Manish’s Scribble Board

I dont have any intentions to write down long long novel resembling stories. Tech Tatva ‘08, the annual tech fest of Manipal Institute of Technology is commencing tomorrow. This four day long fest will showcase the best technical event and talents in the college. This time some categories have taken an inititatve to organize the event in a revised way, just waiting to see the outcome.

Lets start with Param, the category in which am involved. There are four events under this category - CodeBytes, Puzzle Mania, MobiVision 1.0 and Jour.

CodeBytes is the classical coding championship which has the highest turnout amongst all the events under Param. It is to be held tomorrow, 8th Oct. This time this event has been changed quite a lot. The first round is the prelims which contains less than even 20 questions and more than an hour given to solve. Debugging and writing the output of code snippet has been given more importance. Only those who have good understanding of C/C++ are bound to clear this stage. The lab round is not that puzzle round as it used to be. The questions will be quite simple,  the efficiency of the program will be taken into consideration. We would give them simple questions, the marking is to be done on the total execution time of the program. The POSIX time command will be used to calculate the total execution time. People are required to code in Dev C++ with MinGW as compiler. This portable code will then be transferred to Linux systems, compiled using g++ and then using time command, tested for total time use.

Note: Turbo C++ is not allowed. We highly discourage this old and crappy compiler.

MobiVision is another event which is unique of its type, we focussed much on PyS60 and Android, though other mobile platforms are also welcome. We have recieved satisfactory number of abstracts. This event is on 10th October during the afternoon. The shortlisted students are asked to give a presentation of the app which they made, just a working protoype is required. Based on the ideas and implementation, the teams would be ranked.

The last event is Jour. If people can remember, last year it used to be called Night Out when some coding champs would loose their sleep for finding a solution to a puzzle. It’s all gone! Now you have more than 18 hours, make a fully working software application in the stipulated time. The final shortlisted students are required to give a presentation of the application they made to the judges and audiences. The questions will be put up on the site, keep a watch.

It has been four weeks since I started my work here at MSF, Hyderabad. It has been quite interesting and altogether new experience. Out of 9 weeks, only 5 more are remaining and am expected to complete a major portion of the work which am alloted.

Well, apart from doing normal work, I learnt something new stuffs

Hyderabad Food = S. Indian Food - Simplicity + Spices + Chicken - Sambhar

C# = Java - JVM - ClassLoader + MSIL + JIT + CLR - Platform Independence

.NET = RoR - MVC + Horrible Documentation

I was supposed to have a code review today,but as usual I didnt submit my prepared code timely. While submitting today evening, I missed out 2 more rules as I busy cleaning,organizing and documenting my code right from the beginning to the end.

And lastly a bad news. My domain of my Tech Blog www.manishtech.info expired today. I forgot to renew it. Hopefully I wont be extending it. Its too much, since I dont get much time to blog.

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

Ask this question to a full time employee of any company? Where does he want spend most of his time, the answer can be at home due to obvious fact- they have gone tired of work. Well! The situation is different here, we interns like the office very much. Want to know the reasons? AC, Cokes, Beverages, Free Supper, Free Lunch (using Food allowance), hope drop by cab at night, no reporting time etc etc etc. What more we want?

Now lets discuss on work, I learnt C#.NET using Visual Studio.NET with .NET Framework 4.0. These two products as far as I know are still not released but Microsoft has issued a press release for the same. I developed a widget type of application for getting myself familiar with this new language, which surely cant be used for daily work. Now I have been given the main project about which I cant disclose because I signed the NDA at the time of joining. The work is going to be tedious but the environmnt at office is very relaxing (at least for now).

There is a strike by the cabs and auto rickshaws here in Hyderabad due to which were not able to report at work. Cabs are off the roads due to some VAT issues and autos due to increased fuel prices. Worst is still to come, all the drivers are expected to move to strike from Sunday. That too this strike is indefinite!!!