Nishanth' tech rambles

Interesting view presented here . How can we create software to handle situation where DRM (an unfortunate necessity in an imperfect world) is here to stay? Embedded systems such as mobile phones are essentially a close co-operation b/w h/w and software in a scale rarely seen before. It is one hell of a complex system. A thought that says let do virtualization layering, where the critical components (read IP) are kept layered out from the rest of the system. In the day when mobile phones are reaching and will some day cross the traditional desktop computing power, the overhead paid by these virtualizing layers are low. We could have something like an hypervisor running OS of our choice while being blissfully abstracting all the legal and technical woes away. We do today maintain an heterogenous multiprocessing system. And this does allow virtualization to take place to an extent. Probably the way to go might be massively parallel systems, where each system is independent of the other a...

PWM dimming is done on certain LCD displays. here is an article which gives some fundamentals on this. and here is an article on modulation. Now here is some data on JESD204 std for serial comm. on cellphone front, this article speaks about energy scavenging phones. I guess it'd be interesting to convert body heat, body movement back into energy, thinking of it, there are multiple opportunities: a) body movement (peizo) b) body or component heat/ temperature differences(thermocouple) c) light (e.g. sunlight) (photovoltaic) d) pressure (peizo) e)(ok this is a bit fetchy..) crossing magnetic field of earth.. f) electromagnetic noise (I mean there are tons of devices throwing out wireless energy around rt? what if other devices can convert that back to useful energy if the signal is not meant for them?) g) barometric pressure differences? Ok I seem to have run of ideas for the moment, but hell yeah! why just cellphones, probably is energy scavenging or energy "recycle" g...

This article was pretty interesting PowerQuicc Dual-core, 4 Watt consumption and they also speak of a 8 core consuming

David Woodhouse (MTD) and Paul Gortmaker (Windriver, Network dev) More here and here The usual flow for OMAP patches has been: dev -> Tony -> Russel -> Linus . How does this new flow change it? there is a new mailing list . interesting musings.. As the quote goes: The maintainer's job would involve an architecture independent appraisal of the embedded code and generally keeping the code in good working order. Just like a big bunch of guys in this thread , I wonder how does is it all going to work...

Thanks to my boss, here is an article which gives some basics.. it speaks of convergence technologies and fundamentals. There is lots of emerging techologies such as MCL NAND based devices which expose MMC interface to host, etc..

See http://code.google.com/p/omap-u-boot-utils/ for Code and binary details. Background: Few days back, I had written a app which came from a need to be able to script download operations to U-Boot V2 . Now, that I have a bit of time on hand.. here is the detail for supporting an app for kermit for U-Boot. Of course, you are free to read ckermit code, or pay up some well deserved money for kermit95 .. but there is something called as gkermit (also from columbia univ) which is GPLed. There is also something called as ekermit which is kinda neat.. You can find Loadb here . For me personally, drawing the sequence of code as implemented by loadb was enough and did not require looking at the massive code base of gkermit. Details: Kermit protocol in it's simplest form is described as a transmission followed by a end of transmission character. Each transmission consists of multiple packets. Each packet can be a session initiation, data packet or many other packet types. The app I wro...

Thanks to Dirk Behme, this news is very interesting. Here is the link to the discussion and here is the link to download .

Finally.. after years of being on my backup CD, my MCA final year code is online.. http://code.google.com/p/predict2/ is where i have hosted it. GPLV3 :).. The project is a silly thing when I think back now.. it is 6+ years old now, java based anonymous electronic cash protocol which (yeah, you guessed it), I designed..... implementation doc report is here and the project overview here A Warning though: the code did not compile in the 5 mins i tried.. probably JDK1.3 is so pretty darn old.. more probably with CLASS PATH issues.. if any one wants to maintain it, folks are most welcome :) mebbe move it to 2008 era!! am no longer an app guy :(

After 6+ years, on a whim, I have finally decided to research how to write my CV :).. it is one of those things I never like doing.. so to prep up things.. I setup some requirements: a) It should be easy to type in and maintain. b) I will not use Windows, abiword, openoffice etc. c) It should be portable output-pdf is good.. Entrez Latex Step 1: Getting the packages.: sudo apt-get install texlive-base-bin texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-recommended latex2rtf groff latex2html This gives you the CTAN resume.cls which is kinda neat and looks like it makes life lot simple. Step 2: looking for ready templates: a) Jason Blevins has posted a nice CV template gives an output like this . From this page, linked to this - resume style. b) Mathew Miller's CV Template gives this output , but looks more academia. c) just google for latex cv Just choose the stuff you'd like. Step 3: write the stuff.. Well.. the main thing is lots of folks have done this :)... and other than writing the...

Thanks to Sascha.. http://www.denx.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=u-boot/u-boot-v2.git;a=summary has U-Boot V2 support for SDP3430 merged. This weekend, will provide support for Beagle, zoom MDK and send out patches.. I am meanwhile plodding thru i2c arch from kernel to pull into u-boot v2. + point.. Existing i2c drivers should work with small effort on U-boot v2. There is a bunch of other stuff to do: after i2c, USB, NAND, MMC, NOR, etc...