Inspirated

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” — Wernher von Braun

As soon as the next semester rolls over, I will be joining nexGIN RC as a research student. My task will be to participate in developmental efforts on the National ICT R&D funded project “An Intelligent Secure Kernel for Next Generation Mobile Computing Devices”. Here’s an excerpt from the project’s executive summary:

The project aims to develop secure kernel framework that enable self-monitoring, and consequently self-healing operation for an operating system of mobile devices. This is expected to produce a fully functional Secure Linux Kernel that will be run on tablet PCs / smartphones. The developed framework will be fully aware of system conditions and resource usage and will schedule different threads intelligently based on each thread/process’ behavior, thus providing a truly secure computing experience in which malware that manages to escape detection by intrusion detection systems gets thwarted in the scheduler.

From the looks of it, there will be substantial poking around Linux involved in this one. So even though my research area primarily revolved around back-heeled through balls, spoon-chip goals, splendid crosses, powerful curlers, Totti, De Rossi, Batistuta, Montella, Ibrahimovic and Cruyff until now, I’ll be trying to redirect the efforts towards kernel development. What could possibly be more fun? Oh yes, watching Roma top the Champions League Group A ahead of Chelsea, but digressing that much isn’t suitable for a single post ;) .

I never had a slice of bread,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
And always on the buttered side.

It just happens. Within a span of four weeks, I crash my car, my glasses break, my contacts — mere day after I wore them for the first time — tear and then, my laptop dies.

And with that, my online frequency drops even lower. To the point where I have not signed into MSN for about 3 weeks now. The desktop is there, and I will most probably get my laptop back within another fortnight too. But neither of the optimist bits is applicable to the heavily customized and mutilated Fedora+LFS distribution I had on my laptop. From X.org to Firefox, everything was compiled and customized for my build environment. In fact, I had been dragging around the same distribution for about two years now. When I had to switch from the desktop an year ago, I just transferred images of the whole drive using netcat and modified it later on to suite the mobile hardware. Now that it’s lost, I’m looking forward to trying out other distributions. After I get my notebook back in my hands, I’ll likely be choosing between Fedora (attractive again because of the upcoming deca-release), Gentoo or Slackware. If I have to inevitably setup everything again, at the very least I should be having a learning experience with something fresh.