But its people....

Wanted to draw The CMOS Inverter Layout and here is what i end up doing.

LMAO...I am the one with the first ever cartoon of the blog...Hurray

OOOOH....Desp..I forgot to put my signature in each cartoon..Aj

third time lucky

2 posts in a single day. i saw that and decided to join in.

there is this important thing that i wanted to say for some time. it all started the year we joined cet.

OH! its past 12 and my post would be the first and only one of the next day. that's today. so, another day, adios!

Honey, I shrunk the Economy!

I wonder how we got through so much without commenting on the current economy crisis. I always got stuck at a roadblock when trying to write something about it. I don't know exactly why it happened, how it happened, how much it will affect us or when it will be over. I still don't. So here are some interesting headlines that could scare us, but somehow these headlines always give me some kind of sadistic pleasure. Something in me keeps on saying - din't we say so a year ago?

Some of the headlines i picked up in random.. They seem like a crisis timeline. All through i see the economy declining. Can't believe it was just months before when the Sensex celebrating breaching the 20,000 barrier.

September 15, 2008: Markets in turmoil on Lehman failure

September 29, 2008: FTSE sinks 3.3 percent as worries escalate

September 29, 2008: Bradford & Bingley is nationalised

October 7, 2008: Russia backing Iceland as world crisis spreads

October 8, 2008: IMF sees major global downturn

October 14, 2008:House sales fall to 30-year low

October 14, 2008: Inflation soars to 16-year high in Sept

October 24, 2008: Wall Street joins stock market rout

October 24, 2008 : 19,683 Tech Layoffs And Counting

Still can't see the end of this fall..

U myt b an ngnyr if...

This is a type out of an article that appeared in Mathematics Today magazine in the late 90s. I had gotten hold of a pile of the physics,chemistry and mathematics today magazines from my mom's cousin in the wake of the IIT JEE. When i first saw the article i was so impressed i made a copy of it and stuck it on my wall so that every morning i would wake up reading it! Well.. I never got through the IIT JEE and after reading the article (besides my hardly working attitude and umpteen sleeping disorders i.e.) you will know why!  

So strap on guys, its gonna be a long post! 

You might be an engineer if:

• if you have no life and you can to prove it mathematically!
  
• if you enjoy pain
  
• if you know vector calculus but you cant remember how to do long division
  
• if you chuckle whenever someone says centrifugal force
  
• if you have actually used every single function on your graphing calculator
  
• if when you look in a mirror, you see an engineering major
  
• if it is sunny and 70 degree outside and you are working on a computer
  
• if you frequently whistle the theme song of Macgauver(wat?!)
  
• if you always do homework on friday nights
  
• if you know how to integrate a chicken and take the derivative of water
  
• if you think in Math
  
• if you have calculated that the world series actually diverges
  
• if you hesitate to look at something because you don't want to break down its wave function
  
• if you have a pet named after a scientist
  
• if you laugh at jokes about mathematicians (LMAO!)
  
• if the human society has arrested you because you have actually performed Schrodinger's cat experiment
  
• if you can translate English into binary
  
• if you cant remember whats behind the door in the science building which says EXIT
  
• if you have to bring a jacket with you in the middle of summer because there is a wind chill factor in the lab
  
• if you are completely addicted to caffeine
  
• if you avoid doing anything because you dont want to contribute to the eventual heat death of the universe
  
• if you consider any non-science course easy
  
• if the fun centre of your brain has deteriorated from lack of use(in our case this might be grossly untrue)
  
• if you assume that a Horse is a Sphere to make math easier
  
• if when your professor asks you where your homework is you claim to have accidently determinded its momentum so precisely that according to Heisenberg it could be anywhere in the universe!!
  
• if you understood more than 5 of these indicators
  
• if you make a hard copy if this list and paste it on your door!!  

I understood 6 of them! And did make a hard copy and paste it on my wall!! Jeez!! All the same i'm becoming an engineer now! Who cares about these stupid indicators after all.. 

Ciao and Happy Diwali folks! 

A Moment

There are several moments in life when you feel like.. just enjoying it. You don't do anything, let your mind wander and with the moment would last forever.

Yeh Hosla Kaise Juke,
Yeh Aarzoo Kaise Ruke
Manzil Muskil to kya,
Bundla Sahil to kya,
Tanha Ye Dil to Kya

The song from the film Dor sings softly in my ears. The only other sound is the rain lashing upon the trees outside. Ah! the rain - always gets me in this mood. There's darkness all around. Thank you KSEB. I could light a candle, but doesn't feel like. Tomorrow's series exam is the last thing on my mind (How did it even prop up here?). There are so many beautiful and simple things to think about. 'Simplify!' - that was the title of an article I co-authored in school magazine. The same comes to my mind now as I realize... We often fail to see the beauty of simplicity. The song keeps talking of moving on in life, no matter what. But moving on over what? It's moments like these that refresh you, give you the strength to keep on moving. You just have to shut you eyes and let everything be - for a moment.

