I have just de­ployed the new niravko.com web­site. This is the new mi­croblog for­mat that I’m ex­per­i­ment­ing with. I used to use Jekyll for my per­sonal blog, but I’ve come to gen­er­ally hate the ex­pe­ri­ence. Hopefully this new sys­tem of my own de­sign will work bet­ter.

In keep­ing with the spirit of the times, I’ve started play­ing in the Nepali Stock Exchange play­ground. It is a strange, dis­torted world for some­one like me who’s used to the de­ter­min­ism of the com­puter realm. And so far, it has just proved to be a more fash­ion­able way of los­ing money. But it’s ad­dic­tive! If you’ve ever had to use Nepal Stock Exchange’s Trade Management System (often called just TMS), you prob­a­bly hate it. It is at best an in­com­pe­tently made soft­ware with many glar­ing is­sues, hosted over a woe­fully un­der­pow­ered in­fra­struc­ture that can­not even han­dle the most pre­dictable of traf­fic spikes. On more than one oc­ca­sion I’ve over­sold or un­der­sold shares be­cause it’s UI was out of sync with it’s data­base.

As I wrote in my (excruciatingly long and bor­ing) ar­ti­cle on the Nepali lan­guage and Unicode, typing in Nepali does­n’t have to be a pain. You are ab­solutely free to make your own key­board lay­out to type in Nepali Unicode (which, by the way, has much bet­ter fonts than Preeti and Sagarmatha). In fact, a few months ago, I made my own key­board lay­out be­cause there’s no way I’m go­ing to

Data struc­tures help struc­ture and or­ga­nize data ef­fec­tively, and pro­vide sev­eral ab­stracted op­er­a­tions on the data. They are el­e­gant and con­ve­nient, and com­puter sci­en­tists love to use them. Implementing these data struc­tures in the com­puter re­quire the pro­gram­mer to flat­ten the struc­ture into a one-di­men­sional model us­ing point­ers or ref­er­ences be­cause the mem­ory is ac­tu­ally arranged as a one-di­men­sional run of data el­e­ments. It is of­ten nec­es­sary to in­spect the data s

I wrote a toy com­piler few months back. I wanted peo­ple to see it, so I put the code up on Github. But as it turns out, not every­one is will­ing or ca­pa­ble of go­ing through the con­vo­luted process of cloning the repos­i­tory, com­pil­ing the pro­gram, in­stalling a Nepali lan­guage key­board and learn­ing an ob­scure half-baked pro­gram­ming lan­guage just be­cause some id­iot put it on Github. So, I started to write a web app to make the pro­gram eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble. The web app lets user write code i

So lis­ten, It’s 12:30 am. I spent the last hour toss­ing and turn­ing in my bed, lis­ten­ing to the scur­ry­ing feet of the cock­roaches, try­ing to fall asleep. But sleep won’t come. There is­n’t a sin­gle thread of sleep in my body to lull me. I can’t stop think­ing about her. Any time I find my­self slip­ping off, the im­age of her smil­ing that daz­zling smile ap­pears out of nowhere and sets my heart rac­ing again. I re­mem­ber the line I’d read in a poem by Neru

The un­for­tu­nate truth is that she does­n’t care. Which is to say if at any in­stant the earth blew up, the sec­ond be­tween me reg­is­ter­ing the bang and col­lid­ing on a boul­der, I’d be think­ing of her. But she would­n’t. Which is to say that I have kept her in that part of my heart where flow­ers bloom and but­ter­flies flut­ter all col­or­ful and cheery. But she has kept me in that for­got­ten cor­ner where she keeps her small pen­cils and rusty sharp­en­ers, in­side a ne­glected p

I was asked to an­i­mate a dot-ma­trix dis­play for the ro­bot­ics club re­cently. They wanted some­thing that said “Robotics Club” to hang over their door. We had some old P10(1r) DMDs which I had worked on in the past to make a lit­tle score­board for a ro­bot foot­ball match. And, even though I am not very good at it, I re­ally love an­i­mat­ing things. So I de­cided to give it a shot. I ended up writ­ing an an­i­ma­tion soft­ware for the DMD in JavaScript which is un­for­tu­nately only as func­tion

