It is getting bigger : 2009 Lok Sabha Elections

With 2009 year 2 crore more people will be eligible to vote. Having said that more youngsters with a bend of mind towards internet and information will be into voting procedure.

Internet community, newspapers and even political parties are well aware of this. And this can be corroborated with following points: -

1. A lot more videos on youtube this year than what it was a year ago.
2. All Political parties better web-sites these days. check out websites of BJP and Congress.
3. BJP has a team of people for internet campaign.
4. Even Google is in foray with 2009 Lok Sabha Elections.

So it is no longer restricted to newspapers & street campaigns. 2009 general elections are getting bigger and digital.

The VHS vs Betamax Format War

Recently i had a chance to read on a format war and it just gave me something to write on. The instance goes something like this.

In year 1974 JVC launched its VHS format followed by Sony's Betamax format a year after. For around a 20 years both the giants had a great tussle with VHS being victorious.

The victory was not on technical grounds (as Sony was unarguably the winner in that context) but more on marketing and customer needs.

One of the biggest this which went against the Betamax format was that a single tape of betamax recorded for just 1 hour as against the 3 hour movies during that time. Where as a VHS format was for 3-hour recording. Sony did provide with other solutions for longer recording time but it was too late.

The tussle between two giant formats lead to two manufacturing groups with Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Aiwa, and Pioneer on one side. On the VHS side were JVC, Matsushita (Panasonic), Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Akai. But with recording time and the turn around time to create the VHS format players just squeezed the Betamax market.

Finally the last Betamax format machine was produced in 2002 with the war already over by late 1980's.

Remember v/s Thinking

Disclaimer: The below comments given under and my personal comments and doesn’t point to some specific organization or individual. There are lots of companies or institutes who believe in right way to recruit person but my views are for bigger % of institutions who still don’t believe that the path they follow is not right.

Interviews play an important role in a software engineer level. Why a software engineer it plays an important role in every walk in life. But there is a BIG BIG myth about the interviews across the Software Industry in India. Most of the interviews don't even check if a person can think logically or can apply the basic knowledge of solving problems. It just checks the bookish knowledge.

If we just rewind the full movie then we will just reach our childhoods. The school as a whole believed in how well a student can "remember" stuff rather than how well a student can "think". The previous statement is very easy to say or will empathize with each individual but it has a deeper meaning.

I have been a topper in Mathematics, which most of kids used to be really afraid of, and the in retrospect I feel the only reason why I excelled in maths or even Logical thinking was for the single reason: no single answer for a problem satiated me. I was always in look for multiple answers, for an IDEAL answer. There was some devil inside me who was very hungry for more and more answers. I used to even see numbers in air or solutions while seeing the architecture of the school buildings. I used to see solutions of trigonometry while watching shadow of flag post in the ground. In fact I used to design a problem myself. A real time problem to see how fast a bird is flying assuming what speed her shadow is traveling.

This is what I really meant by thinking and not remembering the solutions. I always wished that I would have been more blessed with such a thirst in other subjects too , but it wasn’t just there. And I strongly believe that no single person in this world is born with the vision to think like that in each field. This is the place where a mentor comes into picture and the world is so void without it. The mentor doesn’t have to be some elder person, it can be a young kid inspiring you to learn piano by just giving a great performance. A mentor is a person who shows you what was always there in front of you but one couldn’t see it because one was busy in watching something else.

I just want to close this philosophical, not a usual me note, just a single line. I person can be made to remember stuff but can never be taught to THINK.

Season of sharing-6

It’s been long since I have shared my exp. But it is always better late then never. I have been recently involved in couple of things. I did mail my comps friends regarding the same and did get a great response on varied issues. Here goes my exp:

Using the same broadband connection across two bldgs:
After I came back home some of my street frnds were fed up paying 700/- each for broadband connection. Also they all wanted to play LAN games while sitting in their rooms. To resolve this issue we though of making one computer as proxy and use that for connecting to internet. Also all other computers were thought of being connected with each other using a router.
But having a wired router and laying down wires across the street involved maintenance of wires and a risk of losing the wires to intuitive people. Hence we all thought of using a Wireless router. The idea seemed to have clicked with the distances not that much. Also we were ready to invest some money in signal enhancer at some point where the signal was getting weak. But I think god wanted to test us more. Because of the concrete walls and pillars the signal got weaker than what we had expected and that meant a LOT of enhancers.
The only option left now with us to have tied up with some companies which have their fiber optics being laid down and use that as data carrier. But the expense of 700/- per person seems to less in front of last option. :)

Chat Windows in blog

I have recently added chat windows in my blog "Just Write". Earlier i thought it will be really a pain to add this. But it is fairly simple. There are a loads of free services which provide chat window software. Though they have premium version too but i think for a novice a simpler free version is more than enough. Just check out the one i have added in my blog . It is from cbox . There are few others as well such as tagboard, flooble. So make your choice and make your blog better.

