Good Evening to all my lovely friends and respected teachers. Well, I would like to say that this whole 4 year stay in MNIT has been an eventful journey..filled with crests and troughs in life and emotions but each and every moment has taught me a new lesson.
The biggest contribution of MNIT has been that it has given my life so many different shades and colors...and friends who can do anything for me and for whom I can do anything..
Preparing for IIT-JEE I had gone to Kota but ensnared in the pangs of home sickness ran away from there in 7 days. I thought my career had received a severe blow..not being able to stay away from home would mean it was useless to prepare for IIT or AIEEE as no IIT/NIT is in Udaipur (my home town) but I still prepared at home and got into MNIT ..not knowing in how many days will I run away from here :) ...spemt several sleepless nights in the first semester and the initial period was made really difficult because of ragging..but it was my friends who gave me the support, the courage to stay here made MNIT 'a home away from home' for me..
By the end of the first year I was able to sleep really well..the clutches of home sickness were gradually disappearing / melting away..
: I can imagine myself as within an ice cube ..the ice cube signifying my mind always occupied with thoughts about home..my mamma and papa..but by the end of the first year, for me, the sun at MNIT was shining brightly enough to make the ice melt away..
Ragging taught me what freedom is in the real sense..First day in MNIT I was told the rules to follow as a first yearite...never to go to canteen, to go only to the right side of college (failing which you will get slaps on both sides), no jeans...no T-shirt, no back gate, no dean gate .. if caught the repercussions were there to face..this made the occasional outbursts really adventurous..
Hence ragging taught me how to live in subjugation, how to respect seniors, how to control my emotions after some really hurting remarks and how to follow the rules.
After my Group freshers I realised what freedom really is! All the restrictions suddenly disappeared like a drop of water placed on a hot pan..and it was like going from hell to heaven..my feelings just like a person getting out of a prison after an year..
With the end of the first year started the wait for my juniors on whom I will exercise my bossdom..
Thus life at MNIT was also a reflection of how my corporate life would be..moving from lower to higher echelons..MNIT also gave me for what I had come here ultimately for : A Job :)
Hence the college has given me a lot..has really made me a different person altogether..has given my life an unforgettable experience..and to confess it would be difficult to leave my home for the second time now..
I don't know but somethings in life now don't bring the same happiness they used to carry before. Have I become hungry for more or has the experience of experiencing all these things an ad infinitum times led to all this?
Recently I finished my VII Sem end terms. The exams saw a vitriolic outburst criticising the teachers, not for not teaching us well (that has always been the case) but for not teaching at all.
If the Sem's end was not much of an occasion to celebrate, a full month's holiday (December) was also not enough for a cock-a-hoop. My inner self trying really hard to make me believe I had achieved enough and need to enjoy, but thinking of the CAT exam after 2 days the idea was rejected as a cockamamie.
After spending so many insomniac nights preparing for the end terms, sleep has not remained the way it used to be....so sweet...and enjoyable.
Now its always accompanied by a lot of dreams. I dont know if its a kind of illness or mere mental fatigue.After just waking up I feel as if under the effect of psychedelic drugs.
Sudden spasmodic interests in a whole lot of eclectic fields seems to be more adventurous, melodramic and satisfying than just enjoying the solitude or playing. I want to be a jack of all trades and a master of some.
I have become a kind of a paranoid. I imagine myself as a person running on a highway with thousand others and afraid of slowing down for the fear of being overrun. The story "Slow and Steady wins the race" seems ridiculous. The rabbit in the story sleeps for some time and the tortoise takes the advantage of that to go ahead and win. But nowadays no one likes to sleep or take rest. I don't know what the human race has come to and where does it intend to go. A person on my class is never seen doing anything else than writing some scary code or reading some esoteric research papers like newspapers. The word content doesn't exist in his dictionary.
Nowadays no matter what I achieve I always feel like on a LOCAL MAXIMA with a lot of steep hill climbing still remaining to reach the maximum.
The Mount Everest (the global maxima) is still invisible.
