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.

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.

Google Summer of Code 2009

I am participating in this year’s google summer of code program as a student (yes, you read it right , as a student ).  You can find my proposal to RTEMS here (pdf). The Community Bonding period is almost coming to a close and the work package is getting more clear day by day. My mentor, Thomas Doerfler from Embedded Brains Gmbh has helped me refine and catch up with all the necessary required knowledge to start work. Thank you Thomas. So this summer is already scheduled for me. Oh! You can find the project related wiki page here.

Photography

Whenever I feel like “Its getting on to me”, I take my good friend (now its got some companions like tripod, UV-Filter, Polariser etc) and go shooting. Outcomes are the sets of Tulip Show (one of my favourites), Geneva Autoshow, random pics of my town and nearby areas. The photos I liked the most are in the Masterpieces set. Some preview below.

 

Oh and my cooking skills have improved tremendously. I can now cook Palak Paneer too

Academia

Its been hectic, hectic and hectic. But things are looking good. If everything goes well I should be able to get some experiment results out of my project by July which could be great. I have decided to put all my code that I have written for my assignments on the interweb under the WTFPL. Thanks to Thibault to have suggested it If FEL team accepts we can package it under different sections and provide it along with the FEL Spin for F12. I have a few blog posts to make on some roadblocks I came across which could be really very interesting and informative for fellow Computer Architects, students and in general to anybody interested in Hardware Modeling and Design.

Thats all folks! Later!

To allow for identification, resistors are usually marked with colored bands. Often refereed to as color codes, these markings are indicative of their resistance, tolerance and temperature coefficient. gResistror is a great program that will help you translate a resistor color codes into a readable value. All you have to do is watch the colors on the resistor and then enter them in the program. As you enter you’ll see that the resistor value is changing according to the selected color.

Its one of the fastest packaging I have ever done and uploaded to REVU. If any MOTU is reading this post, it would be nice if the package is reviewed and sponsored.

REVU Link:  http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?package=gresistor

LP Bug report: #251919

GNUSim8085 was one of the first FOSS Projects that I started contributing. Now this is enough motivation to close the three bugs still pending by this weekend.

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980′s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.

The best talk of the second day was “Hacking the Airwaves with GNU Radio” by Rakesh Peter, a talk which I am attending for the second time (attended it during foss.in 2007). Very impressive and great to know the work that is going on. Shreyas came out with his “dormant” idea of setting up a Radio transmission during foss.in 2008. It sounds like a very nice idea to me. The day ended with loads of quotes flowing from the mouths of various people. Details are here in this post by Sankarshan.
Day 3 begins with me feeling the OLPC XO laptop for the first time (Courtesy: Sayamindu). Initially, I was feeling very uncomfortable with the Sugar interface but eventually started liking it. Then it was my turn to take the stage and in my opinion the talk went pretty well with a few questions asked. The slides of the presentation can be found here. The find of the day was “Purisia font”. I think I will use this font for most of my presentations from now on. Flight back home was very relaxing with me getting a seat right after the First Class cabin. Good leg room and the food served was nice.

Freed.in and the ILUG-D folks always make me feel “At home”. This is the second freed.in for me and the feeling while leaving the place just is the same. Hats off folks!! I will mark my calendar every year for this wonderful event and just the thought of meeting up with the folks brings in loads of excitement. I had pretty good discussions with Runa, Sankarshan and Pradeepto and I take home great memories from the same. Special thanks to Gora (who drank H2O), Andrew, Kishore, t3 (for lending his hair to a bunch of people), Old monk, Tirveni, Shreyas and all those who were involved in providing the entertainment. It was great fun!

I happened to browse through my set of “list” emails and as usual was about to delete the LFY mail sent to some lists. But then something told me, “read” that mail. Opened the mail, and it spoke of FOSS India awards and some winners list. Then I scroll down the winners list to find this name “GNUSim8085″ on that. Now, where on planet earth did that come from???

GNUSim8085 was a project started by srid in his college days. He decided to orphan it at one point where Onkar and myself pitched in and took over the development and maintainance. I guess, its been one year now almost after we joined the project along with Srid and this is a big surprise. A welcome recognition and hope this triggers contribution from students to this project. We have a plethora of feature requests that has poured in suddenly. Students, grab this opportunity.

Not many people whom I expected for this year’s event are turning up but neverthless a few folks are still packing the bags to Delhi. I am there on all three days and also talking on “FOSS for Electronics Enthusiasts!”. By any chance you happen to be around Delhi at that time, drop in and say Hi!!!

Get ready to be Freed!!!