N3RD AL3RT_

It’s been a long time since I have updated this blob. Reasons? Lazyness, and time. Both reasons are related in someway that are beyond me. There are several things that I need to do before I start writing regularly again and these are pretty time consuming. Like, if you might have noticed my Catagories do not show up, and some other internal problems.

However, new stuff thats comming up:

1. Articles, code examples and completed programs on Python.
2. Articles and code examples on MATLAB.
3. My lates project reports and details.
4. Updates on previous project reports.

A good news is that I have completed my B.E Hons. degree on Electroncis and Instrumentation from BITS, Pilani-Dubai (U.A.E) campus (atlaa~st)!

My Ankylosing Spondylitis treatment is going on in Delhi, India presently. Natural treatment for now, mainly Ayurvedic.

I have been thinking of moving my blog to blogspot. I know, this seems to be the opposite of what I have always wanted but its mainly because of these reasons:

1. I love Wordpress, I love the flexibility and customizations! But it gets too much to keep up as I am into a lot of other things lately.

2.  As for blogspot, it has been improving albeit a little slowly. Mainly I can add videos, HTML code and Java apps, plus also Google Gadgets. This makes multi-media presentation a bit simpler. Information is more important now, fast information.

So keep an eye on this one for now. I will tell everything about upcoming projects and some more exciting things:

1. Going to buy a rotary tool set!

2. Started learning Python. Amazingly compact and thus a bit tougher to get through it, but its fun.

3. New projects on crazyengineers.com (as xheavenlyx).

4. Will be updating previous projects (since I will be having the rotary tools!)

Here are some interviews with Ben Heckendorn, these are just links and are not mine, but thought neccessary to share with all you readers.

He is a very active game console hacker/moder. Not in any way related to piracy! But he will strip your game console and remake them smaller, portable and much more fun! He has no formal training in electronics but is self thought.

The reason I am writing about him is that he is one of those people who take a boring subject and turn it into creative, artistic, lovable and fun subjects. Visit his website if you are curious: www.benheck.com

He has written an excellent book:

Hacking Video Game Consoles: Turn your old video game systems into awesome new portables (ExtremeTech) from Amazon.com

Ok, so here are the interviews:

1. Hack A Day: Part 1 Podcast about 21 mins,

Part 2 Podcast about 21 mins.

2. Interview with Ben Heck – Console Hacker Extraordinaire From Racket Boy.

3. From Good Deal Games .com : http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_Ben_Heckendorn.html

You must have, should have read about my visit to CNN in the previous post. Well, we finished off by exchanging cards, no wait, not exchanging, she gave hers. We exited the office in awe, thinking wow, that was damn easy So, while getting down the lift, we stopped on the 3rd floor randomly because of the colorful direction boards and company names. We came across many like Cybertronix, 7 Cube etc, but none were open, so we decided to visit Geo Channel. Half of the whole floor was theirs, nice.

We entered the office, no receptionist. We introduced ourselves to a guy next to the recep. and asked if someone could show us around. He looked puzzled which was understandable considering how many barge in like this – he asked us to talk to a guy sitting behind us. He was the broadcasting Station Head; Mr. Imran Meer. Well, Geo TV is Pakistan’s premiere news and entertainment channel like ARY and local PTV group. He gave a huge smile and said, “So, you guys are students? Want to have a look around?”. We were all wide faced smilie-lookin. He took us to the News station area where they receive feeds from all over the world from other stations and journalists or Routers, AFP, AP etc. The edit all that, translations, voiceovers, etc and give it to the area where its put in line with the anchor talking about all that stuff, the studio where the anchor sits (Hamid Mir). well, just for your information they all use apple Mac’s there, not a single Wondooz based PC for the technical work. Though some employees had 2 pcs, one Mac the other an Intel machine.

more…

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Last week a friend of mine, an old family friend, landed here in Dubai, Emirates. His name, Aamer Mansoor Trambu, a final year student of journalism, Mumbai (And presently in Ryerson Uni, Toronto, Canada as an exchange student). We had our friendly exchange of life stories and usual recording of random video clips for our own music video (he wanted to showoff what he learned at the school of journalism and I wanted to showoff my Adobe After Effects skills). By the end of the day, suddenly, we decided to do something I had always wanted to for a long time. Visit random companies and pester them with a million questions about their work (and ofcourse learn at the same time, while keeping their irritation at a minimum). So we decided to head to CNN at Dubai Media City.

