Elvesbane

The water green or dappled blue,
flows and plays around my toes.
The stones that lend its mystic tune,
weathered to be both round and smooth.

Green blades soft, unlike their namesake,
from brown earth do they spring.
They reach up, joyous to the extreme,
an affirmation of new life, it seems.

Trees sway in the warm white wind
and feel the onset of a new day.
They rustle and fall, do the leaves.
The path they trace, like children playing.

The mountains, tall and strong and true.
Old and ageless men unmoving,
like watchers from the olden days,
like caretakers of the milky way.

The birds doth sing, their voices ring,
a joyful peal, of mirth and feel.
Their wings are wide, they own the sky,
they swoop the spring right into their being.

***

Remember, I wrote this in one hour, as a submission to the this year’s poetry (in english, duh) competition for the college’s cultural and arts festival. So it was never meant to be all that good. So spare me the rod. ^_^

Question: Design a two pass assembler for an SIC machine in C language.

Time: 3 hrs.

I spent around 5 hours today working on the above mentioned program. A program that I had been working on, at college, for the past few weeks, totalling perhaps 7 hrs out of 9 in three lab periods. That’s 12 hours.

And I haven’t finished.

Now, I really don’t think I’m stupid or anything (or even lacking in the field of coding)… but this reminds me heavily of something Sriram chetan told me about my mini-project a few weeks ago when I told him what it was:

“Hmm… Graphical Representation of Non-Recursive Sorting Methods… hmm… kozhappamilla…

Pakshe… ithu moonu manikkoorinte karyam-e ollu.”

What is interesting is that nobody ever really questions the logic behind our examinations.

Exam (Definition): Tests designed to measure progress against the objectives of a lesson, course or field of study.

It’s a difficult concept, at best, so I’m gonna leave it at that definition. Let’s talk about our 3hr assembler for starts.

The algorithm for the 2 pass assembler is two pages long. One page each for each of the passes. It describes in a very general manner how the first pass scans the whole assembler code, finds of the locations of symbols and stores it. The seconds pass is similarly described as how the results of the first pass are used to put together the final object code.

The whole  thing really isn’t that hard to understand. A layman can understand the nitty-gritties of the whole damned thing in maybe 1 or 2 hours of reading. I began much the same way because I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the algorithm last semester. It was way too big for me to have finished studying the the last few hours before the exam, you see.

Constructing the actual program is, as always, an entirely different matter. The assembler is expected to read the contents of a file, and do a hellu-va lot of things (to say the least) before anything resembling an object code comes out of it. After my 12 hrs on this thing, I’ve completed the first pass, and maybe one-third of the 2nd pass.

As far as I know, no one in my class has completed this program yet. And I know that 90% of the girls and at least 70% of the boys (well rounded figures, don’t pay too much attention) are incapable of completing a program of  this scale. And this isn’t even that big. I’ve gotten to around 300 lines and think there’s another 100 to go. Not much, no.

But 3 hrs?? I mean, seriously?! I think I’ll barely be able to finish typing 400 lines of code in that time period, let alone make a program that size from scratch.

I also remember that my bro had suggested something like an assembler (macro processor, maybe) as an ‘easy’ candidate for a mini-project. True, it would have been an easy option.

For a mini-project! Not an effin 3 hr exam!

Gotta ask the teach about this one… just to see how she’ll squirm out of it. ^_^

P.S. I’ve updated the blogroll to include Sriram chetan’s new blog.

Edit: I’ve completed those programs and talked about them here.

This is going to be a big one. So fetch that pack of Lays / Popcorn / Favorite munchies before reading any further. ^_^

B.t.w, I’m going to make use of the word fun a lot in the following format - fun! (italicized with an exclamation point) in this blog entry. It’s just that I’m classifying those things as being under my category of having fun. Capish?

The whole thing was… enjoyable, to say the very least. Quite possibly unique too, which is kinda sad (like Jaimy mentioned towards the end) since a lot of it was entirely new to me, and that doesn’t happen often enough. I’m gonna go through the whole thing in as orderly a manner as possible, but that’s going to be hard since a lot of the stuff that’s happened is mixed up in my head, not to mention the fact that the itinerary got modified a helluva lot of times. I’m gonna avoid mentioning the train journeys since they were slightly boring, at best.

