Hey world!!!

Wot a great thing to do.. letting the whole world know wot im doing right from my tiny room here..

Hail Technology!!!

But we’re growing a bit tooo dependent on technology (this ain’t a confession - im not that dependent on technology ).. We sure could have done well without all of this crap.. Because here, in most of India, technology is failing us in almost every thing we do, be it electricity, tap water, petrol, broadband, public address systems…

We could have been much happier, with no worries of not being able to post on orkut, inability to talk to friends on the other side of the globe, we wouldnt even have known them, nothing…

But I reali wud have missed the chili peppers, if it had been that way..
I wish open source becomes more popular here too, with more donations pouring in, so that technology can be perfected based on experience..

The first of April, this year did not have all the fun n excitement it used to have in the olden days. I woz totally astonished to see that nobody even cared to make a fool out of someone here.
No hoaxes, no jokes n no embarrassments.
It looked as though people here had completely forgotten the usual celebrations after embarrassing the gullible.

My day went like any other sunday, with nothing special to talk about. Got up, got breakfast, wasted in front of the pc, n did all the crap.

I woz text messaging with my dad in the evening when he said he had bot a jersey cow with a female calf, because of the increasing price of milk. He has been talking about this for some time, n i knew that with the enormous backyard n with the workers, maintaining them wont be a problem.

I woz happy about it n asked him wot he had named them.

The reply came: The jersey cow’s name is April and the calf, fool!

The IEEE students chapter of our college organized a demo on programming FPGA chips with Xilinx tools. The demo was conducted by an FPGA expert from Bangalore.

It woz exclusive for those who had registered for the Nios II Design Contest, and around 25 students were attending, apart from the 6 staff members.

The demo woz extremely interesting and useful and we got loads of ideas n new techniques on programming for the soft processors.

Once we figure out how to use these techniques with the Nios II soft processor, we are almost ready to start.

The EIE Association conducted a two national level symposium on the 28th and the 29th of March. There were 5 events totally:

1. The usual Paper presentation
2. Project presentation
3. Technical quiz
4. Dexter’s lab
5. Circuit debugging

On the first day, we had the paper presenatation and the technical quiz, and the other events on the second day.

Things went reali great and all of us worked well. Got loads of appreciations from seniors and staff and a good feedback from the participants. I also made friends with a few participants.

As for me, this is the first time that im satisfied with what i’ve done. I designed an application for the quiz and the design turned out to be the best i’ve ever made! Every one liked it a lot!

And I woz happy about the good work at the end of the day.

I’l try to upload the photos some time soon..

ALTERA has announced the Nios II Design contest for this year. We have registered this time too. But only John Rupert and me are in the team. Planning to design an E-Listener for the deaf using the Nios II soft processor.

This requires a lot of Digital Signal Processing, and we’re sharpening our DSP skills. The deadline for the submission of the final report is the 1st of September. Still a long way to go, with loads to do.

BITS, Pilani, along with ALTERA Corporation, USA was conducting an all India project design contest. It was announced in November 2006. Four of us, John Rupert, Pradeep, Anand and Me decided to participate. Our idea woz to design a Laser Video Projector.

We sent the proposal, got selected for the semifinals, n they were supposed to send us an FPGA programming kit, and design software. We got the design software, but the kit never came. We tried calling them, emailing them, but nothing worked.

Atleast we got selected for the semifinals.. We were among the top 107 teams in India.. Had to be happy with that.