Monthly Archive

Well, how should I start this ?? Did I not say in my previous post that I ll reserve my best until after the finals ?? And lo, we have won the T20 WC !!

24 September 2007 : 24 Years and 3 Months after Kapil’s Devils shocked the world, today its the turn of Dhoni’s young brigade to rock !! Boy i m not gonna call them Men in Blue, they are Boys in Blue !! Since I had seen the 1983 win only on TV, seeing India win a WC (in whatever form it may be) is simply a ’splendor’ful feeling for a cricket crazy guy like me (much like millions of others in this damn country where we never follow any other sport!) Man, its an awesome final today in which we beat the arch rivals !!

Well, thinking about what made us the T20 Champions, I feel its the fact that none of us expected Team India to win this WC, given their inexperience in this format and a hard, long English summer.. For sure, I did not expect them to win. For that matter, I never believed we would reach the semis, forget about beating the Aussies giving them a taste of their own medicine. But when its Pakistan that awaited us in the finals, I really hoped we would come off it successfully. My hopes were almost dashed when the punjabi and mallu idiots (am i a bit harsh ?) combined to gift away the trophy to the opponents in the later stages of the Pak chase. But it is India’s Day at the Wanderers (where we got whacked up 4 years ago by the Kangaroos) and nothing is going to stop Dhoni from removing his shirt for a young fan and goto the presentation ceremony to receive the T20 World Cup in a sleeveless !!!

After a boring weekend came the excitement of starting the implementation of my next biggie project.. So its obvious that its going to be a good week (except a friday evening blindspot between simple and sample - now only 1 guy can understand that !! )

And the way the MiB are performing in T20, its been a cracker of a week and I ll reserve my best until the finals get over

When I attended Amazon off campus interview a few months back, I recorded the experiences there as a page. Since i no longer like it being there (reminding me that I was a student :)), i had removed it. But here’s the content of that page -

I attended Amazon Off campus yesterday(24 Jan 2007) at Ascendas. This is the first time i am attending an off campus interview. My test performance was below average, yet got shortlisted for the interviews along with 14 others. The interviews were held today and i cleared the first round with ease, but got bumped in the second round. Rajiv and Rave got selected, at the end..

The test was purely technical and had SQL, Unix etc. So i messed it up !! And the interview was fairly ok… I got my first round with Sriram and another guy (whose name i forgot he was a IITB fresher) who were software developers at Amazon. The interview was very cool and friendly with Sriram firing a lot of questions, jocularly telling that being a 9 pointer u must answer all !! He was very much surprised about my CGPA being 9.231

Some of the 1st round questions are

1. You are provided with a stream of numbers, design a datastructure to store the numbers in the stream along with their no. of occurences.

I told him to use a trie and he asked me why not BST, and asked me to compare both..

2. Given two sorted arrays A1 and A2, of lengths L1 and L2 , L1 < L2 and the last L1 slots in A2 are vacant, get me all the numbers in A2, sorted in the most efficient manner without using extra space. This was a written test question in which i blabbered Quicksort will do..

Infact the answer was mergesort. I misunderstood the question a bit and was thinking in some other direction. But after he clarified the question, i wrote the code in a flash !!

3. In a array of size n , there is one number missing and one number repeated twice. Find them.

I was a fool not to notice the sum of numbers and sum of squares of numbers property immediately. But after getting a clue, i answered it.

Then there were many OS questions and one question to explain 3-way handshake in TCP, and some funny chats !! He called me the coolest among the 3 people he interviewed and God only knows why

And then, the 2nd round.. Terrible.. I got Dharmaraj, CEG Alumni 2000, to interview me !! He is one of the MOST intelligent to pass out of CEG, I m told !! He had worked in MS, Trilogy etc. And this guy found a bug in my written test code. I missed a free() for a pointer which i malloc()’ed

And so it started. He asked wat are the effects of missing a free() and i answered it. Then came the big blow. He asked me to write code for malloc(). It involved a lot of discussions and nearly 45 min were spent on this. But eventually i dint write code. And he was pretty happy with the discussion or it seemed so !

Next one was still more crazy ! It is concerned about Page Number Identification in OCR output of books. And i went mad, but still managed to understand it and discussed with him. Although i could not find an answer to his question, he was extremely supportive and asked me to relax and all that.. In the end , it turned out to be disappointing, though. If i were in his place , i would have bumped myself !

But on the whole, it was a good learning experience for me with some new questions coming out. I now look forward to some other off campus choices… Hope to get a good offer soon !!

Spent mostly sleeping, this weekend had been the most boring in recent times..

Ratatouille (Rat-a-too-ee), an animated movie produced by Pixar is the story of a rat in Paris dreaming to become a chef !! The movie won top honors today by becoming the first ever movie watched by me in a theatre

Yeah, thats right - for the first time in my life, I went to a theatre to watch a movie !! Manu had booked tickets for the 9 am show and the movie was damn good and is worth getting up at 7 am on a sunday morning - absolutely fantastic !!!!

Today I went to college to collect PC and 8th Sem Marksheet and also to apply for TC..

But the best part of the day (or night) came only after 7 pm.. We played a foosball game that went into 2 full rounds and a whopping 45 goals and turned out to be the LONGEST EVER played in HeyMath!, a game in which I eventually ended up in the losing side The highlight of the game (according to me, that is) is that I played in the Forward position where I am usually pathetic but today it was not to be so..

UPDATE on 23 Oct ‘07: Today this record was broken in a match that resulted in 55 goals !!

Yeah, this is not worth reading.. Who is gonna care about my proud claims that I have taken a Saturday off for the FIRST time ever in 3 months at HeyMath!. Instead I went to my friend Babloo’s house and spent the whole day there..