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...

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"?

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...

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..