Anas Maghfur

The Metamorphosis is a story about an insect. The insect does what insects do: crawl around capriciously, feed when there’s food and hide in the presence of men. Yet, this insignificant creature managed to transform the lives of a family which could only have been done effectively by Franz Kafka’s brilliant writing. The cover art of the first edition of 'The Metamorphosis'. Of course, this insect was once a man named Gregor. But before his metamorphosis, Gregor was nothing more than a machine that provided the Samsa family food and shelter. Kafka carefully crafted the first chapter to convey this. He focuses the first chapter on Gregor and his family’s reaction to his metamorphosis which gives an insight on the state of the Samsa family prior to the metamorphosis. Gregor’s reaction to his metamorphosis was strikingly unusual. Instead of being shocked at his metamorphosis and worrying about his personal health, he worries about the financial implications that his per...

Here I am, lying on the floor of Port Authority Station at New York City waiting for the bus to Massachusetts. I have been in the United States for over six hours and already it was starting to feel like home. Next to me, on the same concrete floor with their heads resting on their bags, are some strangers that I just met who happened to be going to the same college. New friends! New family! We have been chit-chatting about opportunities ahead of us, about the new lives we have just begun. I need a soda from all that talking and laughter. I feel the change in my pocket; enough for a can of coke. I get up and a ring falls out of my bag. It is a plastic toy ring based on the rings from the animated television show called Captain Planet. The rings were used by the Planeteers to summon the superhero Captain Planet. “What’s that?” asks my new friend. Slightly embarrassed by the thought of an eighteen-year-old still carrying around a toy jewelry, I begin to tell the story of my hero. I w...

Using the Nexys-2 platform, Prawal Shrestha and I designed and implemented a digital system that utilizes the Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA to allow users to create ASCII characters in an external RAM and then transmit them serially for display on the PC. Introduction Using the serial port and the RAM on the Nexys 2 board, our goal is to enter the four ASCII characters into RAM and then transmit them serially for display on the PC. The external RAM is a 128Mbit Micron device connected to a 16-bit bus. We only used the bottom four 8-bit locations to store the ASCII characters. The writing process goes as follow: Setup the ASCII code for the first letter on the DIP switch (e.g. 0x4A for 'J') and press a button (the 'write' button) to store it in the bottom location of the RAM. Change the DIP switch to enter the second, third, and fourth characters, and press the button to load these one at a time into the next three RAM locations. At any time we are able to verify the co...