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.

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!

• Lost my lovely little Nikon Coolpix L2 (I miss it even now)
• Became a proud owner of Nikon D60 DSLR
• Became a Fedora Electronic Laboratory team member (The dev time line calls me a consultant )
• Got my Ubuntu Membership Approved (Yes I have a @ubuntu.com and @fedoraproject.org email ids now )
• GNUSim8085 was awarded FOSS India Award by LFY magazine
• 2nd time speaker at Freed.in (Will miss this year’s edition. Its like missing a family event )
• NIT Calicut happened (3rd time) again. Miss that too this time around.
• FOSS.IN 2008 Speaker. Was great to meet the known and unknown faces again.
• Quite a few memorable trips with friends and colleagues. (I also did some snow sledging in the fag end of 2008)
• Got Admitted to a World Top 15 Engineering and Applied Sciences University and shifted base to Switzerland.
• I Quit my Nice Cosy Job as a senior Engineer and got back to Academic Environment and Research (Loving it!!)

And this year again, though I feel is not going to be that life changing is definitely going to be full of challenges, travel, loads of photography and a lot and lot of learning. Looking forward to 2009!!

PS: Around Christmas and New Year Abhijeet (I linked your flickr account. Happy now?? ) and I went around a few cities in Swiss and here goes their photos. Enjoy!!!

 

Full Flickr Sets Luzerne, Bern, Les Diablerets, Montreux

GNUSim8085 FOSS.IN 2008 Delayed Release

What was supposed to be a foss.in 2008 release has been delayed by a month and it just became the Christmas Release. Yes!!! GNUSim8085 1.3.5 is released! Go grab it now. So whats special about this release? You can run gnusim8085 now on Windows machines as well. Kudos to a lot of guys who helped fix a lot of issues that were big road blocks for the release and foss.in 2008 was the place where things got sorted out and most of it got fixed in the Workout. So thats news number 1 for you all.

Next..

Around Switzerland in 4 days

Starting tomorrow evening I will be touring Switzerland (Bern, Luzern, Diablerets, Geneva and the likes.) with a very very good friend of mine who is coming down from Germany. I am really looking forward to it. And I will be doing all these with a special thing in my hands. (thats the next news..)

The Special Thing

The special thing is the wonderful DSLR Nikon D60. I got this at a great price. Thanks to Nikon for the 100 CHF cashback offer. Thanks to Abhijeet for the gift contribution. I just cant believe that I am the owner of a D60 now. Yipee!!!! And already I have started flooding flickr

So thats it for now. Wish you all a Merry Christmas and see you again around New Year’s eve. Happy Hacking!

As of now I have listed a few P&S cameras as follows, Canon A2000 IS, A1000IS, A590IS. Any suggestions are most welcome.

 

Last weekend was as memorable as the before one, since a couple of my good friends Ashish and Amit biked down to my place to spend the weekend. Yes!  You read it right, they drove from Bangalore to Chennai on Rane’s Thunderbird. We went on a drive on the Scenic East Coast Beach Highway stopping at Crocodile Bank and Taj’s Fisherman cove. A nice and relaxed weekend it was. For the entire flickr set click here (until the pic with the gun was taken this time) . Ashish has already blogged on it in his new blog here.

It was just not about food, travel and picnic last weekend. Hacking got its fair share too. Some updates below.

• Commited the gnusim8085 changes done at the Bangalore Hackathon to the svn after a quick re check. Thanks Onkar.
• Tested the gnusim8085.exe package for Windows. Works great with a few minor issues (like Syntax highlighting, url linking etc.). Also a installer for the same is in progress. Check screenshot here
• Onkar has already ported gnusim8085 to gtksourceview 2. Seems like quite a few clean ups also done.
• VHDL Emacs mode was packaged for Fedora by Rakesh Pandit and Review request even raised. But only to find out later that it was already a part of emacs-common. I was deeply disappointed at that quality of search done by me before raising that wishlist request. But then, everybody has a bad day. Sorry Chacha_Choudhary.
• gResistor upstream has now uploaded a fresh tarball with the full copy of the licenses included. So I have updated the package on revu. But seems like it is already too late for intrepid. But I must thank Pop Gheorghe for the update.

ToDo : We have been hit by the Wine bug 3915. If someone has faced this issue and managed to fix this please leave a comment. If we dont get this setup right, it will be very difficult for us to go in search of a Windows machine to test our gnusim8085 whenever we have to make a release. Have attached the screenshot of the issue above. Thanks in Advance.

And finally, see you from Switzerland. And do follow me on Identi.ca as I will be posting updates more frequently there until I get settled in the new country.

Flew from Mumbai (BOM) to Chennai (MAA) on 9W469 Jet Airways today. The Air hostess reset the in flight entertainment system and lo and behold I see the above screen. I managed to catch some specs too. It runs on one of those AMD Geode procs with 256 MB of RAM. Uses Redboot as the boot loader. More details when I travel next or feel free to add to the specs as comments if you have more details.

Took the morning Jet Airways flight out of Chennai Airport, found a few familiar faces sitting one row before me me in the economy class having fun! My work got finished very early than expected but Jet could not provide me a earlier flight out. Traveled in the locals from Churchgate to Andheri, visited the InOrbit Mall in Malad, returned to Airport way too early for my return flight to Chennai.

Mumbai Airport has free wifi provided by Airtel and the SSID actuallu says so “Free Wifi by Airtel” ! Its got way better facilities and actually is one of the few airports that can be categorised as “Airports” in India. Spent about 3.5 hrs in the airport before heading back! Reached Chennai around midnight, took the car that I had parked in the morning at the airport and zoomed home! Wow! Mumbai in a day – Executive style!

Oops! Forgot to mention, I ate “Vada Pav”. Now thats complete.

After a bit of emails, builds and blog readings, headed for lunch. Met Kiruba, Praveen, Anivar, Hiran and other folks. Pradeepto joined us late afternoon and headed straight to his talk on “Join the VISION – Kde”. Nice one it was. My talk on “FOSS for electronic enthusiasts” went very well with about 30-40 people attending. Then we (Pradeepto, Kart_ and myself) decided to head out to Malabar Palace for some Appam fest! Returned back to the guest house, discussed various things under the planet including Alternative Education, KDE, Packaging, Marriage, Life and what not.

We had a “Contribution to FOSS” talk the next day for which we had absolutely no preparation. Well when 3 guys are gonna present, I suppose we need some kind of a understanding. But guess what, the talk went extremely smooth and IMO message conveyed. We showed them Wiki, subversion, Bugzilla and also mentioned about IRC and mailing lists. The flow was impeccable for the amount of (almost nil) preparation which we did. Goes to show the understanding among the three of us??

It was time to head back to BLR. On the way back we made quick stops at Wayanad Pookat lake, lunch, Mysore Palace (JIT for the Sunday Evening lighting) and Kamat (dinner). Back and fresh again today to write this long post!

All in all a very relaxing trip. Taking into account the amount of hardships these NITC folks have faced over the last month with loads of speakers dropping off in the last minute, these guys have managed to finish of yet another good FOSSMeet @ NITC. Three Cheers!

Flickr Sets: Mysore Palace, FOSSMeet@NITC, Wayanad

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!