An Engineer's Options & Futures

Bloom Filter in Python

2011-05-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

Bloom Filter is an extremely space-efficient probabilistic data structure. You can read more about it in its wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter. Bloom filter requires a very little storage space for a single key. An enormous amount of data can be stored in a small Bloom filter, if we can afford the risk of a very small percentage of false positive. Venti network storage

Debugging Python on Emacs IDE

2011-04-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

I've tried a few IDEs for standalone Python development. But end of the day I came back to Emacs. I love Emacs because it is lightweight, I can pretty much do whatever I can with any other IDE and much more if I write some Lisp script.Here in this article, I'd just cover how to step through your standalone Python code and debug it using Emacs as the editor/IDE. First of all you have to install

Browserling

2011-04-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

With all your web apps and client side scripts, cross-browser testing is vital. Great were the roaring 90s when Internet Explorer was the only browser. But now the end user uses any browser, mostly either Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari. Despite several standardizations, there is no guarantee that scripts in one browser would run in the other. And as an end-user, the message "this

A Sneak-Peek into Linux Kernel - Chapter 4: Process Scheduling: Part-1

2011-02-13T01:21:00.000-08:00

So far, we have covered the process creation and termination in Linux. In this post and the next one, we will go through the process scheduling. The task scheduler or process scheduler or simply scheduler is the part of the kernel that makes the decision on which process can be executed at any given time, keeping in mind best utilization of the available resources. The scheduler in Linux is

A Sneak-Peek into Linux Kernel - Chapter 3: Process Termination

2010-09-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Finally I found some time to get back to continuing this effort of writing about Linux kernel. This chapter is about how the process or task gets terminated.In Linux, a task is terminated by an exit() system call, made either explicitly by the task or implicitly when the main() function of the task ends. After the task is terminated, its parent has to be informed about the termination through

A Sneak-Peek into Linux Kernel - Chapter 2: Process Creation

2010-09-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

In the last chapter, we looked at the basics of process or task in Linux kernel and with a brief overview of struct task_struct. Now we are going to discuss how the process or task gets created.In Linux, a new task can be created using fork() system call. fork() call creates an almost exact copy of the parent process. The differences are in pid (unique), and parent pointer. It creates an exact

A Sneak-Peek into Linux Kernel - Chapter 1: Introduction

2010-08-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

The source code of Linux Kernel was something that fascinated me eight years ago and I am still addicted and I follow changes that happen to it. I am planning to write a series of post to explore the source code of the kernel. I hope that this would help budding developers and fans to understand and change the Linux Kernel and improve the operating system. But if you do so, please remember that

Virtual Machine 2.0

2010-07-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

Latvian programmer and blogger Peter Krumins (Pete) has recently announced that he along with James Halliday. I came to know about Pete a couple of years ago. As many of you might know, I am big fan of computing, and programming. Pete's blog is a must read for anybody with a similar interest. James Halliday is known for his work on node.js, an easy and practical way to build scalable network

Night Fox of New Jersey

2010-03-29T19:07:00.000-07:00

The movie Ocean's Twelve featured a very interesting character called "The Night Fox", a master thief enacted by the French leading man Vincent Cassel. In that movie, Cassel steals the Coronation Egg (in fact it's fake) by acrobatically avoiding the laser beams. In its previous version, "the Amazing Yen" uses his acrobatic skills to rob a casino. I thought such things are possible only in

Job in 2018

2010-03-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

The unemployment numbers frustrate me and I feel we have to be like this for a long time. Oh.. Light at the end of the tunnel. A new study makes a convincing argument that by 2018, there will be overwhelming number of jobs open because of the mass retirement of baby boomers. And this is of course with no change in the immigration policy or labour law. Just eight more years! At that time,

Where is consumer electronics heading?

2010-03-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here is a graph by International Data Corp. that indicates where we are heading in the consumer electronics market. People want it small and want it to connect to the worldwide web!

Picture = 1024 words

2010-03-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

Most of the time, I need a pictorial representation of call graphs to understand the profiler information with more clarity. Usually I use it to ensure that I am using the memory and CPU efficiently and which part of the code I need to optimize to get the best bang per buck. In my laptop, I use valgrind to generate the call graph and KCachegrind to study the visual representation of call graph.

