Life in the first 6 months of 2010 was abuzz with work. Completed my MSc thesis, interned in a lab working on hardware platforms performing Side Channel Attacks, consulted for a couple of startups on FPGA based system designs and was contemplating/deciding on my next career move. Of-course there were these never ending bureaucratic issues that needed fixing. Finally I decided to stay back at school and pursue a PhD (a separate blog post coming up). Before the start of this phase of my career, I had decided to do a mini north EuroTrip and spend some time with family/ friends back in India. So here I was in India for the past 1 month meeting a whole bunch of people and having pleasant exchanges. I am scribbling down a few memorable moments of August 2010.

• Meeting up with friends in Pune and Bangalore, discussing a wide range of topics from life to capitalism to Indian media to Ekta Kapoor / Indian film industry to state of Indian education to anything under the sky.
• A memorable night out at a farm house near East Coast Road with college friends and spending most part inside the pool again discussing random things.
• Finished reading Gone with the wind, AIDS Sutra, Animal Farm, A Whole New Mind and An Indian Odyssey. 5 books in a month. The last time I achieved this number was a long time back.
• Traveled more that 5000 Kms by air and land.
• Spent a good amount of time with parents.

The BIGGEST thing I will be missing back in Switzerland is the casual chit-chat with family and friends over a whole lot of issues – basically the feeling of connection at the emotional level and of-course the HOME comfort. Strangely enough, I DONT seem to miss Indian food. @sidcarter put it very well in this tweet earlier today. There were of-course some disappointments/frustrations; but I am in a very light mood as of now to even think about them.

Tonight I head back to work in Zurich, Switzerland. See you later, India.

I am again all set to shift house/cities and the amount of books I am giving off, have to put in boxes is way too much and a pain to manage. Additionally, I have had an eye on eReaders for over 2 months constantly reviewing all models. I chose Amazon Kindle 2 over Nook or any other eReader for various reasons. Major one being, its from Amazon and it synonyms with books. I trusted them to get things right and they REALLY have. Below I am summarising the pros and cons of the Kindle 2. I have been using this device for over 3 weeks and traveled about 5000 Kms with it. This is what I have to say on the device. Read on and if it helped you feel free to leave a comment.

Pros:

1. Reading in bright daylight is a breeze. In fact you will feel more comfortable reading in bright daylight. Glare is minimal or nil.
2. Ergonomically placed keys and easy to use Menus
3. Fast (less than a second) page changes when compared to other ebook readers in the market.
4. Battery life is easily 5-6 days with intermittent wireless activity and song playback.
5. Native PDF support.
6. Kindle edition books are cheaper (sometimes upto 40-60%) than the print edition on Amazon.
7. Annotating/highlighting quotes, clipping off articles from magazines are features that I am already loving.  Not to mention that the search option even searches inside the notes you have annotated. (I am very very particular about dog-ears and ink marks on my books and this feature just saves me from those sickness)
8. Good quality music playback.
9. Its also possible to share your books and reads with your family and friends. Read this link.

Cons/Could have been better if:

1. Why on earth did Amazon decide not to put a “prev page” button on the right side of the kindle?
2. No way to organise my books. But I found a work around by using notes to virtually “TAG” my books. (UPDATE: 2.5 software upgrade has added “Collections” feature with which you can sort your reading materials.)
3. Not every book you want to read will have a Kindle edition. So if you are one of those nostalgic guys, you still have the opportunity to buy those one-off paper books and get seduced by its fresh smell.
4. You cannot increase font size while reading PDFs. Yes you can zoom but the entire width of the page might not fit in. For academic 2-column papers I found this hack pretty useful. For books in pdf format, I have to change the orientation of the kindle. Converting PDFs into ebook formats loses images/diagrams and sometimes alignment goes for a toss. (using Calibre for the conversion)
5. I seem to read books way faster than my usual speed. May be because of the ability to set the font size, line spacing, etc. comfortable to me for each book. Which means more books and more cash out. But am not complaining

Killer feature(s):

1. On the fly Oxford American dictionary word-meaning lookup. Yes, the Kindle comes with the Oxford Dictionary packed into it.
2. Automatic wireless delivery of newspapers, magazines you want to read. Check the coverage for your location(s) in this map.
3. Annotations/highlighting of quotes, lines on ebooks. All your notes and markings are backed up on Amazon.com.
4. Pretty nifty note-taking ability.

In short, I would highly recommend Kindle to people who read a lot and travel/move around. Its also worth it for people who want to revoke their reading habits (had friends get back their reading hunger).

Leave a comment if you have any questions or your own personal views on Kindle.

PS: Amazon lowered its Kindle prices recently. Also the Kindle DX is getting a new look soon.

Readers,
Sorry for the spam of the planets. This is a test post to check some server migration issues.
Thanks for your understanding.

