Saturday, September 09, 2006

A post on a rainy saturday

From yesterday I have started attending a "training". Rather I should call it a course.
It is good and I discovered the following yesterday :-

a) Student life is the golden life in one's phase of life.

b) The instructor being a PhD , asserted my judgements of a guy who does a PhD. Dedicated, passionate abt learning being the pluses and maverick , absent minded and recluse being the minuses.

c) I simply agree to disagree on his views (A typical PhD's thoughts abt life and society). I had judged most PhDs are very un-conventional.

d) I was trying to get the pronunciation of his surname. The strlen() of his surname was 20 letters and ended with a -kar.

I discovered the following today

a) I was wrong abt generalising abt PhDs and infact he is a very pleasant man with a good sense of humor and he actually tries to mingle with us .And he was a hit with us today after he started talking tech. Yesterday was an introduction class and he talked abt life etc.

b)Student life is a golden phase but it is really very difficult to sit for classes on saturdays.

The tech part :-

It was absolute delight to start talking abt Computer Architecture and Organization. I remembered the good old days of Hamacher. Accumulator. AB, CD, HL registers of the 8085 micrprocessor. Instruction Pipelines and Program Counters. The CARRY , OVERFLOW flags. 2s complement of a number. IEEE Floating point specifications. The Control Unit of the microprocessor, The bus diagram of 8085 and processor clock and instruction cyles, the Memory Mapped IO Concept. The Instruction Decoder and the factors which affect the word size of a computer.

It was a trip down the memory lane back to the 5th and 6th semsters.

I dont know if anyone remembers, there was a sorting algorithm which was a O(N) algorithm for Parallel Processors. The data had to be arranged in a snake-like format and the time was O(N).

1 comment:

test123 said...

I had a similar experience while taking the Architecture course. I had thought that it was a dry subject, atleast in 5th and 6th sem. But after being taught by a brilliant prof, it was a trip down memory lane with a few differences.
I remember faintly the O(n) one. Do you recall if that was the fastest parallel sorting algorithm?