ABBian friends

Vinesh Kapadia

Friends call him "vin kaps" ... one of the lively and most wanted friend for all ... he is very charming, yet a very simple person, and knows how to be professional when the situation demands ...

He handles difficult situations very easily ... Nobody will every know what is going on in his head, till the time he says "Race is Over !! " .... I don't remember one thing he used to say, something like "Race Begins !" or something like that ...

When I remember the time spent together in the office, and very few short moments outside makes me feel happy that I have this very good friend with me ...

Tea and snacks at the cafeteria, or at the 'laari' outside the ABB campus, going to the main canteen for lunch during heavy rains (with my so called 'costliest' raincoat), getting his bike (so called superbike, Pulsar !!) to the garage for puncture repairing, ...... there is a long list of memories I have which I don't want to forget ever in my life ...

Yogin Joshi

This is Mr. Yogin Joshi, and we all call him "Maharaj". He is one of the most experienced guy and the one who has a very good sense of humor. He enjoys being with the R&D center and we enjoy being with him J. Whatever be the reason, he makes call for a parteee … and always leads the team for managing those types of events in the office ;).

Why must we have only one cellphone per phone number?

Today, if you want to commission one mobile phone, you must decommission another.

Why must this be so? Cellphones are so cheap. Why can’t we have multiple active phones tied to the same number? A call to one would be a call to all of them.

Then you could have:

• one powerful PDA/communicator/GPS smartphone like the iPhone as your main device
• a tiny mini-cellphone/MP3 player to take running — an “iPhone Shuffle” (today I leave my phone behind)
• a backup cellphone to grab when you are rushing out the door, when you misplace or lose one
• a hands-free cellphone integrated into your car. No cables, no bluetooth coupling, no charging
• a cellphone built into your laptop computer. Your computer would “ring” when someone called. You could process voicemail visually from your desktop. It would provide data, voice and video call connectivity when WiFi wasn’t available.
• a couple of docked home cellphones that replace your existing land-line

Latest updates !

I love learning new things and new technology, especially something related to knowledge update. I recently experienced a burning desire to learn programming in Java. There is special reason also behind this desire, but will not be writing much about it over here ... may be sometime later... Anyway, from the first day, I started downloading few of the freely available tutorials available on the internet. Few of the very good tutorials are listed below:

www.javapassion.com
http://java.sun.com/
http://www.netbeans.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.javaranch.com/java-college.jsp

Learning basic programming language is not that difficult, as I am comfortable working with C/C++ programming languages. Java is almost similar to C++, and infact, very much fun to work with.

I must say that being an open-standards based development platform, lot of study material (along with good quality code samples) are available from the internet. If you start downloading each and every technology and topic related materials, you will end up with your hard disk showing the message => "Low disk space" ! Well, I downloaded only those things which were useful to me; only the basic concepts related material.

I will be posting bits & pieces of information as and when I learn new things...

Digital Photography

Well photography as such is dear to me, but from the day when I started using my new Sony Digital Camera, it has created whole new interest, and the variety of photos which I take from that small device has become quite amazing.

Wait a little, I will be posting the photographs which I took recently. Hope you will like those :)

Here follows my first experiments on Macro Photography. Please click on the photograph to enlarge it and enjoy the real beauty of the picture then :

My Education

Schooling : Central School, Rajkot (Gujarat).

Graduation :

College : BVM Engg. College, Vallabh Vidyanagar (Gujarat).

Major : Electronics
Department : Electronics & Computer Engineering

Post-Graduation :
Institute : Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (West Bengal).
Major : Fiber Optics & Lightwave Engineering
Department : Electrical & Electronics Communication Engineering

My Work @ ABB

Hello,

I worked with ABB Ltd., Baroda as Software Engineer. Software which I develop is for the Overcurrent Numerical Relays to be used for transformer and transmission line protection. The software tools I use for the project is Keil uVision 3 as IDE for project management, and C language for programming.

The hardware of the Relay consists of ARM7 CPU based Philips' LPC 2138 Microcontroller, along with other peripherals such as Serial EEPROM (for storing configuration and other datalog information), supervisory circuit and watchdog, etc.

Well I cannot write about my projects in more detail in this kind of open blog environment, so logging out.

Stay tuned for some good stuff related to my technical interests.