GNUSim8085 development team is pleased to release version 1.3.6 of its 8085 simulator for Linux and Windows platforms. This is the first stable version after moving over to launchpad for our project management. With this release we bring to our users a wide range of new additions. To read the complete release announcement head here. We appreciate your continued support in the form of bug reports (with patches ) and general feedback. Feel free to ask questions and get support through Launchpad’s Answers interface. You can join our development team here - https://launchpad.net/~gnusim8085-devel . We always have some work. Some key highlights of this release are as follows

• The UI is now internationalized. Translations for Arabic, Asturian, Catalan, Esperanto, French, German, Gujarati, Italian, Kannada and Spanish languages are now in place.
• Printing support is added.
• Improved Windows installer with multi-language interface.
• Several UI modifications to enhance user experience.
• A dozen bug fixes.

Starting with this release the release files will be available only on Launchpad download page. Please head to https://launchpad.net/gnusim8085 Packages for older Ubuntu releases  are expected to arrive soon and we shall announce once it is in place.

The project management is moved from sourceforge.net to launchpad.net. The work of migrating bugs from sourceforge.net to launchpad.net is in progress. Going forward all project communication will happen only via the launchpad infrastructure.

And oh! We have our own domain now http://www.gnusim8085.org (a redirect to the LP page) and a brand new logo courtesy of Kamaleshwar Morjal

Happy Simulating!!

I use Fedora for RTEMS development and Ubuntu for my regular academic, leisure tasks. Fedora 12 is a Qemu image which I run using the linux kvm module. It never struck me until recently to just ssh into the guest machine (Fedora 12) from the host (Ubuntu 9.10) and do my RTEMS development work. I had always started the VM and worked inside it. This made my other applications on my host (Ubuntu 9.10) crawl. By default, both KVM as well as Virtual Box have guest to host communication enabled. On the contrary, the host system cannot communicate with your guests. This can be done by making the guest (your Virtual Machines) to listen to one of the host system’s ports.

In KVM this is achieved by adding the “redir” argument to the command while starting the virtual machine;

kvm -hda fedora.img -hdb swap.img -boot c -m <memory allocation in megabytes> -redir tcp:[host-port]::[guest-port]

Here we would like to make the guest port 22 (default ssh port) listen on some host port, say 2222.

kvm -hda fedora.img -hdb swap.img -boot c -m 384 -redir tcp:2222::22

If you are using Virtual Box then follow this tutorial.

Now your guest machine can be accessed via ssh from your host system as you would do for any remote server. E.g.,

ssh -l rtems -p 2222 localhost

In case you need X forwarding, use the -X flag or the -XC flag for X forwarding with compression enabled.

Emacs with tramp mode on my (host) Ubuntu machine is all I now need. A perfect Fedora 12 “remote” development server is setup. I can now do away with all the jazz of GNOME/KDE on the virtual image .

GNUSim8085 is a simulator environment for the Intel 8085 processor. Like most open source creations, “scratch your itch” resulted in this nifty application. The “itch” was the absence of a 8085 simulator for GNU/Linux platform while Sridhar was preparing for his Micro-processor lab exam and decided to create one. Three days and it was in working shape with which he practiced for his exam. Even today, this processor is used in many educational institutions around the world for introductory courses on microprocessor architecture and assembly level programming. Onkar and myself took over the development from Srid a couple of years back and for the past 6 months or so there was not much activity in there. A casual visit to the SF page shocked each of us. There were a hefty number of feature requests/bug reports and SF happily swallowed them without any email notifications. This was not the first time this has happened, and we decided to move to some other code hosting service. After arguing on several providers, we finally decided to move to Launchpad. So here is the new project site.

A new release with a lot of bug fixes and some useful features is coming soon. With this release, we will have localisation support with strings translated into Gujarati, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Catalan and Esperanto. If you are translator, head to the translations page and start firing in some translations in your language NOW.

We are happy with Launchpad just for some very inflexible structure that it imposes (but thats a different blog altogether) and the absence of a wiki. We are back to active development and are absolutely excited with the numerous feature and support requests that are coming in via email as well as the trackers. I guess the German Wikipedia page on GNUSim8085 did contribute to the sudden rise in interest. Happy hacking and simulating.

Continuing the meme intiated by Sankarshan and started by the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, here goes my best photo(s) of 2009. I like to categorise it into Best Night Shot, Most memorable trip and Best personal like. If you want to check it out on black background head to the original blog here.

Best Night Photo – I casually took a photo of this scene from over a bridge and upon seeing it on the LCD I saw the reflection of the colours and the beauty. Took out my tripod and spend 15 minutes getting the image according to what I like. Easily my favourite night shot of 2009. Taken in Barcelona.

Memorable – Most difficult one to choose. In the end I preferred this one to this other photo because the other is seen in gazillion of web photo albums. This is unique, simple and potrays the wonderful Swiss landscape.

Adorable – Do I even have to explain? I thank God for this. Best wishes and a very very Happy, Prosperous New Year 2010 to all my readers.

