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Showing posts from February, 2012

Algebra for Circuit Analysis (ALCIRA)

This project would build a GUI front end based on the Maxima Computer Algebra System. Users would be able to import a netlist (involving elementary elements and the four controlled sources and some alcira specific components like opamps) and then derive symbolic expressions for small signal transfer functions etc. God willing I shall start work on this during the summer vacation this year.

An opinion about "Free Software"

I got an opportunity to listen Dr. Richard Stallman . He clarified what " Free Software " actually meant and also tried to remove some misconceptions that has crept in. My motivation behind this post is to give my personal response to what I heard. In doing so I also try to convey what "Free Software", the philosophy that Dr. Stallman upholds mean. First of all, the "Free" in "Free Software" is about freedom and not about the price. More precisely, it values the following four freedoms of a citizen - to use, learn, copy, modify and redistribute - the software. The freedoms of being able to learn the working of the software and to modify/redistribute it entails the freedom of access to source code. ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ). To reiterate the idea, here is an extract from the GNU GPL (Version 3, 29 June 2007), the license used by the majority of software that are considered "free" - "Our General Public Licenses ...

Jump start into Character Recognition - Part 1

Motivation The dawn of computers and their integration into a huge network called the internet has accelerated the sharing of knowledge like never before. However, there exists a divide between the forms of expression familiar to us and the forms in which the information can be fed in at a computer terminal. For example, when writing about scientific material we make extensive use of diagrams to convey the ideas, but, feeding a graphic into the computer, requires special effort and doesn't come naturally. These and other aspects have always been a matter of concern for me, being someone fond of publishing on the web whatever I know :) Any how, the aim of this article and other in this series is not to demonstrate my solution to the above problem ... instead to attract young and curious minds to the problem so that they may contribute to it solution. Start The plan is to build, step by step, a very simple, character recognition program which would take a simple text file contai...

Some good links

Dedicated to my little brother who follows every youtube video on iPhone with great enthusiasm ... http://www.webofstories.com/play/17060 , amazing videos from wise (elderly) men who have made lasting contributions to their own fields. Often times, we complain about the efficiency of our governments and our public servants. But, I must admit that they have started to respond and lets cheer them for that. Get a glimpse into very interesting plans on providing better access to the globe's knowledge through Aakash, Sakshat, Spoken Tutorials and the like ... http://www.sakshat.ac.in/ http://spoken-tutorial.org/What_is_a_Spoken_Tutorial_English