If you are an engineering guy staying in your college hostel using an internet connection shared over a LAN, you know what I mean. If you aren't, read on.

If you are a person with a fat wallet and a high speed internet connection, you will never appreciate this post. You might say, a slow connection means pages load slow, isn't that all? No, you buggers, it is NOT.

Here's what happens when you have a slow connection.

* Pages load slow. Ha ha ha.

* My monitor cost me 10,000 bucks. I dread that some day I will hammer it. No hammers in my room.

* If you are planning to buy a PC that you would be using over a slow connection, buy a sturdy keyboard. I bang my keyboard at least five times every day.

* Youtube videos buffer so painfully slow. Worse, you leave a video to buffer. When you return to it, the buffering has hung midway. Or you replay and the buffering restarts. JEEEEZZZZ!!

* Take care of your social life-I. I find that elusive gal online and send her a hi over gtalk. She apparently doesn't reply and I sign out. Only to find out later that she had actually replied to me.

* Take care of your social life-II. Every now and then people haggle over what others have been downloading and how badly that has been affecting the speed.

* Uploading those vacation pics on orkut takes away half the fun of the vacation itself.

* Replying to blog posts that open in new comment windows becomes so tough. The comment box stubbornly refuses to load. If at all it does, you cannot save your comment. I missed commenting on Shweta's blog post, The harmless little breeze.

* Beef up security. Out of frustration I once installed a software that sent spurious packets to other PC's on my network and stalled their speeds. Someone found out in a week and I came seriously close to getting mashed up. Expect something similar if you are a marked torrent downloader.

* Beauty specialists reveal that stress can lead to premature aging. Health specialists say that stress can lead to hypertension, insomnia, diabetes and a host of other problems. I say that what is frustrating is essentially very stressful.

Yep, that's what I said 5 minutes ago.

Placements have started and I'm yet to get a job, yes, I'm unemployed.

No, I'm not that big a duffer as you might be assuming, I haven't tried any company yet. But you know what, it hardly makes a difference.

But there is one positive to it. My frustration levels are increasing every day and if I manage to use that to motivate myself, I might actually end up doing something worthwhile in my final year.

I have one unfinished project and I need to start another as a final project, its irritating. And yes, the GUI for the search engine is yet to start, though the rest is done.

And if there is anyone waiting for my software, I apologize. Laziness has come in the way of the software getting uploaded, but I will do it very soon.

Long time since I last posted. Thanks to Feedjit, I found that most of my visitors visited my projects page which has no mention of my current favorite baby- The IC tester.

When I used to look at IC testers with their little LCD screens and heavy price tags, something in me told me that not everything was the way I wanted it to be.

Why?

Now all testers contain some microprocessor/microcontroller, LCD screen/7 segment display and all such stuff. I'm not doing anything out of the world, all that I plan to do is to use a processor and a display far better than possible in an IC tester. But won't that cost even more?

Thankfully no! Because my customer would already own it, since it would be a computer present in all hardware labs today.

Such a design would have other advantages as well. When I add support for new IC's, all that would be required is to upgrade an existing database, and it might prove to be as simple as downloading a file from a website and pasting it into a directory!

Here are the basics. The tester consists of an interface with a PC which can be used to switch between the various pins of an IC (to be tested). Now similar to an 8051 microcontroller, data is always written to the port latch for each pin and read directly from each pin. Initially, the data lines are switched between each of the pins and then data is written to the pins. Now the controls switches to the O/P pins and the voltage values available there are read into the PC. These values are matched with the values in the database and the IC can be tested.

Every pin can be configured as an O/P or I/P pin as per requirement and hence a wide array of logic IC's can be tested. Moreover analog voltage values can be applied and hence most analog IC's can also be tested.

Other than building the actual tester, I am currently working on the design to enable it to test sequential circuits as well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed as far as the pricing is concerned. If all goes well, it can be priced very competitively.

The UNIX desktop search facility is almost complete. At least I'm in a position to release the first edition of the utility in about a week's time( optimistic view ). For those interested, this blog is going to sport a download button very soon. Do keep me posted about any bugs or suggestions, they are going to be very helpful ( do understand that I'm still an undergrad student ). So what are the features that I would be providing?? Not much really, people would need to wait for features. Right now, all that I offer are:-

1. A simple search utility that would search your local disks for files, by name only( non -indexed, no content searching ). Format searching is supported, i.e. *.jpg and *ash*.jpg* are all valid formats.


2. An indexed search utility that would also search for file names only( No content searching, yet again). Format searching would be supported as above. The entire file system can be searched within 10 seconds. (I'm no google, at least, not yet. )

System requirements are not demanding, as can be expected. 256 MB of RAM and about 50 MB of hard disk space would be enough.

All I need is to write an installer and upgrade the indexing process to a daemon process. All valuable suggestions and queries are welcome.

Yeah, I'm happy today. My search program is working with its index. Indexing is really painful, it takes around two hours to index the entire file system in my machine. Searching is still painfully slow by industry standards, but yes, it works! It took around 4 seconds to list all the .jpg files in my system. I dared to speculate that the google desktop search would take less than 0.5 seconds. Yes, lots of guys more experienced than most of my profs work on their projects and get paid for it as well, but still, I gotta do better. I say so cause deep inside me, I feel I can bring down the time. A lot still remains to be done, the volume of pending work is huge. Google indexes content, pictures, music, media and more. And I've just been indexing names. But, picture abhi baki hai mere dost!. And the Satan in me (the guy's real powerful), says that people really never search content in a desktop file system *wink*. But I will do it anyway.
Right now I must fine tune the indexer, it must keep running on(rather than running just once as it now does), restrict its RAM usage(it hardly runs like a background process these days), and move on to multilevel indexing and also introduce search options with flags. I would love an API. If only someone were to gift me one, I could do anything for the guy. And I need one more brainwave. Maybe I should try more visits to the loo, yes, that's where I get most of my brainwaves *guffaw*.