Bloom Box and Artificial Photosynthesis

2010-03-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, CBS' 60 minutes focused on K.R. Sridhar's innovation, the Bloom Box, a small sized wireless power plant that can generate energy for your house. That's a form of clean energy. We can envision that in the next 10 years, all homes would supply electricity for themselves with the Bloom Box that I looked at as the miniature of a monolith (Tycho Magnetic Anomoly-4!).Now Dan

Compiling the extra dimension

2010-03-02T10:09:00.000-08:00

Three dimensional FPGA and three dimensional chips are creating a lot of buzz and may be the direction that VLSI design and reconfigurable computation are headed in. Why is it just a "may be"? There are a few start up companies that have come up with the 3D fabric and the interesting part is that the third dimension is not the same for everyone. In some architecture, the third dimension is the

Cost of public school education

2010-02-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

Earlier I have written a blogpost regarding the need for an educational reform citing the increasing number of college dropouts. In that, I have mentioned that the public universities give excellent education for an affordable cost. Recently Dr. Mark Perry of the University of Michigan has written an article comparing the per-capita money spent on public school education to the Harvard tuition

Growth in computing power

2010-02-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

I am running a fever, cough and cold that collaboratively make me tired at body and heart. The tiredness unfortunately keeps me away from blogging, as research, work, and study effectively occupy my reduced "active" time. When the going gets tough, I have to give priority to what I am paid for and what I pay for. Somehow I find sometime to write this, when my Python script is running in the

Inequality and Income distribution of G20

2010-02-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

Recently I have read an extremely informative article in G20 website about the growth in personal income among the population of different G20 countries and there was a similar NBER working paper. The article is a little long, but it gives deep insight about poverty, inequality and income distribution. The research tracks the income growth since 1970. One interesting observation is that the G20

3D-FPGA Reinvented

2010-02-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

The concept of 3D chip has been coming and going. I have not seen many commercial chip that is 3D. But that may be the norms in future, as we find it difficult to integrate more transistors into a given area.If the area is small, stack it up. That's what was done in New York in the mid nineties. In future, at least in a distant future, that's what they would do in Atlanta and Phoenix. What

Turned on by COTSon

2010-02-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I wrote an article longing for the need of a multicore processor simulator - preferably one that is free. One of the reader of my blog have left a message about COTSon (I wonder why (s)he wanted to be anonymous). So I started reading more about it, starting with the white paper that was in SIGOPS. And I liked what I read.COTSon is the result of a collaborative effort by HP and

Do you feel your boss is more incompetent than you are?

2010-01-02T00:16:00.000-08:00

In management, the level up to which someone would raise in the organizational ladder is governed by the Peter Principle, named after the Canadian psychologist Lawrence Peter. Consider a team of dozen employees out of which Alice is the most competent. So Alice gets promoted to the next job level. Now given the fact that Alice was the best among her contemporaries does not mean that she would be

Arduino - Open Source Initiative of 2009

2009-12-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

For those who do not know, Arduino is an open-source, embedded prototyping platform. The single board microcontroller hardware with a bunch of sensors and embedded I/O controls. Hardware components contains an Atmel ATmega328 AVR microcontroller, a thermister, a crystal oscillator, etc, although it varies from board to board. It is an advanced RISC microcontroller with 32 x 8 registers and a 2-

Ubuntu's backward step

2009-12-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

I have a laptop that runs Ubuntu Karmic (and OpenSolaris in multi-boot), and I recommend Ubuntu for all my friends who want to give Linux a shot. The most important reason is Ubuntu's ease of use. For the past several months, many people are shifting from Windows to open source OS because unlike past, Linux is as easy to use as Windows. I still remember those days of 9 CD Debian installation and

Temporary Suspension

2009-10-30T10:54:00.001-07:00

I have not been posting anything in my blog recently as many of you noticed and some of you mailed. The fact is that I am busy in two completely independent work. 1. Designing and implementing a completely new heuristic of logic minimization and 2. Physical layout design for a CMOS charge pump.Both these are interesting and consume most of my time. As a result, I cannot find time to post my views

The Daily Show on India's Moon Mission

2009-10-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

This made me laugh out loud!The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cDeep Space Naanwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorRon Paul Interview

Arrow of Time

2009-09-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

Last month (Aug 09), the world of physics was enthralled by a mathematical work that led to an explanation to the arrow of time. The paper was by Lorenzo Maccone, one of the biggest names in quantum physics in this generation. The physicists in the universities (at least big universities) around the world have a hard copy of this paper in their hands, gearing themselves up for lunch time debates

Required: An Educational Reform

2009-09-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

President Barrack Obama in his congressional speech on health care compared the proposed plan with the current education system in the United States. There are private universities like Stanford, and Harvard offering top class education but at a high cost, while public universities like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, UA Tucson, UMass Amherst are offering good quality education at an affordable cost.

