Manish’s Scribble Board

When Luck Shines, there’s a heavy downpour of opportunities and success. This is what I felt after being being addressed “Congrats Manish! You have been selected for the internships, just tell us the time frame when you would like to pursue it?” It still echoing in my ears, what a pleasant surprise! I never ever thought of this day. My whole family is delighted, too much delighted, too too much!!

Want to know the whole story? Read patiently below, or test your patience.

We left Manipal for Shimoga at 5PM on Friday leaving behind the sessionals at a risk, well its a bit stupidity on my part to abandon the interview just for the exams. We were total of 7 people who headed on a Qualis. It takes three and a half hour to reach Shimoga by road, which crosses Augumbe Point (better known as Sunset Point). We stopped for five minutes just to have a look at the place and then headed on.

Reached Shimoga at 8 at night, had our dinner and went to station to catch our train, we had a third AC ticket which is supposed to be reimbursed by the Microsoft guys. The train left at 10 and reached Bangalore at 5 in the morning. We took a hotel room, 7 people in a room, got fresh, changed to formals, dumped our belongings and went to Exam Center without breakfast.

At the center we were told to sit in room no 11, after we had done our first question, the Microsoft dudes told us that my mistake they had put us in the wrong section, so now we will face a different pattern of exam. Our paper started at 11AM. First question was traversing a matrix in spiral order and secondly deleting n nodes out of every 2n nodes in a linklist.

Results came out in 5 minutes, 3 out of 8 people got selected. Now I had to face two rounds of interview. IN the first round, I was asked to implement memcpy and second to reverse adjacent nodes of a link list using address not values. The interviewer was very much impressed by my approach as I had prior idea of the both questions, thanks to PCS and DS papers which we had been taught we studied ourselves.

Second round was the most dangerous round. The problem statement is as follows

Given a whole C/C++ program in a program buffer, remove the single and multi line comments from this program. Draw a Finite Automata (or DFA) for it and write down the corresponding program as precise as possible.

After writing this program, he evaluated it thrice each time finding some or the other minute and minutest errors (guess that person was a genius and had an eagle eyes, catching even the smallest bug). He asked me questions on hashing, clash in hashing values, open hashing. Order of hashing etc etc etc. After it was done, he asked me to wait outside.

After 5-10 mins, a guy came out and said exactly the same words which I had mentioned at the top of the post. After that we were busy waiting for Adi’s results. God’s luck shined on them too and rest two of my friends were also selected. Who two? Drown yourself if you didnt come to know by this time. Its Sathvik!. Then had my dinner at 9PM after exactly 24 hrs. All this time I was alive on WATER!

We left Bangalore at 10PM night by a horrible but the only bus available was of come National Travels (or something of the sort). It had only 8 seats left at the last of which we booked 7. God! All the seats were defective . Mine was turned, Harry’s seat didnt slide to semi-sleeper and bulk loads of problems. There were mosquitoes all inside the bus. Reached Manipal at 9:30 in the morning. Am deadly tired, writing this post after sleeping for 3 hrs and missing my lunch!

Guess today’s turnout of workshop? Its was just seventeen (17) excluding me, Ankur and Anomit. Now the question crops up- “Why so less”? I asked some of the people who attended the workshop itself. The answer which i got was something which I had always thought of. They said that many of the people havnt programmed earlier and don’t ever have used any programming language in their life. Since they are doing it for the first time, they are bound the face problems. Those who were sincerely attending the workshop had previous knowledge of C/C++ programming.

One more shocking observation was that all of the attendees understood SQL and DBMS very easily. I had expected these topics to be completely greek to them since its a new thing. I had even told them in the beginning that since its a bit different thing, pay attention and ask questions if you have. SQL is not a procedural language and DBMS concepts are something new to all.

Well, something new from hostel! I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 Beta 4 version on my system making my system triple boot ( It was also earlier). The looks and feel of this new version is very promising and surely its gonna pick up very soon. Here I attach below a snapshot.

Click on it to zoom ( may take time to load, its 504 KB in size)

So just returned from Day 3 of the Web Design and Development Workshop. Today we started with the core PHP language constructs. The syntax of PHP matches very much with C/C++ and students should not have problems understanding this very simple but exhaustive, beautiful language. Yesterday I taught them about Interpreters and Compilers, the basic difference between them and their implementation, the server-client model and lots of other stuff.

