Go Embedded!

We went to Japan this May on a trip that spanned 50% of the country. I had done fair bit of reading on Japan - it’s culture, people a little bit of history etc. We landed at Osaka Airport late in the evening. Osaka airport is built on an artificial island. Starting with the queues at the immigration counter, silent nature of Japanese people was in stark contrast with my fellow Indians - no offense meant! Compared to America, one of the best things I felt immediately after getting there was abundance of public transportation - both ground and rail. Roads are as good as they are in the US - better in many cases. Road signs are bi-lingual. So getting lost is not that easy. Fascination of Japanese with machines is remarkable - be it a vending machine, coin-changers, bus station, train station, toilets automation and machines are omnipresent. Density of population is quite high in most metro cities but commute doesn’t take a toll on you as it does in Indian metros or even most American metropolitan areas. Our colleague in Japan told us that most people in Japan believe that there is too must of infrastructure there.

Indians are held in quite high esteem by most Japanese and they feel that if India has achieved what it has without much government support and infrastructure; imagine what they would do if “they” had the right infrastructure. Most of them believe that we Indians are really good at mathematics and science — I won’t say anything about that, otherwise my countrymen will pelt me with stones.

Overall my first impression was that Japan is a very nice country without xenophobia - at least about Indians. They are a country which has achieved a lot but as individuals most people are polite and do not exude the confidence that is so typical of most Indians. Learning Japanese is a key to success in Japan. It’s not easy - but it’s about time that we as a nation thrive on doing things that are not necessarily easy. I think that there is a lot of potential for business between India and Japan, provided we understand each other’s cultures and young Indians seize the opportunities that are available in IT and other sectors in Japan.

Shitsurishimasu (Good Bye)!

There are two steps involved in mastering C#.NET – first imbibe the language elements of C#.NET and then use them to harness the power of .NET technology. Part I is about the Language Elements of C#, whereas Part II is about the Technology Skills of C#.NET. These books will help two categories of readers – those who wish to find out how good C#.NET programmers they are and those who wish to find out how good are the candidates who claim to know C#.NET. These books will help you test your skills in C# language as well as technology areas. They are very helpful for job interviews, vivas, examination etc. You can purchase them online at our KSET Quest Store.

• Test Your C#.NET Skills - Language Elements
• Test Your C#.NET Skills - Technology Skills

Most of us lead a life running about our daily chores with little or no excitement. Same cannot be said about peopl working on creating world’s largest particle accelerator - The Large Hadron Collider being built more than 100 meters underground at border between France and Switzerland. The goal of this effort - which is global in nature is about unravelling the mystery of elusive subatomic particle - Boson with an ultimate aim to unravel the secrets of origin of universe, Grand Unified Theory, and many other unanswered questions about the universe as we know it.

Today there was a article on this in local Marathi newspaper by eminent science writer Dr. Bal Phondke. Wikipedia contains very good information on the same. For all those who have a scientific bent of mind, take a look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

The experiments are expected to being in just a few months so stay tuned for more updates!

We are glad to announce the launch of two new Quest courses

- ASP.NET Programming Through C#
- ASP.NET Programming Through VB.NET

Based on pre-orders we can clearly see that these were the most eagerly awaited

Quest titles. We have made every attempt to make it useful for beginners and professionals alike. ASP.NET Programming is Microsoft’s flagship techonlogy that has become immensely popular over last 7-8 years. It exploits the true power of .NET languages - C# and VB.NET and makes it fun to build professional web applications. We are sure you will find these courses useful and enjoyable.

C programming language was instrumental in taking the art of programming to masses. More than 35 years later, Web Services are transforming the way we do programming, in an equally, if not more, dramatic manner. Procedural programming gave rise to Object Oriented Programming. With the spread of TCP/IP networking, Web Services now enable you to build software in truly distributed and reusable manner. In short, they represent libraries on the network. In this journey, we will show you how the web allows companies and individuals as diverse as people on this planet to create software for the coming decades.

http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php/Product/eBook_Creating_Web_Services_Using_.NET

KSET Pvt. Ltd. is proud to annouce Detailed Technical Training eBook for Microsoft Windows CE ( Compact Edition ) 5.0/6.0 - better known as WinCE. WinCE is Microsoft’s flagship embedded and mobile OS. We have created this training material through years of experience and actual WinCE work. This content will address lack of good quality learning material in this important technology area.

http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php/Product/eBook_Embedded_Systems_Using_WinCE

After a long wait, long promised book - Go Embedded! will be available for sale in a bookstore near you. It includes in-depth coverage of following topics:

• Embedded C Programming
• Operations On Bits
• Introduction to Embedded Systems
• Embedded System Boards
• First Embedded System Program
• Blinking LEDs
• EEPROM Programming
• Flash Programming
• Programming With Sensors
• Interrupts & Timers
• Serial Communication
• Serial Communication Using Interrupts
• Building Interactive Embedded Systems
• Working With RTC Using I2C Bus
• Build Process Internals
• Working With Makefiles

Buy it online at http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php?products_id=47

Dear Sir/Madam,

Quest Team is proud to announce launch of one more course to it’s Foundations of Computer Science series - Quest - Data Structures Through C++.

