Gokul's fairly detailed personal logs, & thoughts

link to another blog post called 'Intelligence and how to get it'

2011-10-31T07:38:00.001+05:30

Like in the material from the below article, I too tend to have a bias tending towards the opinion that 'intelligence' (whatever that is) is environmental and how much effort you put (=passion you have in order to put effort on it) than dna and stuff.
http://vinayakpathak.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/intelligence-and-how-to-get-it/
http://vinayakpathak.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/intelligence1.pdf

2011-07-04T11:50:00.000+05:30

I saw some ants waging a war today morning and filmed them on phone Fighting ants! - Shake stabilized

The above video was stablized for 'shake' with a cool l1 optimization algorithm :D
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/06/auto-directed-video-stabilization-with.html

(this is the original shaky video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHBT6ubcD2M)

L1 optimization is really close to what my research topic is - motion compensation in xay CT imaging. :D

i donated blood for the first time a few days ago

2011-06-06T17:40:00.002+05:30

I donated blood for the first time a few days ago (sat morning, 3 days ago).
I'd given my name in the IISc donors database, A- blood - i'm happy i donated for some emergency reasons.
Along with three other A- donors from IISc - the person needed 4 units of blood urgently.

It was 450ml of it in a bag. I was scared of the needle at first :D But it only hurt while poking, and painless while inside. The blood was oozing out wow nice dark red. Besides I was scared something could happen to me as i am lean and weigh only 61kg while my height is 5 foot 8 inches (or something like that).

Nothing happened! I guess all the cycling gave me good health! I was strong and felt nothing. :) Good - I'm not so weak after all!

an app a day keeps everything else away

2011-05-29T10:26:00.003+05:30

Today i installed an xkcd comic viewer app :D It's awesomely geeky cool seeing those geeky monochrome line drawings fill up the screen of a geeky phone :D
The app even makes offline copy, so you have to download only once and can flip through all of them anytime :)

No Signal? 5 Quick Ways to Boost Your Cell Phone Reception. Updated. | Wise Bread

2011-05-11T22:52:00.001+05:30

No Signal? 5 Quick Ways to Boost Your Cell Phone Reception. Updated. | Wise Bread

Checking blogger app again

2011-05-10T17:44:00.001+05:30

Friend's fish tank

Testing the android blogger app

2011-05-10T15:11:00.002+05:30

Does it work :)

Yes it does. Above is a random pic taken from camera, from within the blogger app.

Stolen camera finder

2011-05-09T12:03:00.001+05:30

http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/

Got this link from someone... never tried it myself yet.

2010-12-29T18:24:00.001+05:30

Got this news through the IISc freethinkers group
The following is not my own writing:

-------------------------------------------
Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal Society journal

“We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do
stuff that no one has ever done before.”

This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a
high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its
tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from
Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10,
the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be
published in a Royal Society journal.

Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard,
describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with
more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a
project called ‘i, scientist’, designed to get students to actually
carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some
support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick,
Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.

The class (including Lotto’s son, Misha) came up with their own
questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed
data. They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and
they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.

It’s a refreshing approach to science education, in that it actually
involves doing science. The practical sessions in modern classrooms
are a poor substitute; they might allow students to get their hands
dirty, but they are a long way from true experiments. Their answers
are already known and they do nothing to simulate the process of
curiosity and discovery that lie at the heart of science. That’s not
the case here. As the children write, “This experiment is important,
because no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment
before.”

Read more (and don't miss the *video*) here
-------------------------------------------

End of 'not-my-own-writing'.

Weight machine.... and bicycle weight.

2010-08-10T00:01:00.004+05:30

So ... some bicycles are made so light, and every few gram you shave off the weight of the cycle, especially below 13kg or so, it costs so much more.

Is it really worth it?
Depends on whether you're an athlete needing those few seconds of advantage.

