Sucessfully Defended

Nov. 11th is the day I defended. My presentation was good. I could answer most of the questions. Everything went pretty well. I visited a nearby temple that evening and that is a memorable day for me for many reasons. It's time to fly back to my country for a vacation.

My Thesis.....

My thesis is going pretty fast and as expected. Now I am stuck!!!!. I wanted to show a plot in my thesis but I am not able to generate that plot. Trying since 2 days to make this work. Have to get my defense done in 15 days from now. I am worried about the questions my committee will ask me at the defense. Very busy schedule ahead.

MySQL Vs SQLServer

I found a website that states the differences between MySQL and SQLServer

http://www.tometasoftware.com/mysql_vs_sqlserver.asp

Really good. I did not think that SQLServer has so many advantages over MySQL.

What are relational databases?Why do we need them?
Find answers at
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question599.htm

Back to School.....and my Thesis story

I was done with my internship and came back to college by the end of August. Got a warm welcome from my advisor and my co-RAs. I was confident that I could complete my thesis because now I can spend all my time for doing my work. But it doesn't seem that easy. Writing code is not enough. I would say writing code takes 25-35% of the total time. Validate your code is crucial.You should run it and compare it against some results. Running the code takes most of the time. In my case, my code is running for the past 3 days and still running. I am waiting to see the results so that I could go on to the next step. If the results are not good, it means I wasted 3+ days on something useless.

Installer for Deployment in VS2008

Every time I build a project, I get a .exe and I generally share out this executable. But it looks very good if we can build an Installer for the Deployment of the software.
If we have the executable and all its dependencies, we can easily build an installer in Visual Studio 2008. Step to step guildlines are provided at

http://www.fordevs.com/2009/07/steps-to-create-setup-and-deployment-project-in-dot-net-vs-2008.html

Give the executable to VS 2008, and it does all the trick. VS 2008 creates the .msi and setup.exe files. Just run the generated setup.exe. That's it. Its simple and wonderful.

Link for O3D Libraries

http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/o3d/samples/o3djs/

OpenGL support for your Graphics Card

To find out what OpenGL version your graphics card supports, download "GPU Caps Viewer" from
http://www.ozone3d.net/gpu_caps_viewer/
and just run it. It gives out all the details of the your graphics card.

More Exciting....

I have to start reading about O3D provided by Google and about the "Element Viewer".
Did not hear these terms till date and now I have to start working on them. I am excited. We plan to learn many new things but we actually don't start to concentrate until there is a necessity. Now I should learn so I will learn. Really like this situation.

Learning C#

Today my manager assigned me a task of writing a utility in C#. I looked at him without saying yes/no. Then he asked me "Do you know C#". I answered "No". He asked me to learn C# and then do the task as fast as possible. I was excited to hear that because I love learning new coding languages. I told him that this work seems interesting. So, Chandana learning C# from today.

Something new and different.

These days there are a few unexpected things happening.

1. During the long weekend, my friends and I went on a trip to Niagara Falls and Cedar Point. This is the first time that I visited places outside Morgantown after coming to US. Niagara was very good - liked it very much. Cedar point was not that exciting to me. There was a prediction of thunder storms due to which most of the rides were closed. But I enjoyed travelling 2 days.

2. I got my Driver's License. This is a very big thing for me. Very very happy for that.

For both of these, thanks to Umesh Shewalla.

My struggle to checkin code

I have been assigned a task to modify small part of code. I finished it long time back (probably 4 days back) and I assumed once I check-in I am done with the task. Before committing the changes to the server, I need to run a lot of regression tests. This is Okay but the problem is some regressions fail on the server and so will also fail with my code changes. I told my BOSS that I can't test my code against some tests because the tests itself were in fault. His reply was: "Wait till someone modifies the tests so that they pass on the server and then use that test code to test your changes and then if all tests pass ONLY THEN YOU CAN CHECK-IN YOUR CODE". This is frustating, I am waiting since 3-4 days for everything to be right on the server. I realize that strict rules are necessary for code check-ins on the server as many people check-in code everyday and if everyone goes by there will, everything screws up. Even after knowing all this I can't stop blaming the rules.

PSK and QAM

PSK and QAM are the basic modulations. I always get confused when working on these modulations and I have to have GOOGLE opened for reference. While I was googling for this today, I found a good link to a ppt that would explain these from basics with simple waveforms and constellation diagrams.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19601185/Signal-constellation-diagram

Good Advice

This was my friend's message and and and it seems to be very true.
"Never burn the bridge once you are done crossing it. You may feel you don't need it anymore but in case you are in a wrong route, you will never be able to go back!"

LISP Vs C

To implement a task or logic, C needs more lines of code than LISP. As the size of the code increases, it becomes costly to maintain the code. Also "GARBAGE COLLECTION" - a form of memory management, is very efficiently handled in LISP. In simple words, LISP brings with it many attractive features and it takes time to appreciate them.

Many companies are in the process of converting their products to use LISP.

Is LISP popular? If Yes, Why?

I have been attending LISP classes since a month. I can't find anything that LISP does which other languages cannot. My professor tells LISP is a very efficient and well-used language. But I don't find any jobs that requires a LISP programmer(Everyone keeps talking about Java, C and C++, .Net etc). I searched many books to find what is differentin LISP. The books talk pages and pages about the importance of LISP without any clarity. The more I read, the more I get confused. Today if I get a chance, I will ask my professor regarding this. Hope he gives me a convincing reply.

"Checked in" my code

Today I migrated all the code to use a new header file. The existing code uses a ".h" file that is Windows dependent. Our team developed a ".h" file that has the same functionality but is not-Windows dependent. I was asked to find out all the code in the database that uses the old header file and then make changes to some code in those files so that they work with the newly written header file. I have done that and it worked on my machine. Then I checked in the code into the server. Now I have to wait until tomorrow to see if my code breaks someone else code. If it does break then thats it!!! Everyone will start interrogating me.

My day at Office

Today I really learnt some work. One of the senior software developers in our team(who guides me) taught me new things. He talked about many things but I could understand only some of them. The most important thing to remember is that Microsoft's COM helps to create header files and C files from the interfaces. I am not sure if I framed the above sentence correctly. The gist is by running interfaces we can create header files.