2005: Happy new year

errr.. Nothing creative coming to my head right now.. I guess "Happy new year" should be enough, rather than doing recollections of what I have been doing in 2004 (the archives are there for that)

Number 20

Happy birthday to me.. I turned 20 and am no longer a teenager (who cares)..Morning I had my friends wishing me (some did forget about it.. and haven't calleda yet). In the evening me and my friends went to eat out. Had a nice time and got to click some photos with the new nikkon coolpix digi cam.

Tsunami hit India and other parts of South East Asia. Many people lost their lives and their homes. Hope their souls rest in peace and may god help those who survived this tragedy.

My first day.. in Delhi

I reached Delhi yesterday, the train journey was pretty boring. In fact the Train was delayed for 4 hours ( to add to the boredom ). Today, I went to Gurgaon with Mom, Dad and my brother. It is 40Km from my home place and I got to drive, so that was nice. We went to one of the malls to have lunch. The food was good and the place was designed with a retro North India touch. For example the place had an Auto Rickshaw inside the restaurant (granted, that autos can be seen everywhere in India,but this one was the kind which you see here.) My brother had a new nikkon camera so he took some snaps. We came back around 7:00 in the evening. Everyone else was very tired, but I went to see my other old school friends. It was a nice busy day.

Leaving for Delhi.

I have Christmas break and I'm leaving for Delhi today. I'm going alone.. (as rest of the guys have already left) the two day train journey promises to be a big bore (as always). I have packed everything.. and nothing left to do..

Microprocessor lab over

Today I had my Microprocessor lab. Although I was a bit apprehensive, the lab exam went on pretty smoothly. I got a comparatively easy question ( To generate two square waves depending on a mode bit 90° and 180° out of phase). Others were not as lucky as me.
One truth about lab exams is that, they are 70% luck and 30% hard work.
Well, it is a big relief that all my exams are officialy over now. I'm leaving for Delhi tomorrow. I hope I have some fun there. I'm really looking forward to driving the car and meeting my friends.

Language processor lab over

I had my language processors lab today. Although I hadn't studied much I was confident that I would do okay. I reached there at 9:10 am (courtesy Sourav), and came to know that the exam was supposed to begin at 9:00 am . Fortunately the exam only began at 9:30. I got a question to implement a symbol table for C in C. It wasn't too tough and I was able to do it. The other guys in my batch had to implement FIRST and FOLLOW. Initially I thought that they had to implement it for any grammar, which seemed quite unreasonable, but they had to do it for a given grammar. The algorithm for any generic grammar is a bit tough to implement and not easy to understand. The cases which we have to take care are the following.

• When there is left recursion.

• When there are cycles in the grammar

  A->B
  B->C
  C->A

• When there are epsilon productions.

My modded case (courtesy of Rahul) with a stealth drive and shiny lights. 

Believe it or not this is a PC cabinet.. made by zapwizard. 

My modified case

Yesterday night out of nowhere Rahul dropped by and said that he wanted to make me a stealth drive. I (obviously) didn't object and he went on to work. Not only did he managed to do the stealth drive very nicely (given the set of limited tools at his disposal), he also put in some lights inside the cabinet for me and it looks really nice. I will put up some photos, as soon as Rahul gets his PC in working condition (well the photos are in his camera.. and the camera is connected to the PC which is not working... blah blah).

MSN Search for language processor lab

Tomorrow is Language processor lab, so having nothing worthwhile to do I did a search for language processor lab on MSN. Guess what, my home page was second on the list. That is some progress that my site has made :))

Quantum computing

Quantum Computing is a field on which research is being done. It is a very promising field, as the advances in this field can increase the computing power of todays computers tenfold ( actually much more than that). The concept behind quantum computing is a bit hard to understand. I couldn't figure much about it. Quantum computers should be able to crack most of the current prevalent encryption standards such RSA etc pretty easily.In 1999, a group from Los Alamos National Laboratory and MIT constructed the first experimental demonstrations of a quantum computer using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology.Though these devices have had mild success in performing interesting experiments, the technologies each have serious limitations.

Exams over..

My exams are finally over. The fact is it never felt like exams. They came in a hurry and went in a hurry. But the funny part (or rather the sad part) is that I don't feel relaxed (not that I'm tensed up or anything, but usually one does feel relaxed in such a case). So right now I'm here all alone in the house.. I have watched Ocean's Eleven (nice movie) and I really don't know what to do.. Among other things I managed to dig up some funny irc logs .

The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

The Book of Mozilla, 7:15:
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Continuing on the emulator trip

Gentoo Linux Newsletter -- December 13, 2004. The Gentoo newsletter had a ton of emulators for (guess what) Linux. Of which I have only used User mode linux.

Bochs (pronounced box)

bochs: The Open Source IA-32 Emulation Project (Home Page). Some more of emulation stuff for me to work on .. will give it a go after the exams are over.

BrainF***k

Something to emphasize on what is going inside my head.. well no. This is actually a programming language (yeah right) for which one could write a compiler very easily (not joking). In fact the compiler for BrainF***k is around 171 Bytes large. By the way don't even think about writing programs in it.. It is a total waste of time. It consists of only 8 commands (originally posted as "operators") and was built to be turing complete (originally posted as "to simulate a turing machine"). To me the programs look nothing more than cute ASCII art.

Quines and bad exams

I had my Language processors exam today. The paper was lengthy so I couldn't write everything that I wanted to :(
I recently came upon this: Quines are programs that print themselves out. Now, this didn't sound that tough to me on first look but believe me it is not easy as it sounds. In fact a guy has even written a paper about it.