Teaching using chalk and duster on the board is something very traditional and today I felt it. I switched off the projector and took the chalk to teach them about the language constructs, well what to teach? It matches C++

Ankur got some pics from his mobile camera, where you can see me explaining on the board and in the last pic sitting comfortably and giving lectures ( inspired by our OS teacher)

So finally the much hyped Web Design and Development workshop kick started today, am very much exhausted today. Though I tried my best to make the class as interesting as possible, still the topic in itself was such dull that even three people could not make it so interesting. In the middle I felt that people have started sleeping but still we cant help them if they cant help themselves.

The turnout was some 40-45, I was expecting more! Many of my third year friends didnt attend today since they know HTML, they will be turning up tomorrow for advanced HTML and getting the basics of Web Scripting. The Basics of Web Scripting includes telling how web development languages are different from desktop based languages. Telling them about interpreteres, how are they different from compilers and all those stuffs.

Well on the other side, my interview is caught badly in sessionals. We has appealed to college to just postpone the sessionals a day ahead next week, they taking a lot of time to give their decision. People had suggested me to give the interview at Mumbai this Saturday which is quite difficult as I have not prepared anything and in this present situation am sure to be rejected. Tomorrow Director will be coming out with his decision from which I dont have much hope. More updates tomorrow…

So here goes the fourth event of LUG Manipal which will make a special stamp on the history of this newly founded organization. Firstly clubs/organizations in MIT charge hefty amount of sum for attending workshops and all such events where they teach all shit.

What they teach? HTML, CSS using Dreamweaver! OMG! What is so special about it? I feel like banging my head on the wall when people fall prey to these traps. Dreamweaver is an advanced IDE and people go to attend these workshops thinking that its another new language, only to get disappointed. At max they might teach ASP for a server-side scripting even at the days of ASP.NET. All old and useless technologies of these days! Such pathetic situation.

First I want to make it clear that LUG would not take a single penny from its members for any event as registration fees or event fees. If we do anything that costs us, we gladly inform our members about the same and ask them to make their own accomodation. Here too we are organizing a Web Design and Development Workshop for all the students of Manipal. No registration is required, no charges, it all free! All that’s required is commitment.

We will be teaching Open source Web Development Technologies like LAMP/WAMP. We are hoping to give more preference to LAMP. Now question comes why PHP? Just because its one of the best scripting languages and best when it comes to Open Source web scripting language. Why MySQL? Well there is no other alternative and MySQL just rocks. If you are not satisfied better use MS SQL or Oracle if you have enough powerful hardware, PHP supports both of them. But the feel which you would get with MySQL is difficult to achieve on other database softwares. Why Apache? Its the uncrowned king of webservers. Its deployment is around 70-75% of the servers around the world. What else reason you need? Why Linux? To get the real server like feel, using file permissions, PHP and MySQL are specially optimized for running over Linux.

One more question comes into play is Why not ASP? Its not an open source technology and for me its vastly inferior to PHP, no comment on ASP.NET as I havnt used it. What buggs me most is that many people dont know about PHP and ask questions like “What is PHP? I think ASP is more powerful than PHP“. I ask them have you tried? Then how can you say this? They are dumb-struck! PHP has so many third party extendibility like hundreds of frameworks, Templating Engines, PEAR like packages and many many more. There is simply no end to this great programming language. Thanks Rasmus for your creation.

And Yeah! I forgot to mention that the poster was designed by my friend Aavik! Designing a colour poster is a bit easier than designing a black and white one. Using 8-bit grayscale is somewhat challenging and he did it.

Revels the MIT Cultural Fest started on Wednesday, though I had informed about it earlier, this post will throw more light on the most awaited event in MIT (not the most cherished). Yesterday’s dress code was Ethnic but none of such for today since today was “Fashion Show” event, most people took special care to dress up as smartly as possible. We did get some pics, have a look at them. Tomorrow is the last day of Revels, not much idea of what’s tomorrow, still it was a good timepass in these dull times.