Hyderabad didn’t really turn out the way I’d thought it would… actually nothing did, and that’s to be expected, I guess. The greatest surprise during the whole trip was, undoubtedly, Sharika. Not that I really understand her more than I did before, or anything, but it definitely is nice to know that she doesn’t think of me as a completely hopeless conversationalist anymore. In fact, my high point during the whole trip was an argument I had with her, Shreya and Rajani during a trip back to the hotel - I disagreed with their opinion that women don’t pay any attention to a guy’s looks when it comes to a relationship. I hope I made at least one of them think differently. I thought the best part of shopping at Hyd was the Imax mall. It reminded me of Dubai what with all the expensive shops and the arcade (that was fun!). I even had a go at the rock-climbing wall - I climbed about halfway until I reached the negative gradient section which proved too much. (once again, fun!)

Snow World was also fun! Making a snow ball is difficult! But I pride myself in the knowledge that I was probably the only one who figured out how to make a proper snow ball. Towards the end of the one hour, my snow balls could travel as far as I could throw them (which isn’t all that far) without disintegrating. ^_^ My aim isn’t all that good though and that, coupled with being a pacifist, meant that I didn’t really hurt anyone with my super-duper snow balls. I got hit plenty of times though. It stings, lemme tell ya. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any pics here since I didn’t want a wet SLR on my hands.

Ramoji Film City was, as far as I’m concerned, a day wasted. At least everybody had the good sense (perhaps beat upon them by the unyielding sun) to leave early. Ramoji is more of a plain park than anything else. It’s got its fair share of interesting buildings, sights and curios, but the sad fact is that there is nothing more. Its all just something to see, and all that seeing gets pretty boring when you’re walking under a sun hot enough to make lead liquify.

On to Bangalore! The first day was entirely devoted to shopping. We (Me, Sabir, Sreekanth, Sreejith, Divya, Deepti, Roshini) went around the local shopping places looking for stuff. Actually I wasn’t exactly looking for anything but I ended up buying a USB cable for the iPod (which turned out to be useless), and another air-gun (I just can’t resist those ^_^), and a funky t-shirt.

Wonder-la turned out to be a photocopy of Veega Land. All that talk about it being 4 times the size and 10 times the fun is a load of hog-wash. It’s, at best, just as much fun as Veega Land. I tried out all but the most adventurous rides, and had fun (fun!) making a fool of myself in the Wave Pool. That’s about it for that Wonder-la, really. It was just your everyday water-park in a nice clean (heavily chlorinated) package. ^_^

The third day was a joke. We went to some temple in the morning - It seemed to me to be more of a commercial center than a place of worship so I bailed out early. I heard that the food stalls inside were very good though. The I.V. (that oh-so important ingredient) was an even bigger joke. We walked around the Infy campus and were finally lead to an impressive conference room, only to be shown a worthless promo vid, followed by an even more worthless question-answer session which proved that our guide didn’t know what to do with us and didn’t really care whether we left the campus impressed or not. Sigh…

Tour organization began to break down that evening. We got informed by the organizers that the train tickets to Goa hadn’t really been booked yet so we were going to have to look for an alternative means of transport. That really sent a lot of the guys into hysterics. Guys, mind you, not girls. All the girls remained calm (I thought that was mightily impressive) but a lot of arguments broke out among the guys with a few complaining about the lack of organization and what-not. Here’s an excerpt from a mail I sent Asif around that time:

“… It turned out that the tickets to our train to Goa hadn’t been ‘booked’ as had been assumed. This was two hours before the train was supposed to leave, approx 2 hrs before ‘now’.

All the expectable results followed - meaning a whole fuck-load of hue and cry. Sreekanth shined by being prominent among those who whined. That’s a whole story in itself so I’m not gonna get into it. …“

to which Asif replied:

“... Ah, something always happens. What’s a tour that goes strictly as planned? A strict tour, maybe.

Sreekanth shined by being prominent among those who whined. shine - whine - shine - whine - shine - whine - shine… …“

Truer words than he realized, I think. I actually had to physically drag Sabir away from Sreekanth at one point when their argument got a little too loud. Sabir later confessed that might have actually hit Sreekanth (or tried to) had I not pulled him away then. That would have been a sight. lol.

Anyway we reached Goa at 6 PM (much delayed, on a sleeper-coach bus), the next day and a few of the guys (including me) had a dip in the pool at the resort. We celebrated Nidhin’s and George’s birthday that night and I later went out with Sabir and Sreekanth to Dominoes and had some really nice pizza. Me and Sabir spent the night improving our aim with the air-gun. The can of deo that we used for target practice was left looking like the moon, its surface scarred by lots and lots of little craters.