IDE Decision

2009-09-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

Texas Instrument has recently made a sound decision to make their Code Composer studio's IDE to be based on Eclipse. That's a good news. Now that's not taking anything away from the old IDE of CCStudio. The old IDE is very comprehensive, very good, and very easy to learn. But the current developers do not just look for this. How easy is it to customize the old CCStudio IDE? That way, as the IDE

Taco Bell Revelation

2009-09-05T10:25:00.000-07:00

Today I had my breakfast at Taco Bell. When I was waiting for my bean burrito, I observed that they sell egg burrito for $0.89/-. And what more, it has bacon in it. Well, I don't eat bacon, but the menu board reminded me of some old stories. Back at the beginning of the year, some Ivy-League-educated people scared all my friends that the US would be stifling in inflation. But I was not scared. I

TR-35 2009

2009-08-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

What can you achieve in the first 35 years of your age? OK. This has wide answers, since in some field like sports people achieve their most before 35. Let me reduce the scope of the answer. What can you achieve in the field of science and technology, before you are 35 years old? May be you can win Nobel prize in Physics. Or may be you could formulate 3900 mathematical equations and considered by

Synergy among processors

2009-08-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

A simple question. Jack is a cobbler, working in DumbCobbler Inc. He stitches on an average 20 shoes per day. DumbCobbler Inc has got some new orders and so they hire 9 new cobblers to work with Jack. Do the math. How much shoe can DumbCobbler make in a day? If the answer is 200,...Wrong. Actually they are making 225 shoes a day. Where does the extra 25 shoes come from, if all the cobblers are

Returning 80s

2009-08-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

Fashion is cyclic. What goes out of fashion today would be fashion tomorrow. Now whatever was the fashion is coming back slowly. I am not talking about the pure fashion news. I am talking about a silicon PCB and a 3D chip with buses through bare silicon between layers. Some start ups are trying to build PCB-like system on a bare silicon. One does it in 3D and the other in 2D. With a high ASIC

Ted Kennedy - your memories shall never die!

2009-08-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

Ted Kennedy passes away. I cannot forget his very famous speech, "Dreams Shall Never Die". It is an inspiration for all youngster who feel heart broken by our current economic state; for college grads who do not have a funding, for graduated folks who do not find a job; for those hard workers who just lost their jobs for nothing wrong in their part. Must watch video.The news for EEs was particularly bad as the jobless rate more than doubled from 4.1 percent in the first quarter

Tom, Jerry and Attenboroughii

2009-08-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

Looks like Tom has got a new friend to help him catch Jerry!Sir David, 83, said: "... This is a remarkable species the largest of its kind. I'm told it can catch rats then eat them with its digestive enzymes. It's certainly capable of that."

Thanks, Dr.DeLong!

2009-08-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this month, Richard Posner published an extreme criticism for Christina Romer's prediction about the stimulus package. That article even questioned the ethical responsibility of Romer and some prominent progressive economists (Stiglitz's name was missing!!)But there was a basic mathematical mistake in the criticism. Posner compared annual GDP with quarterly spending. Although

I still don't know how Core i7 is made!

2009-08-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting video on the making of Intel Core i7. It starts off well, but slowly it becomes more of a marketing video than a technical video. It gives an overview of the architecture, but I was looking for an in depth analysis of the microarchitecture with design decisions and why they were made. It disappointed me. Anyway it is a good video for a high-level picture and it's worth

Proposals for Smart Grid

2009-08-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a good news in the last weekend. Earlier what was considered to be an impossible and impractical challenge has received more than 400 proposals. I am talking about Smart Grid project (part of the Grid Vision 2030) through which the United States Department of Energy (DOE) tries to modernize and improve the electric grid through the introduction of microprocessor and microcontroller based

Garbage collector for C - not for embedded systems programming

2009-08-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

A quick and dirty post while drinking a tall, non-fat latte in a coffee shop. A few months ago, my friend asked me whether C/C++ had garbage collector, since there is no native garbage collector in C and C++. My answer was no. Apparently my answer was wrong. There is a garbage collector for C and it is not just some crackpot code, it is in Hewlett-Packard site. Sweet. But do C or C++ need it? I

Will technological growth lead to job crisis?

