Nirenjan’s Space

Fate has screwed my computer. My cousin brought a hub to fix the network problems. It seemed to work fine till today morning when Windows XP crashed. Some file missing. I start win 98 to try to restore XP but that also crashed. Now I am posting from my cousin’s comp, waiting for the tech guy to come & fix my comp. Good thing I decided to bunk college today to try to set up the network. Instead, I wound up trying to fix my computer. At least I can access my cable modem from here also. Thank God for that.

How the hell do I set up a home network? I have a cable internet connection which requires a network card. The home connection requires a network card. If I install a new card, the old card refuses to start. And as my modem is connected to the old card, my net connection was screwed till I switched connections. So now, I don’t have the network, but I have the internet. Let’s see what fate has in store for my comp…

She came to me when I was about 16. She’s my closest friend who helped me during all classes to solve my problems. She’s been missing since Saturday. She’s my calculator. When I went to the office, they asked me all sorts of questions about what model, make, identification marks etc. The bloody people at the office treat us like thieves if we go to see if our calcs have turned up there by chance. Without her, I’m screwed royally. So, until I find her, I have to borrow another calc, or (Horror of horrors) buy another one…

Looks like the exam dates have been announced. A bit early in my opinion. Oh well, one can’t have everything in life. Let’s see how I do this semester…

Rather long time since my last post. Well, I guess I was just too lazy after Sports Day @ Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. ECE won the Athletic championship (for the 4th time in a row!!) and the marchpast as well. (for the first time ever!!!!). Unfortunately, we lost the games trophy to EEE (who seem to have done well in team games).

Did anybody manage to solve the puzzle I gave on Friday? Unfortunately, I’m stuck with a shipload of record work, so the solution I promised will have to wait for a couple of weeks. It looks like everybody is sitting screwing around trying to figure out when the bloody exams are starting. If there are no holidays in between exams, we are all royally screwed.

An interesting puzzle this time. The old jealous husband brainbuster with a few changes. A king, his mantri and his bodyguard and their wives are on the bank of a river. They need to get to the other bank. The only means of crossing the river is by means of a small boat, which can take only 2 people at a time. Now, neither the king, mantri or bodyguard are willing to leave their wife with any of the other two men unless he is with her. Nor is the wife permitted to even move to the bank where a man is there unless her husband is either with her or on the bank to which she is moving. How will they cross the river?

I’ve started thinking seriously about my project now. With PCR guiding me, it should be a little easier than what I thought it would be. I’m thinking about adaptive filter implementation in Digital Signal Processor for noise cancellation. Easy in MatLab. Screwball in Verilog, VHDL, etc. I now need to test the adaptive filter first before anything else. Maybe that can be done easily with a DSP processor.

Anybody got some good skins for Winamp 3? I’ve got really bored of the old skins.

What a comedy it was today!!! Only 12 people were present in my class today. The remaining 39 had all gone for Run. I still don’t know how it was. Unfortunately for them, our dear HOD and class teacher insisted on taking classes. Morning session gone. Afternoon session, all 12 of us are made to sit in system programming lab & complete our experiments. At least we didn’t have Frank’s class…

Here I am just back from the Nichyadartham of my cousin. Tomorrow is the wedding. Our beloved chairman, Shiv Nadar, is visiting the college. Our “wonderful” management has said that we must be present or else one week attendance is going down the drain. Well they can go and bang their heads against some wall. No way am I going to attend college tomorrow. Shiv Nadar will just have to do without me.
The computer that I was reinstalling has been returned to it’s owner. I tried Return to Castle Wolfenstein on that system. It had 16 MB of video RAM. All I did was pause the game to answer a phone call and the system locked up. Looks like RTCW requires a few gigs of video RAM to function properly!!!

I recently downloaded Winamp 3. The user interface is really cool, although I’m wondering what happened to the balance control in all the skins except the classic one, as well as lack of quite a few options. Apart from that, the skins I downloaded today are really cool. Especially the CornerAMP. One of the best features I like is the crossfader. It makes the music sound like what FM radio broadcasts, a rather unique feature. Even better is the ability to play video. That alone makes me switch from WMP to WinAmp for all my multimedia purposes. But one bug is that the shuffle feature makes it likely to repeat a song unlike WinAmp 2. Hopefully it will be fixed in subsequent versions.

Till next time…

Look’s like I’m back in business with quite a few computers surrounding me. Being one of the few people in the college with a CD writer, I’m one of the most sought after persons on campus (by my classmates, of course!) ;-). I’ve just finished reformatting a computer, partitioning it, reinstalling Windows, the drivers, the works… Maybe I should start charging for my services.

Thankfully, the DSP Lab is now cleaned of viruses. Several systems got infected over the past 2 weeks with Nimda and thanks to that, we very nearly lost a lot of data. (Not much, considering that the “data” was a bunch of programs written by the students in the System Programming lab, although the students would have complained had it really been deleted). With almost 30 systems to be reinstalled with Windows and the drivers and networking components and software to be reinstalled, the cleaning was not an easy job. One system alone had over a thousand files infected with Nimda.

Today morning, another virus crept in but luckily we managed to isolate that system from the network and clean it. Now, the floppy drive on all the systems has been disabled. Otherwise, who knows what other viruses could enter the network… Maybe after this semester is over, we should format all the systems and perform a destructive restore. Only then, we can be sure that the virus is completely gone.

More later…