Cliff Calvin was explaining the Buffalo Theory to his buddy Norm.

Here’s how it went:

“Well ya see, Norm, it’s like this… A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the lowest brain cells.

Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That’s why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

cheers, drink on!
WARNING: CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOL IS INJURIOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

I noticed that the English lab at our college has been upgraded. It must have been done at least 6 months back. The lab has been nicely furnished with cool looking tables n chairs, and around 40 new computers, all with dual-core processors and lots of RAM and hard drive space. They’ve also purchased English training software approved by the university for all the computers.

I’ve been in this college for more than 3 years (I’m in the final year now), and during this period, there have been several improvements in infrastructure. Still, we find if difficult to get resources where we need them.

For example, the common computer center here has some 75 computers and the students can browse during non-class hours. The problem is that all these computers were bought at least 3 years before I joined the college, and are vintage items now. They have Celeron 700 Mhz processors, have 128 MB of RAM and run Windows 2000.

Well, even the Windows 2000 thing doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is that all these computers have only Internet Explorer 5.0 installed. The technicians say all other browsers are as evil as hell. Nobody cares if IE5 doesn’t support AJAX. Why does it matter to them? The entire computer center is not capable of display in the standard gmail interface, and they don’t have the slightest idea of installing at least a newer browser!

And moving on, even while opening normal HTML pages, these computers won’t let us open more than 3 browser windows at a time. If we do, they will slow down terribly or worse, stop responding completely!

Why does the English lab, which runs only training programs need such nice computers while the common computer centre has vintage computers? What is sickening is the fact that the college has nice computers, but not where it is actually required.

This college would have been at a much better place, if they had learnt to manage the resources properly. I was wondering if their idea of creating a nice learning environment is different altogether!

I am supposed to take a seminar on some technical topic at the communication skills lab, the day after tomorrow. I thought I would just read something about video game controllers and give a small talk. (yea yea, i chose this topic only to make sure every one listens to me.. ;D)

But preparing for the topic turned out to be extremely interesting and exciting to me, because they have a lot more of instrumentation, than I had expected. Infact, they have more to do with instrumentation, than with any other field.

The potentiometers used in the joysticks, the accelerometers for motion sensing, and the piezoelectric vibrators for force feedback were all part of my curriculum, and this particular application excites me.

I must go and prepare for the presentation now. I want to share this excitement with my classmates too. Hope it goes well.

Check this link: http://scienceline.org/2006/12/18/motioncontrollers/

A few friends and I have decided to design a simulator for the PIC16F87xA series of microcontrollers as our final semester project. Most of the simulators and compilers available for the PIC microcontroller are commercial software. Microchip corporation’s Assembler is free, but not open source, and the C compiler that they offer is commercial.

There are quite a few open source counterparts, and gpsim is especially good among them, but still, all of them lack a good interface and are in no way friendly for the beginner.

That’s why we decided to go with this project, and if it turns out to be good, it will be released under the GNU public license. Initially we are planning to design the simulator using Visual C#, and then port it to Python at a later time.

If time permits, we will also try to include a few other PIC microcontrollers, and we even have plans for the ARM microcontroller. I guess we will be having some trouble with the C compiler part. Hope my CSE friends come to the rescue.

I had Ubuntu installed on my computer along with Windows and my computer and I were extremely happy for quite a while. All was well until last week, when I decided to get a little adventurous, and got a few linux distro dvds from the library.

I tried OpenSUSE first. Then when I came to know of Novell’s deal with MS, and OpenSUSE’s similarities with Vista, I decided to scrap it and took the Slackware 11 DVD. They say its the best slackware yet, still it doesnt have a graphical installer! And it does not install Grub or Lilo so that we can have multiple operating systems installed.

I almost lost my windows! All my data is in my windows partitions as windows partitions can be accessed from both windows and linux. Then I installed Ubuntu again and fortunately, my windows came back.

Things learnt:

1. The Slackware installer was not designed with me in mind.
2. OpenSUSE has lost its integrity.
3. When I want to get adventurous, I should use a spare computer.

Things lost:

1. Quite a lot of applications that I had downloaded on my Old Ubuntu.
2. 3 nights’ sleep.

Finally, I decided not to try anything other than ubuntu for a while.

My first ever program was a hangman game that I wrote on my brother’s old TI-85 programmable calculator. It was some 7 years back, when I was in class 8 at school. I don’t remember exactly how it started, as it was quite a long time back.

The TI-85 did not have much memory, so words couldn’t be stored in it. To play, every time, a word had to be entered by someone at the beginning, and the game would be to find that word within 5 mistakes. My dad, my brother and I used to play the game repeatedly and by the time each game ends, I would have thought of a new feature or some improvisation I could do on the program and the program got better and better, and we spent a whole lot of time playing too.

Even back then, my brother was an expert in programming computers and was not too interested in the TI-85 and so, I got a lot of time on it. And soon, seeing my interest in programming, dad got me a computer too and I started with C n stuff.

I saw a TI-85 recently, and that brought the old memories back. Well, to tell you the truth, those days were great too!