The good old days !!

I almost gave up on a piece of really complex dma/interrupt code yesterday. All the failing scenarios were eating up my mind for the whole day and then through the night.
Then it hit me in the morning right after i wonke up. And whola!!! i was back in action. Suddenly there it was my interrupt handler in action doing asynchronously the things i commanded it to do. Hmmm.... where have i felt that warm feeling before????
Well i am so surprised to see myself at the same place i was in 7th grade. Surely its the same warm feeling that i got when i first saw my MS DOS tsr code in aciton. This lead me down to trip in a memory lane.

Ah!! i started with simpel IBM BBC BASIC. Soon we had a 386 at home and i was all set to do my coding mistakes. Created my first sort of blogging/journalling application in QBASIC. Nothing much but it was publishing my daily notes into a root directory. Well i spent more time coding it than using it. My academics will show a steep downwards curve that time which never went up ever again :).

But i was not happy with the interpreter. And i actually didn't know about compilers, (hey i was just in 5th grade). I started digging up the exe codes. Spent months trying to decode them without a 8086 manual (this was teh pre internet era may be 1994-95) i remember i actually managed to run a modified exe. I think i had some dissassembler from sombody i absolutely don't remember. Unfortuantely i had a disk crash (i didn't tell my father but i had tried some crazy stuff with disk IO). Neways by now i was also learning VB and getting frustrated by lack of flexibility.

After two years in windows world i turned towards my first c compiler Turbo C ++. Everything happened at twice the speed since then :-)). Learned how to write TSRs ported my favourite NIBBLES game from basic to C, half done port of GORRILLA.BAS was never completed. Built my own equivalant of NCURSES library.

Then came the internet era, we were one of the first 50 internet users in INDIA. had free internet shell access for about 6 months. Dad had not given me access as it was my Final year at highschool but i cracked the password with my keyboard monitoring tsr anyway and spent most of the time browsing the infant yahoo direcotries and the good old gopher (anybody remember the once popluar protocol?).

By now i was in Junior College and there came the first issue of PCQuest with slackware 1.0 CD.

Rest is the history :-D.

At each step there have been number of occassions where i felt the same warm feeling i got today. I wonder how many other people can relate to their childhood hobbies in their jobs.
I think i am just one of few lucky ones.....

Autocommenter updated

I ditched the cproto based earlier version of my automommenter. It was just ugly and too hard to maintain and fix.
Today i managed to upload the replacement based on unix shell script. Its been around on my desktop for a while and is working on atleast most common scenarios. It is a bit over engineered though but given my nature everything i do usually is :-).

Neways give it a try if you like. You can find it through my home page link at right hand side.

BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Homebrew glider anyone?

Take a look at these ....
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000573027090/
http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/

For several weeks now i have lingering thought about actually trying
my hand at something like this. Last week i actually made some
progress on the design side while i was visiting home.
I got the basic requirements jotted down and a rough grand plan.
Feasibility is still a question as lot of things aren't available
easily (and more essetially cheaply) in india.

Lets see if this turns out to be doable.

--
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

Will F1 it be more interesting this year?

Just heard the news that all the regulation changes this year are
final and all cars are conforming to it.
This means the engines will need to last three times as much as
before, the tires will have to do the same and the downforce is
reduced by whopping 25%.
This should put ferrari right back on the place where all teams were
till now, thats on the edge of their capability. Unfortunately with
maclaren's record last year i have no speculations to make about them.
Hopefully all other cars don't have much to lose, they were already
streched to their limits and were fighting on the same aspects.
Will this counter the Ferrari might? or will Ferrari once again will
be proven to be,... ummm well, Ferrari!!. Only time and checkered flag
will tell.

Boy i feel like living in stoneage!!!

Just read this!!

"Are we becoming irrelevant? Is it time to give up? I don't believe that
either is true. I see our competition facing challenges of their own. Linux
keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It
now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the
code. FreeBSD took over the huge task to implement fine grain SMP and after
two years of effort they still don't have a production quality system.
OpenBSD is still touting its security features but lacks the manpower to
integrate major kernel features such as UBC and address performance problems.
Instead it focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland
utilities. The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer and
promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing complexity
of the operating system. Sun is trying to keep Solaris relevant by
open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going to be open-sourced
and when. Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be producing any useful
results, possibly because it is not complete, and the open-source version of
the tree is always behind the commercial version."

This is quote from NetBSD president, trying to encourage the netBSD community.
But hell he managed to find out disastrous view of all the other operating
systems. None of them are spared. Reading this feels like computing as we
know it is comming to an end. Ha ha ha!!! i hope this does not put of few
instead of getting them on to do something. :-))

His interpretation of linux cycle is a bit off the road btw. Its not that
linux is becoming unstable and community is fighting it and can't do it so
vendors have to do it.
Its rather a calculated change made by linus and the gang. The process is
being put there by design and not due to desparation as the above makes it
sound.

Screw Ferrari, i am for Jordan now

Why?

They hired Kartikeyan !!!!!
Finaly a possibility that an indian anthom will be sung at the podium.
(hey i can dream, can't i?)

Neway lets hope this brings the F1 racing closer to india and possibly
one day even a race will be held here.