Truth, Computing and Fail

Two back to back posts, but couldn’t resist it…

Movie Reviews

You decide for yourself :p

Follow this link.

DOS is dead. It’s 16-bit. It’s obsolete. The only people that still write DOS assembly are crazy old hackers that are too attached to their 386s to throw them away.

Couldn’t agree more. I see no reason to be working with 16-bit registers on systems where you can afford 32-bit mode. Developing assembly programs for DOS using 8086/8088 code means you are forced to run them in ‘real mode’, that the processor can address only 1MByte of memory. Also that you will be tearing out your hair keeping track of segments and also that you would never know when a segfault would be staring you in the face. Take into account the fact that unlike linux which would give an error like Segmentation fault(Core dumped) and then come back to its helpful self, if you are working on the Command Prompt you would only get to see something like An illegal instruction occured at and two so called ‘options’ (close and ignore) which anyways, would lead to the same thing i.e. you having to terminate the process. If it is the real 16-bit MS-DOS, then God save you or to be more precise, the reset button.

I have no idea though why our colleges are so obsessed with totally obsolete standards that are out of sync with the requirements of modern computing.

Found out this solution at ubuntu forums after googling a bit. I was totally fed up with the connection acting out randomly. The solution lies in locking the network interface to a specific 802.11 a/b/g mode.

Edit your /etc/rc.local file and add the following lines before exit 0

modprobe ath_pci
(sleep 10 && /sbin/iwpriv ath0 mode 3) &


Actually it uses the iwpriv mode X command to lock the card to a specific mode, where
X=0, for a/b/g
1, for a
2, for b
3, for g
You add this to /etc/rc.local to make the change permanent, so that these settings are loaded every time you boot into ubuntu.

Source

Gotta try out wicd as a replacement for network manager too.

Some might have started learning assembly language programming in MASM and maybe already under the impression that finally they are ‘doing some shit’. Well, I don’t want to sound as if I am a know-it-all guy. Even I was under the same impression, and we can’t be blamed. Well, when you see a screen all fluorescent green and bright blue showing the registers and segments getting updated as you trace through the program, you can be excused for feeling on top of the world. That is, if you are a Computer Science student and most importantly think like one too!

Well, sorry for the digression. Coming back to the point, there are two major syntaxes of writing assembly language code for the x86 processors: the AT&T syntax and the Intel syntax itself. For the first one, we can use the GNU assembler in linux with the as command (which is a part of the gcc package) and for the latter, another assembler called NASM is used. In this scenario, assemblers like MASM and TASM don’t exactly fit in and are neither here nor there.

You would say, why should I give a f to the assembler and its syntax as long as it is churning out the binaries. After all, whatever the syntax it would get translated to the same machine code in the end. Sample this, you are stuck on quite a large assembly code and you need some urgent help. You go to an IRC channel, show the guys out there the code and ask them to help you out. Chances are that none of them would be able to help you out. Why? Simply because MASM and TASM syntaxes aren’t exactly standards and so most probably they haven’t even cared to learn them.

Now if you are stuck in the lab using MASM and on top of that debugging using Turbo Debugger (yeah, that Turbo shit!), I would advise that at least use the debugger that comes with DOS. I can say this from my personal experiences. TD will often load the code from some other code segment that you had executed previously rather than the one you want to trace right now. It can be really irritating and for the programs which have almost the same functionality like multiplying two 16-bit numbers and multiplying a 32-bit and a 16-bit number, after you have traced through half the program you realise this is not the program you wanted to trace. I am yet to face any such issues with debug.

Well, the LUG in my college was started last semester itself, in November but it is only now that we have swung into action and making our presence felt.

Soon after the college reopened we had a 2 day install fest and the meet over the last 2 days, at the time of writing this, was a follow up to help those who attended the install fest getting started on linux, like the basic directory structure, the different software alternatives, the power of the command line.

But still a lot needs to done to change the mindset of the students about linux in specific and the Open Source philosophy in general. I guess the first wouldn’t be so tough as they would be attending our meets and learning about the power of linux and how much it allows you to wield greater control over your system. Regarding the latter, those who attend the LUG meets have to change the way they view them, like a workshop or a ‘lecture’ by some guys where they would just be the silent audience. In a meet, you don’t listen to lectures, but ideas flow freely. Anyone is welcome to contribute anything (s)he assumes would be a better idea than the one being discussed. Its only by sharing that their knowledge would increase, not the opposite. There is nothing to be protective or guarded about what you know unless it is some world-altering hax0ring skills :p .

Here is the website of our LUG:
www.lugmanipal.org

We have a wiki too! wiki.lugmanipal.org/