Wordpress

For the ease of writing equations... the engineering blog has moved.

http://mimecheng.wordpress.com/

Surviving a system crash

Yesterday my laptop failed to boot up. I had to go for a system restore. This caused an OS reinstall deleting all files on the C: drive leaving the D: untouched. The result - lost all pictures, all music, all audiobooks. Moral of the episode - store good stuff on D: more importantly take a back up.

I got in touch with iTunes and Audible. I managed to get back some of the songs and books from my iPod. Nothing could be retrieved from iTunes store. The reason according to the customer services was that the albums might not be stocked in store now. The good news was from Audible. I managed to get back all my audiobooks.

Installing the browsers, file compression systems and yes Microsoft Office was a pain. The good part of the story is that the computer is a lot faster than what it had been before the crash. All is well!

Adventures with wxMaxima

I was looking for a software that could help me with numeric as well as symbolic computations... something that could work like MATLAB and Mathematica, the two packages that I had some experience of using several years ago. I found the opensource wxMaxima which I downloaded from http://andrejv.github.com/wxmaxima/

Beginning Java

It has been a while since I started computer programming. The year was 1987 when in VII standard Computers were introduced as a subject. The course commenced with the origin of computers, leading on to the generations of computer, looking at the architecture and then moving on to BASIC language. My first project was creating a quadratic equation solver - with real roots ofcourse.

Some FORTRAN

Swapping numbers...

!====================================
subroutine swap(m,n)
implicit none
integer::m,n
integer temp
temp=m    !store first number in temp
m=n    !store n in m
n=temp    !store temp in n
end subroutine swap
!====================================

Programming... good old days!

Recently I went back to the good old FORTRAN. It's changed. And it's changed for the better. The old fixed form that we used at school, the famous ftn77, is changed to a free form mode since f90. I tried using f95 in a few of my programming endeavours last week. And the compiler doesn't throw as many errors at me as it used to in school... most of which had something to do with the fixed form.

To C or not to C

It has been a long time since I did some serious programming. My first venture was programming in BASIC when computers were introduced in standard VII in 1987. I learnt programming in BASIC first on BBC Micro and then later graduated to PC-AT. When I went to the engineering school, I was introduced to FORTRAN and as C was being considered the language to learn and use, I developed and enthusiasm for the language. I did some programming using C and then tried migrating to C++ while I was at IISc. However, for most of my programming needs, C sufficed and the only aspect of C++ in my programs were the friendlier input and output commands - the cin and cout. I found these easier than the scanf and printf commands in C. Another useful thing was the much easier dynamic memory allocation in C++ rather than the malloc.