Manish’s Scribble Board

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.

I just want to finish this up in as short as possible. Here is the list of possible companies that are expected to visit the campus for placements during year 2008-2009.

It includes the so called “Mass Recruiters” (MRC) and “Dream Companies”. Though MRC’s are clear to arrive after semester exams, the dream companies will come next semester till the end, We are expected to give names of two companies in which we intend to appear as our Dream Jobs Choosing these two are a great headache as we dont know which company will arrive when and which of them will become open? Lots of tension and confusion is prevailing all around. I am too in a deep fix what to do? Which company? EMC² or Cisco or Microsoft or Yahoo or Freescale or Deloitt? The list is too long and time is less. The worst part is that no one is cooperating. I understand that all of us want a job, but still there is something called humanity. Just imagine someone (not me) who is not able to figure out what to fill in and doest have any idea? What will he do?

Hope, I make up my mind before Monday which is the last date for submission. I have already submitted the academic biodata form yesterday.

And yeah, TCS is coming on 2nd May, not completely sure, but heard. Maybe its true!

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!

This is the first biggest update regarding to our batch’s placement for the year 2008. Though yesterday Lister Technologies came for their Pre-Placement Talks, its not so important as today’s update. Today was our section turn to apply for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The application form was online and we were required to furnish our details in the time slot of 20 mins.

Though it was just an event to apply for the exams, it was more of a fun rather than a serious event, everyone was pulling other’s leg for applying leg and showcasing themselves as dumb and persuading other not to apply so that a seat can be spared. Old drama !!! Quite common.

Not everyone applied for this company, many students have their own expectations and they would not be sitting for Mass Recruiters, instead they will sit for big companies which are expected to come next semester. Well no problems, its their own placement strategy. I applied for TCS because I didnt want to repent later that I didnt apply when time should have done.

More Updates later, keep a watch.

Today I finally tried my hands on XBOX 360 for the first time! Its awesome, thanks Swap for giving us a chance for this wonderful experience. The experience sweetened coz I won all the races except the first one ( didnt know what to do at that time) and last one against Swap ( highly experienced player).

Here below are the pics which swap took when I was having the final race with Rock. The first final race was very close, I won by less than half second. The second match was relatively easy, though I didnt take my opponent lightly. Thanks God! I learnt how to make turns smoothly which led to this success.

Having drinks before starting the finals

In deep Concentratation

Yeah! That’s called Victory!

Just a year back on this day, I bought this domain with the intention of having my own web presence. Am now happy to announce that am celebrating the anniversary today to mark exact one year of starting this blog too. At that time I bought it just for $1 though this time am paying some 400INR for the renewal. Now I own two domains, the other one is a Technical Blog, on which am not so active these days (not getting time).

Aside from this I am making my 100th post today to even mark the century of my blogging career. On the other blog, I havnt made much progress as far as number of posts is concerned. Hope to improve it in the future.

I just returned from Revels ‘08, the annual cultural fest of my college, I dont want to mention the quality of the shows but still I cant resist. Better any other MITian, I cant say anything much about my college. We were supposed to wear ethnic wear today as the dress code,unlike last year Revels missed the Celebrity show this time. Well, now I damn care, have hundreds of work to complete ranging from small logo designing to making mass SE projects.

Cheers….