Nishanth' tech rambles

Quote: Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element, joining the other three -- resistor, capacitor and inductor. ... It is as fundamental to electronic engineering as a chemical element is to chemistry or an electron is to physics http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/145365/hp_researchers_build_intelligent_memory.html Slashdotted here Tempest Declassified: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/topheadlines/~3/280951697/nsa-releases-se.html Indian economy given a respite: Given the "state" of economy today, this is not a bad news.

while downloading ubuntu 8.04 vmware for my office machine, got curious as to how Ubuntu reviews are.. I had a rare hick up with my network(but then I blame my ISP for killing my dns once in a while - yep, they route my not found DNS to thier "awesome" webpage..).. but then hit this: http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/ I was like.. hmm.. a story that applies anywhere! I mean, I work officially on a product which tons of developers use.. but never really thought indepth.. Kind of assume all know what a flash device is, what is RAM etc.. but then.. am I right? the average developer is skilled in a specialized area - say multimedia or say GUI development, not all are Linux geeks out there.. hmm... moot point indeed.. I give a message "download" does it mean internet download or what? if i ask the average developer who wants to do GUI/Android development.. go get the kernel from xyz, patch it with blah blah blah, g...

Kinda learnt what quilt was.. and AM IMPRESSED! I suppose it was kinda a late entry for me, but it is neat. let me put what i learnt. quilt can manage patches pretty well.. and works pretty well when you are working on something which is git based. here is a excellent doc http://www.suse.de/~agruen/quilt.pdf explaining what it does. Simple(halfbaked?) steps: a) pull your git tree. b) think up a nice sounding name - bingobaba.patch. quilt new bingobaba.diff c) quilt edit file -> do this to which ever file u want for a related feature. better still to create neat alias (I have qi - instead of vi).. d) make, debug, fix,re-fix etc.. till u are ready.. e) quilt refresh -> again a nice lil qr alias will do just fine, but the bingobaba.patch will be updated with what ever changes u want. (oops.. upstream tree changed).. f) quilt pop -> off disappears ur changes, g) do a cg-update synced back up. f) quilt push -> put ur changes back. continue the qi story... kinda neat..

Duh!! two days to make me sad - pay day and appraisal day.. Sometimes I laugh.. Mebbe I go and work coz I do just like what any soldier goes to war for.. for the guy next to him... not for the cause, not for the pay... "brothers in code"?

Voice contributions: encouraging an open source speech recognition: http://www.voxforge.org/home/read

Kinda perked by Dirk's interest in getting a simple blinking led working on beagle over usb/uart, i started off with bare minimum code.. but then, when u download an image and expect it to boot, and it does not, there are millions of places it can go wrong.. It was interesting to think back to the days when I wrote the first lines of sdp2430 u-boot port.. It used to be on Virtio then.. But, having faced similar issues while working in a certain module in CSST, I knew it was not something I would want to do every day - a good challenge though. The fav trick of mine is to use hang code. usually on SDP, I'd add code to show something on 2 line char LCD.. but the entire idea was to get LED glowing.. getting thru the initial points of setting CPSR was standard omap boot process.. WDT was also easy to think out on.. the ones that did stump me were: a) LED lines shorted on the board for me: I tried GPIO5 out bits 19->22 and i kept seeing the LED glow for 21 and 22 -> bad part -...

interesting ..

After trying a bunch of terminal irc clients, i decided i wanted an irc client which with go as a task icon to prevent things getting into my way. The closest i got thru was with konversation. Then, RoadRunner my ISP seems to be frequent in having hung DNS, and kaput - konversation goes beserk.. finally i fall back on the legendary x-chat (2) - i need something for office environment, and i have been using icechat for it..(not to mention i hated the interface), anyway.. saw this: http://www.silverex.org/news/ x-chat2 Windows.. gotta try it.. now i need to get rid of akregator for RSS.. it is all nice and neat.. but i hate having my rss feeds of one feed end up in another.. Now, why the hell did I not go with x-chat long back?? darn!! I now have tons of plugins also including ones which use festival to call out the message to me when my nick is called.. anyways.. I usually hang out in these irc channels: irc://irc.freenode.net/#OL - Omap Linux irc://irc.freenode.net/#mtd - Memor...

