Hello, World!

This post is an attempt to dispel all rumors suggesting that I’m dead, have lost the ability to write, and/or have given up writing this blog. All three assertions are baseless; I’m alive, kicking and have some interesting posts coming up over the next few weeks.

It all started when I decided to interview for the M.S programs at IIT Madras, and IISc. So I had to spend a few weeks preparing for the interviews. Then I went to the interviews and found out that what I thought I knew was a lot lesser than what I thought it was! Eventually, I ended up being accepted at both places and have now joined the M.Sc (Engg) program at SERC, IISc. Between preparing for the interviews, doing some background research on what I want to do in grad-school, and keeping up with work at NI, I couldn’t find any time at all to blog. I am hoping that the move to IISc will give me some more time to focus on this blog.

In between, I bought a Dell Vostro 1510. I wanted a machine that had a decent processor, lots of RAM and HDD space – this one has all three – a Core 2 Duo T8100, 4 GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. I decided to run Ubuntu 8.04 on this, and had a lot of trouble getting the network card to work. It turns out you have to remove the r8169 driver that is installed by default, download the Realtek r8168 driver from their website, compile it from source and install it. The worst part of the driver nightmare was that the default shipping driver randomly works, instead of not working at all, and because of this I got fooled into thinking that passing pci=nomsi to the kernel at boot time fixes this. It doesn’t. You have to do the r8168 compile and install thing. See here for details.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I promise to get back to the functional programming series very soon. Ciao!