It matters on climbs, but not that much. You could carry a 1litre more water (either in you or in a bottle) and you add a kg to the weight. So it really doesn't matter to lighten a cycle in such expensive ways. For people who aren't feeding their families by winning competitions, at least.

Also at higher speeds, aerodynamics matters more. Just google it.

________________________________________________________________________________

I checked my weight today. Before eating, 60.6 kg. After having noodles and a banana (didn't drink any water yet), I checked the weight again. 61.0 kg. Ah! So the weighing machine really works.

This also shows how small shaving off a few hundred grams from an already light bicycle is.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But too much cycle weight _can_ be a huge problem especially when climbing. I learnt it going to the top of the nandi with my infamously heavy 9 years old hero ranger swing.

Nandi ride : My first longish bicycle ride

2010-08-09T23:36:00.008+05:30

I went cycling to nandi (on my 9 years old heavy ranger swing bought in school (8th std))

A distance of 119.5 km (round trip distance) (on my companion's cyclocomputer)

My previous distance was a 40km (round trip distance) more than a year ago. (Trip to visit my friend.)

People from Bangalore Bikers Club (BBC) (100+ people rode) and IISc Bikers Network (IBN) (6 of us came out of around 50 members)

Photos - a few I took
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://picasaweb.google.com/116911111987510094958/NandiBicycleRideAugust12010Sunday02

About the ride on
IBN http://groups.google.com/group/iiscbikersnetwork/browse_thread/thread/edbe42e5647f4200
BBC http://groups.google.co.in/group/bangalore-bikers/web/sunday-august-1st-2010-nandi-hills

I am planning to buy a nice cycle now. I am loving cycling.

A very beautiful thing : http://groups.google.co.in/group/bangalore-bikers/browse_thread/thread/47bdc25e7469a11f

Excerpts from the above link:
"Hard exercise makes you brutally honest with yourself, your excuses, your
weaknesses and your shortcomings. There's no room for bullshit when you're
tiring at kilometre 60 and there are still 40 left to go."

"In a car, it's fun to watch the odometer go from 9,999 to 10,000. On a
bicycle, it's like watching a sunrise. "

"People who are killing themselves with chips on the sofa have no business
telling you how dangerous cycling is. "

"Don't listen to haters. People don't like passion about things they don't
have passion for. Find yourself a group of people--in real life or
online--that understands.

It's okay if this group seems like a bunch of fanatics. Passion is
important, and passion for the right things is increasingly rare. We live in
a world full of people who are passionate about cell phones, laptops, cars,
TV shows and IPL. For God's sake give me someone who can talk about pedals
and headsets all day. "

"On a 100km ride, the halfway mark is about 80km. "

I'm reading terence tao's blogs and watched some of his lecture/talk videos from youtube

2010-07-15T22:56:00.004+05:30

I came across to Terence Tao's blog from Richard Gardner's pages, through a reference in a paper about Richard Gardner's geometric tomography.

So I was reading up on 'meta information' in Terry's blog, like things about
Enjoying your work
Working hard
Learn the limitations of your tools
Ask yourself dumb questions
Use the wastebasket
Write down what you’ve done
Advice on writing and submitting papers
Continually aim just beyond your current range
Being patient

I want to do this soon:
Making your work available
(so that I am forced to do some work first!! in order to make it available :D
So it's both good for me and good for others too).

I joined GIMPS

2010-07-15T22:48:00.005+05:30

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime search!
(http://www.mersenne.org/)

This is a distributed computing thing that machines all over the world, through the internet, find the next biggest mersenne prime. Now I joined it.

My core 2 duo GNU/gentoo laptop runs GIMPS while I read research papers / browse the web and other such things that keep the machine idle.

My username on it is 'gokul'.

Environmental thoughts??

Hmm... with both the virtual CPUs (core 2 duo remember) on my laptop running two GIMPS worker threads, powertop shows some 30W of power consumption.

My idle laptop consumes around 7 to 12W, with the display on.