PS. My last blog was about the frustration of being idle.. feelings, they never fail to amaze me.

Why you should switch to Octave ?

I have been trying to 'sell' Octave to lots of guys who intend to use Matlab to do their project and my campaign was not well recieved, at least this far. So I am going to tell you why you should ditch Matlab, and get into the Octave bandwagon.

Octave is a free software developed and distributed by the University of Wisconsin, to perform the stuff that Matlab do. It was originally developed by the University of Wisconsin.

Octave is capable of performing real and complex arithmetic for scalars and vectors. Octave programs are written just like Matlab code, with one or two minor modifications. Code written in Matlab is compatible with Octave and vice versa. Octave script files have the .m extension, similar to the Matlab scripts.

Octave's capability can be enhanced by integrating it with Octave Forge, which is a collection of additional toolbox packages, for Octave. This is pretty much like the additional toolboxes available with Matlab.

Octave is a command-line based system and although a GUI is avaialbale, it is still in the alpaha stage and wont give you the experience that Matlab's IDE gives.

I have been trying out Octave for the past few days and I am very impressed by it. What really attracted to me was that the installer was very light, only around 55 MB. Once installed, it took soem time to get around the settings and controls. I tried running some code, that I had written for my project in Matlab, on Octave, and to my surprise it executed without any major change in the code.

I tried using the GUI that comes with Octave and it is good, although it is not a replacement for Matlab's neat IDE. It has pretty much everything that the Matlab IDE has, ie Command Window, Command History, File and Variable Window etc. The command window has a black background, which adds to Octave's geek value. :-) But be warned that OctaveUI is still in the aplha stage, and it is prone to crashes.

Overall, Octave gives you pretty much everything that Matlab can give you. It is a open source software distributed under the GNU General Public License(GPL). So you are actually using something legal, unlike Mtalab, which is used by most of us (read almost all) as a pirated program.

Octave - For

• Open Source Software
  
• Capable of doing almsot everything that Matlab does
  
• Two-way compatibility with Matlab
  
• C++/Java style mathematical operations ( ie it is OK to write i++; whereas in Matlab you have to use the tiresome i=i+1; )
  
• The well-written Octave manual is enough to get you started.
  

Octave - Against

• Lacks a good GUI (this proble will be solved soon, though the alpha version is not that bad)
  
• The Command line version requires some practice to get used to.
  
• The loops and conditional statements like for, if, while etc have a slightly different syntax compared to Matlab.
  

So guys, please try Octave. As I have already mentioned, it is very light, and can be downloaded easily.

Please read the Octave FAQ here.

kannadi collage

Insipid

Today is Tuesday
say how the day?
boring to the core,
raining more and more.

hows life?
full of stuff;
what kinda stuff?
stuff that make you laugh;

is it worth a laugh?
go ask your staff;
what will my staff say?
"are you gay?"

are you in love?
no I'm not;
torn between freedom and love,
I'm all bigot.

its a narrow lane to my house,
narrower is my mind.
my life ain't even a clause,
freedom where shall i find?

what do you seek?
abandon the meek
move free above the ego
alas! something that ain't easy to forgo!!

to be free from bonds,
bonds that create bounds,
then the vim shalt return,
least ways for a sojourn.

how long can you remain idle?

flashback or as the mallu movie goes.. rewind.. drastic rewind..

Three weeks ago we were working on something without a body, without a mind, trying to make the future. Our minds and body were bent on making it work. The robots were made. The battle half won. Who cares about the rest half. Anyway that is past and back to future. I keep haing an obsession of jumping from past to future when the thing that matters most is the present. But present is just a moment while the past and future are immeasurable.

So back to past or the recent past to be exact. What's keeping me busy these days? Nothing. So what's the problem? nothing. No i din't mean there's no problem. Nothing is the problem. You laugh at it, you sleep over it, you wake up and look around at and still don't see. You realize that the nothingness or the lack of anything is nothing if you consider the something days in the past when you had everthing and wanted to have nothing. Those something days.. when you always had something or someone in mind, when pen was mightier than 12 hours of sleep, 8 hours of looking blankly at the computer screen and 4 hours of trying to count the hours in a day.

Since when have you been a workaholic? You'd pride yourself in being the lazy kid. But even while being lazy you'd always tried to keep the brain moving. If it doesn't move, you feel congested, feels like..dead. So wake up buddy. Wake up and see the world.

Who am I talking to?
ah.. Hi John, what's been keeping you busy these days?