Deepak's Home Page

Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem *

Welcome to my personal website. I am a Master's student in computer science at Ohio State University, USA. I come from India. More on me in About.

What's here?

Tech

I am fascinated with technology. In particular: operating systems (esp. Unix), computer architecture, networking, user interfaces and usability.

Linux

Linux Command-Line Tutorial in four parts (old, 2002-03): 1: intro, 2: commands, 3: advanced, 4: vi/emacs
A Presentation on Linux (old, Apr2004) "...provides a very thorough broad-based introduction to Linux for people who may be familiar only with Windows" (Linux Gazette, Oct2001)
PixelView TV Card under Linux Getting PlayTV Pro card to work under Linux
Vibra Sound Card under Linux Getting Creative Vibra 128 card to work under Linux
DLink Wireless Card under Linux Getting DLink DWL-G650+ wireless LAN card to work under Linux
Olympus Digicam under Linux Getting Olympus C770UZ digital camera to work under Linux

FreeBSD, OpenBSD

fork() in OpenBSD Notes from the implementation of fork system call in OpenBSD 4.1
FreeBSD Remote Kernel Debugging Using remote GDB to debug FreeBSD kernel
NFS Between Linux and FreeBSD Using NFS to read CD-ROM from across the network
FreeBSD on ThinkPad R40e Notes from installing FreeBSD 5.x on this laptop
OpenBSD Install Notes Some notes I made while installing and using OpenBSD

Scripts, Patches

TinyOS All-in-1 A single package of TinyOS tool chain in Linux. Click for more info.
savepage Wrapper for wget to save web pages. Also maintains an index.html (sample)
p4pkg Packager of open files for Perforce CVS. Makes a tarball of old and new files; useful for reviews.
pkg_free Simple shell script to list packages that have no dependencies and are therefore deletable. (FreeBSD)
wget-204 204 responses would hang wget, so I made a trivial patch. I also mailed them about it, don't know if it's merged yet.
Daylight graph A Perl script to plot daylight and sunrise/sunset for a given city or location. Click for sample graphs and script.
TCP-time-seqno A shell script to tabulate data flow in TCP connections. It reads from a capture file and generates gnuplot-ready data. (Sample graph, shows 2 retransmissions.)

Software

GINF is a FrontPage™-ish software for Linux. Was featured in Linux Magazine, Japan (Oct2002). Screenshot. 2002.
Teddy is a full-screen text editor for Linux, like EDIT.EXE for MS-DOS. 2002, latest version 2004.
tcpd is a daemon that provides reliable network transport over UDP. Written for SunOS, but should work on most Unix systems with Makefile tweaks. Tarball includes project report. 2008.
pcaptain is a simple network packet capture software for Linux. 2002.
Beehive (GUI) is a peer-to-peer network protocol and software for Linux. Report, presentation. 2003.
DrawIt is a Paint™-like software for MS-DOS. 2002.
Programs I wrote as part of labs during engineering. I tried to make them simple and well-documented, so they are helpful to learners: Data Structures with C (2000), OOP with C++ (2001), 8086 Assembler (2001), Algorithms with C (2002), Lex and Yacc (2002), Computer Graphics (2002).

Misc

Multiboot Computer Tips Some tips if you like to have many OSes on your computer
Emacs As Your IDE for C programming, with cscope and Perforce CVS integration
A presentation introducing Intel's new Core microarchitecture. Originally I wanted to make notes, but ended up creating a preso. 2007.
Hyperthreading, a presentation. 2003.
Screenshots of a few operating systems I installed on my computer (1999-2003). Red Hat Linux 6.2, OpenBSD 3.1, Solaris 8. I could run Win98 under RH7.1 as VM. See Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody) under: GNOME, IceWM, TWM, WindowMaker, BlackBox.

Fun

sudoku-helper is a small, simple program to solve most sudoku puzzles.
wwheel A program to unscramble jumbled words or find completions (inspired by Word-wheel game)
fortune A PHP front-end to Unix fortune program. I've made it my homepage to get a new fortune every time I open my browser. ;-)
pastri A tiny program to print Pascal triangle of numbers as wide as the terminal allows (Yes it's trivial, but hey, I like the output! Screenshot)

Non-Tech

Writing

Some poems and short pieces.

Poems: At the bus stop, In a green park
Prose: An evening in Munnar, The festival of lights, Love on a sewage bridge

Science

Grains of Mystique is a layman tutorial on quantum physics that I once co-wrote. Archived in faqs.org.

Kannada

I have written a few humorous limericks (hanigavana) in Kannada, my mother-tongue: ghattagalu, munnade, prayana, savari, thimingala, nalle. (Even if you don't know Kannada, click on to see the beautiful, curly script.)

Philosophy

C'est la vie An assortment of life epithets. See also: voyageur below.
Tao Te Ching Selections and notes from the ancient text. Dan Macintyre took the verses and made a fortune database. You can see it in action (random Tao verse every time, English translation by John Wu [1961]) or download the database file yourself.
kagga Selected verses from the Kannada Mankuthimmana Kagga. Also available as PDF with embedded Kannada font (thanks, Swaroop), and as slides in PNG image format (thanks, Ravishankar).

Photography

I am interested in photography. Visit my Flickr page for my travel- and other-photos.

Journal

I maintain a journal at LiveJournal.
In early 2007 I had a weblog -- a scrapbook of interesting stuff I came across on the Web, with occasional personal entries. April/May06 (17 entries) has mostly serious news articles, February (23 entries) and March (14 entries) have a medley of exciting and funny stuff, Dec05/Jan06 (20 entries) is mostly oddities. If unsure, try February.
For the most part of 2004, I kept a journal with philosophical bent called voyageur. Not light-reading material.
I'm collecting pithy quotes (most of them are from my daily quotes feed)

Misc

CS MS in America Some tips and pointers if you are planning to get a Master's degree in CS in USA.
I have a fly-over idea to decongest Hudson Circle area of Bangalore, but nobody responded when I wrote to them. So I've just stuck it here.

About

Hi, I'm Deepak. After four years there, I quit working for Citrix-NetScaler, Bangalore, in June 2007. I'm now a full-time graduate student at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. I graduated from PESIT (Comp.Sc.) in 2003. Prior to that, I studied at SSVM, National High School and National College (B'gudi), all Bangalore, with a short stint at Sainik School, Bijapur.

My interests include computers, books and reading, nature, and travel. Unix (Linux, BSDs) and systems software in general attract me; I also have interest in usable software design and principles. Recently I bought a MacBook; I'm excited to learn Mac. I've been spending some of my free time learning compsci at the fantastic MIT's OpenCourseWare and hearing great ideas at TED.

I read mostly non-fiction, on a wide variety of subjects. Favourite books are Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse), A Briefer History of Time (Stephen Hawking) and the Sherlock Holmes collection. I also read a lot on the Web; favourites: Slashdot, New York Times, New Yorker, Economist. I am choosy about movies. I like Hitchcock thrillers and Bruce Lee movies. Recently I liked Matrix and Samsara. I listen to soothing alternative music.

Although I don't consider myself religious, I frequently get attracted to Buddhism and Taoism. They seem simple yet profound. They seem to teach one how to live in peace accepting things as they are, instead of offering escape routes and false gods.

This site has been in existence since May 2000, in myriad avatars.

Contact

You are welcome to write to me at: n dot deepak at gmail dot com.

This page last modified: 16/Mar/2008

--
* (Chinese)
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.
(From a Zen story)