From the last so many vacations I have been reducing the time I spend with my family and I am not an exception (not even in the home bunking list of top 10 or 20).
The present century sons have become the proverbial "PARAYA DHAN" (DHAN taken away by the companies), leaving the homes even before the age the daughters marry!
Every time I go home, the joy in my mother's eyes suggests how long has she waited to just see me. And by the time I leave her gloomy eyes suggest that she's crying from within...she knows that now she won't be able to see her son for 'don't know how many' months. I just feel disgusted with myself and feel like crying myself out. But is there a solution?
This year Netapp came to MNIT on August 19. In the seminar itself they made it clear that they need students only for QA (Quality Assurance).
They had a written round in the morning , announced the results at 3.00 PM where they shortlisted 12 students.
All the 12 students were called for the interviews at 3.30 PM.
After the first interview they again shortlisted 6 students and called them for the interview the next day. The scapegoats were not aware that they were to face not 1, not 2 but...3 grueling interviews!!!
So here I present all the questions that were asked to me in the 4 interviews that I faced.
I interview (Aug 19)
1. What do you know about NetApp? Do you know anyone there?
2. I can see that you have made a Robot (after seeing my resume). Can you explain me what kind of a robot was it? Explain me in full detail everything that you did giving details of the basics.
As I was explaining...there were counter questions.
He asked me if I had a photograph of the robot. :P On saying 'no' he asked : then what proof do you have to prove that you made the robot.
me : Sir I have the Certificate of the competition in which I participated...on saying this the smile on his face was killing...he didnt see the certificates.
3. If you were interested in making robots then why didnt you take mechanical engineering?
me : I have the plans to make robots with some artificial intelligence capabilities...for that I will have to program the robots either in LISP/Prolog.
4. You have to impress me in 2 minutes. Start.
5. What is your area of interest.
me : computer networking.
6. Then he asked what a bridge is?
7. Can you give me the example of any presentation layer protocol?
8. Explain the concept of subnetting by taking an example of a Class A IP address.
9. Tell me something about your family.
10. What are your strengths?
11. Write a C++ program for multiple inheritance.
After I made the program he asked me if it is possible to declare a base class constructor in the derived classes?
What will happen if I make a member function in the derived class with the same name as that of the Base class member?
12. If you had the option of choosing between the developer profile and QA, what is it that you will really go for?
me : i will choose to be a developer but with NetApp to work as a beginner in QA I have no problems.
13. Tell me your daily routine.
Ok...I am done with you...Do you want to ask me any questions?
II Interview (Aug 20)
1. You have worked on LDAP...explain me how LDAP works.
I explained everything. In between there were counter questions like what is SSL, DES,SHA,etc...
2. OK. Now suppose that you have made an LDAP module. How will you perform negative testing on it?
My answer : port open in firewall or not, number of simultaneous connections, hardware support, network bandwidth,...
He said explain me from the perspective of the Client-Server architecture.
I explained something about the injection attacks, the security of the encryption algorithms used, need for strong passwords, dictionary and brute force attacks, PAM modules etc...
3. What makes a strong password?
4. Then he asked me to write a C/C++ program for the following:
You are given a file that has the entries like:
SNO : student name : marks
What you have to do is to read the file and write the names and marks of the students into another file in descending order. But make sure that you take care of all the boundary conditions and the program should be completely fool proof i.e. for eg. if the student name field is empty then you should take appropriate actions.
I did my best to make a fool proof program with all the checks.
But then the irony.........he told me that at NetApp you will be a part of the testing team. So now what you have to do is find as many errors as possible in this program.
I started thinking from the perspective of the operating system, i was able to find some of the conditions where my program went into infinite loops, some conditions for the memory bleeding, etc.
5. Explain me how a NAS works.
I told him that I had installed a NAS in the college to mount the home directories of all the mail users, then he asked:
What is the difference between a SAN and a NAS?
me : NAS works on TCP/UDP while SAN on iSCSI...
6. What is firmware?
7. What are device drivers? Why do we need them? Why the application program or the new hardware that you attach cannot talk to the kernel directly?
