Manish’s Scribble Board

So Folks! Interview results are out! Kicked out in the first round itself, though am not surprised ( had performed badly). Well leave it, no point discussing the same thing. I was told that am “Not Upto the Mark” as per Microsoft standards.

I was supposed to give a demo at 2PM today in Conference Room about my work which I did for the last two months. The presentation was for around forty minutes out of which I presented for around half an hour and last ten minutes were left discussing about the various design issues. I had made a small power point presentation to make the show a bit lively hoping that it can add interest. I had thought of many things which I would be telling only to find my mentor picking up the questions and answering them.

When I came back to my machine, I tried writing a funky but proper “Last Day at Work” mail. This is what I had written.

Hi everybody,

I would like to inform all that today is my last day of work at MSIDC. I was working as an intern in this group.

I would like to thank each and every person for the love and affection which they have shown during all the eight weeks which made my stay a really memorable one. I am very excited to return back to college with a tag of being a MS Intern. This really counts.

I would like to wish all of you best of luck for your future and would surely love to be in contact even after this internship.

Briefly describing myself: Am a student at Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal , Karanataka. Well what more to say of academics? I have decent grades and good reputation, but what I felt was that grades don’t matter in life (personal experiences).

My personal e-mail ID is manishsinha27 {at} gmail  {dot} com .

Regards,

Manish Sinha

My mentor called me up in his chamber to brief about the review and say some parting words As he thinks my strength is that am Committed and Hard Working. These two words gave me a great shock! I never came to office before 12:30-1:00 in the afternoon and never reported him on time after completion of work. Another strength was that I “never crashed in the work which has been assigned and somehow finished it howsoever unusual it ought to be”. This I can agree to some extent, though its the thing which made me work patiently for last two months.

Now coming to weakness… “I don’t have communication skills!”. Okay! “I don’t test my code for all test cases and half of the time its not running even though the algorithm is quite good”.

I would be leaving for college tomorrow night. Its actualy a break journey from Hyderabad to Banaglore and from there to Mangalore. There is also a 10 hrs gap between both the trains, which time is quite difficult to pass. Going back to college, I would be sitting for most of the companies including Sungard which is coming on 28th-Monday, Cisco on 30th-Wednesday, Yahoo on 4th-Monday, Toshiba on 7th-Thursday and Philips Innovation on 11th-Monday. No! I have no intention to take all, this list is only for those which I have registered.

See you in Manipal soon. Now wish me a Happy Journey!

This is my second last day of work at MSIDC where I spent the last two months working on a verification tool. I have nothing much to say except that I really enjoyed the holidays except the last week which was really too hectic. We went for all types of trips possible, movie outings and shopping. At present we are only 2 left at our flat out of five at one time. After my return to Manipal, it will be Aditya alone in the flat. Saumitra will join back on Sunday afternoon ( He had went home for 5 days).

Today I had my first interview, it was really a horrible experience, the woest interview of my life !! How on earth was I unable to explain difference between stack and heap, example of deadlocks and a question where I was asked to find the order or complexity of the algo which I had written. The only question which went smoothly was “Difference between Process and Thread”. Result still pending!

Next week in college, I have to sit in Sungard on Monday and in Cisco on Wednesday! The preperations is as usual crap with just 3 hours of preparations. Yahoo is scheduled to come on 4th with  a mind-blowing requirement– Perl ,Unix and Unix Shell Scripting knowledge in addition of general expected knowledge. Once Anomit told me that Yahoo openly look for Unix Geeks. Tough time ahead!

Just thought of updating the blog as am still waiting for the result. More later when am back to Manipal.

For last 24 hours I have been trying my hands on Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG). Its a surely kick-ass format for playing around with Vector Graphics. Now you might be thinking how I bumped into it. By chance I was just browsing the Mozilla Developer Center when I fell across a page in which they explained their stand and implementation of SVG in Firefox. It had some references about this format. The second thing which caught my mind was that Inkscape supports SVG (I didnt knew this). I had used Inkscape before so thought of giving a try, read some basic tutorials and its entry on Wikipedia and then set down to work.

After 24 hours its done! First is the image which gave me the idea how to draw.

I am going to contribute a lot on Inkscape Wiki and Forums. Wait for more graphics of the sort…

Even though we advance to new technologies and say ourselves as technically superior when compared to guys 10 years back, its a sad truth that we need to actually look at out back for the truth. You might be wondering why? Read on…

Engineering colleges are the places where most of the present day engineers have their first programming experience. Naturally we expect them to use those technologies which are provided by the colleges (after all we cant expect everyone to be a geek). If these college admins dont take the initiative to provide latest technologies to the students, what can we expect? Either a student will adapt themselves after finding that they lag or may change themselves after joining a job.

The aim of this post is to tell directly how much Turbo C++ sucks. This crappy compiler introduced long long long back should go or should be banned by LAW! It is one of the main reasons why computer engineers of our college don’t know what actually are coding standards. What the hell is conio.h, clrscr() and getch()? These are not a part of ANSI C recommendations. Using them will make your code unusable on other compilers.

I really  have a bad experience dealing with this sucking 16 bit compiler. It eats up so much of processing power as if its almighty and born just to rule over the CPU! Just try minimizing its IDE and opening any other application. You may not be able to open even MS PAINT (at least not for me). The resource utlization is mainly due to the IDE which is named tc.exe . The real compiler is tcc.exe . If you ever want to use this compiler, just invoke tcc.exe via command line. Don’t use the IDE. Ever try to run it in non-full screen mode and see its charm

Just as a workaround, it would be my job to provide you the alternatives. The best is to use Dev C++ provided by Bloodshed. Howsoever bad it may be (for its critics), its thousands times more efficient than the legacy compiler. Dev C++ is more frequently used a graphical compiler (means with IDE). If you still in love with gcc style compilation using command line, I suggest you to use MinGW. Its a GNU port for windows and has same feel like that of original one. It even has an IDE named Visual-MinGW.

Hope you people would now have nice experience when it comes to programming and building enterprise level softwares on Windows.

This post is going to a bit philosophical at the beginning, but am going to tell a great *known* fact. Hold your breath and continue.

I hear many people saying that they cant do this, cant do that. All of us have some or the other capabilities. I recall Hellen Keller for her amazing feat, such a handicapped person can achive such things. Recall Braille, the creator of Braille script which is widely used as a language for teaching to the visually handicapped.

It so happened that while working on a product over at my workplace, I faced a big problem whose solution looked impossible. Disgruntled, I left the product for a moment and opened the Feed Reader to find a blog post which contained a link to a YouTube Video. After watching that I felt  I can achieve anything. Have a look, and gear yourself for the toughest thing in this world.

More such Videos are here on YouTube, check them

Video-1 Video-2 Video-3 Video-4