The second day at Goa was spent shuttling back and forth between beaches. We went to the resting place of St. Francis Xavier towards the end of the day. The church exterior seemed to be in need of a lot of renovation, but the interiors were magnificent. Once inside, Sharika pointed out that a few of the girls (in our batch) who were actually crying as they prayed in the church. That seemed a little odd to me since I couldn’t spot anything that would make anyone cry. Religious fervor seems quite far-fetched so I assume it has to do with something I know nothing about.

Further breakdown of tour-organization meant that everyone was now fretting over whether we’d have tickets on the train back home that night. A lot of opinions were flying around and I tried my best to stay of the way. Eventually, after a lot of sorting through the chaff, it was finally decided to make do with what seats we had on the train. It actually turned out okay, and I still have no idea how they managed it, since we fit 58 people onto some 40 seats, and technically that’s illegal.

The ride back home was sombre at best. I spent a lot of the time sleeping and kathi-adikkifying since my iPod had lost its charge and I didn’t have any books to read. We reached Thiruvananthapuram at about 10 o’clock at night, and I got back home within 15 minutes. I slept from 2 o’clock that night to 2 the next afternoon. God, was I tired.

I’ve uploaded all the good photos I took during the trip to my PicasaWeb Album. Clicky!

Catcha’ll later!

I had an idea. A good one. I like!

Enough about that (^_^). Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of everyday life.

Or not, since I wouldn’t know how to make it sound interesting. I say that because I do not believe that my everyday activities are not interesting. Saying so, would not only be stupid, it would most likely be false. Of course, my everyday activities refers to waking up, going to college, falling asleep, and everything in-between.

Let’s see… what interesting stuff have I done (thought about, realized, whatever) lately?

• I’ve installed Windows Vista on my system (64bit Ultimate)! I have to admit that I’m mightily impressed by the work Microsoft has put in. The installation was deceptively easy… I kept wondering when the endless pop-ups full of ‘Allow this to happen’ and ‘Allow that to happen’ would begin their assault. As it turned out my fears were unfounded. Those popups do pop up once in a while, but not too often. It’s difficult to find 64-bit software by the way, but that’s okay since 32bit works fine. The only failed app I’ve encountered till now is Alcohol, which is kinda sad. Vista is extremely zippy by the way. Windows Explorer has had an overhaul and is nigh unrecognizable from its predecessor. If you have a system with >= 2gB RAM and a decent CPU (read C2Ds or X2s), you should be thinking about upgrading. 64-bit is not a must, but it’s nice if you like to stay on top of things.

• I’ve noticed (over a large period of time) that girls like to mention that I talk very little when I’m in their company. Its interesting to note that they offer this piece of insight only when they outnumber the number of guys that are in the chat at that time, and almost invariably never let me answer the question. Perhaps they feel intimidated. By my looks? No one in their right mind would call me cute, but I guess I could be called handsome under certain lighting conditions. That’s me being silly, but then telling me that I’m quiet and I need to talk more is kind of silly too. What makes them think I don’t know that I’m quiet? As for the question… its involuted nature lends me to believe that it can be safely disregarded.

• I saw the teaser trailer of Need for Speed: Pro Street in High Definition, and I’ve grudgingly accepted the possibility of the eventual death of gaming on the PC. The sort of graphics displayed on that Trailer (run on an XBOX360) cannot be run on my PC (C2D E6300 + 2gig RAM + 7900GS) at either that level of detail or at those frame-rates.

• Oh, and lest you forget, I had a good idea. A very good one. I like, like, like!

One more lab exam and the fourth sem can be considered over. That’s tomorrow, by the way, and it’s DS, so I’m not exactly worried. La Fest was yesterday and I came out of it thinking “I’ve seen this before”, and of course I had. My bro was correct in his assessment - “La Fest doesn’t change. The people do.”

I’ve been tinkering with my computer. I tried to overclock the CPU, but there’s something wrong with the settings and its doing more harm than good. Instead I tried clicking a idiot-proof button in the BIOS that read “Robust Graphics Booster” and set that to Turbo. My 3DMark06 scores jumped a good 300 points from its stock value! Here’s a text file listing my journey. Simple, and so much more effective than a CPU overclock! Heck, it even took my 3D performance above what it used to be when I had the 7900GT. The GS won’t last long anyway (in the current gaming climate) so a little automatic overclocking by the board should do no harm.

Oh, and I’ve been thinking.

In the distant future, it is inevitable that sufficiently advanced technology and comprehensive (or close to it) knowledge of the working of the universe will allow man to live in harmony with nature, as is so often portrayed in Utopian views of the ‘not-so-distant’ future.

The question is, how much will we have to destroy before we get there?

Or, perhaps, whether there will even be a nature with which to co-exist.

