Thermal Noise

Thermal Noise

is the noise generated by the equilibrium fluctuations of the electric current inside an electrical conductor, which happens regardless of any applied voltage, due to the random thermal motion of electrons in the conducting medium.

Thermal Noise (The Blog)

is a set of noisy posts generated by the equilibrium fluctuations of thought patterns inside my /dev/brain, which happens regardless of any topic, due to random seeks performed on the brain device.

Who Am I ?

I am named Ananth. Blessed with plenty of nicknames including but not limited to Bull, Neo, Ant, Express, Luke. I happen to be 23 years old. I am an engineer in the Solaris 10 Sustaining & Engineering Team at Sun Microsystems Bangalore. I work on Solaris Device Drivers.

I spend my life Programming on Unix, Reading Books, Watching Movies, Learning something new, Blogging, Playing Chess, Solving Puzzles, Day Dreaming so on and so forth.

I have very few true and close friends. Aside from this circle, I rarely communicate to the outside world. But, I would love to get in touch and have discussions with anyone who sees anything in common - a hobby or a passion, an idea or an ideal.

I find these subjects fascinating: Thermodynamics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Super String Theory, Number Theory, Modern Algebra, Permutations, Combinations, Probability, Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems, Cryptography and try to read up related literature once in a while.

Computers

When I was 8 years old, I wrote my first program in LOGO

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When I saw a square appear on the screen, I fell in love. LOGO remained my source of fascination until I discovered BASIC. I programmed BASIC for almost 10 years in my summer holidays and spare time. I wrote a Super Mario clone (Level 1 alone) in BASIC. My first BASIC programs were for the Commodore VIC-20.

In my spare time I learnt PC-DOS programming and Wordstar, DBase, Foxpro, Turbo Pascal. I wrote something similar to the Mid-Point algorithm for drawing circles in FoxPro

When I entered college I started programming C in DOS initially. One fine weekend I discovered Unix, then Cygwin, then Dragon Linux, then BeOS, then RedHat Linux 5.0. Linux became my prime weekend past-time. But I also did some extra-ordinary amount of coding in Visual Basic (primarily for friends). I tried learning C++ but found it overwhelming. I had to learn Java and read Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in Java before I could come back to C++. Then I fooled around with MFC, Visual C++ and a bit of DirectX.

Then I decided to write an operating system in C++. You can find it here. My final year project was an implementation of my own parallel game tree search algorithm for playing chess in a Beowulf Linux Cluster.

Then my first employer proved to be quite a challenge. In a space of 14 months I worked on Mainframes, AS400, COBOL, JCL, CICS, ReXX, ISPF, DB2, Oracle, PL/SQL, Powerbuilder, Centura, GuptaSQL, Visual Basic, ASP, JSP, Servlets, HTML/CSS, DBase III+,VBScript, JavaScript and MS-Office Scripting ! I then joined Sun Microsystems, Bangalore where I currently work on Solaris Device Drivers. I prefer OpenSolaris as my primary development platform. FreeBSD, Linux and Windows pop up occasionally.

Python is my favorite programming language (apart from “C”). At times I find .NET and LISP interesting. I am trying to get my feet wet with Ruby. Lately I have found my distaste for Java growing less and have even taken a look at Jython and JRuby !

Systems Programming and Web Programming are the two unrelated ways in which I spend my time on computers. Developing high complexity mathematical, scientific applications is something I want to do in the years to come.

Unix Classes

If you badly want to learn Unix (any *nix) and you are not able to do it on your own because you don’t have a computer or a book and you are not financially well off or whatever. If you are in Bangalore you are in luck - I take Unix classes on weekends. If you are a group of college kids - I can come to your place and teach. Its free as in “free beer” - but make sure you do it because you have the passion to learn Unix and not because it is something that comes free. One more important thing, a few times it happens that you are really interested in learning Unix - earnestly, but you simply don’t understand fundamentals well below Unix. So I might ask you to write a small test before I actually decide if I am gonna take the classes.

I can handle Unix fundamentals, internals, system administration, shell programming, networking, Kernel Internals (Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux) and Device drivers (Solaris and Linux) to a reasonble degree. I certainly am *NO* Unix Guru. Nor do I make the pretense of being one. I only offer to share with you what I have understood in working with *nixes for about 6 years. But I beleive that is a fairly large amount of information.

Send a mail (see the bottom of this page) to me if you are interested in the classes.

Other Classes

If you are a part of a volunteer group or a NGO who want help in teaching Mathematics / Physics / History / Computers to economically or emotionally or physically challenged kids, you can contact me (see the bottom of this page).

*nix CDs

That aside, If you are somewhat knowledgable on Unix, but want to get dirty by playing around with it, and you don’t have CDs of Linux or Solaris or BSD, I can help. I might even do an installation at your place. But don’t count on all that - I am pretty busy actually.

Disclaimer

This is supposed to be my excuse if I am about to get fired from my job for writing shit.

You have no right to judge me by these posts. Nor do you hold the right to form some abstract mental picture of me and hold me responsible because I don’t fit your assumptions. These are words that are let out in moments of joy or sorrow or boredom or pain or fear or anticipation or delight or disappointment.

But the fact is that, all the writeups under ThermalNoise.WordPress.Com are my own views. They don’t necessarily represent the views of my employer, cat, dog or girlfriend.

Home Page

http://ananth.shrinivas.googlepages.com/

Contact

Send me electronic mail at a n a n t h (dot) s h r i n i v a s (at) g m a i l (dot) com