Recent blog entries for rkrishnan

I finally got my amateur radio licence yesterday with a callsign VU3RDD. Within afew minutes of getting the license paper, I made my first "QSO" on VHF with VU2QNY, another fellow ham from Bangalore. He was equally excited when I said it is my first QSO! May be I should keep a seperate amateur radio Blog.

I need to setup my station now. I designed a simple QSL card with Scribus and it was really a breeze. Scribus is really nice and easy to learn. I need to improve upon my design and create a better card.

On the GNU Radio front, my 2.3 packages are stuck in NEW for more than a month now. In this period, a new swig version was uploaded which will mean 2.3 won't build. So I need to upload 2.4, which is ready too. I also wrote a signal processing block which does filtering on one path and a delay on another and sent a patch to Eric. The copyright process with FSF is also done.

I decided to do a monthly blog entries from now on, as it makes more sense to me.

This month was probably one of the busiest one in my recent past, yet it was one of the most productive one. I created the packages from GNU Radio, experimented with different stuff. Everytime I encountered problems, I had to go and delve into books, study the old graduate class stuff again and come back to my programs. It was fun stuff and at the end I am seeing good results.

I believe, SDR is going to get more people into Amateur Radio. It will foster the idea of homebrewing and experimentation back into the hobby.

I finally got the copyright assignment documents ready from me and my employer to the FSF (for gnuradio) and sent it to the FSF office. This is my second contribution to a GNU project.

There is no progress in my amateur radio license front. The only option infront of me seem to be migrating to a different country and I have started working on that! I do not hope that Govt of India will wake up on the issue some day. They have other important clients in the cellular business where millions of rupees are changing hands. Who is bothered about this non-commercial amateur radio?

This month, the government finally opened up the domain name registration and people started registering all kinds of domainnames. I helped transfer debian.org.in into SPI, registered the domain arsi.org.in for the Amateur Radio Society of India and radio.net.in for myself.

I am posting after a long time. Nothing much has changed in these days, except that I am now getting a bit more time to spend on my free software projects.

swig

From the swig homepage:

2004/12/14 SWIG-1.3.24 has been released.
2004/11/11 SWIG-1.3.23 has been released. 

Why are these releases not available in Debian? I need a newer version for building the latest gnuradio tarballs.

This is really great news for the Free Software community. Thanks IBM.

I finished reading Free Culture by Prof. Larry Lessig. It's a wonderful book and should be read by anyone who is even remotely connected with creative work. After reading the book, I now better understand the Copyright issues. I have decided to buy the other books written by Lessig and Siva Vaidyanathan.

Yesterday I bought the Art of Electronics, the classic book on electronic circuits. I am also slowly catching up on my readings on Coding Theory.

Cringely has written another brilliant piece on building a Tsunami Warning System. His idea is neat, afew have already started working on such a system, but has afew flaws. There are currently no sensors in the Indian Ocean. Without the actual sensor sitting somewhere, monitoring the waves, nothing can be built on top, which can save lives. And two, this part of the world, unlike the west, do not keep monitoring the weather channel all the time. Weather is something taken for granted, because there is often no wide variation expected in a given day. So evenif such a system existed, it may not be of much help. It needs a change in the attitude of people. And three, reaching out to the people after getting the warning is another big issue. In my opinion, we need more radio amateurs than anyone else when a disaster strikes. So, in theory, his ideas are great, but it may not work very well in India.

Skype website has a section with little movie clips and a title which says "Sharing good. Not sharing bad.". Alas, they don't share their code with the rest of the world.

I wrote last year about afew plans for 2004. Looking back, I think I achieved some of them and am glad I did. This year, I hope I can view the video lectures of SICP and also read the book, get my amateur radio license (not really in my hands), do some hardware hacking and also get my GNU Radio receiver setup running. I also hope to revive my coding theory studies, which were sort of in the back burner for the past few months.

I really hope that Debian Sarge will be released in 2005! :-)

Last friday was a holiday, so I sat and finished creating debian packages for some of the pending gnuradio packages. Some more packages need to be created, but with the ones in the alioth archive, one can create a working gnuradio system on a Debian i386 machine. Atleast I hope so.

I have filed a bug for removal of 0.9 version gnuradio packages from the archive, so that I can upload the vastly reworked and superior 2.x packages.

Today, Indian subcontinent was "attacked" from all the sides by Tsunami and thousands of people are dead or homeless or are missing. Earthquakes measuring around 8.4 on the ritchter scale was measured on many areas and most coastal areas of India are submerged in water. I am concerned about the VU4 expedition which is currently on at Andaman Nicobar islands, where floods are worse. Some of the VU4 crew are my close friends. I hope they are safe.

Why there are only 3 DD's from India?

Get:1 http://mirrors.kernel.org unstable/main gconf2 2.8.1-4 [1256kB]
3% [1 gconf2 418470/1256kB 33%]                                240B/s 15h31m16s

I had been postponing (due to various valid reasons), building an Athlon64 box, but today morning I got around to do it. I went to the MG Road and bought an ASUS K8V-SE Deluxe MoBo, 512MB DDR2 ram, a 400W SMPS and an ATI Radeon 9200 SE w/128MB DDR ram AGP8x card. The ATI card is supposedly old, but since I do not care about 3D much, I think this was a good choice. I came back and compiled a new kernel with new drivers. It looks very good now. I need to check whether the cabinet is getting heated up and whether the ventilation is proper.

One of the main motivations to buy the new machine was for mor espeedy GNU Radio compilations and for access to USB2 ports which are essential for USRP/SSRP operations.

In another development related to gnuradio, I got the TI differential amp chip needed for SSRP ADC daughter card. But it looks like Linear Technologies, Inc, do not ship samples to India, so I am stuck at that point.

I hope to update the gnuradio debian packages more regularly and have created an alioth project for gnuradio. Any help in verifying the packaging is welcome.