Next week I’ll be attending my final two exams for the year, first DDP (Digital Design and Programming — essentially, a beginner’s course to the VHDL language on CPLD chips) on Monday, then ALG (Algorithms) on Thursday. Neither are particularly difficult in the brains department, but both require a lot of memorizing. While I fully understand all the algorithms covered, I do think it’s a bit much to make students remember every possible case for every covered algorithm for repitition on demand — Red-Black Trees alone have a good five seperate cases for insertion. I’ve always been cursed with a poor memory, so I’m possibly doomed on that alone.
On a brighter note, Gary sent me a link to his own blog, detailing some of his AVR exploits, the most recent of which is MyUSB related. It’s always gratifying to see my work being used by both commercial and hobbyists - the latter was a great consern in the design of the library, since commercial outfits would use a bad library warts-and-all if no alternative was avaliable. It’s fantastic to see that people are using it for their personal projects, proving to me that it is at least somewhat accessible to the normal AVR folk out there.
During the course of our exam study the other day, myself and my techno-geek friends got to discussing absurd communication mediums. Honestly — the lot of us looked almost identical to the characters in the awesome show “The Big Bang Theory”, with a tablet PC connected to our TV, and iPhones and laptops flying every which way. That’s neither here nor there however, as the discussion moved from the mundane (TCP/IP over LEDs) to the outrageous (TCP/IP over SMS). This was my suggestion; correctly coupled with a free online SMS service, it would be theoretically possible to write a proxy which sent out TCP/IP packets over 150 byte long SMS messages.
I don’t think SMS supports much other than the basic latin alphabet, so that means that packets would be base-64 encoded. A typical TCP/IP data packet (as opposed to a non-data containing signalling packet such as an ACK, SYN or FIN) header is around 50 bytes, so there would be sufficient space for a tenth of a kilobyte or so of data to be transmitted per message. I can’t imaging the phone company being to happy about the torrents of messages it would produce, but the TCP layer would ensure data integrity on the recieving end (even for out-of-order packets) and would probably out-strip GPRS anyway ;).
I really should spend more time studying.
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