2009-08-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Gregory Clark has written an article in Washington Post in which he has claimed that in future we would not have any job as people would be replaced by machines to do those jobs. I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never once spoke to a human; my mechanical interlocutor seemed no less capable than the Indian call-center operatives it replaced.

Multicore Processor Simulator

2009-08-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005, I was listening to the recorded voice of Intel President Paul Otellini saying this in Intel Developers Forum. When he described the future direction of Intel, this is what he said: We are designing all of our future development to multicore designs. We believe this is a key inflection point for the industry. Followed by the diminishing returns from the Instruction-led Parallelism in

Uranium Ore sold online!

2009-08-01T04:45:00.000-07:00

Check out what Amazon is selling. A can of Uranium ore! Also look at what the customers bought after looking at this and what the customers who bought this also bought. Very funny!

Bokode - the barcode killer and much more

2009-07-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

In SIGGRAPH 2009 conference, the MIT media labs is going to present a paper titled, Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera Based Interaction from a Distance. Here is the abstract of the paper: We show a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a

ARM-wrestling with Intel

2009-07-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

ARM Cortex A8 is finally going to run in GHz speed, delivering more than 2000 Mips. So your Netbooks and iPhones may just be faster. If your response is Intel's Atom is already beyond GHz mark, here is the best part of the news: ARM Cortex A8 does all these while consuming just 640 mW power and can run at a minimum supply of 1 volt. Currently iPhone 3G runs at 600 MHz powered by ARM Cortex A8

Recession and the broken Okun's law

2009-07-24T01:22:00.000-07:00

In economics, Okun's Law states the relationship between unemployment and GDP gap. It states that for every 1% increase in the unemployment, the GDP will decrease by 2% of its potential GDP. This is an emphirical based on observation rather than theory. So conversely it looks reasonable to assume that for every 2% reduction in GDP gap, a 1% reduction in unemployment can be expected.But the

Standing on Flights

2009-07-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

Those who have been to India might have noticed that in India, people are allowed to stand in the bus while travelling. I have also noticed that in New York subway trains. What about standing on short flights? The recent survey by Ryanair suggests that 60% of the passengers would do so when the ticket is for free. 42% would do so for half-charged tickets. The airline also considers replacing the

Weighing Scale for Molecules

2009-07-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

A group of physicists headed by Dr. Michael Roukes have developed a nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) based mass spectrometer, which can measure the mass of things as small as a single molecule. The professor and his group has been working on this for the past 10 years in Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute.In laymen terms, it is a NEMS resonator which keeps oscillating at a particular

Linux boots in one second

2009-07-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

Montavista has recently created a record for boot time of embedded Linux. They booted it in one second! This significant achievement is made on Freescale MPC5121E RISC processor. Please look at the demo in the Freescale technology forum. This is undeniably a great achievement. The application requirements demanded visual feedback of critical real-time data in one second or less from cold power-on

India Microprocessor - Sensibility with no Sense

2009-07-20T07:11:00.000-07:00

The top scientists in India are going to convene together in a project to make India Microprocessor. Network security has become a hot topic in many country's security meets thanks to Chinese hackers. Chinese hackers have broken into several governmental networks over the past few years. They managed to take down Russian consulate website and made nearly 70000 attempts on a single day to

Apple, is thy pseudonym Stimulus?

2009-07-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

A little strange, but a good news! Integrated circuits sales has raised worldwide by 16% last quarter. This is the biggest quarter-on-quarter growth since the second quarter of 1984. More particularly DSP unit shipment has increased by 40% QoQ. One probable reason that I can think off is, in the last one quarter both Apple iPhone 3G(S) and Palm Pre were introduced. And with the reduced price line

Intel x86 Processors – CISC or RISC? Or both??