What is the difference between device drivers and firmware?
9.You have worked on Unix...so explain me the whole Unix architecture.
10. What are the file permissions in Unix? How can you change them?
11. What do mean by white-box testing? Give me an example to explain.
What are the types of white box testing?Give examples for all.
12. Why do you want to join NetApp?
III Interview (Aug 20)
1. How are you? How are the interviews going on? How has been the experience until now?
2. You have 25 horses. There are 5 similar tracks and only 1 horse can run on a track at a time.
You have to find the fastest 3 horses out of these...But you have no time or distance measuring instrument. You know only the starting and finishing lines.
Write an optimised algorithm that minimises the number of runs.
And here it comes again...After I gave him a working algorithm, he asked me : as a part of the testing team how will you test this algorithm for the possible bugs that might crop up.
-->I gave him around 8-9 exhaustive test cases like for eg. my code would fail in the case if more than 2 horses reach the finishing line together or if all the horses do not start at the same time the results would not be correct that's why when we implement thrking.is algorithm we need to have clock synchronisation and precision of the nanosecond range.
3. Rate yourself on networking.
me: 8/10
4. Ok then explain me the routing algorithms that you know.
-->I explained him the Link State and Distance Vector algorithms.
5. What is RIP?
6. What are the problems associated with RIP?
7. What are the internal and external gateway protocols?
This was a pure HR interview.
She asked me the following questions:
1.Tell me your educational background from the time you came into this college, what all you did and learned.
2. Did you do anything after coming into the college that made you famous?
3. What all did you do to improve the conditions in your college?
4. Are you a team player or do you like to work alone?
5. Do you know what exactly your job will be at NetApp?
6. Will you be able to perform well for this kind of a job?
Moral of the Story (for me) : It was useless to spend on the folder, it was never really opened up! :P
I was really upset to have a hair cut for the placements, the only thing that could have soothed me was getting placed in NetApp :)
Today lets have a look at some of the cool facts about snakes : one of the most interesting creatures to be found on earth.
- King Cobras make nests : Generally snakes show little or no parental care. But a pair of King Cobra will cooperate to find a suitable nesting spot. Nests are built usually in the month of April. Despite having no limbs, the female remarkably constructs her nest of dead leaves by scooping them up with her large body.
- Snakes are cold blooded with the exception of the Leatherback Sea Turtle, which can elevate its body temperature well above that of its surroundings.
- Snakes smell via their tongues : Snakes smell by using its forked tongue to collect airborne particles then passing them to the Jacobson's Organ, a special organ in the mouth for examination. The fork in the tongue gives the snake a sort of directional sense of smell.
- Snake venom is a combination of many different proteins and enzymes.
- Snake Venom as an anti venom : An anti-venom serum is actually a small quantity of the venom itself which when injected into an animal or human affects only slightly triggering an allergic reaction to it. The allergic reaction will allow anti bodies to be formed and thus immunity to the venom is developed.
- Size : While the anaconda can grow up to 38 feet in length, the brahminy blind snake is just 2 inches long, making it the smallest snake.
- Pit vipers : The pit vipers have 2 pits on either side of their mouth. These are not the nostrils as we all might expect but are a special gift to them. They are the infra red sensors which can sense a temperature difference of about 0.2 degree celsius. This helps these snakes to catch their prey.
- Teeth : Snakes have more than 200 teeth, which they do not use to chew, since they point backwards, but bite and grip their prey securely.
- There are about 2,600 different kinds of snakes. Of these, only about 400 are poisonous. Still the rest 2,200 innocuous species get killed by people just because of ignorance about the snakes.
A WORD OF CAUTION!
Many snake species are slithering unnoticed towards extinction. There are many a reasons for this but the ignorance about the snakes being the biggest one.
The snake charmers who catch the snakes and bring them out of their habitat are also a reason.
Many a snakes are being killed for their skins and and the beautiful snakes might become a thing of the past lest these practices are put in check.