On a far lighter note, I’ve put together a series of Garfield comic strips. They’re supposed to be read together, and so if you’re in the mood for a few laughs (or not ^_^ ), follow the link. Ta ta!

Garfield is Jealous!

My contacts list in Yahoo shows absolutely everyone is offline. That’s never happened before.

Been a long time, hasn’t it? I’ve been very busy, mostly happy, experienced feelings of extreme embarrassement, depressing boredom and the ‘tearing-out-my-hair-in-frustration’ thingy in that time. However, considering the period of time involved here, that’s to be expected. I’ve also probably missed out many more and i guess, that’s to be expected too.

Dishaa was… intriguing. I did feel like tomhif quite a few times that day, but it felt different, and I enjoyed it because of that. Asif was there pretty much throughout the day… which was surprising.

College is crap, as usual. The teaching is quite definitely not what it’s supposed to be. It’s all just an attendance game. This sem is pretty much over anyway, and only those perpetual pain-in-the-neck lab records remain as loose ends.

I need to carry around my camera more often. Lots of interesting things happen all the time these days, might as well capture them while I can. ^_^

Check my flickr for a few more Dishaa Snapshots!

It’s a feeling of not having done something. Like there’s something obvious that I should know, but do not, and it’s nagging.

Distract myself and get it over with. It’s bullshit anyway.

Been to an auto expo today… called the ‘Autobahn’ after the speed-limit-less (no more, it seems) expressways of Germany. I don’t know what they hoped to convey with the name, but suffice to say that it didn’t dawn on me when I was at the event. There were a few interesting vehicles there… a rather fat-looking Hayabusa, a run-down-lookin’ 1998 sport-modded BMW M3… and um… oh wait, that was it. Sigh… and of course there were quite a few farting RX-100s and the accompanying cocker spaniels who seemed to be oblivious to the amazing racket their machines made. Sure, their front wheels were up in the air a lot of the time, but if you’ve seen one pass, you’ve seen em’ all… And there were a LOT of these passes. Enough to make someone feel it’s just another day of college…

…which it wasn’t…

since I actually participated in an event called the ‘Slow Race’. Predictably, I did not win, though I did make sure that I didn’t get disqualified…

…which was satisfying in itself.

I smell something really nice cooking downstairs… Let’s go investigate.

A post every few days anyway.

I finally got around to buying a new helmet today.

Vishnu says it looks pretty wicked along with the glasses. It’s pretty tight, unlike my last one. And it quite frankly looks a good lot better too, so that’s definitely an improvement. I’ve yet to start studying for the series exams, but I’m not overly worried, except about Maths, that is. And I don’t even have the time table yet. Typical, some might say.

India / Bangladesh match going on right now. India 63 runs in 22 overs. I feel like screaming with joy already… sigh…

So, what happened today?

A university exam… lab… electronics… sigh… toto fuck up aayirunnu. Ah well, I guess there’s always the ‘retry’ six months from now.

Not that I’m looking forward to it.

Design. It’s fun, sometimes. It’s just that I’m unable to envision myself taking it seriously. For that matter it’s hard for me to imagine myself taking anything seriously. So that shouldn’t really put me off, but something is. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, maybe because there’s more than one thing involved. But I think I’m ’sort of’ good at it right now, and if I spend enough time on it, I can be really good at it. But commitment to anything has never been my forte. And that scares me.

Too laid back. Too detached. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t care enough… which is kinda confusing… and it’s giving me a headache. Maybe later.

It pulled me into the world and made me believe that I was a part of it. That’s what I felt when I was watching ‘Children of Men‘. No, the plot cannot be called realistic… more like imaginative, but the camera work and the way in which the action scenes are put together gave me the chills.

A must watch. Really. It’s very very impressive.

I’ve been playing a game called ‘The Spirit Engine‘ quite a lot lately. Well, probably because of the fact it’s a 2D game, and that’s all that my oh-so-powerful 7900GT can manage at the moment. Throw 3D it’s way and it’ll throw back a BSOD soon enough. The memory (and perhaps the core itself) seem to have become damaged. Don’t ask me how… I didn’t mess around with anything! Really! I didn’t. About the game, it’s quite good, for a 2D game that is. It’s got a rather engaging story, which is a must as far as I’m concerned, and since it’s an RPG, it’s just the sort of thing I like to spend time on.

I’ve got my lab exams tomorrow, the electronics kind… and truth be told, I suck at it. I don’t think it’s a goner though and I’m hoping that the mysterious entity known as ‘luck’ that seems to shadow me helps out in some way. I’ll need it. Bye!