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2097004728.html has some interesting article of Ubuntu on ARM.. Another interesting look I got from Jadon on the beagle irc : Poky Linux: http://pokylinux.org/ Recently, I have been looking for UI for which I have certain custom requirements, and ended up with tons of options.. all not working due to licensing.. will such a story strike the mobile development platform - plethora of platforms, but none just the right thing coz efforts are put in all directions? I dont know.. just musing..

And I thought 45nm is bleeding edge? take that! 32nm from IBM!!! http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9918278-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 Darn.. what is the life time of a fab in this fight?? This is kinda interesting Opera following Android foot steps: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/opera_android/ Found this funny: missing five minutes for morons (that includes me;) ). http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/14/linux_manual/

Embedded and Intel.. http://embedded.intel.com/ (funny to see flash, Lia welcoming us around..).. If you are interested.. Embedded Systems Conference is to shoot off in Mid April in San Jose.. will probably add more info later.. Checkout this weeks' newsletter for more articles.. some papers are pretty interesting.. I am duly interested in UML for embedded sytems, static code analysis (yet to see something better than lint) - but there is some interesting security aspect as presented here..

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/268881085/article.pl kicked me off thinking: Dude!How many of the new kids passing out the engineering colleges know the true impact of opensource? For that matter, did I know about the impact until a few days back? I don't think I really did! My 2 cents on "the essense of Open Source" : A bit of background: I love this statement I picked up in some novel long back: "there are two kinds of people: the pianos and the piano players". I love another saying from my home state Kerala in India "if you are at the age of 18 and not a communist, you don't have a heart. if you are the age of 30 and still a communist, you don't have a brain!". Time for an confession: Being in kerala, I have been thru the kerala philosophy.. Boy! does it not feel good to throw it out? :) Now, I dont usually speak political things in my blog, but you cannot speak of opensource without one of the extreme feelings in your he...

Mebbe I am seeing this late.. searching for something else.. hit this link: http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbudocumentcenter.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12667 then I see this: OMAP34xx Wireless Technical Reference Manual (swpu114g.pdf, 47 MB) 03 Apr 2008 Download

Was finally getting time to lookinto uboot-v2 again today (atleast for 1 hr before my mailbox announced another firefighting.. :( ).. anyways.. in that time here goes.... Weee.. using uboot sandbox was a breeze.. but u need gcc 4.1.3 (4.1.1 did not compile neat for sandbox in my office vmware.. anyways, did not dig in to the reasons).. menon@coyote:~/Src/opensource/clone/u-boot.v2$ gcc --version gcc (GCC) 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2) Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. nmenon@coyote:~/Src/opensource/clone/u-boot.v2$ make sandbox_defconfig; . This is kind of neat - for folks working with kernel.. this is right up your alley... * Network drivers * smc911x ethernet driver (DRIVER_NET_SMC911X) [N/y/?] n tap Ethernet driver (DRIVER_NET_TAP) [N/y] n * * SPI drivers * MC13783 a.k.a...

--Chip industry confronts 'software gap' between multicore,programming--The industry is just starting to address what's being called asoftware gap between a rising tide of multicore processors and a lackof parallel programming tools and techniques to make use of them. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvC0As --ARC, Toshiba extend licensing deal--ARC International and Toshiba have extended their partnershipdeveloping configurable multi-processor technology and, as part of thedeal, the Japanese chip maker has also extended its license to use theARChitect Processor Configurator. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvE0Au --Consolidating the MCU market around the ARM architecture--It's inevitable. ARM's Cortex-M3 processor core is going dominate theMCU market - so says Jean Anne Booth of ARM microcontroller companyLuminary. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBICQ0FyTZ10FrX0FwvF0Av I am curious about multi cor...

Imagine spending time b/w 11pm and 3 am dreaming about embedded computing (as opposed to mobile computing) - technology and hardware is available today I was given a http://beagleboard.org/ and am now spending time dreaming about using the tiny computing powerpack and unable to sleep.. kinda wierd.. but then.. imagine this: linux+android(?) running over s-video on a http://www.i-glassesstore.com/ and a headset to give commands, my GPS +USB wlan+ webcam plugged over USB - if i can get http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php to work on omap3430, the possibilities are awesome... no more cellphones! i can even think of stereoscopic vision(using the additional dvi output). pure open source and free - covering sight, hearing (I cant do much about touch,smell and taste ;) ). but that should account for a pseudo virtual-real world embedded human-machine combination.. i guess i am truely rambling on.. but i am going to give it a shot and see how far i can get..