2009-07-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

The argument between CISC architecture and RISC architecture is longstanding. For compiler designers, RISC is a little burden since the same C code will translate to nearly five times more lines of RISC assembly code compared to x86 assembly code. But from pure academic point of view, it is easy to see that RISC wins the argument because of several of its advantages. RISC instruction set is very

Atmel's battery authentication IC - a reality check

2009-07-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

Atmel introduces a cryptographic battery authentication IC - AT88SA100S in a attempt to curb the market of counterfeit batteries that has all sorts of problems that would tarnish the brand value of original equipment manufacturer (OEM). I think the idea is more like digitally signing the battery. OEM would have a signature that the quacks cannot forge.The AT88SA100S CrytpoAuthentication™ IC is

Mukherjee at Minsky moment - a clarification

2009-07-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

A few friends of mine showed caustic reaction through phone calls to my previous blog by blaming me for not understanding the importance of reducing fiscal deficit. One of them was a professional economist working in a small south Indian university.Let me clarify my position. In normal period, when foreign banks are not closing at a fast rate affecting jobs all around the world, I am totally in

Mukherjee at Minsky Moment

2009-07-12T05:54:00.000-07:00

In India, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee presented his first budget of this term on July 6th. The budget speech was criticized heavily by economic luminaries. Sensex responded by falling down by 870 points. Pranab Mukherjee has gone into a spending spree on infrastructure and building social security safety net. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan called it a lackluster budget with fiscal deficit crossing Rs. 10 lakh

Connection Machines – Prelude to Parallel Processing

2009-07-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

The computer architecture entered into a new phase with the stored program concept and programmable and general purpose computing architecture. The credit for this development goes to John Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, and Howard Aiken. Later it was relatively easy to build microprocessors and computers like ENIAC, since the general computing architecture was well established.However there was a

Robot Democracy

2009-07-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

The previous blogpost has stimulated some of the philosophical gyri of my brain.After long, inhuman experimentations, we finally figured out that democracy is the best for to govern humans. But we do not give the democratic rights to other organisms like cats and dogs or to machines working in the assembly lines of Ford Motors. It is not surprising because the humans are far more superior to

Future belongs to carbon based lifeforms

2009-07-07T10:04:00.000-07:00

Many science fiction novels and movies are based on either robots ruling mankind in the distant future or a warfare between humans and robots. Going by the recent technological advancements, one thing seems clear like a beacon. The future world is going to be ruled by carbon-based lifeforms; either one form or the other.

Hardware / Software Partitioning Decision

2009-07-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

Most important part of Hardware / Software partitioning scheme is to determine which part of software needs to be moved to FPGA. This problem becomes complex in a system with multiple applications running at a time. Kalavade et al has given a set of thumb rules to decide whether a given node can be moved to hardware or not. Here they are:Repetition of a node: How many times a given type of node

Numeric definite integral in FPGA

2009-07-04T01:53:00.000-07:00

Today when I looked at the comp.arch.fpga USENET feed, I saw an interesting question: how to perform integration in FPGA? Well, most of the time the answer would be, since FPGA is not handling continuous function, summation would be the approximation for integration. From the first glance, this may look like a right answer. But when we look at the purpose of integration, we find that it is too

USB 3.0 – knowns and unknowns

2009-07-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest technology news that I see in journals often is about the advent of USB 3.0. Of course, not up to the hype of iPhone, but certainly all major news feeds that I am subscribed to cover this. Linux has come up with a driver for USB 3.0. Windows 7 will have USB 3.0 support. All these could help you in 2010 with transferring high speed HD videos and large databases. One year ago,

Ride on the STBus - a brief look at the different protocols

2009-06-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

System on Chip (SoC) communication architecture is a vital component in SoC that interconnects heterogeneous components and IP blocks and supplies a mechanism for data and control transfer. This is a significant parameter in the performance and power utilization of the chip, especially when the feature size is in nanometers. As a result, a given architecture must ensure to deliver an agreed QoS

A Quick Tour of the FORst

2009-06-26T08:10:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post about VLSI routing, I promised a little wonkish post on Obstacle Avoiding Rectilinear Steiner Minimum Tree (OARSMT). This may be it, but still not so wonkish. In this post, I would try to explain FORst - one of the earlier methods (2004) to solve OARSMT problem.OARSMT is a NP-Complete problem and so it cannot be solved in polynomial time. So VLSI designers use different

Human Development Index - where the Indian tiger trails

2009-06-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

In late eighties, India was in the verge of its self-annihilation. The mirth of license raj fettered India's arms to welcome private sector to do business in India. The government engine was at the peak of its inefficiency. Indian Rupee was inconvertible and high tariffs prevented cheap foreign goods and cutting edge foreign technologies from making inner roads in India. The country suffered from

