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How to synchronize an internal time server with an external source
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I’m currently using a T-Mobile prepaid phone which gives me 1500 minutes of talk time for $30 a month. The price is not the best you can get in the market, but is definitely pretty good. I settled for the plan because I already have an unlocked GSM phone.

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The default security policies of Windows XP don’t allow users to change power configuration options, even though power options can be user specific. I’ve had to work around it a lot of times, so I’m documenting the process mainly for my own reference.
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As part of my MS program at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, I researched a certain way of building immersive virtual worlds. The system involved translating motion within a 1 meter diameter ring into an infinite virtual world. This required some trickery with converting foot steps into virtual motion and simulating motion with optic flow (which, by itself, is very common). I delved into the cognitive aspects of such virtual motion and looked into a phenomenon called Recalibration. Below is the thesis that resulted out of my work at the University of Minnesota.
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MAX7456 is a nifty chip that lets you insert fixed-width characters and sprites into a TV signal. Sparkfun has a very useful breakout board for $40, which ends up being much cheaper than the MAX7456 eval board from Maxim priced around $100. You can find Youtube examples of DIY projects that have used the MAX7456, and to get a quick idea of how the display looks, take a peek at the MAX7456 datasheet. In this article, we will look at how to interface an MAX7456 to a PC using a Bus Pirate board.

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Bus Pirate is an incredible piece of hardware for digital electronics tinkerers. It was designed as an interactive sniffer/communication bridge, but has evolved over time to become a Swiss Army Knife for hardware/firmware developers. Besides the original text-based command prompt interface, the newer versions of Bus Pirate firmware have a Binary Mode interface that makes it simpler to program. pyBusPirateLite is a Python library that communicates with the Bus Pirate and allows you to program applications in Python that use the Bus Pirate. To my knowledge, this is the first such tutorial.

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Today, my friend Alex was trying to type in the URL for a webpage I had open on my PC into his Android phone. And I thought out loud that it would be a weekend project to write up a Firefox app to generate the QR Code of the URL for the current tab. Alex being Alex, he immediately created a bookmarklet in Firefox to generate the QR Code and then used that QR Code to browse to the webpage he was typing into his phone. Read the rest of this entry »

Set of frequently needed but often forgotten commands. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I started this sequence of commands, I already had SVN and Apache2 installed and configured to work together.
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When I was in junior year of college in 1998-99, I worked on a project at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India under Dr Rajeev Sangal and Dr Vineet Chaitanya. My programming partner, Naoshad Mehta, and I collaborated on adding support for Devanagari script in X under Linux through ‘rxvt’. We called the modified version ‘rxvt-idev’. The results were so well received, that Naoshad and I received a Department of Electronics, Govt. of India grant to continue the work and add Indian script I/O capability to X in general. Read the rest of this entry »