I an­i­mated this a while back. I re­mem­ber it took me days. First I had to learn how to ac­tu­ally draw the hu­man skele­ton (_The Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist_ by Stephen Peck is an amaz­ing re­source). Then I had to dis­till the ideas into the bare min­i­mum re­quired to get the pic­ture across. Finally I drew and an­i­mated the whole thing in piskel. The an­i­ma­tion process was quite te­dious, at least in part be­cause this was my first try.

It was a strange af­ter­noon, no doubt. The sun grinned from the west, mak­ing shad­ows in strange cor­ners and bounc­ing off white­washed walls, while the east­ern sky was dark and pre­mon­i­tory with a sin­is­ter tur­bu­lence. I was walk­ing home con­tem­plat­ing this con­trast and hop­ing for a rain­bow. First an ap­pre­hen­sive drop hit my ear­lobe. I con­tin­ued to walk. The next landed on my cheek. The women com­ing out of the shop held out their palm and light­heart­edly ex­claimed, “Hurry! It’s start­ing to rain!”. I con­tin­ued to walk. I felt a drop on my eye­brow, then on my nose, then two drops at once and be­fore I could reg­is­ter that I had lost count, it had started to rain.

The fi­nal code is in GitHub _here_. Da Vinci is quoted say­ing, “Art is never fin­ished, only aban­doned”. I don’t see why it should be any dif­fer­ent for code. With that said, I’d like to de­clare my lat­est pro­ject: an im­ple­men­ta­tion of the huff­man’s al­go­rithm aban­doned. It works well as it is, but it can be made a lot bet­ter.

If you think be­ing madly in love with your best friend’s girl­friend is un­for­tu­nate, try sit­ting next to him dur­ing a Microprocessor lec­ture hav­ing to lis­ten to him de­scribe the sex they had the day be­fore. What’s more, Mi­cro­proces­sor is one of the few sub­jects I ac­tu­ally en­joy. My friend is nor­mally a level-headed per­son who does­n’t speak much. But it seems that the ex­cite­ment of the first time is grand enough for him to break char­ac­ter. Need­less to say, I’m mis­er­able.

This line popped in my head yes­ter­day with no con­text what­so­ever. Then I spent the next many hours try­ing to re­mem­ber where I’d read it. The an­swer came just as sud­denly. This line is from the book “Hear the Wind Sing” by Haruki Murakami. I love how it evokes a sense of deep long­ing for the past. In many ways, I think this line is the essence of the en­tire novel. Time erodes away the hum­drum re­al­ity from mem­o­ries and leaves you with frag­ments of faded im­ages. No

I re­cently made a cir­cuit to demon­strate au­dio gen­er­a­tion us­ing an at­mega32a mi­cro­con­troller. And even though mostly knew the con­cepts in­volved, I ended up learn­ing a lot. For one, I learnt that ma­trix boards are very an­noy­ing when deal­ing with mi­cro­con­troller pins. I ended up re­ally mess­ing up the cir­cuit’s back­side be­cause I had­n’t planned be­fore­hand (Did I men­tion that this is my first time us­ing a ma­trix board?). Next, I learnt that CR2032 bat­ter­ies don’t

Long ago, when I was a lit­tle kid, I found about the WAMP stack. It ab­solutely thrilled me to think that I could own a piece of web and make it do what­ever I wanted. I was also a fan of 000webhost back then (then it got hacked). So in a frenzy of rapid cod­ing and loads of cussing (I was a be­gin­ner in both) I built sev­eral web apps. Things like half baked so­cial net­work­ing sites, blog­ging web­sites and such­like. One such in­ven­tion I re­mem­ber with par­tic­u­lar fond­ness is a s