Manish’s Scribble Board

I landed on Manipal on 28th last month and since then just running pillar to pillar. In these last two weeks I didnt leave a single stone unturned to get a job but alas!

As I reached Manipal on 28th morning around 11:30, had a bath and rushed for Sungard exam, but didnt expect much in such a hassle. As usual rejected. Next aim was Cisco which was on 30th. It was very much shocking to see how people madly sat for this company and only 27 got shorlisted for interviews including me. The interviews were worst and all kinds of hardware and weird questions were asked (maybe to reject me). When result were announced I was sure not to be in the list.

Next was Juniper on 1st last week. The written paper went quite well except that I didnt get much time for apti section where I didnt attempt more than 4-5 questions correctly, rest all were guesses. This was one of the exams where I expected much and papers went perfect, still not chance of hope.

The biggest one of all - Yahoo came on 4th of this week. I cleared the written round which contained 20 questions plus one subjective question. Next milestone was a coding round in lab. This was the place where I performed the worst when it comes to output but best when it came to algoritm used. This round cleared and we were advanced to 1st technical interview on the same night. When my chance came, the interview lasted some 40 minutes where I was drilled on UNIX for some 25-30 minutes. Now we 6 people advanced to final round next day. The 2nd technical interview was more than an hour in span where the guy asked me lots of questions but less of PHP,MySQL,UNIX and those stuffs. He liked puzzles, book questions and theory. I tried my best to cope up with such bookish knowledge and succeeded to some extent. At that time my expectations were quite high. Result were declared after an hour and the only word which came to my mind was “Which is the next company”. I have faced 5 rejections in 10 days, its a record in itself

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.

So finally after a long wait am posting something technical on this personal blog. Last year, means last week of December , I was experimenting a bit on SQLite which is actually a database software. Unlike server-client model of other database softwares like Oracle and MySQL, it is actually a flat file database which can be embedded within any application software. No need of of a database software running as a server!

Some more info about SQLite : SQLite is ideally suited for embedded systems like media players, mobile phones and other small softwares which need to maintain their own data properly. Using a database server would make it dependent and an additional server load would have to be met. Instead SQLite is a flat file database where the database software is embedded inside the host software itself and all API calls are made and received inside the application itself. The data is stored on the file. Since it is unlike the traditional database software, SQLite depends heavily on the Operating System on which it is running for functionality like file locking (reader/writer locks) and user authentication.

SQLite is used vastly and the developers claim that it is the most widely deployed database software. Firefox uses SQLite to maintain its data, the Android mobile platform from Open Handset Alliance of which Google is a part also uses SQLite. Symbian also use it in its high-end mobile Operating System. Check for more deployments of this product.

The source code of SQLite is in Public Domain, so feel free to use it without any hesitation, no licensing terms are going to bound you. Its very very liberal.

I have finally completed experimenting it for PHP, C and C++ languages. It has binding for more languages like Python, Ruby and more, but sorry I dont know much about Ruby, only a bit about Python. I may soon make a post on my Technical Blog on installing and using SQLite for C/C++, using it with PHP is damn simple. And a note: The post will be aimed at installing it on Linux not windows.

Update on 3rd January (7:36 PM): Here is the post on SQLite. This tutorial is the best for a beginner, dont refer more functions in the beginning as you can get confused. Even though the manual on the site is good, examples are lacking, which I have given in this post. Have Fun! Click Here