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Showing posts from 2006

No Cheating!

I like people who dont cheat. And I find that its difficult for Marketing/MBA people to stay away from it. After all who will by a "standard" product. Everyone wants more and more features.. And the marketing dudes advertise the product such a way that people get fooled and get wrong notions about the product.. I dont know how far their claim is true but Pest Control of India has a nice brochure which at te least educates the consumers about the technicalities of they provide..see for yourself .. its somewhat enlightening.... after all who thought that there were so many varieties of so many pests in mumbai! (i dont know about the copyright issues involved in this but since they were mass distributing the brochures for free I suppose there wont be any problem withme scanning and putting it up for everyone else to see... beside its even more free advertising for them.. see what morally correct advertising can earn you!!! - still more publicity!)

Some More Assorted stuff...

These were all accumulating up, so today i have decided to write them down here.. before they are lost in the oblivion... Lonavale Trip On 9th september, the dude and dudettes of our batch at L & T EmSyS, Mumbai went for a picnic to Lonavale.. The Bushi Dam was all dried up so we climbed up to the waterfalls.. the actual source of water to the dam.. A few minutes uphill walk took us to a small waterfall, where we all cooled off. But it wasnt fun enough so some of us went even higher up to another waterfall. This involved trekking thru virgin land. The whole route was actually a sort of rivulet and it was so much fun making our way up further, higher up to the better tub shaped cavity in the big rock into which the water was flowing. Me, Jithin, Saurabh,Biswadeep,Bhagvath and Joseph were the first ones to get there. Many of the other people why were trying to get there had got bored and had turned back from the half way point. But we kept moving one. And it was worth it. We sp

Cause and Effect

Yes, we are being taught crap in colleges in India... Yes i screwed my acadmics to gain a bit more insight on the practical side..(eventough i still keep forgetting how a transistor works).. and Yes, many people have said many things on how to fix the system... but whats the use... Lets see what one of them wants to say.. : Sudheendra Kulkarni - Why India needs to learn how to teach Now what this guy says is truly correct, its the right way to fix the system, but its hard to visualise how to actually go on implementing those "renovation stunts". I mean the stuff presented in the article is simple enough to be understood.. you dont have to be a PhD in economics/engineering/psychology/sociology to understand what the dude is saying.. but there is no way a simple common man can come up with actual implementation plans for this. I look at people now a days.. they dont have the bloody time to think anything... You tell them that we have a problem... you even go ahead and t

Why is soil brown?

Some quarter years ago, while sitting in a bus, i just wondered:"why is soil brown?".. a pretty common question... its common because the subject involved is common... but we seldom stop to think about such things.. A scientist/engineer would know why things are coloured: There is a photon associated with each wavelength of light. Light of different wavelength are composed of photons having differnt energies. The lights of different wavelength are perceived as lights of different colors by our eyes. Hence the different colors of light, are thought of as representing photons of different energy. Now object on which white light falls, are composed of molecules or ions in a lattice. The electrons in these materials can only move between well defined discrete levels. And while doing that these electrons absorb (lower energy level to higher energy level) or emit (higher energy level to lower energy level) photons. Since their energy levels are discrete, they can absorb only those

Life+money+Engineering/R&D+consumerism=Cycles

There are cycles in our biosphere.. Water Cycle, Carbon Cycle, Nitrogen Cycle and then there are theoritical Cycles eg. Born Haber Cycle. Then there are the season... Similarly there are cycles in our socio-economic lives... Most are chains of cause and effects.. I just realised one of these cycles: I as an engineer am working currently to develop a new product. This is involving one of those field sensors which is used in factories. I am working on creating a generic design (hardware/software) for those. This design could be used to make a field device for measuring any specific physical quantity. I am getting pay me for doing it. Later on, we expect that an external client/company will give us a contract to design a specific product using this generic thingy. They will pay our company for it. They will then mass manufacture this product and market it. Customers will pay for these to use in their own factories which in turn mass manufacture some other product. This is probably an inte

Switch switch switch

the wall socket connected to the ...extension board and extension board connected to the.... monitor.... and then there are switches!! theres one on the wall, theres one on the extension board and then theres one on the monitor... (the switch on the monitor is a simple microswitch which turns on the high voltage section via a bigger (more power handling capacity!) solid state switch - DP904C (POWER IC PWM Samsung Power Switch )) So whats the big deal about the switches??... yeah , yeah you have heard many people tell you that they are the most under respected components.. and they are the most important... but simply said.. they have LIFE!... Or in more technical words, "Mean Time Between Failure" ... The datasheets (the technical documents provided by the guys who make 'em) specify these numbers in number of cycles... ie they specify the number of time you can switch them on and off before they fail... of course these numbers are just a rough estimates... and the

nanhe munhe bache pechan kaun!!

