Weekend Nights
A weekend night is something we all yearn for over the whole week and the plans for such nights can be numerous varying from person to person but nothing trumps the fun of sitting late in the night with nice background music, sipping coffee/coke/red bull and eating doritos while trying to figure out a way to reduce 20ns latency in my program!!
Any programmer (software and hardware) can testify that the he loves to debug. It is tedious but then following the expected behaviour of the code and comparing it with the simulated results is something we can do when others are out there partying, and wasting time!
And that feeling of achievment when that little bug in a code of 2000 lines is found is incomparable to any other human emotion.
Although, as I said earlier, I’m heavily loaded with courseworks I’ve begun to enjoy it since I started working on it. Coding is always fun and when it doesn’t work, it takes away my sleep. Take an example, I was writing a code in VHDL last night which didn’t function in the first attempt (they never work in the first attempt!). I tried to figure out the bug for few minutes (at least 90) and then kept my laptop aside and went to sleep with the lights on. When I woke up in the morning, I glanced at the bedside, and within seconds I was back in the world of code looking for that bug. So the sleep didn’t matter at all.
Quite recently Saadia and Leena asked me what am I doing, so here is a glimpse.
Click here to see a small part of the layout that I’ve made for an 8-bit adder, the complete layout is pretty big and nasty for general public view. (The other domain is mine too, the next project which I’m working on whenever I get some free time. And BTW, I will have yet another blog very soon hosted on Imperial College’s network because I have been selected as one of the 10 bloggers and all ten of us were given a nice Sony Cybershot, memory sticks and some other freebies 
….More on this later!)
And below you can see some waveforms and binary digits which are the results of my VHDL simulation for interaction with a video RAM. Things are working quite nicely here but my output is taking 20ns more than it should. To those who don’t know, 20ns in digital world is like 20 minutes of real life!
So life is full of courseworks at the moment but it is fun and pleasant at the same time!
I’ll conclude by giving a snapshot of my current desktop which is a reflection of my life: disorganized! [My laziness and more use of Linux has also contributed to this]
12 comments
:O… You have space on your desktop??? :S
My desktop is the same as yours. Just “tried” to clear it up yesterday!
What’s VHDL?
@Talha: I have space for 11 more files/folders on my desktop right now.
@SAWJ: VHDL is a hardware development language.
Just as I thought!
This suuuuuuuuure brings back some nasty memories :S….
But you’re having fun so all’s cool !!
Nice about the selection as one of ten bloggers !! Congrats !
And I know about that feeling.. when the code finally works perfectly!
that pretty much looks like my desktop! aah…who thinks girls are very organized
I do not know whether to feel jealous or proud … you are WIRED man…I was never this deep a coder…Thank God?
You all khwaar people!! Like me!
Ok if clean desktop is a measure of tidiness then perhaps i am the most tidiest person on earth. I hate crowded desktop.
@Anas…Remember i wanted to see ur code do send me when its complete and trust me i am not going to sell it off
Nice colour combinations on the layout you shared. Haha, I can’t understand more than that, but yay, that means you really are upto something!
And I didn’t like your desktop!
I have no space left on my desktop. Shortcuts, notepad files, some images, folders, and a few other things (I have no idea why they are there, and how they got there :S). Its a mess I don’t want to clear up. It will take time, in which I can do many other fruitless things.
I plan to perform a massive cleanup tonight, which will include an operation on the desktop and cleaning up my laptop physically after about…err…i never cleaned it :S