Happy blogging!!

Interview at Techspan noida

I recently gave interview at Techspan. Here are the details of the interview.

Round 1: Written test

The test was of 1.5 hour duration. It was more of generic test. General domains were:

• Logical questions
• puzzles
• Visual questions
• Rotation and revolution of figures and finding out what final figure will be.
• Flow chat problems.
• Mathematical Questions: probability, Time and distance, relative speed etc.

There we in all 40+ questions; time was 1 hr though the HR told me that i can take approx 1.5 hrs.

Round 2: Personal Interview (Technical)

The second round was by some technical expert and he went through my resume and kept on asking all the technical languages i had specified. He didn't miss a single language mentioned there. Though he asked some related questions i.e. if there was jsp specified then he asked if I knew structs. Just be normal and say I don't know. And write only those things in the resume which you know of. The fields I was tested on were:

• Java
• Core java concepts
• Servlet
• SQL
• PL/SQL
• JSP

Round 3: Personal Interview (techno/HR)

The third round was by manager. Things which I were interviewed were very general ranging from my interests, my ethics, why I want to shift...so on.

Interview at Progress Software

I think this was the most technical interview i had. But no doubt in technical terms fundu.

Q1: Implement “toString” in Collection framework
Q2: Thread pooling program :- checked on Design patterns, Threads fundamentals, Resource sharing and synchronization
Q3: Post Order traversal
Q4: Why is hash code there is JAVA object class
Q5: How is hash tables implemented in Java.
Q6 : Two puzzles
a) There is one machine which gives Pepsi, another coke and third which gives both.
These machines are wrongly marked in such a way that none of them have correct
label (viz coke,pepsi,code/pepsi). Now how will you re-label them properly if you
are allowed to switch on just single machine. By switching on the machine you can
come to know what that machine provides.
b) You are given a rectangular piece of paper. Now you cut one rectangular piece of any
size and orientation in this paper. How will you cut a single line on resultant paper so
that each of the cut pieces have same area and are congruent.

Round 2:

I was given a computer and was allowed to use any IDE ( is used Ecllipse) to code . The question was to convert any number into word :
1,013 : One thousand one hundred Thirteen
100 : Hundred

I coded almost full in about 1/2 hour and then there were more generic questions like namespace (I was because asked about namespace because i had worked in XML. Then was asked about DOMParser and SAXParser. More generic java/j2ee questions.

Amazon Interview Round 4

Round 4:

It was again telephonic with one of the top shots. Also the last of the marathon.

Q 1: There are two linked lists. You need to find if there is a intersection in these lists. By intersection what he meant was that if two link lists merged at some point.

Q2: After solving the above he asked me the node at which they will merge.

Q3: Given a graph , you are given a particular node and asked all the node which can be accessed from this node and all node which can access this node. (Directed graph)

Q4 : If 2nd October 2001 was a palindrome : 10022001 which date before this was palindrome?


Mail me if you find some problem solving the above.

Amazon Interview Round 3

For third round they flew me down to Chennai and there I had four rounds:

Round 1 : This round went for approx 1 hr.

Q1: They asked me about the product i was working on. They asked me if i would have the creator of the product what design patterns i would have used? What are the loop holes in this design? blah blah blah. I think these questions were more on the specific project than on generic interview as such. but this was the only interview where i was asked about Synchronization, threads and other java/j2ee stuff.

Q2: If you have been given a currency format which is of the American standard then how will you write a regular expression for the same. the format examples $110,000,000 or $1,000,000.
Solution: Though I didn’t know much of regular expressions and to start with i wrote more of finite automata machine than regular expression, but in the end I was able to produce the desired result.

Q3: Pre-order of a binary tree without recursion?
Solution: Easy solution by using stacks.


Round 2 : This round went for approx 1.5 hrs. This was one of the most amazing rounds. It started with all amazing stuff on what I do , I read, my hobbies , if i am self motivated on reading about new technologies if yes then what and so on so forth. I think I solved just one question. And total duration was 1.5hrs!!!

Q1: You are given a tree and a pointer to one of its node.
One can call lock or unlock functionality on this node.

LOCK : There can be two outputs to this method "lock" i.e. true when we were able to lock this node and false when we were not able to lock this node. The condition is that if the node which needs to be locked has a parent which is already locked then one can’t lock that node. Also if any of its successors are locked then also one can't lock that node.

UNLOCK: If that node is locked then unlock it.