For the past 1 month, especially en-route preparations for FOSS.IN 2009 I wanted to have a complete repository on my hard disk from where people can checkout, commit src code, schematics, technology information and do whatever needed without the necessity of INTERNET connectivity. Thats where git drew my attention. I have been a cvs / svn user for long time now and the very fundamental design aspect of git / any distributed version control system makes me happy as it is just what a developer like me needs.

So here goes a quick how-to (more of a note to self) on how I setup a remote git repo on one of the servers I have ssh access to.

1. SSH into your remote server (ssh uname@remoteserver)

2. Say, you are starting off setting up a git setup on this remote server. Create a directory by name say git (In the below example I put it in the home directory). All projects shall go into this directory.

uname@remoteserver$ mkdir ~/git

3. Now, create a project.git directory. If your project name is ledblink then do the following.

uname@remoteserver$ mkdir ~/git/ledblink.git

4. Initialise a bare git directory

uname@remoteserver$ cd ~/git/ledblink.git

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ git – -bare init

5. Edit the description file to describe the project [Optional of-course]. Then edit the config file to enable reposharing by adding the line “sharedrepository = 1” under the [core] section.

6. Setup appropriate permissions. In the below example user only rights.

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ chmod -R g=u .

uname@remoteserver/git/ledblink.git$ find . -type d | xargs chmod g+s

So all is done on the server side. Go back to your local machine.

7. Go to the folder you want to be version control or create a fresh directory where you will put your project files. Lets say localprojectrepo is the directory name. Change directory into the localprojectrepo and do the following.

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git init

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ touch samplefile.txt

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git add .

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git commit -m “First commit”

Your local git repository is created. Now lets add the server as remote so that a push “syncs” the changes to the remote server.

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git remote add origin uname@remoteserver:<pathto>/git/ledblink.git

uname@localhost/localprojectrepo$ git push origin master

Life is good! To take backups of your remote git repo, use your favourite means to copy the ~/git directory you create on the remote server. Thanks to good old friend Anurag for helping me through the details.

If you are enthusiastic about Free and Open Source Software and you are anywhere near Bangalore (even if you are not, there is nothing stopping to be near Bangalore during this time), make sure you head to FOSS.IN 2009. FOSS.IN is the first conference for Open Source that I attended back in 2005 and was impressed. Since then I have attended all FOSS.INs except the 2006 (away from the country on an official trip). The conference has undergone several changes over the years from being a “Just another Conference” to “Getting things done” event. Project days were introduced in 2007, Workouts in 2008 and this year, team FOSS.IN has decided to take it a little further making it more “hacker” friendly in similar lines with Chaos Computer Congress organised by Chaos Computer Club, arguably one of the most influential hacker groups.

This time around Santosh Vattam and myself are taking leads in having a RTEMS Workout. We have put up the pre-requisites, purpose and general outline on the wiki page here. Currently we are stream lining the objectives into being more specific. If everything goes well, we will be kick starting the workout with a basic introduction to RTEMS, a quick overview of the architecture, a walk through of source code structure and some basic knowledge sharing wrt what might be required during the next 4 days. So Day 1 would mostly be setting up and getting up to base. Day 2, 3 and 4 would be hard days filled with coding, debugging and lots of fun! Day 5 would be more of a wrap up – collecting patches, cleaning up things, sanity checks and reporting!

So, if you want to see your contributions go into NASA and ESA space shuttles then RTEMS workout is the place you need to head to. RTEMS community is a bunch of extremely nice people full of patience and am sure you will have fun hacking with us.

On a sidenote, I am currently at Zurich Airport calculating the probability of missing my connecting flight given that my first flight is delayed, life is full of mathematics. Number never fail to impress me. See you at FOSS.IN 2009!

A few days back, my website was defaced by a “(cr)hacker” group. Discomforting pictures of blood and swords were put up. I really wonder why the morons who crack websites have to load some gory pictures of violence. As it is always “All for good”, grabbing up this opportunity, set it up for a battle against my laziness, I *finally* moved my website to a VPS and now I have complete control over my content, more freedom and flexibility. As I was moving the site contents, I figured out the highly outdated content, spammed blog, old WP installation. It felt like my website was living under a rock for all the 4 years. The next few weeks , I will find myself doing self-marketing to a number of folks and hence the decision to re-design everything was taken. A good decision I feel as I write this with the new site launched. My home page looks like the below screen shot.

My homepage

Nice, right? It would be a blunder on my part if I don’t mention my good friend Kamaleshwar Morjal for all the efforts he put in over the last two weeks to get a new design running. He has his own design company “Eficacy Designs” and provides design services for the web and lots more. The Wordpress blog theme, was custom made for me. Very few designers have the capability to convert what you think and tell in words into the final product. Believe me, I just had online IRC conversations with him of how I would like my pages to be and thats it! A shameless plug but also a show of gratitude – “Do check up with him for any of your future design needs or consultancies. I highly recommend him”. So in short, the all new tuxmaniac.com is up and running. Check it out!

Aanjhan’s Home on the Web