It includes in-depth coverage of Data Structures and necessary C++ topics like:

• Linked Lists - Singly, Doubly, Circular
• Queues
• Binary Trees
• Tree Traversal
• Searching
• Sorting
• Graphs
• Depth & Breadth First Search

etc…

We are sure that you will find this course very useful. If you wish, you can order it online at:

http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php?products_id=42

With Warm Regards,
Quest Team

KSET Pvt Ltd is proud to announce launch of two more courses to it’s growing list of titles

• Quest - Java Programming
• Quest - C# Programming

Both these courses include in-depth coverage of Java and .NET platforms with topics like:

- OO Programming
- Interfaces
- Generics/Templates
- Web Services
- Network Programming
- Stream I/O
- Annotations and Attributes
- Using XML etc…

We are sure that you will find these titles useful. If you wish, you can order them online at:

http://quest.ksetindia.com/

http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php?products_id=41

http://quest.ksetindia.com/product_info.php?products_id=40

This was a seminar on Pointers and C. Karad is picturesque town surrounded by Sahyadri mountain ranges on the western coast on Maharashtra. We reached there in the afternoon after a 3 hour road journey from Pune. The road is part of ambitious GQ (Golden Quadrilateral) project and highway is NH-4. Tunnels and other engineering marvels make you feel that we are surely going to benefit a lot when infrastructure is made available.

At the venue, two projectors, two microphones etc. were arranged for. Close to 400-500 students were patiently waiting for the seminar in an orderly manner. This is something we have noticed over last couple of years. Students in smaller towns are more hungry for knowledge than their counterparts in larger cities. Despite all odds like loss of power to laptop, electric shock in audio system, we were able to carry on. Again - students were very patient and understanding. Post seminar, everyone was energized enough to create a stampede of sorts for meeting with us.

We told the students what we have been always saying wherever we go - rise beyond the realm of languages and get your hands dirty with technology while you are in college. If we have to continue to lead in the IT sector as a nation, absorbing advanced technologies early in your career is the key. During college years, team spirit and freedom to try new things would certainly spawn entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

This was announced by Mr. Kiouchi Nakamura Vice President, Innosoft Japan at a glittering ceremony on Sunday. This courseware has been conceived and created by KSET Pvt. Ltd. under the leadership of renowned IT authors from city Mr. Yashavant Kanetkar and Mr. Asang Dani. This courseware is a unique combination of audio, video and PowerPoint presentations delivered through a state of the art content delivery platform developed by KSET. Once installed on the PC, this courseware gives the user a live class-room experience on his home PC.

“Japan is a product centric country, and this unique way of disseminating top quality knowledge would have tremendous appeal in Japan”, said Mr. Andrew Larson, President, Innosoft Japan while addressing the gathering.

They were full of praise for this novel way of reaching the masses with top-quality educational content at a very reasonable cost. In the very first year of its launch the “Quest” products have won accolades in countries like Ireland, United Kingdom, Philippines, Albania, Saudi Arabia, USA and Austria. In India too, Quest courseware is being used by several IT companies for their in-house training requirements. Very shortly, the product is also going to be launched in Germany informed a company source.

The best seller book “Let Us C” by Yashavant Kanetkar which explains C Programming in most simple form which have made all its previous seven editions immensely popular all over the world is now going to be published in Japanese, along with two more titles by the same author. These books don’t assume any programming background. They begin with the basics and steadily build the pace so that reader finds it easy to handle complicated topics towards the end.

During their visit they also announced plans to convert the same content into “ebooks” and “Live Streaming”, which are very popular learning mediums in modern economies of the world.

The function was attended by Mr Manish Jain from BPB Publications New Delhi along with Mr Andrew Larson Vice President Innosoft Tokyo Japan and Mr Kiouchi Nakamura Vice President of Innosoft. The function was attended by large number of IT enthusiasts from the city.