Now before I talk about the visit, I want to get something off my chest. Generally students, as far as I know in my college, think its not possible to get companies to show them around. This might be from the fact that our college professors never encourage us nor tell us how to go about requesting companies to do that and, sharing the blame, the students themselves are never interested. Very few students have tried it (successfully, but never shared their experience which I dont understand why not) and very few professors have told us to do so (these few professors are the reason I am still interested in engineering For sure, if you try it the right way, companies would love to show you around as long as you truthfully tell them why you are there.

Moving on; I called 119 (Information services) and asked for CNN’s number. They didn’t have CNN listed, weird. Anyway, I know every group here has a website, like Media City (News.TV.Publishing.Magazines.Events), Internet City (Software.CorporateSolutions.TelephoneOps.ISPs), Knowledge Village (Institutes.Training.Colleges.otherCompanies) and Academic city, Biodubai, Silicon Oasis and so on. We got CNN’s number and Aamir called them up. The operator directly transfered the call to a sweet lady, Miss Samia (Initially he got confused and asked if we wanted to drop in our CV, I wish!). Samia asked us to meet the next day (14th Nov) at 12 pm. Wow, we could not believe it. CNN is just a call away!

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Here are two videos I made using windows movie mekah. Its not bad for basic picture to video presentation and amature video editing. The best features are easy text/titles/credits and splitting an imported video. The worst thing about this is the video can only be exported in .WMV format!!!

Update [09/12/08 - 8:00pm]: I am testing a new flash video player. However, WP already has a way to directly import/embed youtube video’s. The new flashplayer can only play flv, and related videos.

Update [09/12/08 - 8:00pm]: Tested internal Flash video player. Garbage! Does not work…or is too slow. The best options are using default Youtube and FLV links. And 1 Pixel Audio Player.

Basic Youtube form using an option provided by Wordpress:

Using an Audio Plugin:

Download file here: Enigma: Gravity of Love

We, and I mean all of us existing (with no intention of generalizing), have a tendency to ‘Label’; a genetic habit of trying to place something somewhere within a ‘group’. Why do we do this? As I said it’s genetic.

Not surprisingly, we have a tendency to label even the un-label-able and sometimes label the lables themself (damn those homophobes). Now I could go on about labeling the anti-labelers (antiracist? what about pro-anti-racists?)

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J. J. Leonard and Hugh Durrant-Whyte, in the last decade, briefly described the general problem of mobile robot navigation by three questions: “Where am I?,” “Where am I going?,” and “How should I get there?.”

I was shocked to realize that these 3 basic questions which we, ofcourse take for granted(!) are actually immensely complex implementations in robotic systems.

What I found interesting is that to date there is no truly elegant solution even for the “Where am I?” part! A collection many partial solutions can roughly be categorized into two groups: relative and absolute position measurements. Because of the lack of a single, generally good method, developers of automated guided vehicles (AGVs), unmanned flying vehicles (UAV’s) and mobile robots usually combine two or more methods, one from each category. These two super-groups can be further divided into sub-groups as shows below.

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Today’s Selection

Excellent video lectures on Op-Amps and circuits from MIT. Click here to visit the whole page or watch each video.

These are 50 minute videos (rm) are with full explanation. A good watch!

I never thought I will write a general entry to my blog. But non-technical can be as interesting as technical (N3RD alert_).

So anyway. College is fine, except a few glitches with my right hip. Because of which I get a little cranky and irritated.

Still in the making: Tilt sensor. FM bug.

www.crazyengeers.com recently interviewed Jessica Arnold (Microsoft® Outlook® Product Manager) (All because of our amazing admin Biggie_K!)

We are planning to interview a few professors of MIT too, in some time though. Since forming informative Q’s is not reallyyy easy. Moreover, they dont have much time. Last time they had Dan Kuykendal (Director Of Engineering, NTObjectives Inc., USA) – the man behind Mighty Seek Podcast, podPress, project – phpGroupWare, rpmBuilder, Qmail & podcastAlley!

Keep watching for more interviews. (/N3RD Alert_)