This picture was taken on 22nd January 2006 which was Elecrama 2006 Day 5 . The MUSN team went to watch a stupid hollywood movie "Just like heaven" at Inorbit mall malad. This hollywood movie turned out to be worse than a stupid bollywood movie.... The restroom featured above is the one inside the multiplex at Inorbit mall. This picture was taken on 27th March 2006. The location is Juhu Circle... The circle has been broken now and traffic lights have been put up; but people still call it Juhu Circle. Pleople who are new to Mumbai get confused with this... they keep asking where is the circle. Even more confusing fact about it is that it was maintained by Lokhandwala Builders, so some used to call it Lokhandwala Circle (there was a big signage "Maintained by Lokhandwala Builders" on it. This lead to total confusion as there is an another circle just outside "Swami Samarth Nagar" which is popularly known as Lokhandwala. So just to avoid the confusion, the M

el lamington road kaminos!

ADSL Splitters Gallery......... This is what you get with your ADSL Router when you subscribe to MTNL Triband: This is what you get for 225 rupees from a supposedly "trustworthy" shop in Lamington Road (we bought Deepti G's computer from this shop!! and thats working pretty fine... although her monitor was a wee bit off.. but we got it fixed for freeeeeeeee)... bloody piece of shit this splitter turned out to be.. wasted 225 rupees.. that to from my first salary... One measly inductor and one capacitor... WTF is this world coming too??.. I hope the guys who sell such stuff get Gonorrhea or Syphilis : This is what you get for 110 rupees... sexy chinese stuff.. works better than the black box which you get from MTNL. Got this one from Lamington Road too. From a shop which specialized in telephone components. When in Lamington Road, its pretty hard to figure out whom to trust and whom not to! Oh and why do we need a splitter?: (following taken from http://www.adslguide.o

finally! Mumbai will have its own metrooooo!!

AVR Workshop at VESIT – A Report

The Electronics and I.T. Departments of our college had organized a workshop on Embedded System Design Using AVR Microcontrollers. The workshop was held on 1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd and 4 th of September. Professor Dhananjay Gadre from NSIT Delhi was invited to conduct the workshop. 45 Students attended the workshop. Professor Dhananjay Gadre is a certified AVR Consultant and has written a book on the subject together with numerous other articles in various magazines. It was one of these articles that prompted me to contact him via email. From then on I have in constant touch with him. I had let him know about Robocon and how our college had been faring in it over the years. Since he was in Pune at the time of the competition this year, I invited him to look at our robots during our stay at MIT, Pune. He met our guide Professor Abhay Kshirsagar and it was then that the idea for conducting the AVR Microcontroller Workshop came around. On returning from Pune we immediately set towards organ

lost my religion

What is religion? - a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny - an institution to express belief in a divine power What is god? The term God is used to designate a Supreme Being; however, there are other definitions of God. For example: Many religious and philosophic systems consider a God to be the creator of the universe. Some traditions hold that the creator of the universe is also the sustainer of the universe (as in theism), while others argue that their God is no longer involved in the world after creation (as in deism). The common definition of a God assumes omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence. ... In brief , religion is a belief system and God is a symbol to represent it. How wierd can that be, you cant see or touch or smell belief.. and you cant do that with god either! If God is supposed to be the symbol of belief then we should be able to see, touch, smell or atleast feel "him" Many people believe that God exists.. others bel

The Last Question

Recent floods (previous year's 26 july 2005 and the ones happening around today) evoke one to think about the fate of human race... Remember the movie "The day after tomorrow"? .. Maybe we are screwing up too much with our environment??? But then again maybe thats the way its supposed to be? The second law of thermodynamics states: "The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value." So one of the logical outcomes of the second law is that the human race will continue to exist as long as it manages to increase entropy of the universe at a rate greater than what it would be if it were extinct. So all the nonsense we do actually enables us to survive longer as a race... Imagine.. all the hot soupy particles of the solar system came together to form the sun and the planets (decrease in the entropy!?!) just so that we would be born - and the universe will have nice candidate to help facilitate its own

Radio/TV License

I can't believe that we were required to have a licence to own and use a Television for Receiving Broadcasts. Indian Posts and Telegraphs used to issue such licences in India. Some countries still require users to have these licences (See Wikipedia Article on Television licences )!! I found our old TV licence stashed somewhere in our house. I scanned it and put it up here. Imagine the waste of time, standing in line, to fill up forms, submit documents and getting this license - so much effort, for just being a lazy couch potato.