Myself and Yashvant will be there at Seattle for Global MVP Summit 2007 for about weeks time.

http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/MVPsummit

This Sunday Shashi Tharoor wrote in Times on The Elephant who became a tiger. I haven’t read anyone write on India’s changed image in the way he has explored. Fantastic treat for everyone:

http://timesofindia…/SUNDAY_SPECIALS/…/SHASHI_ON_SUNDAY

It’s a common misconception that only those with electronics background can learn embedded systems. Although sutdents with electronics background do have some advantages - learning embedded systems meaningfully requires good knowledge of electronics, computer architecture, operating systems and sound programming skills. Naturally no one is born with these skills and most colleges in India today don’t impart such skills as a part of single course. Like most other things in computing one can aquire this knowledge if he/she is willing to work hard for it.

We are happy to announce that after the resounding success of earlier Quest courses we have launched this week the “Embedded Systems Programming” Quest course. As an add-on, those who wish to try the programs in the course on a Embedded Systems board can also use the board that we have created. This hands-on approach will go a long way in spreading the knowledge of Embedded Systems in the student and the software community.

We have launched a movement called Quest. The goal is simple - Every person should have a right to learn from a subject from a person who has sound credentials and a proven track record in the subject. Time and again we see that though the technology is in place, it is the lack of motivation that prevents even good teachers of the subject to make available their talent and knowledge to others in the field. People have already tried mediums like books, articles, webcasts, podcasts, streaming, CBTs, etc. with varying degrees of scucess. What was missing was a good but simple Content Delivery Platform that can deliver the lectures in a Audio + Video + PowerPoint format, at a reasonable cost with minimum infrastructure requirements and with a guaranteed IP protection for the content creator. With this in mind we have developed the Quest Content Delivery Platform. We have also recorded 60 lectures apiece on C Programming, C++ Programming, VC++ Programming, Data Structues, VB.NET Programming, Embedded Systems Programming. More details of these are available at http://quest.ksetindia.com

We are continuously developing more content on variety of IT subjects like ASP.NET, DirectX Game Programming, C# and Java.

Anybody wanting to participate in this movement are welcome to send a mail.

It was indeed nice to see a crowd of close to 650 persons listening intently to our talk titled “Go Embedded!”. This is in contrast with many colleges where after getting a job in prefinal / final year the learning almost stops and the students are just running through the motions to complete the balance semesters, get a degree and get on with the job. It is often found that the keenness for “learning” is gone in most such cases.

NIT Rourkela experience was quite in contrast with this. The students were very keen to learn and see all the demos on COM, DirectX, Bluetooth and Device Drivers. I am sure, with this “attitude” towards learning many of them will make a mark for themselves in future professional life. Buck up NIT Rourkela, we need more colleges and Institution with your mindset.

We will be there for a seminar at Confluence 2007 on 10th Feb. 2007. See you there.
http://www.nitrconfluence.org/

The event was organized at CIT, Coimbatore. It’s a really nice city with warm welcoming people and we were glad to see a sizeable crowd on a cloudy Sunday morning. It is indeed heartening to see that students of today are not interested merely in jobs but want to create a marks for themselves. We think that’s what Quest is about.

Happy Learning!

We will be in Chennai on 27th Jan. to inaugarate our partnership with Ameex Pvt. Ltd. Chennai - our exclusive partner for the state of Tamilnadu.

Chennai event was a great success. It was our first visit to the historic Guindy College known elsewhere as Anna University. The enormous college grounds and campus and list of greats like Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam who have been at this great college easily overcomes you. The event was organized at Vivekananda Auditorium and more than 500 students, teachers and technology enthusiasts were present.

Professional Programmers papers by Alexander Stepanov, father of “generic programming” (also known as Templates, Generics, STL). Fantastic reading material. Very inspiring.

http://www.stepanovpapers.com/

Recently, I read a post on Sue Loh’s WinCE Base Team Blog. That made me realize the rationale for using shared memory has changed with the advances in Computer Architecture. Traditionally, we are taught in our OS courses that if you have to share some data between two co-operating processes, there are two options:

1. Copy the buffer from source to target process
2. Create a shared memory area that both processes have access to and use that to share information.

What most people believe is that second approach is inherently better. After all, it prevents two copies of same data from being created.

However, on closer look at modern processors, it turns out that this may not be always true. Most modern CPUs like ARM, MIPS, Hitachi SH4 and even Pentium-4 have 8-16 kBytes of “Instruction” and “Data” cache between CPU and main memory ( which typically is SRAM or DRAM ). The caches are used to hold most frequently used “Instruction”s and “Data” for executing tasks. To identify “what” is being cached, virtual addresses are used.

