Month: January 2007

RAM Upgrade and Vista Trial

Did a RAM upgrade on my Home Desktop PC. First thought of  adding just 512MB.  DDR1 costs more than DDR2, and my mother board supports only ddr1. After installing the RAM the machine froze after couple of minutes. I didn’t know that these RAM problems still plague the industry. My friends advice and another 1200 bucks, I got a chance to upgrade to a total 1GB. What a relief for VMWare. Apprantly diffreent memory sizes  cause a problem and if its different brands, the problem is even worse.

Installed the Vista that I downloaded, lack of display RAM didn’t get me enough rating for the Aero interface. The installation went fine, except that it required 8G. The best part of the installation is that it doesn’t wait for user input in between, saving time by leaving the installation.

A problem that I found was that it wouldn’t let me create a new network connection. After googling and restarting the machine somehow the problem got solved. I don’t quite know what setting I changed. The UI is stunning, but that’s not a requirement for a power user. The prompts for running each and everything that requires MMC(Microsoft Management Console) is irritating.

I guess there’s lot more time to change and nothing really worth a change in Vista.

A day of work and laziness

Got up reasaonably early and went for a morning walk. Well there also was an evening walk to the theatre. Was lazing around on the net. The treo’s calendar synch was giving problems. Its still not solved. Tried some new tricks but couldn’t get it working. Called up Ramnath, an old college friends and discussed about the ideas of my new site. Yet to sent him a mail on the details.

Didn’t go to office thinking that more work could be done from home. There was progress in the work of the new product. Old projects source code helped. That reminded me of our project days, in fact I could still hear the recorded conversation from the PC based feature phone for windows 95 project. Thanks to CDs.

I started getting the whole picture for the new product, got the feeling of its potential and above all its similarity with the products that I already developed. That feeling started to give the necessqary enthu.

Paulo Coelho’s  Like The Flowing River, is indeed being read by like the title, a slow but steady progress. Nice insights, nice prayers, new hopes and doubts too. I happened to get to www.hamsa.org through his book and another link that led to parable about other religions at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/alex_matulich/why_i_believe/8_apndx.html

Designing of a new product

I have started the work on a new software product. There is of course competition. Competition makes design easier. You have a starting point. You have a trial to download. You can reduce its complexity. Add innovative features that were missing and what not. Now thinking of a product name and design of all the UI is required. I’m also thinking of a good company name.

I feel working on a true notebook with pen better than a laptop or so called notebook with mouse and keyboard. In those old days in school and college when access to a PC was limited to college and school, there was more design going on at the hostel. I took a break yeaterday from laptop to notebook and it worked. There’s still more to go, but there’s progress.

The Cine Ex Trip

Went on 23rd eve from calicut on a tourist bus. I didn’t have many friends, as most of the exhibitors are not in my age group. The fields of interest was also different. I got a new friend Faizal, who was accompanied by his manager.

Reached Trivandrum, next day morning. Was quite surprised to find that the accomodation provided was at Mar Ivanious campus. I had taken Fr. Mariadas’s book to return. I called him and he was even more surprised. I had told that there’s no possibility in the remote future for me coming to TVM. I got ready and he reached as promised within half an hour.

We discussed a lot a about the coincidence, about old school life, the trip just before leaving school. There was also a talk about love marriages and its problems when the partners belong to diffrent religions. Got a new book called Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections.  So far so good, nice collection of thoughtful snippets. Went around the beautiful campus. Later got dropped to the group.

The procession or whatever to the secretriat took so long, the artists were at the centre stage, we were partly side lined. Anyway got to see the artists and other important people in Malayalam Cinema. Had a chance to talk to Blessy.

Returned after the function at Tagore theatre. Food was arranged and after the program it took some time to get the bus started. On the way back a good number of people were drunk. But its no fun, being among them. Oh… I feel tired completing this.

The next day that’s Thursday, there was another vehicle strike. God know when this is going to change.

Cleaning and Painting

Did some cleaning on the DTS system in our theatre. So much dust. Lookslike there’sa defect in the processor. The audio in SR mode disappears after some time (around 3 minutes). Added CD audio to the processor. Sounds good.

Painting in the mill prompted for a clean up of the office PC. Didn’t have as much dust as expected 😉

Old project, new thoughts

I happened to go through my BE project PC based feature phone for windows 95. I was wondering how much things have changed. The UI of our software was not that bad after all. Now Iam working on it again, now with a PIC micro interface in between which will make it more sophisticated, with lots of more features and less dependency on the PC. Getting rid of the I/O card will make it working on NT platform without those I/O dlls. Lots to do but still there’s progress.

Part one of Telephone Logger working

After 3 days of morning soldering, got the dtmf decoder with isolation transformer circuit working, The calls can be recorded to PC. I discovered a freeware voice recorder with silence detection called mega voice recorder available at http://www.globalsoftware.biz/

Now the remaining portions are

  1. Off hook Detector (I need parallel off hook with optical isolation)
  2. Ring Detector – for differentiating incoming and outgoing digits.
  3. PIC Micro for processing
  4. RS232 line driver
  5. EEProm storage
  6. RTC

Once I start with PIC I think I’ll be back with a newversion of jaledit with JALV2.