VLSI Routing - the most interesting puzzle of the last decade

2009-06-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

One of the most important task in physical design of VLSI circuits is routing. The speed and power conservation of the chip depends upon how the different components are routed using the shortest possible wiring. The speed at which an optimal or semi-optimal route is derived, is crucial for the rate of chip production in scale. To solve this problem, we have to divulge into Graph theory.Now lets

Germany might loose two decades

2009-06-15T09:42:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, I wrote an article on how Germany's current account surplus may help its economy. But a more careful analysis shows that its entire economy is grounded only on the exports and the domestic market is extremely week. This is not a good sign, if what they are looking for is a fast recovery. This is what happened with Japan in 90s. Here is Paul Krugman in an interview to The Guardian:

Palm Pre components and surprise factors

2009-06-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

Last week, iSuppli posted a preliminary cost analysis of Palm Pre, the most touted iPhone-killer. iSuppli simply did an excellent job. The components used in Palm Pre shows that the design of the device is very much similar to that of the iPhone. Source: iSuppli CorporationIt uses integrated circuits of TI, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Sony. As you can observe, the display is the costliest of all

Cash for clunkers - Does India need one such scheme?

2009-06-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

The US congress has approved the "Cash for clunkers" bill. Under this bill, the government buys in the old gas guzzling vehicles (both cars and trucks) for a reasonable amount and gives the seller incentive to buy new environmentally-friendly vehicles. By environmentally-friendly vehicle I don't really mean a hybrid car, but any car with a better mileage. This bill is based on the proposal made

A Verilog HDL library for fixed point-floating point conversion

2009-06-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Generally when people ask for my advice to learn Verilog HDL, I prescribe them this book, this book, this book or this book. But then, learning of a programming language does not complete without practise. So I would suggest that they write a synthesisable, vendor-neutral Verilog code for a simple, fixed point RISC microprocessor and test it by writing a testbench. Later on they can expand then

Analysis of current account deficit

2009-06-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

One of the problems complicating this recession is that the US and UK ran a huge current account deficit, even before the recession. Current account deficit is roughly the difference between export and import, adjusted to foreign aid, interest payment, dividend payment, etc. So as the country starts spending more money to recover out of the recession, it will get into a fiscal deficit.The

Direct Digital Synthesis

2006-04-17T01:55:00.000-07:00

As all the engineers know, the waveform is generally analog in nature. It is then converted into digital form for processing ease. To test our digital circuits, we usually get an analog wave from an audio frequency oscillator (AFO) and feed it to ADC to get the digital output.But today, the technology has changed paving way to a digital synthesis of analog waveforms. They calls this as direct

As Moore fails...

2006-03-21T01:15:00.000-08:00

Gordon Moore became more famous because of his one casual statement, that was taken as a law. That law held good until recently. Moore's law was helpful for many computing companies to predict how fast their software would run after a signficant number of years, assuming that the particular software stands in the industry for that long. Everything went fine, until one fine day, we found the

Power analysis of RFID tags

2006-03-19T22:22:00.000-08:00

Power analysis is a type of cryptanalysis, in which the physical implementation of the cryptosystem is attacked instead of exploiting on the established algorithm. Although the designer has implemented a strong encryption algorithm, the computers and the processors in which it is implemented and the microchips leak information about the operation, processed. In power analysis, the power

RFID viruses

2006-03-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

Computers and communication devices shrinked down at a very fast rate to the size of RFID and MEMS. RFID is a small computer-in-chip, that can be knitted with many things that we want to track. RFID transponders are usually no power circuits (not always), they are powered by an external reading device, called RFID reader. Usually RFID reader can sense only the RFID within some 50m distance. An

Globalization - A game of opportunity

2006-03-15T04:02:00.000-08:00

A few days back, I read an article read by Swaminathan Ankleseria Aiyer in Economic Times. It talked about the impact of globalization over the society. This sparked an idea inside my mind. I may be right or wrong, the readers have to decide, and please express your opinion.The hottest discussion today is whether globalization is a boon or a bane. This discussion runs continuouly everywhere - in

Socially engineered basketball game

2006-03-14T21:39:00.000-08:00

This is one interesting news, I read today.It was a kind of crucial NCAA basketball match-up between Univ. of California(Cal) and USC. USC is headed by their All-Pac-10 guard Gabe Pruitt. Interestingly, a few days before this match, Pruitt had a conversation over IM with a girl who claimed that she was Victoria, studying in UCLA. The chat went on so well that Pruitt decided to meet Victoria after

