Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

WHAT A DAY! First, my microcontroller program works successfully for the first time. I was really very sceptic about using C to program the controller. But thanks to SDCC it was a cake walk. As a rough estimate, SDCC and the allying tools reduced development time by at least 80%. SDCC is an optimising compiler derived from GCC. It comes along with a simulator - S51 and a source leveldebugger - SDCDB. Really good tools, also available for Windows. I had heard that cross compilers bloat up the code a lot. However the code produced by SDCC is certainly better and compact than I could have written in assembly. And, where it beats most of the other tools is that it is free software and doesn't have any restrictions on code size. Thank God for free software ... or should I say ... RMS? Today was also the day India won against Pakistan. Sachin Tendulkar made short work of plans a, b, c .... (how many letters do we have?) of the Pakistan bowlers. Boundaries were coming at will. Shoab ...

Had a real hectic week. RMS was fantastic. He is a phenomenon. What was most striking about him is that he is a king who mingles with the commoners. He replies to each mail personally, eats and drinks with his audience(whatever they eat), doesn't bother on insisting on things like mineral water and has a good, analytical brain. And unlike other great people who can give great speeches, he usually talks sense. You can rarely catch him on the wrong foot. He really had me convinced about calling the system GNU/Linux. But saying "guh-noo slash leenux" everytime is a bit tasking on the toungue. Also "Linux" sounds cool ... although "guh-noo" is not bad either. I think I will go with GNU. It would also make it easier to adapt when the 'hurd' begins to stampede. My project now has an official one-word name. It's called AppCon for "appliance control". I think it's the best I could do when told to choose a name in half a minute. It...

Posting this from GNUnify at SICSR. Supposed to be doing a RH 8.0 installation ... but there are better things to do like 'nothing'.

I hope all the GATEs open up to me :-)

Just had a passing thought - do we all see the same colours? I mean, it could be possible that one person sees green what another sees red. There is no way to tell really, because an individual has been told that "leaves are green" and "sky is blue". He will associate the colour he sees the leaves with 'green'. Is it possible to tell what he really sees? It could very well be the sensation I get when I see red, for instance. No wonder then ... beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! Doesn't matter really. Beauty is relative. And the beautifull things will even then seem relatively beautifull ... or will they? Again, how do we decide if something is relatively beautyfull without taking into consideration the sense of colour? God, this is a recursive cycle. Frankly, I would rather do factorials if recursion is the way to go!

The IIT techfest was beyond words. The best technology from the country was at display and the lecture series was also amazing. The best part was perhaps the laser show. Then there was the 'Robo-cup' - dog like robots playing football match and then dancing in synch to "Who let the dogs out". There were so many amazing things that it would require a full fledged report to describe them all. Maybe www.techfest.org would be much better. One thing that 'stood' out was a 6 foot tall, six legged walking robot (Natraj). It's manufacturing price is about 13 lakhs ... compared to $2 million of its US couterpart with the same functionality. There was a lecture by RMS (teleconference from Boston). Thankfully, he spoke not on free software, but on current copyright laws and their ill effects. It's sort of sad that the space shuttle had to crash during the event though. Maybe NASA should have thought about an abort after something went wrong during the launch. ...

Well, it's been a while ... I had my foundations of C programming shaken up a bit, and I am still recovering from the shocks. I got the hang of the .bmp file format finally, and I am now seriously hooked on to image processing. I am leaving for the techfest at IIT Mumbai tomorrow. Looking forward to a few days of good, fascinating technology.