I guess around 20W extra to find the next biggest mersenne prime is not that much of an environmental sin? What do you think?

Besides some day I could make it up by buying a 100W solar panel (one of my wishes is to buy one).

Worm bin water logging

2010-07-15T22:41:00.002+05:30

My worm bin (vermicomposting) wasn't going on well at all. The kitchen garbage didn't seem to be converted to vermicompost at all.
The number of worms also started decreasing. I knew something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on the cause for a long time (more than a month I think.)

Finally I guessed it : too much undrained water. This is the monsoon, so rains almost every other day. And the worm bin is a plastic tub with poor drainage.
So I siphoned out the stagnant water into another bucket (didn't throw out that black water - it'll make great liquid vermi-fertilizer).

And then covered the top of the tub in a better way such that rain wouldn't collect in it.

So that was on the last weekend, and this weekend (2 days later) I'm going home and checking on it and it will hopefully be working good as before.

Edit : Aug 7 2010 : Yes it seems to be working better now - no more water logging and I saw a nice fat healthy worm and lots of others. Haven't checked the worm population though - but feel it should be getting better.

Python challenge is an easy way to get into python

2010-05-06T01:00:00.001+05:30

http://www.pythonchallenge.com/

I love this idea! Must be one of the nicest ways to get into a new language.
(I've just begun the challenge now... just finished 3 levels into it)

Nice math place!!

2010-05-05T07:33:00.001+05:30

http://plus.maths.org/index.html
Quite good i think (haven't explored it much, just found it a few minutes ago.)

Learning - some thoughts

2010-03-17T20:17:00.003+05:30

* I think you learn better if you are exhilarated (at least excited) about what you're exploring. This is probably because the neurons form better connections when the signals are stronger. (I'm hand waving of course). Also I saw a documentary where people appeared to remember things better under strong stimuli (palms placed on ice blocks)

* Fear / anxiety can cripple creative thinking / free thought (again no proof, just my intuition)

Digital camera

2010-02-25T23:34:00.001+05:30

I have access to a digital camera now
Canon's A1100

(I am eagerly waiting for a CHDK port for my camera to be released...)

What's chdk:
http://lifehacker.com/387380/turn-your-point+and+shoot-into-a-super+camera
http://chdk.wikia.com/
http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/how-to-expand-your-camera-with-chdk/
Hacking a Canon A720IS digital camera with CHDK on GNU/Linux LG #154

New laptop for me :D

2009-10-04T18:35:00.002+05:30

I have ordered a new Dell vostro 1520. Expected delivery - 7th Oct 2009. (This up-coming wednesday)

Their customization idea is good, and I spent a lot of time to pick a configuration that would work well on linux. I also chose an n-series one, which means it has freedos, and no other preinstalled OS. I don't have to pay for any preinstalled w*dows that I am never going to touch anyway. Linux... oh! here I come to install you with open arms. ( I am also thinking about bsd. When there are good options, one must use them. It is foolish to not even look at / try the other options ever simply because one is good enough.)

My key requirement was hardware with full specs openly released so that perfect opensource (free) linux drivers could be written.
Graphics card: So I chose the Intel 4500mhd graphics card instead of an ATI or NVIDIA. This is good enough for me. Why it can run compiz, and render all those simulators like torcs and flightgear very well. I think it could render most linux 3D games quite very well. What if it cannot run the bleeding edge w**dows games - I am never going to run them or the w**dows OS even.)

Wireless lan card: The default option was a 'dell wireless' card (which I suspect uses the dreaded-linux-incompatible closed-specs (that's what I heard, I may be wrong) broadcom chips). So I chose an Intel 5100 a/g/n wireless card which was actually cheaper by a few hundred rupees.

I heard Intel releases all its specs and Intel hardware usually have fully working open source linux drivers. Including their graphics cards. So this is good news for me and helps in choosing among options.