A blogspot for TCE-ECE

2006-03-14T06:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I contacted my friend Balaji after a long time. He shared a room with me 5 years back, during the first-year of my college. He was as proactive as he ever was and he suggested me something which should be given a serious thought (comment to my previous mail). The alumini of computer science department of my college have got their own blogspot, in which they share their common views. He

My College grows

2006-02-08T03:46:00.000-08:00

I did my graduation in Thiagarajar College of Engineering in the field of Electronics and Communication Engineering. I am sure half of you have not heard of such a college, until now. But these days my college is clearly going high. For computer science(CSE) and electronics department(ECE), we got a good set of juniors. So, both these departments are growing up. ECE is running franchise-record

Techies - What exactly do they mean?

2006-02-06T20:49:00.000-08:00

Most of the times we come across magazines and websites talking about geeks or techies, by default everybody assumes that it means only computer guys. For instance, an aircraft designer or a DSP engineer can never become a geek as long as he does not work in any hardcore computer software,like SAP or he is not an expert in any hardcore computer technology, like Data warehousing. Here is one more

Hi-tech drop box

2006-01-31T23:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's BBC showed that a rock-like drop box was found somewhere in Russia, which is actually a hi-tech spy drop box. It looked more like a normal rock in the video and it would probably be a wireless mesh node. It is just my guess. I had only read about some tree hole and some pigeon nest used as drop boxes and that too in Fredrick Forsyth novels. I think, now, NSA is going to diagnose all

Pentagon's Psychological Warfare

2005-12-15T03:06:00.000-08:00

According to the reports of Matt Kelley of USA Today, Pentagon is launching a psychological warfare, which includes posting of pro-USA messages and news in foreign media without revealing themselves as the source. Most of these works are concentrated on allied nations. The US military has to fight an information warfare against Al-Queda and other anti-US terrorist groups. Pentagon plans to do it

Lot o' work

2005-12-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

Today, my team mate is on leave, leaving me with a heavy workload. I will try to complete most of them today, even if it requires staying back. Tomorrow, I am going to Madurai, my birth place and the place where I did my graduation. I am so happy about going back to see the places where I roamed during my college days. Since I have to catch a train tomorrow, I won't be able to stay back and work.

For Unix geeks @ Universities - Sun Solaris Challenge

2005-12-14T00:23:00.000-08:00

Sun Microsystems is conducting Sun Solaris University Challenge. Form a team of 4 smarties in your university for the challenge. Because, the payout of this competition is huge. Here is the deal.One individual or one team of up to four individuals from the same university will be awarded the Grand Prize - US$5,000 prize purse per individual, plus a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation. The winner's

My friend blogs about UNIX history

2005-12-13T01:36:00.000-08:00

My best friend Ananth Shrinivas is working in Sun Microsystems, Bangalore. He had produced one excellent article on the history of UNIX-based OS. Just within half-a-day, it marked a whooping 700 hits, a testimonial for its high quality. Go through it, if you have time and interest.Personally, I found it to be biased towards his company's open Solaris OS and to some extent Linux. That's because

Saturday Freak-outs

2005-12-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

This Saturday at around 2 in the after-noon, I went to my friend's place. We shared a veggie pizza for lunch and solved a sudoko. Then we decided to go to the British counsil. There I borrowed "Schrodinger's Kitten", after reading its review. Personally, I feel that the fee I pay to become the member of British Counsil is too high for its collection of books. If someone says, in British Counsil

Team Lunch

2005-12-09T02:33:00.000-08:00

Engineers in Software companies are not experts in software. But they sure are in killing spare time. Today, we had what we call a team lunch. We went for a lavish 5 starer near our office. There was a big parking lot, followed by a hall with pompous arrangement of furnitures. There were two restaurents and we chose the simplest. There were more Germans in that North Indian restaurent. I ate food

Blogspot, here I come

2005-12-08T21:32:00.000-08:00

Until few days back I did not have a good opinion about blogs. Of course, it gives every internet user some freedom of speech, but still I considered that as a waste of time and bandwidth. The only blog, I have been visiting regularly is the one hosted by Bruce Schneier. But after reading a lot of blogs, I find them more interesting and a good way to ventilate whatever you feel. Besides, I also