End of Quarter 1 (UCLA Rocks!)

Forgive me for the unimaginative title, but I just had to give a post a title before I actually get around to publishing it...
Now to business...

Phew! It's been a hell of a journey. I'm sure there's a lot of posts online about Grad School and lots of comics too. Let me take some time to describe my last week, and my adventures in the United States.

The last few days of the quarter, tension running high, I had two submissions on the last day of the Fall quarter and both on the minute before midnight on Friday night. The first of the two was an Advanced Operating Systems assignment. We were supposed to do the lab and a challenge problem. I had already done the lab a couple of days before, however, a challenge problem was pending. I like doing challenge problems as although the problems are usually defined (we do have the freedom to come up with our own, but I lack creativity and usually go the textbook approach) how to get around to actually doing them is actually up to us. So even though many people attempt the same challenge problem, the results are often contrastingly different.

The second submission was a project which was in particularly a bad shape, mainly because it was challenging, and as it was quite open-ended, there was no end the project could come to. We wanted to do as much as possible, so in order to get enough done, I and my project team began work and did two successive night-outs in the EGSA (Engineering Graduate Students Association) Lounge, but got our project in shape for submission.

On Thursday, we had an AOS challenge problem demo session. Some of us demonstrated our challenge problems we had implemented. I had not gone prepared to present anything, but ended up doing an impromptu presentation anyway. And yes, there was awesome cake and cold ice-cream!

I also had to do a challenge problem for the last lab, so I spent almost the whole of Friday doing that. I ended up doing a decently good challenge problem, and also implementing the "cp" and "mv" functionality in the shell. Both submissions were done, and the quarter was finally over!

Did it end there? Not quite!!!

A couple of weeks back, I had registered for a ski trip to Lake Tahoe (a bit east of San Francisco) and we had to leave on Sunday morning. As it turned out, since I was going to be in Los Angeles, I hadn't carried too many warm clothes from India. Therefore, I had to go shopping with some friends in order to get a waterproof jacket, some ski trousers and a couple more things from Target. It was late by the time we came back, but I had asked one friend to come over for tea (ended up in being dinner!) We had a pretty amazing time, and by the time we were done, it was around midnight. It was a fitting clelbration for the end of the quarter, and..... I still hadn't packed for the trip!

After packing, I realized that if I slept, I would never be able to wake up in time for the trip, so I chatted some more with the friend I had over for dinner (thankfully, she was online) and ended up sleeping for just one hour, and all the way on the bus to Lake Tahoe.

The next three days were quite amazing, to be honest. I ended up learning how to stop, and how to turn (while on skis, obviously!) and ended up falling around ten times in all. I also got to ride a ski-lift. I finally got to see it snow! That had been one of my dreams. There were also a couple of things I learnt about myself while we were there. We all (60 of us) stayed in a huge lodge and enjoyed spending time together. Turns out, I hate it when there's too many people making a lot of noise or playing load music in the same room, especially if I do not know most of them personally... Thankfully, I had a friend who saw this immediately, and helped me get away from all the ruckus. I should work on my people skills...

The food was awesome, and the staff in charge of the trip was very organized, helpful and a lot of fun. I met a lot of people and made a handful of friends. Around a dozen of us also played Taboo on the day before departure back home till 2:30 am. The game is awesome, and we made it guys v/s gals, which made it even more fun. We tried our best, and I'm happy to note that we won by sever points less than the other team... We had also played a couple of games of Shrink on the previous days which was also fun to play...

The ride back was almost uneventful except for the fact that we saw Lake Tahoe (finally!) and watched a couple of "good" movies.

I thought the fun was over, and could finally look forward to some free time. But no, not quite yet!

Turns out, my roommate's friends had come over for the holidays, so we went to Venice Beach the next day! The water was so cold that we couldn't stay in it for more than a minute. However, me and my trusty DSLR got a decent number of amazing shots of seagulls flying, and of the sunset. Made the trip to the beach so worth it....

As if that was not enough, the next day, all of us went to Universal Studios Hollywood! We went quite late though, and it did not help that it was a rainy day. There were a lot of amazing shows and rides there, and I think it'll take another post to write about all of them, and all the fun we had there.... I finally got my picture taken in front of the Universal Studios globe (one more thing I wanted since a really long time) The studio tour was amazing, the Shrek 4 show was cool, and the Mummy and Jurassic Park rides were thrilling (roller coaster - one which also went backwards for a bit, and Aquadive at Esselworld respectively) We came back at night, and had dinner at Chipotle (yummy!)

It was an amazing end to the first quarter at UCLA with lots and lots of fun, and several gigabytes of pics!

Looking forward to more stuff we'll be doing over the next few days....

Later!