All these processors are used in conjunction with operating systems like Windows, Linux and embedded Operating Systems like Windows CE. When two processes will “share” some data through shared memory, each will use it’s own set of “Virtual Addresses” for that data. Since the “Level 1″ cache uses “Virtual Address” as a tag, there is no way that “Virtual Addresses” corresponding to this “Shared memory” region be “cached”, unless of course the region has same virtual address in both processes. If it is cached, the cache controller will not know that two different Virtual Addresses from two different processes refer to same area in memory. As a result these operating systems mark the shared memory region as “non cacheable” in “Page Table” of each of these processes.

Since caching affects the access time for frequently used data significantly, it’s clear that in case of shared memory access, such data access turns out to be significantly slower. The advantags of “sharing” may be easily offset of disadvantage of non-cacheability.

To summarise, it’s clear that one cannot make assumptions about performance based on theory alone. If you have performance critical systems, it is necessary for you to understand your Processor, Operating System and finally do some benchmarking to understand which approach works best in your case.

One size fits all is certainly not going to be the case!

KSET Pvt. Ltd. is proud to announce the launch of Quest Video Course CDs - a unique mix of Audio + Video and powerpoint using unique methodology that allows students worldwide to learn from Asang Dani and Yashavant Kanetkar directly in following subjects:

1. C Programming
2. Data Structures
3. C++ Programming
4. VC++ Programming
5. VB.NET Programming

This is a one of it’s kind learning tool available for students and professionals alike. Happy learning. As an introductory offer, each of these courses can be purchased for Rs. 500 each. To find out more:

http://quest.ksetindia.com/

With the launch of CE 6.0 WinCE base team has done a commendable job of exploring lot of issues regarding memory usage inside drivers. Part of it was necessary because CE 6.0 now has overlapping address space ( lower 2GB ) for each process. But some other APIs and mechanisms introduced are a marvellous demonstration of how careful one needs to be when working with memory. An article on this topic by Sue Loh is fabulous.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/2006/11/09/Memory-marshalling-in-Windows-CE.aspx

For those mere mortals among you, I will be publishing series of small articles explaining virtual memory in general and CE 6.0 issues in particular. I hope you enjoy them.

Here are some nice bookmarks I have gathered. I hope they help you too. Please don’t go looking for freebies. These links should help you understand bluetooth and use it on your own.

   http://del.icio.us/asangdani/bluetooth

A very nice course on Pervasive Human-Centric Computing. Its interesting to see where current trend in computing might lead us to. python and bluetooth have been explored in detail alongwith speech, location-aware (LBS) programming and cellphone programming. Extensive information available at following two links:

1. MIT 6.883 Pervasive Human Centic Computing
2. 6.894 - Pervasive Human-Centric Computing - Fall 2004
3. MoDe

RC model helicopter prices have reached a point where all sorts of challenging (i.e. crash-prone) robotics projects become affordable. This document explains how to build a 300 g, 3D-capable helicopter with embedded Linux and Bluetooth datalink for less than 500 EUR.

As a proof of concept has been built which allows the helicopter to be remotely controlled over Bluetooth with a PC joystick. Really nice effort and truely awe inspiring
http://perso.orange.fr/pascal.brisset/chromicro/doc/chromicro.html#id2789228

If you haven’t been paying attention to the amount of e-waste that gets generated - here it is for you. RoHS - Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive. It’s a EU (European Union) directive - not a law. It talks about six important harzardous materials used in various electronic and electrical goods. Most equipment manufactures are complying to this directive voluntarily. So if you want to keep your backyard clean of e-waste, check if the next laptop you buy is RoHS compliant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive

Quite an active Blog of Prof. Dhananjay Gadre at NSIT, Delhi. http://dvgadre.blogspot.com/

We spoke at NSIT InnoVision 06-07 yesterday afternoon. The event was a mixed bag. We met some good people at NSIT like Dr. M.P.S. Bhatia and Prof. Dhananjay Gadre. Both were quite energetic and enthusiastic about what they were doing. Prof. Gadre was quite blunt in his criticism of Services companies, esp. the leaders in India. In his opinion they are primarily responsible for degradation of science education in this country. There was a gentleman from TCS who countered his views and said that if it wasn’t for these companies there wouldn’t be any jobs for lakhs of young middle class students in this country.

I agree with both these views. In fact the abundance of jobs in present times has definitely led to frivoulous standards of education. However, if it wasn’t for these jobs millions of average students wouldn’t have had high paying jobs that they have today - let alone careers. Although IT revolution of last 15 years have changed the face of the country in short term and brought much needed properity in bigger cities, it’s imperative that unless we raise the standards in our educational institutions - other than just give autonomy, we have serious troubles in medium to long term. Engineers in this country have unfairly smooth roads to tread upon right now. They shouldn’t forget however that unless they raise their standards through lifelong learning the roads will be full of potholes in coming years.