Nirenjan’s Space

I’ve been looking around for a hosting service to host my website. V India Technologies has a nice hosting service for 575 rupees a year. The only hitch is that they do not provide database support, for which I have to pay extra. As a result, I’m unable to host MovableType on their server. I tried to put a couple of other weblogging tools on the server but the configuration is a little too confusing and daunting. So if I do sign up with V India, its going to still be my Blogger blog, until I can afford the extra database charges.

I spoke to PCR over the phone today and told him that we were unable to get even a simple sawtooth waveform out of the DAC. Niranjay told me that the port details in the manual given by Vi Microsystems was wrong. PCR has now said that he’ll enquire at Vi and tell us by Tuesday when he comes.

The October/November 2003 exam results are finally out. Thank’s to God’s grace, I’ve passed in all subjects. Just one more semester to complete and then I’m rid of this Madras University for good.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

I just bought an 80 GB hard disk yesterday and managed to get it set up in my computer. But I think one of my IDE cables conked out coz no device connected to it is being discovered by the BIOS. I have now removed my old 20 GB drive and the CD-ROM and now I have the 80 GB and the CD-RW on the primary bus. Nothing on the secondary. Maybe I should change the BIOS itself. I’m getting a lot of experience in this field.

I have now installed SETI@Home as a service in Windows XP so that it will always run in the background and I don’t have to manually start it each time. 247 WU’s and going strong.

Quoted from The Hindu:

More happier as a Professor: Kalam
Chennai, Dec. 17 (PTI): “I was a more happier man as a Professor at Anna University here, mingling with students freely,” President A P J Abdul Kalam, said here today.

He said he had accepted late Homi Bhaba and late Satish Dhavan as his role models, which helped him in his professional career. He wanted students “to accept a great son of the soil as their role model” to achieve their dreams.

Looks like the college has gotten a facelift since last week. The reason? His Excellency, the President of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is going to be present in the college tomorrow morning for about an hour. I don’t think anybody would have recognized the college had they seen it. Now, we have a helipad where our old cricket ground was, a new pathway to the auditorium instead of the usual roundabout route, sprawling lawns, and a huge entrance arch. The entire stretch of cement blocks outlining the greenery were painted white. One section of road was even relayed for the armoured car, which is rumoured to be weighing about 2 tons. The entire motorcade comprises of something like 25-30 cars.

The security for the president is unbelievable. There are at least a hundred cops all over the college, and for all we know, they’ll have snipers as well from the rooftops of the hostels. The president will arrive by helicopter tomorrow morning about 10 o’ clock. He will then come to the auditorium by car (or rather by the motorcade). The function will begin about 10.15 and should go on till 11.15-11.30. He will then leave for Kalpakkam, I think. For the visit, a select few of us have been assigned security passes which we have to show tomorrow along with our college ID card, otherwise we will not be allowed inside the auditorium, probably not even inside the college.

However, we still have a problem tomorrow. One, because of the security, the canteen will not function tomorrow. So we have to eat breakfast and come. Two, the buses will not enter the campus but will be parked outside. Three, for all we know, they will not provide lunch, but will provide some snacks. We have to make our own arrangements for food. Too much security is bad for us. But I guess I can mooch something from the hostel mess.

I have started work on the implementation of the adaptive sinusoidal interference canceller (ASIC) in ADSP-2181. The major difficulty in the implementation is the determination of cosine & sine values as 2181 is a fixed point processor and doesn’t have native support for the core math functions. If I implement it in C and cross-compile it, the method will work, but will be very slow. The other difficulty is debugging the program, which is almost as bad, if not worse than debugging C programs in Linux. But I think we can finish it by the end of the month. That will complete the project work, leaving only the documentation.

Something’s seriously wrong with my system. I think I deleted some important programs by accident while trying to remove the spyware that had infected it. Now, I’m unable to browse the internet from my desktop, but thankfully, the proxy server is still working properly and so I can access it from my laptop.

I’m just back from IIT Powai, Mumbai. I’ve not had access to a computer, let alone the internet, for the past few days, except during the competition, so I’ve been unable to update my blog. Anyway, the contest went off well, although we had a host of problems with our systems. On Saturday, during the practice session, the system wouldn’t even start up PC2, or the documents. Finally, the organizers allotted us the AIUB Blue team’s machine as they didn’t even turn up.

On Sunday, although everything started up fine, PC2 wouldn’t log in to the server. After to and froing between two systems trying to get PC2 to log in, the organizers did something and finally got PC2 to log in, thanks to which the start of the competition got delayed by almost an hour. To top it all off, the team from Shanghai Tongji University managed to solve two or three problems within the first hour and apparently were relaxing after that. None of our solutions were accepted which was most disappointing. Most surprising that our solution for the first problem, decoding, was running fine on our machine but was giving a run-time error on the judges’ machine. For all our other submissions, we got a wrong answer reply. Perhaps our algorithm was wrong altogether or our implementation was wrong.

In any case, the entire event is over. I can no longer participate in the ICPC, but maybe I can coach my juniors to try and take the first place next year. I’ll try to put up the contest questions later. I’ll also try to get the judges’ data, and if possible the output and solutions from some of the guys from IITB.

Well, the review went off without a hitch, although Dr. Srikanth was asking us a lot of questions. Plus we made a few blunders like not putting the labels and titles on the graphs. Somehow we managed to convince him and got 10 in the review.