It also has an LED backlight for the screen, good for ecology (power saving and battery runtime). It is a 15.4 inch screen. The resolution is 1280x800. I guess I can live with it. I need a tall screen for viewing code and manuals and pages. But I can manage with this resolution I think. 1280x800 is actually a widescreen (16:10 ratio) not a 'tallscreen'.
But on the other hand a widescreen may actually have the advantage that you can put your code on one half and docs on the other.

***************

What distro of linux:
Well this is a another huge time consuming question. At first, my choice was linux from scratch (LFS). But after realizing that I also had to complete my PhD, I settled for something in between. Gentoo.
I can still compile everything from code. Not that much time needs to be spent compared to LFS.
I can still customize everything to a great depth and extent. So for now, gentoo it is. I am in the process of looking through the webpages about gentoo right now.

Why all this effort:
A personal computer is another whole new place, another dimension where I can live. So I need to get it just right to my taste. I should not cripple my freedom and creativity, which is why I love things like free(dom) software and GNU stuff.

Aquaponics, vermicompost, roof plants update

2009-10-04T17:58:00.005+05:30

Note that now I stay at the hostel in the IISc campus. I come home on weekends.

* My aquaponic system:
My aquaponic system is ... well, the transformer of the pump controller is damaged (seems to be due to heat or something).
Now the plants in the tubs are not watered by the fish-water now.
Only the muck collected all these years and rain water (this is the monsoon season now) has kept them green. Including a rice plant which has several rice grains ! This is just one plant from one rice grain that I found in the sack of rice we eat at home. This rice grain was one of the few in the whole sack whose husk was still on it.
From one plant from one rice grain, I have got several (30 to 50?) rice grains on the plant!! What a scale of reproduction!

And the fish - I can't feed them properly as I stay in the IISc campus on weekdays. But they seem very fit (I am not a fish doctor - they just looked fit to me). I have prepared a small, new batch of fish feed (from chickpea flour, ragiflour and curd (yogurt) made into a paste, solidified on a hot dosa plate and cut into small squares. I have put this in the freezer. I shall instruct my parents to feed the fish with this for now, from the IISc campus, through phone during weekdays.

I plan to repair my homemade pump controller in the near future.

* Vermicompost
Yay the worms are doing very well. My mother is religiously collecting bio-degradable kitchen waste garbage in a bucket, and I dump this into the bucket with vermicompost and worms when I come home for the weekend. Vermicomposting is really low maintanance! Its working very well with a little commonsense knowledge from past experience and the internet's vermicomposting websites, and very little work on my side.

* Roof plants
On the roof of my house I have a small patch of soil, the size of a floor mat (common indian floor mat size). It is only a few inches thick. I am a strong believer of liquid gold used in a sensible, safe hygenic manner. I also have tried to innoculate the soil with as much biodiversity as possible. I have added to the soil, a little vermicompost diluted with a lot of water, some water from my aquaponic system, lots of cowdung from the areas around my house. (The cows/buffaloes are grass fed - this is like a village type of area in Bangalore.)

So now the roof actually has 8+ corn plants! They are now having some corn like things on the tops of the stalks, I have to wait and see what they mature into.
I dislike buying seeds from a seed 'manufacturer'. I believe plants have been there long before our industrialized seed 'manufacturing'. They can surely grow and reproduce on the own, if we only let them!
The corn seeds I used were actually ones from a half kilogram batch bought for eating purposes.

I also have on the roof, chickpea plants which have already produced chickpeas long ago. Some corriander that bolted, but I'll let the seeds from the bolted plants fall and reseed themselves! I like 'natural'. Our job is easier if we only have to assist nature, not control it. (We can control it after we have understood it, right now we have understood very little about all the bacteria and interactions in natural biodiversity and how plants exactly work.)

I also have two tomato plants that have come up on their own. (Some tomato pulp must have probably, accidentally fallen on the soil). They are producing tomatoes.

