Chintalagiri Shashank

I'm leaving for home (Hyderabad) later tonight. Its been almost a year since I've last been in Hyderabad, so the trip has been somewhat over due. I'll be in Delhi tomorrow, the 7th of December (and possibly for half a day or so on my return trip around the 20th). I'll then be in Hyderabad for a week (8-14th) and then Bangalore for 5 days (15-19) for foss.in and possibly a bit of nonameconf.

One of the rather annoying things about working in an environment with a lot of different families of microcontrollers is that, well, there are a lot of different families of microcontrollers. To make things worse, we don't just have multiple controllers, we have a few different logic levels as well. One of our epic team members who's now working elsewhere was here this weekend, and we were discussing the insanity. Normally, I'd just shrug it off and return to the pile of work waiting for me (or the unwatched TV shows from the last day or two, depending on my level of pissedoffedness. This time, though, I went ahead with some prodding from him to develop what may prove to be one of the most useful pieces of electronics I've made thus far. This is the beginning of what promises to be an interesting affair.

Charudatta posted a long and well thought out comment on my previous post on IITK's 'problems'. His views align rather well with those of the moderates-in-majority on campus right now, and are certainly worth reading to get a somewhat fuller picture of the landscape. We're still missing the views of the conservatives, but I suppose one could approximate them with the public statements issued by IITK authorities. While etiquette suggests that I should reply to him there, I've decided to post this separately because of two reasons. The first is that it brings up a few tangentially related issues that I planned to write about (eventually) anyway. The second, and more plausible reason is that there is something wrong with my comments system which I need to sort out which is nuking the formatting of the comments. My apologies for breaking etiquette in this manner. His original comment is quoted below, and my responses/reactions to some parts of it are inline.

Twice a year, we have the end-of-semester (yes, I know the frequency is obvious) exams at IITK. Even the casual observer, given enough time to observe the normal behavior of people on campus, will quickly realize that something changes during these periods. We aren't alien to such changes - every exam takes its toll. The midsem and endsem effects are generally well documented, and typically include heightened trolling (both on and off-line), increased activity at photocopy centers and the library, and so on. I've been here for over 5 years now, and I've noticed an additional effect of the endsems - someone generally kills themself.

So I've been using Zine for a couple of weeks now. After first using 0.1.2 for a while and not having many stability issues I went ahead and upgraded to 0.2-dev (no, the upgrade was not pretty. If you want to do this upgrade yourself, make sure you have your data in an accessible format. I could do it because I had only a couple of posts that really were tied in to zine). This post is a brief collection of my thoughts about the platform.