Damn, I typed up this WHOLE thing and the power decides to go off, its REALLY frustrating, since my stupid UPS's battery is crap, even after replacing it once. Not again, this time, I am typing in wordpad and saving every 5 seconds or so. But dang, I have kinda forgotten a lot of stuff I wrote.
I'm Thomas, 19 years old, living at Cochin, India ( somewhere around 10°N 76°E ). I am currently in first year at college, pursuing a B.Tech degree ( equivalent of B.E) in Mechanical Engg. I found Orbiter sometime before the 2006p1 version was released. I haven't used it much in a quite some time. I actually dont know what to do in it now. I have tried a couple of Mars trips, a Pluto trip, the DGIV Venus mission, some missions to the ISS, Moon etc.
I like reading thrillers/SF/Fantasy novels and generally most informative things I find on the internet. I was also into programming in a big way sometime ago. I can program in C,C++,Java,PHP etc.
[RANT]
It makes me kinda jealous to see computerex is only 15 and he has already made so many addons and all ( just kidding .
). When I was 15, I was ... let me see ... yea .. messing around trying to make an OS in assembly language. .I think I had too much free time. I had it get into 32-bit mode, made a rudimentary keyboard driver, FDD driver .. and had got until memory management when I got fed up. I later tried using C and ASM and got as far again and stopped.
I started programming when I was around 13-14. the first programming language I learned was ... wait for it .... assembly
. Of course, the way I found out about it was .. lets say a bit on the gray side ( I used to really like "Crackme" programs
) . Assembly is actually quite easy once you try it (
http://www.masmforum.com ). Win32ASM means, writing programs that use the windows API using assembly language. In ASM, 50kB - 100kB of executable code is HUGE. Really, the file sizes are so small and the programs so fast. They are also very easy to debug as the code listing you see in the debugger is mostly what you actually wrote. The assembler I used, MASM, has some high level constructs like IF,ELSE,WHILE etc. implemented using macros, which made it a bit easier I suppose. But it actually helped to understand how Windows programs and all actually work, and how functions ( stack frames), DLLs etc. work, which actually made learning other languages such as C and all a lot easier. The only thing being that C and C++ has so many damn datatypes while in ASM, almost everything is a DWORD .
I have a few ideas for orbiter addons and have been thinking about making them for sometime. I actually got as far as the Surveyor addon as done in the tutorial at Orbiterwiki. I did it last week. .. Well, I guess, any progress is good.
[/RANT]
I also like lugging up my *heavy* 6'' telescope( 17-20kg ) occasionally, through a few narrow corridors and a steep steel staircase to the terrace for some astronomy. I have also tried taking a few pics using my poor Sony Cybershot and have got some good Moon pics and some not-so-bad Saturn pics ( frames from a video actually).
I guess thats all. I hope no one was bored
~
Thomas