases in my head. I heard somebody calling it as monkey testing, but its not really it is, since it is done during unit testing and not as part of module testing.

Hence i got back from my coffee break, and spend another 2 hours doing my experiment with this module with almost 10 test cases, i came up with. Gladly at the end of an hour or so, all my experimenting test cases failed. Even some resulting in complete application crash.

I was completely satisfied about my work and i reported to my colleagues and to be frank, they even appreciated my experiment

Happy Coding,
Zen