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.

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.

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.

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

Take it easy, am not crying! Its a pun intended intentionally for most of the people. You would like to ask what it actually means? Well read on…..

Software Engineering was the paper this semester in which every Tom,Dick and Harry scored more than he expected. Leave besides what this paper really meant, the teachers were also rich with marks and flooded the students. Naturally, everyone has high expectations in it and many even hoped of getting an A+ once in engineering.

Now my scene: I left the first sessional (no regretting) and then second. My internals were the lowest in the whole batch or at least among lowest. Means I dot know what software Engineering it and am very weak in it. Maybe I am,according to the Indian Education System. Whatever happened later doesn’t count. People got A+, majority A and I surprisingly got a B ( more than expectations).

Well the above two paragraphs was just to build the story’s climax,well its not a story anyway. Now working here at Microsoft on real time projects, I felt half of the things are not required at the earlier stage and more complicated things can be learnt gradually with experience. Have we been give any idea of Version Control Systems ? The answer is a big NO! I cant imagine developing a good software without a version control system.

Coming to some simple things. We had been told to document our codes, even the format of documenting was taught and any other way of documenting was prohibited (unless you wanted to lose marks). What happens here or anywhere, document the way you deem fit keeping in mind some standards. All companies have their own method of documenting codes. In a typical file, 2/3 rd of the content are comments.

My suggestion to budding coders and programmers is not to blindly follow the books as suggested by our Education System but think use the net to find out standards. We havnt been even taught how to file bugs. We had been taught testing, now what to do if we find a bug? ( Swallow it? ) There is something called a bug tracker or Issue Tracker.

Concluding the whole article, I would like to say that you alone can make a big software provided you follow the standard methods like documenting, naming, intendation and some more software development concepts. In any way dont follow the Books blindly.

Ahem! I forgot one thing, most of the Engineers in my batch are preparing for MBA! Who wants to be a coder? Hard to figure out.

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.