Water in a Tubelight

Captured on the train while coming back to campus. There's water in the tubelight, and its a wonder how the tubelight hasn't short-circuited yet. Here's 'Nisarg Saundarya' (Nature's Beauty) for you VAB, not outside the train but but right inside it........ :)

Cube Hunt

Puzzles have always fascinated me right since childhood. I have solved a variety of puzzles available at the local toy shops back home. On the second last day of college before a Diwali break, I was in a friend's room chatting with him when I saw a puzzle there which I had been unsuccessful at solving a long time.

The Rubik's Cube, one of the oldest puzzles available and also one of the most popular, was lying on his desk. Suddenly, my interest in it was rekindled, and I just had to buy a cube and learn how to solve it.

As soon as I got home, the first thing I did was get myself a cube from a local fair. The cube wasn't of a very high quality, but was decent enough to learn how to solve.

Jump to a month later.....

I had bought a cube but due to the busy exam schedule, I hadn't got an opportunity to actually analyse and solve it properly, though I had tried to play with it for a couple of minutes whenever I got the time.

Finally, after trying repeatedly to unsuccessfully solve the cube, I turned to Google™ for help. Finding a tutorial was simple enough. During the journey back home, I finally learned to solve the cube, but was still a little shaky.

During the vacations, I could finally perfect my technique but ended up spoiling the cube in the process......

Here's where the cube hunt began.....

I wanted a cube that was of a better quality that I already had. The first place I thought of was the toy store from where I used to buy all my puzzles a long time ago. However, unfortunately, the store had only one cube, but that was of a very low quality, compared to my cube.....

I tried going to a few more shops in the vicinity, but there I had trouble even getting the shopkeeper to understand what a Rubik's Cube is.

I had to visit my relatives in a neighbouring town. I tried visiting all the major shops there too, but to no avail....

Finally, there was one last shop left which I thought might be having a good cube for sale.....

I go there and find that all their cubes were sold out just two days ago. I asked the shopkeeper when new stock would arrive, and he told me that I would get a cube in a week....

Now the problem was that the vacation was almost over, and I had to return two days later, and hence my dream for a better cube remained a dream.

Hopefully, I will be luckier next vacation and will finally be able to procure a cube, and continue learning to solve it faster than the basic method I am now familiar with.

Until I get a new cube.........

The Start of Something New

These winter vacations, as with any other vacation, I was looking for something new to do and increase my exposure and give me more experience. In college, a few introductory lectures had been delivered by our seniors on "Microcontrollers".

I knew an old friend (old as in the duration of our friendship, not his age ;) ) who had some exposure in the Electronics and Robotics field, and I asked him to guide me as I built a programming board for a microcontroller.

He knew about the Atmel AT89S52 microcontroller, so it was the same microcontroller I chose.

I asked him to make me a list of all the components I would need to make the board and I bought all the components from the "Mecca of Electronics" a.k.a. Lamington Road.

I already had the basic electronic stuff such as soldering iron, flux, rainbow wire and the various tools with me as I had been making electronic kits (simple stuff like clap switch and listening bug etc...) since as back as 9th grade.

Soldering all he components onto the board took about a day at max, when I realised that I was a few components short, leading to another trip to Lamington Road (This happens quite often in electronics)

Finally when I had all the components ready and soldered, I went to his house at 2pm on one fine day, so that he could do the touchups , check the circuit board and help me begin programming.

As with any electronics kit, this one also had a few problems and believe me hardware debugging is a lot more irritating than software debugging. The power was not at all reaching the 7805 transistor, so I had to desolder it and put a new one in its place.

Pray to God that you never may need to desolder a component off a board...... It is the worst thing that can happen to you in electronics......

Now, back to the board..... Even after replacing the 7805, the power did not reach it so we came to the conclusion that the track was faulty...... We shorted the track, and another track and finally the circuit began to work.

By this time it was 11pm so he quickly showed me the way to write a program and burn it on the chip (we did not have time to do it then.....). Then I said a quick bye and thank you and left for home........


The next day, I decided to try making my own program. The first challenge was getting Keil and the burning program he had referred to to make the programming wire. Finding these took 2 hours together, after which I finally sat down with a Mazidi Mazidi to try out a sample program.

Using Keil was simple enough but then burning the hex code to the chip was more of a problem than it seemed. It seemed that errors while occuring randomly while programming the chip. I finally realised that holding the board in the air while the programming took place was the most secure and error free way to burn the program onto the chip.

I wrote a simple LED blinking program to begin with, and the burning was finally successful and I actually saw the LEDs blinking in the way that I had programmed them to. It was an exhilarating feeling. It was like the first time I did something new and worthwhile in a long time.

Such moments are very rare and can never be forgotten....
I may forget which microcontroller I used but I definitely won't forget the sheer thrill and joy that rushed through me when I could make a computer program do something in real life.

These moments usually occur like the time one learns to ride a bicycle, or writes his or her name using a mouse in Paint on a computer for the first time etc......

Such moments are truly magical and will be treasured by me forever....................