I have also planted lots of potato plants from the separted eyes of a few potatoes. They are also quite big plants now. Haven't dug up to see if there are any potatoes but I don't care. Let them grow all they want. If they dry up, the new potatoes under the soil will produce new plants. A stage will reach when I can just dig and find atleast a few potatoes anytime I want.

All this has managed to sustain itself on the monsoon rains and maybe my mother's occasional watering. I come home only on weekends, remember?

Ted talks is amazing

2009-07-13T15:23:00.000+05:30

Ted talks is amazing.
http://www.ted.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector

My firefox bookmarks

2009-07-06T22:40:00.000+05:30

Here are my firefox bookmarks, slightly edited with grep and sed.
There _may_ be some useless links but there are many awesome ones too and I really want you to not miss out on them:

Bookmarks

Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities

mmm... (ok I couldn't think of a better subheading)

The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics
Algebraic & Geometric Topology
arXiv.org e-Print archive
Math Texts
NUMDAM :: Search and download archives of mathematical journals
Online texts
MIT OpenCourseWare

How a transistor works, an alternate viewpoint

Al Zimmermann's Programming Contests

Programming Contest Calendar - Algorithmist

Hacking Linux Exposed

Home Automation on *nix

Linux Home Automation Project
The Open Source HCS project
MisterHouse

www.cut-the-knot.org

MathPuzzle.com

Mathematical Association of America: MAA Online

Complex Analysis

A First Course in Linear Algebra (A Free Textbook)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASTROBIOLOGY, ASTRONOMY, AND SPACEFLIGHT

Eric Brasseur

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

IBM Research | Ponder This | January 2004 Challenge

LinuxFocus Index theme - software dev

LinuxFocus Magazine, English

Single list of HOWTOs

Mark's lecture material

Fravia's web-searching lore: Main entrance: Finding Information and Knowledge on Internet

Autopilot: The UAV Project

Inertial Sensors and Systems

Linux Journal |

Linux Gazette

Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online - Table of Contents

Computer Collector - Geniac Document Archive

Spark, Bang, Buzz and Other Good Stuff.

Beginner Seeking Guidance ( Need to sharpen my mind ) Text - Physics Forums Library

International Lighting in Controlled Environments Workshop

the Otherpower.com Discussion Board || Make your electricity from scratch!

Graph Theory - (english) book by a German author

An Introduction to Wavelets: Wavelet versus Fourier Transforms

Python Tutorial

Nyquist Plots

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Cooking For Engineers - Kitchen Notes: Scoville Units

Daily Musings: Kollu Paruppu (horse gram) Chutney and Rasam

electronics

Bill's Art bots
Hack A Day
Play-Hookey!
berkeley : Basic Semiconductor Circuits lab
Electronics Index
Circuit Cellar Discussion Board :: Index
Robotics India - Your online robotics community
hackday 6 MOSFET PWM
Open Circuits
practical, common electronic components
EDAboard.com
'Junk' Reuse - Identifying Electronic Components
Popular Electronics Magazine
Ashish's hacks
GPS & GLONASS RX - theory
semiconductor physics
mobile phone LCD hacks

LCD - mobile phone - Berty's Page

Thomas Pfeifer's Homepage - Elektronik, AVR-Projekte, Tipps und Tricks

Nokia LCD Library

Nokia LCD types
electric vehicles

Electric Bicycle Experiments

www.ebikes.ca Homepage of the revolution

Electric Vehicle Challenge - Swan TAFE

EVDL Library

Electric Echo Blog

Electric Echo - Home

Electronics
Embedded projects from around the web
Wolfgang Wieser
www.SiliconFarEast.com - All About Semiconductor Manufacturing!
Elliott Sound Products - DIY Audio Articles
The Best of Bob Pease
Where to Buy Components
opencores.org
John Kent's VHDL FPGA Projects
zorg.org
Wireless FM Transmitter
VA3AVR's electronic circuits for the hobbyist
Guido's Home-page

aquatic ecosystems

Aqua Botanic - Plants and biological filtration
Wetwebmedia's Freshwater Index (SubWeb)
Backyard Aquaponics
Fish: Search FishBase
114 Photos of Mineral Deficiencies in Plants (~ 1 meg) for Visual Diagnosis
FishProfiles.com
Hydroponics Plant Nutrient Deficiencies and Solutions from High Nutrients
Worm Composting :: Setting up Your Worm Bin, and Moving In :: All Things Organic, Worm Composting
green water-why, how, myths