Now we need to store some information in the nodes. So I was asked to design the data structures of the nodes which will be helpful to me to store information.

Then this question went on from binary tree to n-ary tree.

Solution: Will be posting soon.

Round 3 : This was the great round. Loads of questions. Lot of brain-storming and i think it was a mix bag in end. But I think i gave each and every question a nice shot and that might have effected my results.

Q1:

Q2:

Q3:

Round 4:

Q 1: Difference between inner and outer join.

Q 2: One puzzle. Your are participating in a game show. It has three doors, which have a goat, a dog and a merc behind them. Now you have select one door. It is kept closed. Now the anchor selects one door. He makes sure that it is not the one which has merc behind it. Now you are given an option to go with the your first selection or select a new door. What will you do?
Solution: I will select a new door. He asked why? I explained using probability.

Q 3: To calculate number of petrol pumps in Chennai.

Amazon Interview Round 2

The second round was also telephonic. It went for almost 1.5 hours though scheduled for one hour. The main reason for that i think is that i was solving questions and each time i was asked to re-look at the solution I used to improve it further.

Question 1: Shuffle pack of cards
Solution 1: It is one of the most common questions that are being asked in Amazon (Though I came to know this only after the interview:-D). I started with using Sets again but the complexity turned out to be very bad. I assumed that there is a random function with time complexity O(1) and I call this random function to get values from 1...52. Once i get that random function i will add that value in a SET. So in end I will have all the numbers from 1...52 in a random fashion. The catch in my solution was that if the random function returns number x, m times than for each number we will call this function m times and for 52 numbers it will be (m power 52). This is huge. I tried giving another solution but was no better. In the end he moved to next question. Check out here for solution.

Question 2: Count number of lines, characters and words in a file (Given that we don’t have much access to flashy java methods like readline, String methods like indexOf etc.)
Solution 2: The constraint given above simply means that one has to read character by character. I started with a basic program of reading character by character and passing that character to switch statement and doing some logic when ever i got ' ' , '\t', '\n','\r' . But the problem with this solution was that whenever i used to get some odd input like empty file, a file with just '\n' or a file with just a space then i used to patch my earlier solution. Then as i was giving solutions to problems i was asked if I could store some "state". I tokk that lead and provided another solution: -

Store a "state" variable. i.e. when ever a NON- special character (i.e. character apart from ‘ ‘ , ‘\n’ , ‘\r’, ‘\t’ , EOF comes then make the state 0. Whenever a special character comes make state 1. So whenever we go from state 0 to 1. Increase word count. Whenever we get \n or EOF we increase line count. And each time we increase character count.
After this solution no clarification was asked for.

Question 3: Write USE case for Auction model where you have a seller, an item and a buyer.
Solution: This was more generic design question and was just asked to write use-case. Not seq diagram etc.

Learning points 1: Have a nice grip on time complexity. They will make you calculate for each of the solutions you give.
Learning points 2: Concentrate real hard for that 1.5 hours and if you are not clear of the problem then don't hesitate in asking it again.
Learning points 3: You will be asked to write proper code.(even you will be asked to communicate the same through phone)
Learning points 4: The questions will be very generic and never specific to some language.
Learning point 5: Used a variety of test cases to check one's solution before presenting the same to interviewer.

Amazon Interview(Round 1)

Recently I under went Amazon interview and have received the offer letter.
Following are the details of interviews.

Round 1: Telephonic

I think my first round was more of patience than of intellect. Interview was fixed three times. I was made to wait for 1.5 hours each on first 2 instances and finally was interviewed on the third time. Round1 went for 45 minutes.

Question 1: Resume walk through, mainly concentrated on my latest project. Asked me my best and most challenging project and the questions revolved around those.

Question 2: Intersection of two arrays. Though he reframed the question but the basic point was that I was given two arrays and I have to find singe array which is intersection of the 2 input arrays.
Solution: I used Java set collection and gave a decent explanation then i was asked to write code for that.

So the above 2 questions took full time. The basic points of the first round were to be very much clear about what one has written in resume. Also be ready to write some proper code (in whatever language you prefer)

Season of sharing-5

With Google and yahoo competing against each other i think i have to share things on daily basis. There are 2 new things this time:-

1. Google Sketch
BEWARE mechanical engineers. Now with Google’s help even a Software engineer can design which mechis used to design in CAD/CAM. Check out this tool: http://sketchup.google.com/ . This tool is really simple and helps you to design ur home :) ...happy googling....

2. Yahoo's home page
Now after yahoo's mail client; yahoo has changed the look of their home page as well. It’s worth looking at. Access your mails/messenger/city climate/groups at a click and with AJAX technology :). After Google now yahoo is new AJAX fan :)