Nirenjan’s Space

One of the six down. ACE was pretty tough today. I think Madras University is intentionally correcting the papers badly so that they can collect revaluation fees from us and then they’ll pass us. Let’s see how PMOB is.

I just collected my hall ticket today. Since exams start on Saturday, I have to get really serious about my studies, especially for ACE & control systems.

I’ve started my studies in earnest. Just 10 more days to go, then the real headache starts. Anyway, I’m not too worried about any of the subjects except control systems, which is a major headache.

Just back from Shaastra Day 3 at IITM. Nothing much happened today, as opposed to yesterday, but still had some fun. I was at AGK’s house for a while, and since we came a bit late, we weren’t able to participate in the Core Dump contest. We did try out for the Main Quiz though, although we couldn’t understand half the questions. Anyway, I’m not planning to go tomorrow, coz the exams are right around the corner.

Just back from Shaastra 2003 Day 2 at IIT Madras. The IIT junta put a lot of enthu into organizing Shaastra. Unfortunately, SSN’s participation in Shaastra is almost Nil, not blaming them though, coz it’s exam time. Only 5 of us were there - Ajoy, RV, AGK, Deepak & myself. Deepak left after paying his GATE fees. The rest of us were there till the evening. I saw Shivaram & Aditya there - enjoying themselves. Anyway, we participated in the programming contest & Make Things Work. The programming problems were hajaar tough. I just hope it’s not the case with ACM-ICPC. On the other hand, Make Things Work wasn’t so bad. AGK, RV & I had planned to go for Quake 3 Arena, but unfortunately, we got stuck in the auditiorium for Make Things Work. I guess we could have gone there itself & tried the tournament. Anyway, we saw a superb movie, similiar to the Tom & Jerry cartoon where Tom puts together a lot of stuff to try & trap Jerry, including a candle, boat, fan, tyre, etc. etc. etc. Wish I could get a hold of it.

When I came out of IIT, there was a hajaar traffic jam on the IIT side of the road. In utter contrast, the other side was completely empty. Not even a cycle was on the road. I assumed that the CM was passing through and asked the traffic cop whether a bus would come or not, and he told me that it would come in 5 minutes. I then walked to the stop, but my impatience got better of me and I continued walking upto Madhya Kailash. From a PCO there, I called Mom to tell her the situation and found out that even she was caught up in the jam near Park Sheraton. I then got the info that Abdul Kalam was passing through. Just as I came out of the booth, the traffic started flowing. I managed to catch a 47G near Sri Krishna Sweets and came home. Now I am planning to go tomorrow for Core Dump and try to attend gaming again, if the games are interesting.

Nothing of major note. I’ve just put in Office XP and Matlab. Now I’ve resumed work on my project. Unfortunately, none of the three methods are providing a distortion free output. Everything is giving a gain of atleast 20 dB to frequencies around the 50 Hz center frequency, instead of just attenuating the 50 Hz noise. Guess I have to go to college one of these days to ask PCR what the problem is.

Last night, I just finished reinstalling my computer. Something was slowing down Windows XP horribly, and Windows 98 wasn’t performing too well either. I repartitioned the entire system with the fdisk tool available on the Win98 CD, but the damned CD wouldn’t format it. I had to install XP, format the individual partitions and then install 98 and then again put XP. In any case, the install is now complete, and the only things left for me to install are Office and Matlab.

Something in my BIOS is totally wrong. Everytime I start up my computer, it reverts to the defaults. I don’t know whether the jumper is set incorrectly or whether the battery is dead. Better check that soon.

Sadly, one of my CD’s containing a nice collection of software is damaged and hence I have to download it again from elsewhere. The software included Acrobat Reader 6, DirectX 9a, Media Player 9, Isobuster 1.4, MSN Messenger 6, Yahoo! Messenger 5.6, Nero 6 Demo, a bunch of drivers and lots more. Fortunately, I’ve managed to recover the drivers. But the biggest problem is that my driver CD for Windows 98 has been with Karthik for the past 4-5 months and I still have to get it back (atleast if I want to play Renegade!) Thankfully, XP doesn’t require the drivers and works well with the default drivers.

OOPS, pending, my printer, modem and scanner - yet to be installed. Bye Bye.

My studies and project together are taking up most of my time, with the end result that I’m unable to put anything together for the proposed DSP section of my website. Since I have my exams beginning from the 25th, I have yet to start preparing for the papers, mainly ACE & Control systems. The other papers can be managed. The only dragging paper is PMOB - pure management and totally out of my field. But it’s also one of the most scoring papers, provided you write it like a history paper, atleast 5 pages per question, and running to atleast 50 sides for the entire paper. I really detest Madras University corrections for that. I just hope I pass with a good aggregate score.

As far as the project goes, I’ve managed to simulate only one algorithm for both single and multiple frequencies. I tried So’s method for the single frequency, but it didn’t give as good a performance as Widrow’s method. I’m trying a simple notch filter implementation as well to compare the results. Let’s see how many marks PCR gives us.