<not very awesome> - Engineering Questions and Answers

WebEE Tutorials

Dilbert.com - The Official Dilbert Website by Scott Adams - Dilbert, Dogbert and Coworkers!

Thomas Greenleafs hobby programming

ibiblio - transmission lines intro

ibiblio - Lessons In Electric Circuits

ibiblio - Open Book Project

ibiblio - Socratic Electronics

Battery Chargers and Charging Methods

Hashing.txt

Chaitin, The Limits of Mathematics. (LISP here)

Roland’s Blog Mathematician, linux hacker, former athlete

The C Book - Table of Contents

The Math Forum @ Drexel University

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

VU3RDD Station Log » Putting together a Junk Box

Homebrew Radio How-to

Hacker's Delight

Geeksinside.com - Home

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Website

ftp://194.44.214.3/pub/e-books/

Introduction to Airplane Design for Education and Learning

LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux

ffmpeg and youtube : Using A Sharper Stick « Oldskooler Ramblings

eco geek

eco search engine

My IISc course now Ph.D

2009-07-02T19:41:00.000+05:30

Yay!

Instead of the MSc program I am now going to persue the direct Ph.D program.
(They offered me an option between MSc and PhD and I readily agreed to the latter.)

I am very happy now.

Changes in my environment

2009-06-28T20:55:00.000+05:30

Below are some changes in my environment that could occur when I join my pg programme:
_____

When I shift to the IISc hostel, I don't know whether I need to take my desktop with me. I don't even have a laptop right now.

A good part of me becomes a void without my own personal computer. I am a linux person.

Hopefully, they might provide the students with a unix account. Then it will be bliss. (real bliss)

Let's see.

_____

I like to (at least try) to grow my own food. Food nowadays, even in India, (at least in the cities) is certainly not free of pesticides, and very probably grown with NPK fertilizers not paying attention to soil-biodiversity (earthworms, micorrzheal fungi [correct the spelling yourself if your picky], nitrogen fixing bacteria and humus, et al).
And then food is becoming more and more expensive, probably because it is transported using polluting fossil fuel that's imported.

So I have recently tried to attempt to grow some food plants myself (I enjoy growing plants anyway). Though the quantity of food that I have grown so far is negligible compared to what I consume, I tried out the grow-your-food experiment more as proof-of-concept on a small scale. I could scale it up anytime. I have successfully grown a handful of ground(or pea)nuts from just 5 plants, a fine bunch of fenugreek plants, around 1.5 kg of tomatoes (around 10 fruits were lost to a nibbling rat-like mystery animal - the pesky thing :)), small potatoes (maybe I should have taken better care - they would have grown up well), some spring onions, lots of mint, quite a bit of fennel seeds as well as fennel as a leafy-herb-thing, three or four garlics, some beans.

All these were grown in a very small area. Except the tomatoes which were outside on the ground, most of the others were grown only in a thin layer of soil (the height of your palm)!, spread over a ledge of my house. The fennel and mint was grown in my aquaponic system.

I wonder if I would be able to continue to try this after I join my pg programme.

______

Some people may say I'm wasting time doing all sorts of things, but I've read in a kazillion (good) places (places include webpages, books, etc) that anybody _should_ have a hobby to be sane.

Well I do have hobbies, that I am proud of. I am constantly in the quest of things to do. Places like www.instructables.com give me a high. You would understand.

