Manish’s Scribble Board

So guys, here is the news. Sorry for being late, I was having my day after getting into this company.

Rolling back to Thursday, the day on which Schneider came to our campus, lets start the story. I was too reluctant to sit in it at the beginning. Since I had my DWDM assignment from 10:30 to 11:30 I didnt feel like writing the test as I had not even attended the Pre-Placement talk.

The paper was really mind blowing, 70 questions total which consisted of 56 technical and 14 aptitude. The technical questions were really above the capability of normal computer science students, most of them unheard till date. A paper called Database was included and it looked that this company is in Database management. Only questions of OS and Algorithms such that we could think of giving a try. I didnt try aptitude much, now its a guess that I had just crossed the minimum cut-off.

The  first technical interview was as smooth as butter Being fully relaxed answers strike your mind at a better rate and that too perfectly. In some questions “Havn’t heard Mam!” , “Dont know” were my statement as nothing else could take its place. Second technical was something I never dreamt of! I couldn’t even understand half of the questions asked. :P  At that stage I was having a feeling of being kicked out.

The last round was HR ( I never expected to clear previous two), where I showed my real talent, don’t know how this talent came out all of the sudden since its my first HR interview. This maiden HR interview was better than all of the technical interviews I have given till date. I really think that the guy was impressed.

I got a job in Embedded Systems department of this Electric company. It has a two year bond which I have to sign during signing of the offer letter. This is completely a new branch for me and I hope to perform my best in the coming days.

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…

Its long since I last posted the update. It Saturday ( Holiday ), still am sitting in office till 8 in the night. Shocked? I have nothing to do at flat, so Microsoft becomes our destination even on weekend. This is the day on which we dont write a single line of code, nor do we try our hands on debugging (has always been a futile attempt). The guy next cubicle watched movies the day long. This is the day in which we watch YouTube videos,download junks,eat, even sleep in our cubicles and blah blah blah.

My loyal blog readers (if any) would be asking what’s going on or “SUP?”. The only answer you can expect “Just Going!” I havnt prepared a single line for placement, neither for the work here. If we have any problems, Google comes to rescue, the find the documentation in MSDN. Many Many classes in .NET are not documented, hope I may add community notes once I become a bit fluent in using the API. My work has being going on at a smooth pace, God only knows if something disastrous can happen. I am to get a full complied list of bugs for a tool which my team is working on. Now what that for? Actually the tool I have to build is a sort of helper tool, so some sort of integration has to be there. I cant disclose more due to the fact I have signed NDA.

Made a post at Google Groups for Web Search,as I was getting a 403 Forbidden error. Google thought I was searching like a bot. No reply till now.

Made a new post at my Tech Blog Check it

Updates the Pages of my Blog, added Networks and Movies & Popcorns page

Ever since I reached Hyderabad I had hundreds of plans in my mind like having fun. playing tennis and all sorts of new things and adventures. Hardly half of those plans materialized, and rest half things were totally unexpected. I didnt imagine having some moments spending with my team sharing experiences.

It so happened that last week our Visual Studio Team went for a movie outing at IMAX Hyderabad. I was a bit reluctant at the beginning as most of the people were still aliens to me. Though the movie was Indiana Jones which I didnt want to see, still I took the ticket from my admin. I was even relucant to go since I had loads of work unfinished and was a bit scared that my mentor was find me leaving work for movie. When I returned back after collecting the tickets, he met he with tickets in my mind. I was a bit speechless thinking of the worse. To my surprise he said ” So you going for the movie na?“. I yelled “Yes, surely“. This was one face of the so called geeks at Microsoft.

The whole trip was amazing, it takes 45 mins from the campus to Prasad’s IMAX. My mentor is a real funloving guy (I noticed later), though his command with technical things is also amazing. I met many of my team members with whom I shared my experiences and all of them were praising my mentor ( named Gautam Geonka) of his skills. We were a total of 30 people and we did play and had fun even in the bus. The only thing missing was courtesy dinner too ( Cool Down! Just Joking). Taking us to movie on a Gold Ticket costing 200 bucks in itself a big deal at lest for we freshies.

VSTS Stands for Visual Studio Team System which is the team responsible for making Testing tools in Visual Studio

Succumbing to the global oil prices pressure, the central government announced a steep hike of Rs 5 for petrol, Rs 3 for diesel and Rs 50 for LPG. What next? protests and strikes and bound to follow, the only sufferers are the common people. For me the increase was inevitable, the global crude oil prices are more than $110 per gallon and the oil companies are facing loss of more than Rs 25 per litre of petrol. Petroleum Minister Deora wanted a Rs 10 hike but this steep hike was too risky.

Now what are the after-affects? Here at Hyderabad the autorickshaws went on strike, on that same day, the cabs were also in the same state. This situation hit the IT sector hardest as more than 80% of cabs are used for IT companies ( according to The Hindu ). We missed our office on Friday as our guest house was too far off. I had thought of staying till late night but had to leave before midnight. The cab owners have called off their strike ( they were on strike for VAT issue, not fuels ) . Autos are going on complete strike from sunday as the newspaper says. Hard time next, as we out flat is 7 kms from office after shifting.

Instead of protesting against the fuel hike, we should try to save it as much as we can, use public transport as much as possible, use fuel sensibly. If the price is not hiked, the oil companies will run out of cash to import and then we will face power crisis which will be too disastrous for this developing nation. Even this growing crude oil demand should go down since demand-supply equation is responsible for such sky-rocketing prices.

Sorry for the Bad English! I cant help

Dont have much to say, after all its a scribble board! Me leaving for Hyderabad today 27th May for the Internship which starts next week, 2nd of June. I will be reaching there on 29th morning at Secundrabad which is quite near to my destination.

My journey has a break at Bangalore, means I will be boarding bus to Bangalore which reaches at morning tomorrow and then again train from B’lore to Hyderabad. Train (Rajdhani Exp. ) departs B’lore at 8PM and reaches its stop at 7 morning next day. The people to Microsoft will arrange for 15 days of accommodation at their guest house after which we have to arrange for ourselves.

I have fixed my laptop completely from all the problems except that the partition’s (sda9) file system (jfs) on which I installed “Hardy Stable” is giving a lot of problems. I hint some problems with the file system itself. The XSever hangs and I have no other option other than a hard-reboot. Next time, the Xserver fails to start and drops me to shell. Problem doesnt end here, whatever I try to do is blocked since / is mounted read-only.

P.S: Exams finished yesterday, nothing left to comment as it was completely messed up. Lab grades out, am satisfied except below expectation in one of the three.