Memoirs of a QWERTY Keyboard
My final semester project will hopefully deal with something related to UI-Design and Multi-touch devices. A completely new topic to me at the moment but something I *think* I can work out, in the three months that I have. If all fails, there’s always been the web.
If anyone’s worked with self-made MT devices (FTIR, etc.) and have a minor tip or two, do let me know!
Am mixing a lot of words ain’t I? This is for September + Hectic.
There’s the college technical events coming up on 14th, named ‘Pragmatics’. I’m responsible for the code event under it, and can almost smell the deadlines. Then the next day I leave for the college-provided tour across Kerala and a part of TN itself. All nicely ending with the Indian Python Conference 2009, around the month end.
Results for all even semesters B.E. and B.Tech (Engineering Degrees, for IT, CSE, ECE, EEE, ME, E&I, etc.) (2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th) will be out in the coming weeks of July 2009, as most rumours go (Most of which point to a date around 15th~). These are for the exams that stretched from April/May 2009, to June 2009.
Update: For 2010 8th Semester April May Results of Anna University B.E./B.Tech, click here.
Here’s a list of potential websites you can check for your results. Comment if you know some other ones!
(I shall keep updating the links once results are out)
More will be added once results get out.
With the onslaught of these micro-blogging sites I just can’t think of writing anything more than 140 characters. I’ve tried posting a digest of the same in the blog every week just to keep it going here but it does not look so neat. The Lifestream plug-in, now in action at one of my pages, keeps track of most of the 2.0 updates while I try to bring myself back to posting proper web logs.
With the model exams over, I have about a month’s holidays to prepare for the 6th semester exams. Too much time, probably cause I listen in the classes. This semester was pretty good compared to the five before since it had two programming and one cryptography topic accompanied with some mathematics to keep the dullness taking over. I don’t know what they’ve chosen as electives for the next semester, but I do know that learning Compilers and related topics at college has nil possibility now. I can learn things myself but I don’t always have that discipline required, hence the sadness of not being taught.
I’ve decided to merge here, the PyQt blog I have running over at WordPress.com. I’ve not posted much there, and think that it will be better off at my own blog. Will be posting the existing posts one at a time. Qt 4.5 brings in quite a lot of performance boosts and their blog is very active these days with new concepts/features being put up almost every week. Thank you Nokia!
I also upgraded my Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04 flawlessly. The updater’s config-file diff warning notices need to have more options since it blocks the update process; an editor should do well. Jaunty Jackalope, as it is called this time, has good updates like OpenOffice.org 3 (Took long enough), Qt 4.5 (Wonder how KDE4 would perform on this one), Python 2.6 (Deprecation warnings, yum). A lot of other updates are present too, I just mentioned the ones I cared about.
One of my cabinet fans started making very loud droning noises and it made my temper flare quite a few times. I literally punched it, hard. The everlasting dust issue also started to seek attention again and I had no choice but to sit down, yet again, and clean the CPU off its dust. The graphic card had quite a lot of dust collected upon it this time, and that was the reason why the computer whined when I played a graphic-intensive game. After cleaning off the cabinet using an air-blower, I detached the side fans and after discovering that they had a secret compartment beneath the sticker I gave it some oiling.
It does not make much noises now, except for a few audible scratches when my Prescott is really hot trying to run the VisualBoy Advance at 400% throttle. Peace in my small room, at last. I’m losing patience on this 4 year old machine and I have probably mentioned that a hundred times. Yet I can’t seem to take a decision and buy a newer PC, and I don’t know why. The only things am sure about right now is on getting a 22-inch monitor and half a terabyte of secondary storage with two or four gigabytes of primary memory thrown in. The processor and the motherboard, however, are still delaying my decision with new ones coming in every other month. I’m dying to dive into the upgrade pool.
Having, at least, three weeks of free time I decided to get myself the Spider-Man’s Web of Shadows game. It does lack in performance but has some cool moves, like the last movie game did. I also want to play the Broken Sword series again but I don’t think I’ll find time to do that. For now, let’s just swing with the symbiotic.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve done in the past three days. More as they come.
I know I rant a lot about my college, the studies that men do, and general stuff in that regard. But underneath all that hate I seem to spew around, I do actually love my course.
It does get tedious when some subject you have no real interest for gets in the way and you have to learn it no matter what but if seen clearly it does teach you something you never knew all your life. And am sure somewhere you would be able to apply the same, if not immediately, in your life.
I shouldn’t be speaking examples here cause cases are all relative to what people study but I’ll push on with it. I had no idea how or what JPEG compression worked or did until this semester. And when I did learn that and GIF, TIFF, MPEG and other stuff like it, I realized how important digital signals were and how much you can achieve by them. I had to remove the mental block that had grown out of my hatred towards any subject that considered a signal x(n) and derived seemingly useless equations out of it a.k.a Digital Signal Processing.
What I mean here is, once I got to know how large the application area of the subject I hated was, I felt shame I did that. But its not entirely my mentality at fault, its also the syllabus outline we have prescribed. The subjects hardly focus on the practical part of a paper, and by practical I do not mean laboratory or stuff like that, but real-world applications. At max all I see is a small 4-5 point block about “Used as”, “Used in” and etc. Never do they include an detailed explanation about at least one of the various interesting applications of the topic.
Not that it would make a difference to the majority who wish to graduate for work purposes alone but to those who actually have joined with an interest it would mean a lot.
Back to normal topics, (i.e. if you’re still reading this far), I’m loving this Gentoo Linux, it didn’t turn out to be hard as predicted at all. Of course I just did the stage3 install via the Handbook but I’ve compiled my own custom kernels and applications and it all seem so easy and nice to do. Well, so much for a normal topic huh?
Gonna watch Iron Man or Speed Racer within the week and both within the next. Just for summer’s sake of course. I really wish The Dark Knight released sooner, its too long the wait since Batman Begins to watch Bale take up the Wayne role again with his perfect straight face, heh.
Anyway, me off now for some stuff I must have done long ago. Got to catch up with the skilled world. 