Nothing (my hobbies, that is) is going to affect my research. I have a passion for science that can only be deep.

Why even google has their Fridays reserved for their employess doing whatever they want. A lot of good google products were born out of this.

Creative juices flow, but never when you're working on them and trying hard, slogging to get a bright idea.
The greatest of ideas have never arrived because someone sat down at a table and tried hard to make it come. The awesome-est of ideas come up when you have lunch, or go to the bathroom.

What about Edison's 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration?
That's very much true. I enjoy the perspiration part, even if it is 99% of the time. But this always follows the 1% inspiration (the 'idea') that comes, not when your sleeplessly slogging but when you are doing something completely unrelated like tending to your bean plants.
There is no point in the 99% perspiration that does not come trailing with the 1% idea in front of it.
______

Admission offer - M.Sc at IISc (or Ph.D?)

2009-06-26T14:04:00.000+05:30

I couldn't be a happier person.

I got a letter today offering admission to an MSc program at IISc (indian institute of science) in the Electrical department, systems and signal processing.

I may also be able to take up the direct Ph.D program instead of MSc. But it is not yet confirmed and is being processed. It has a good probability that it will happen. I am praying it will happen.

Another update on my current status: All my 8th (last) semester undergrad formalities (exams, etc) are completed (finally!) Only the results/report cards are being awaited now.

Another thing that prevents me from being totally happy is that the admission to M.Sc/Ph.D is going to be provisional until I get the report cards saying I passed my under-grad, before a certain deadline.
Although the probability is low that I fail to pass my under-grad, I still cannot rest happy until everything is all confirmed.

Done Chapter 5 of my Linux from scratch! :D

2008-07-28T11:56:00.000+05:30

Done Chapter 5 of my Linux from scratch! :D

Some philosophical rantings:
The reason I delayed doing Linux from scratch (LFS) for quite a long while is because I don't find it enjoyable to just follow instructions, with no creative inputs from my side.
The LFS book has instructions that an LFS newbie has no option but to follow exactly (it's recommended to use the exact, same versions of the software too!). So I was discouraged and didn't actually dip my feet into LFS for about a year.

Now : I decided it's ok to follow the LFS instructions without creatively putting your own inputs. (only at first - remember, only at first as an LFS newbie.). Why is this ok - a few points:
* Admit it, it's hard to do otherwise as an LFS newbie - a chicken and egg problem. You do LFS to a) have your own customized distro b) to learn about how it all fits together in a linux distro. If you don't know how it all fits together, you cannot modify things and deviate from the LFS book instructions !
* Things like glibc and gcc are really complex and if you mess up some compilation options as a newbie who doesn't know how it all fits together, you'll have to start all over again. You know how long it takes to compile stuff !!
* Once you follow the instructions the first time, you never have to do it again! You get the hang of it and you can truly rest happy.

UPS/SMPS - idea for better efficiency.

2008-07-20T01:46:00.000+05:30

I was thinking about computer power consumption and was annoyed that with power from a typical UPS battery, even with the monitor turned off and the CPU idle, you could still last only for 20min or so!!

Bad isn't it?

I could not get a quick fix for drastically reducing idle state power consumption of our fairly monsterous x86s (unless we used a clockless processor or at least one of those beautiful RISC machines.)

But I did think about the UPS - the fairly low battery voltage is converted to 240V with some inefficiency and back to 5V, 12V by the SMPS with some other inefficiency, which is multiplied by the first inefficiency (to get the total inefficiency) ... whoa!

If the UPS and SMPS were integrated somehow, the only user of the 240V AC power would be the monitor (well, maybe we could get an LCD monitor to work out of 12V or something? But a CRT can be tough to get to work from low voltages, especially DC voltages, because it needs really high voltages (kV) for the CRTube you know. Anyway they seem to be getting phased out on most desktops now.)

