Catatan harian yang terlupakan

Yesterday i decided to do some maintenance work on my old Dell latitude which is getting slower and slower everyday. Page file usage, according to the monitor thing that shows up when you press ctrl-alt-del, was unbelievable high, more than 600MB! (my laptop has only 256MB of RAM)

So you can imagine how desperate i was to free up more memory usage (trading in this old laptop for a newer one did come across my mind, but soon vanished as i realised i had no budget for it :p).

As usual, when this happens, you can do several actions. The easiest thing to do is clean up the desktop (mine was full of icons).

And that's when i found an unfamiliar file called "worklog.txt".

I opened it.

Lol, it's my own stupid work diary! (i forgot i had one)

It's interesting to know that many of my plans written there were quite impressive, even though not much of these were ever carried out. (sad)

An example of what it said: (LoL i'm such a lazy bloke!)

Tuesday 22 April 2008 9.24pm

Woke up 9.30am this morning, got to work a bit late in the noon. Went to Ibu's kantor first to bring Polycrol for ibu.

Work done today:

1. Started panduan praktikum elkadig about programmable logic and VHDL. Made CUPL sample program (shift register) and has been tested. Remaining tasks: implement the same circuit in VHDL and decide design project assignment. Candidates for design project:
- simple hamming encoder and decoder plus error detection
- look ahead carry adder? (review adder structures)
- pulse width measurer (counter)
- customized stepper motor controller

2. Learnt WinSIM (simulation for WinCUPL) which gave me some headache. Still can't figure out why simulation results of the shift register sample app is still wrong (not completely correct). Will probably look at Cypress Warp for the simulation instead.

3. Downloaded and evaluated DIPTRACE free pcb design software. Looks okay. The plan is to create PCB designs for:
- GalBlast minimum effort GAL programmer
- JTAG ICE and ISP
- ATMega16 board
Also, managed to install Endnote. Proves handy for writing lecture materials (want to show proper referencing)

4. Decapsulated an AT89C51, and several discrete transistor components. Still puzzled on how discrete bipolar transistor components are fabricated, and what their structure should actually look like. (the decapsulated components were observed through the lab's microscope, and they look very interesting. make sure photographs of them are taken tomorrow morning)

5. Revised summary of bipolar transistor document for eldas class (a tiny revision). Still need to work on transistor biasing and small signal analysis. (not a big priority)

6. Helped praktikum elektronika dasar, and learnt that even though coupling capacitors on the input of amplifiers are supposed to remove any DC components, the fact shows that any DC offset from the signal source will distort the output signal, and in effect reduces gain. The cause of this problem remains a mystery, should try to look at this problem again.

Oh yeh just to show you one result i've got from the plans mentioned above is this picture: (microscope photographs)

Hmm... i think i'll keep this file on the desktop. Look's useful =p