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.

Back from Sabrimala

Okay so I'm finally back from Sabrimala (Lord Ayyappa's temple), looking much tidy after the shave ( no haircut till now, but I will hopefully get one soon). It was quite a trip. We started on Monday afternoon and reached Sujit's place in Kollam in the evening, had dinner there, did Puja and left for Sabrimala in the night. The jeep ride was a bit scary, as the driver drove very fast, we were at high altitude and the elephants liked to play football with vehicles (yes the elephants do sometimes come and kick your car off the hill when you are going there, why ? Because they are elephants and they have nothing worthwhile to do, unlike us). We reached there at around 1am and took bath in the Pamba river. The water was not too cold and wasn't too deep. We started to climb the hill after that. The climb was really exhausting. We had to climb around 3Km with a very severe incline (and on top of that I had to take care of the Mund, which kept on slipping). We reached the temple at around 3:30am. The temple was to open in another half an hour.
The temple has been built on a raised platform. It is said that, it was once surrounded by a trench to prevent wild animals from coming inside the temple. There are exactly eighteen steps to the temple and each step is made up of pure gold. (The temple itself is made up of gold) These eighteen steps are considered very sacred.
The scene when the temple opened was worth witnessing. A horde of people come charging towards the steps with coconuts in their hands. As soon as they reach near it they start smashing the coconuts on the walls over the top of other people (surprisingly no one gets hurt). Then they go up to the temple.
We were fortunate enough to get Darshan and left back home with lots of paysam.

All that was very nice, but I haven't studied a bit for the exam and I wasted today also. I hope the gods help me ;-)

Rik Van Riel

Hi,
Its been a long time since I posted anything... well to be true I was too lazy to do anything. I got User mode linux working on my system. It took me a whole 12 hours to make the root file system and I was messing things up quite frequently.
Well I got UML working for the patched 2.4.26 kernel but I wanted to work with the 2.6.9 kernel. Unfortunately I has some problems building it... so I went to #kernelnewbies on OFTC. I typed my problem and guess who replied Rik Van Riel hmm that was something ;-)

Making boot up times faster

Well all my exams (including lab) are finally over.. so I set out to tweaking my system. I removed FC-1 from my system (as it had too many issues and gentoo was a better alternative) and used its partition as my /usr (so now I have enough space for Gentoo).
I wanted my system to boot fast as compared to XP. The first thing I did was to find entries in init.d which were not being used and removed them. Another thing which I noticed ,was, that my kernel was 1.6 MB. So I set out trying to make it smaller. I excluded a lot of things from the kernel and modularized the rest (which were needed) and in the end I was left with a kernel which was 980 KB.

And by the way Happy Diwali :)

The wishlist completed

One day it took to get everything in my wish list completed. Here is a screenshot of what I came up with. Looks really nice.

KDE is up

It was a good day today.. I finally got kde up and running. I have also got xmms running.. I also got the frame buffer thing going. So now even the console looks really neat. Here is a screen shot of the console. There are still a few things on my wish list though

• emacs
• mplayer
• ymessenger
• mozilla firefox

Probblems with Qt

So I had really big ambitions with gentoo.. but that seems to have taken a backseat. I was trying to install KDE but the qt library is not building. Now, as many apps depend on qt I dont know how I will get them to work. The only good news was that I got the sound going (mpg321 rules .. :) ).
I have a stupid software engg assignment to submit tomorrow. So I guess I will go write that.

More thoughts on gentoo

Well I got gentoo working from my hard drive. I had to compile the kernel 4-5 times to get all the things right. I have the internet (which includes sharing also) and the lan working. Overall I'm pretty proud of the nice clean system which I have put up together (although a lot of work still needs to be done). I also got X-11 working on gentoo. I still have to get kde (which is an incredibly huge download). I plan to put other things into motion also. Especially UML (user mode linux and not the stuff we study in software engineering) interests me. coLinux also seems to be something nice so I will dig up some stuff for that also.
No classes after tomorrow.. so yeehaw.. finally free..

Gentoo

So I had nothing much to do this weekend so I started browsing the web. It was then that I encountered gentoo. I had heard of it before, but never thought of installing it, as I already have a Fedora Core 1 system running nicely. Inspite of that I though why not give it a shot. So I downloaded the minimal live cd and the stage 2 tarball. I mainly chose stage 2 as I wanted to build the system approximately from scratch. The installation till now has not been too tough, but it depends heavily on the web. Just downloading the portage tree took 3 hours and I still have to install quite a few packages. I havent even downloaded the kernel sources yet. But come to think of it I'm in no hurry and I guess I will just gentoo run all through the night.