So a 12V battery, with some simpler ciruitry that can both boost and buck this (since battery voltages usually drop as they discharge). Providing 5V, 12V more efficiently. 240V AC only for CRT. Even an LCD monitor should be designed to work with low voltage supplies.
Why, even the speakers / external amplifiers use such low voltages anyway (through their own little transformer).

Result:
You save on some transformer/other electronic component costs. You get the computer to run longer during a power failure.

Edit: I just remembered google uses a simplified SMPS (12V output only), getting themselves 85% efficient ones instead of the usual multiple-voltage-output 55% to 65% efficient ones. Their whitepaper (pdf) .
It's also been discussed at Slashdot. Someone even mentioned the UPS /SMPS inefficiency thing there.

Styrofoam (thermacole) vermicompost container.

2008-07-15T09:45:00.000+05:30

I made a cheapo container (a rectangular box of approximate dimensions 500mm x 300mm x 210mm) out of styrofoam sheets!

Verry fragile but definitely stronger than the worms inside it.

I have some (100?) eisina fetida (red wrigglers? - compost worms) that I got from my grandmother's village (from cowdung manure that was being vermicomposted as a NGO initiative or something like that).
(Heck no I didn't steal the worms meant for a good purpose of educating villagers. I got these handful of worms from a bucket of compost that was meant to be spread around in their home - backyard and they had a much larger stock of worms in their main composter anyway.)

The worms have actually been in a smaller plastic box for a few months. (maybe 2 or 3 months?). I see a lot of worm capsules ('eggs'). Great!

Yes I did hear about possible toxicity of styrofoam bins (by leaching some volatile vapours or something) but I finally went ahead with it due to these reasons:
* We sometimes drink and eat out of styrofoam
* It looks and smells inert to me ;)
* I am going to expand in the near future (a year?) into a bigger box. I will probably be using untreated wood or something then.

This box I made looks real good (aesthetically - not structurally of course) and I may be able to go further in acheiving the goal of vermicomposting everything non-plastic, non-toxic that would otherwise leave the house.

Nice gEDA tutorials!

2008-07-15T09:11:00.000+05:30

I found these and I am going to go through them all !
gschem_warmup gsch2pcb_tutorial
Muahahaha :D

I got the gEDA suite installed at around Aug 21 2007 (file creation dates on the binary) but never got to playing with it because I had other priorities and the gEDA suite is not straightforward and intuitive to use.
(I say it's not intuitive because it's a suite of various software, not a monolithic thing, so. I repeat : There seems to be a negative correlation between powerful software and intuitiveness to beginners. Powerful software/things rarely come without a fairly steep learning curve. Like emacs, blender3d and so on. No gain without pain.)

Now that I also have 3 weeks of holidays left (until Aug 4):

Let my fun begin! :D.

Just had pulav with aquaponic mint (pudina) :D :D

2008-07-11T10:02:00.000+05:30

Just had pulav my mother made this morning. She first put my request for pulav off saying there was no mint (pudina) in the house, to which I reminded her of my aquaponic system which was overflowing with it.

This morning I had the pulav and...

[yummm..]

I don't know if it was due to other ingredients or due to the AP(aquaponic) mint, but I sure think the mint is the one that has made this pulav so good.

+1 for aquaponics :D

Boring log : Cleaning up things for passing time away

2008-07-10T23:20:00.000+05:30

I have a month of holidays until Aug 4th.

Today I actually ended up labelling and archiving everything on my gmail inbox.
This was because I read-up Gmail Tips: The Complete Collection from head to toe.

Now every mail has at least one label. Yeah (personal opinion) folders are inferior.

You know, I once had such an idea for a filesystem or a user level program where users attached tags (keywords) to files, each one they created, which would keep things organized/searchable. There would also be folders, so you could have the best of both worlds.

Why, a filesystem is complex to hack, but one could easily make a user-level program that just needs to
* Maintain a database of filenames and tags
* Provide a search for paths given tags as the search keys.
* That's it :D