About Me
Here are a few facts about me.
The following is a little outdated. Will be updated soon. Hopefully.
Who the heck am I?My full name is Srichand Pendyala. I am in my final year of the BE Computer Science and Engineering course at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology. I will be graduating June 2007.
Theoretical interestsMy main interests lie in the softer forms of AI and Machine Learning. I am currently working on optimizing genetic algorithms for amplifiying particular characteristics as required by the problem statement.
I am currently working on the Motif Discovery problem, attempting to find transcription factor binding sites in DNA sequences. My work has lead to a paper titled "Motif discovery with genetic algorithms using multiple geographically isolated populations". Future work will utilise other stochastic kernel based processes such as support vector machines and distributed approaches. For more information on the distributed approaches, go here
What do I do?Well nothing much really. I am however passionate about Free and Open Source software and as such a lot of my activities revolve around the same. I am one of the nice chaps who organize the Mukthi series of FOSS conferences in Bangalore. Before you ask me, the next one is scheduled for 11th and 12th April 2007.
My affiliations lie with my home LUGs VRLINUG and The BLUG. I've been involved with some open source projects, including some of my own:- Sharpscore - For the cricket season! Go India!
- Sharptella - A proposed crossplatform Gnutella client using Mono and Gtk# - now vaporware
- Java-GNOME - Just recently got involved with it. Far from vaporware or anything trivial! Sent in a couple of patches or so.
Most people would know me as a Jack of all trades and a Master of none. Here are some exploits that got me the "Jack" tag.
- ACM ICPC 2005
In the October of 2005 Anuj Bhatt, Nikhil Vyakaranam and I represented our college at the Asia Regional Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Though we ended up at the 25th place, it was good fun. I recommend the experience to anyone who has the opportunity!
- Mukthi 5.11, Mukthi 6.03 and Mukthi 7.04
In the November of 2005 and again in the March of 2006, we organised two of India's largest student oriented FOSS events. I was an organizer for both events. I also gave a talk on Knoppix at Mukthi 6.03. The fact that I wasn't booed right off stage, probably indicates I can speak a bit. (UPDATE: My talk at 7.04 was awful, so I guess I'm back to form. Note to self: Never speak at a conference you're organizing!) Mukthi 7.04 which happened on the 11th and 12th of April was an amazing success. Our star speaker this time was Andrew Cowie!
Andrew and I gave the first talk together, which was a basic GTK+ tutorial. I then assisted him with his talk on "What they didn't teach you at school", which was basically a tutorial session on all the tools used in the free software world. Andrew had the crowd with him, with the hall packed despite being 3 hours overtime, as usual.
- Numerous Hardware hacks
I've built a few simple circuits, mostly audio circuits, but a couple of other things including a proximity-detector using an LDR and an IR LED for a robot. (didn't work too well though, inconsistent) and some parallel port controlled stuff:
1. Dancing lights - Tried connecting XMMS to it, to get a set of 8 LEDs to dance to a song. Partly successful, this was on my old motherboard, who's parallel port didn't work too well. I'll probably work on it again. I'll upload a video of my attempt soon.
2. Computer controlled household peripherals - Again, used the parallel port to drive an opto coupler to drive a relay to drive a peripheral of your choice. It worked with a 60W bulb, until I had to cannibalize the opto coupler for another experiment.
But the biggest of my circuit-exploits would probably be Krypton Fuzz or KF for short. KF is a heavier 70s style distortion (Think Led Zep + a little more gain and bottom heavy). Again, simple design: A bi level asymmetric clipper using a germanium and silicon diode in the negative feedback loop of a u741.
- Sylvester OS
Right after completing my schooling, I had a few months off before College started. I decided one fine morning I would [attempt to] write a toy OS of my own. Sylvester OS was born of this very same attempt. Why Sylvester? Because just like the fictional cartoon character, this OS keeps trying [to boot that is!] but fails more often than not. On a totally unrelated note, the project Sylvester OS 1.0 release is codenamed "Tweety". Sylvester OS so far has support for FAT12, FAT16/32 and ext2fs. Current status: Bootloader works [well, sort of]. Kernel doesn't do any mem management yet, just passes control to init. Init in turn, spawns a shell, which is still under construction.
If I ever do get around to working on it again, I will probably want to get some initial coverage of some basic UNIX system calls done first. Next target would be some basic coverage of libc. If you're interested, mail me. The code is not put up online anyplace and it won't be, unless I work on it again.
- Fizz
While working on the Motif Discovery problem, Anuj and I decided to try building a live cluster for our work. The result was a 3 node cluster called Fizz (I could tell you why its named that, but then I'd have to kill you ...). We played about with Fizz, checking against various metrics for our work.
Bigg Fizz, the next gen live cluster, involving about 40-50 nodes is in the pipeline. Watch this space for more!