Archives for March 2005

Holi festival

26 March 2005 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Holi is a Hindu Spring annual festival. It takes place over two days around late March or early April as per the Hindu calender. On first day, a bonfire is lit at night to signify the burning of Holika. On the second day, known as Rangapanchami or Dhulandi, people go around throwing colours at each other and meet and have fun. A special drink called thandai or bhang is also consumed sometimes, which actually contains small amounts of marijuana to make the festival more enjoyable. People invite each other to their houses for feasts and celebrations.

As for my own experience of bhang, I have none :-)

Kyan is 1/2 a year old today !

15 March 2005 By Avinash Meetoo 4 Comments

I am proud to tell you that my little brother Kyan is 6 months old today. Kyan is getting bigger and bigger day after day. He can already (nearly) sit and already (nearly) hold his feeding bottle by himself. And he is getting restless and reckless. He loves to play, and laugh and make mummy and dad go bezerk ;-)

All in all, I think mum and dad had a pretty neat idea when they decided to give me a little brother :-)

Happy 1/2 birthday Kyan

Respect my Athlon 64 !

15 March 2005 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

After more than one month without a computer at home (yep ! that’s why I was so quiet), I’m happy to announce that I am now the proud owner of a brand new AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor ruuning on a very good Abit KV8 Pro motherboard.

I’m still running x86 Gentoo Linux right now but I’ll quickly switch to AMD64 Gentoo Linux in the coming weeks.

To be frank, I was also considering an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz (Prescott) but at the end I chose 64-bit technology as I feel that this is the future of the PC architecture. With a 64-bit OS (like AMD64 Gentoo Linux), the Athlon 64 works in 64-bit mode. In this mode, all 8 general purpose registers (like EAX and EBX) are extended to 64 bits and 8 additional 64-bit GPR come into existence (R8 to R15). Furthermore, the SSE 128-bits registers also double in number. This makes for a formidable number of registers (compared to plain old x86) for a (nearly) RISC programming paradigm.

And don’t forget that Intel has licenced this formidable AMD64 technoloy and has implemented it in some very expensive Pentium 4 and Xeon as EM64T technology.