Wirth's Law :
Software is getting slower more rapidly than the hardware is becoming faster.Gates's Law
It is a humorous and ironic observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months thereby negating all the benefits of Moore's Law. This could occur for a variety of reasons: "featuritis", "code cruft", programmer laziness, or a management turnover whose design philosophy does not coincide with the previous manager.
Gates's Law is born of the frustration that many users feel due to the apparent tendency of commercial software to become slower with each successive incremental version, such that buying new hardware upgrades sounds like a reasonable idea.
Though the law's name refers to Bill Gates, Gates did not formulate or express it. Rather, the name refers to a perceived tendency of Microsoft products to slow down with each new feature or patch.
The gentleman’s game has had a makeover. So move over Test cricket and One-Day cricket as the Indian Premier League (IPL) T20 tournament is here to stay.
The BCCI-backed IPL claims it will give serious competition to the saas bahu soaps on television as a "sizeable number of women" have shown "tremendous interest" in the shorter format of the game.
With a new format, Bollywood actors promoting it and business tycoons financing the teams – the game has just got bigger.
Lets have a look at what experts think about it.
Charu Sharma (Chief Executive of Bangalore Royal Challengers) believes that there is nothing wrong with movie stars being involved with the IPL.
"What’s the harm? You talk about film stars being involved with sports, the cricket T20 in particular. They are practically involved everywhere, whether it is politics or human rights causes or television. So, what’s the problem here? Let us not be cynical, let us be a little mature.”
However, Vinod Mehta (Editor-in-chief : Outlook) had some reservations about the latest revolution that has taken the entire cricketing world by storm.
“I don’t want to sound like a kill-joy but IPL is to cricket what page three is to journalism. It is a bit of harmless diversion and a bit of tamasha. And if somebody makes money on this, then good luck to them. But in page-three journalism we have to be careful that it should not become page-one journalism. Similarly, if IPL, which has the potential to undermine Test cricket and One-Day cricket, becomes the sole concern of the BCCI then we are going into very tricky waters.”
It was just a part of what these experts think. Now lets have a look at stats :
-According to a new survey there has been 70 per cent increase in TRP ratings of cricket after India's World Cup win in the Twenty20 format.
-BCCI had netted a total revenue of $1.749 billion (Rs 7,000 Crore) from the IPL even before the first ball.
- 80% of the people that after the IPL it would be really very difficult to watch the test matches.
IPL is changing the rules of the game. Its adopting the way the soccer gurus have long before chosen to follow. Franchises exist in soccer since a long time and they have been able to keep the Fans on their heels, hungry for more even after getting so much of it, never getting satiated.
But IPL though similar to footie in many aspects is a lot more different. Its changing the game in a revolutionary manner. Its taking cricket away from where it started ie test cricket.
But what I think is if cricket has to live it needs a lot more IPL's.
No one in this busy worls has the time to sit and watch a boring test cricket match for 8 hrs a day. (Comapare with soccer matches of 1.5 to 2 hrs). People come to watch games for excitement and a changeover which T20 promises to provide. Everything has to move on. Change is the law of nature and to live in a changed world you yourself need to change which is what IPL and T20 cricket is doing.
IPL is about creating new value. As long as every one involved in the IPL get something back, the IPL will succeed. The players, the Cricket Boards, the Corporates that own the franchises, the advertisers, the TV companies and the paying public; all will have to get something back from IPL.
The extent to which cricket will change post IPL will only depend on its success and how BCCI handles its success.
(sung to The Beatles "Let it Be")
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C."
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers"
"Write in C."
Write in C, write in C.
LISP is dead and buried,
Write in C.
for science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.
Write In C, yeah, write in C.
Only wimps use BASIC.
Write in C.
Write in C, oh, write in C.
Pascal won't quite cut it.
Write in C.
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Don't even mention COBOL.
Write in C.
And the edior is bugging me.
I'm sick of ones and zeroes.
Write in C.
Seven is the one for me.
I hate the word PROCEDURE,
Write in C.
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
PL1 is 80's,
Write in C.
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
The government loves ADA,
Write in C.
