Back from Bangalore

As I had mentioned earlier I had to go to Bangalore for Subex's interview. I landed at Bangalore day before yesterday after a sleepless bus ride. Me and Sujit stayed at Sharat's place. That day was spent roaming Bangalore. We went to Forum, Commercial market, Amoeba and then Spinn in the night. We reached back at Sharat's place at 2:30 am (because we got lost). The interview was supposed to be the next day (yesterday i.e) at 9:30 am. I woke up at 7:30 am and left for the interview at 8:30 am.
The Subex office, although small, was pretty nice. The people working there also seemed nice. We were supposed to have 3 technical interviews then 1 HR interview. The interviews chugged along slowly because their Q4 results were going to be announced. Finally I came to know that I had been selected at 6:30 pm. Me and Bhalla were the only ones to get selected that day.
It was a nice trip :)

Project demo

I had my project demo today. I was given the first slot and had to be there at 9:30 am alongwith my P.C. Sujit dropped me there in his car. The presentation went of pretty smoothly and lasted about 45 Minutes.
I leave for Bangalore today evening, hope to have some fun there :-)

Having fun

Life is going on pretty smoothly, we went to F1 yesterday and had a blast. Finished my project report today and went to meet grandma at my uncle's place. We went out and had dinner, I had a nice time chatting with Neethu (my cousin). I have to submit my report tomorrow and my project demo will be the next day. I will be leaving for Bangalore the same day (for the Subex interview) hope to have some fun there. Cheers

6th Semester last class

Today was the last day of my 6th semester. Had systems programming lab in the morning. Then Sujit got his car from Delhi today (yep, good days are to follow soon) and yes I cleared the written exam for Subex systems, so I guess I will be off to Banglore in a few days for the interview. Anyway , in the afternoon there was a small scare that I had lost my phone, when it was actually safe with Sujit. We had a nice cricket match in the evening with more than twenty people coming to play, it was great fun. Still rolling around .. ;-)

Subex

We had Subex systems visiting our campus yesterday. It is one of the major telecom companies in India. Although the organization's workforce is not too huge, it has handsome profits. It doesn't deal with services, but rather product development.
It was given dream status, so I could write the exam. The exam consisted of one objective round of C questions. The standard was pretty nice and I could answer a few of them. The second round was a written programming test. I got a question where I was required to split a text file into other files of a fixed number of bytes and care needed to be taken that the file wasn't split between words.
The interview will be held in Bangalore (if I clear the written rounds). The company has a reputation of hiring very less individuals, so I don't know where I stand. Lets see what happens. Results will be announced the coming week.

Farewell

We had our senior's farewell party today at hotel seagate. It began at 4 pm. We had some contests for our seniors , food and cold drinks. Dance was to follow next and I was able to dance for the next two hours non stop. All in all it was nice.. reminded me of my school days, where parties like these kept on happening. :-)

Dirty cricket

It had been a long time since we had played cricket. Anshul somehow managed to find a bat and it was decided that we were going to play in the muddy ground at the back of our house. Sticks took the place of wickets. The only problems (except from the ground being soggy) was that: the ground was surrounded by houses with fragile windows and that there was a well in the middle of the ground. We played two matches. One of 6 overs and another of 3 overs. Our team lost both matches, but it was great fun. Addy managed to get his pants dirty and torn once more. I guess he is a compulsive diver.
Among other things, India managed to lose to Pakistan once again in spite of making a huge total of 315.

Offshore outsourcing: A view from both sides

Wired 12.02: The New Face of the Silicon Age, this wired article talks about outsourcing from the perspective of both an Indian programmer and her American counterpart. The article is a bit old and a bit long, but worth the read.

5th Semester results

I got my 5th semester results (10230062) today. I got 81% and am second in Computer Science. Shivendu is the topper with 851/1050. Sunita is 3rd with 847/1050.. Second again, I am getting tired of this.

India Vs Pakistan

India and Pakistan had a match today, here, at our very own Cochin. I could have gotten the tickets but me and Rahul decided that we will go to Park Inn and have a blast (they had a large screen T.V and A.C)... ;-) We went there at around 10:30 am when Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid were batting. Shortly we were joined by Sujit, who came after giving the written exam of Satyam Computers. At around 2pm Anshul was also a part of the party. We blasted off till India won.. it was great fun. We were ther for around 7 hours ;-D

Automating downloads

I had spare time so I wrote an article about automating downloads using Perl. Nothing great, short and sweet like perl :-)

More companies

The days seem to pass by without anything interesting happening. We had Sonata softwares on campus today. It is a small company and I think that making it come to the campus so early was a bad decision. It was offering Rs 2 lakhs p.a and you also had to sign a bond of Rs 1 lakh for a period of 2 years. IMHO it is not at all a good package. The share value of the company is around Rs 20, which, for an IT company, is not at all good. The impression they gave in the PPT was that the job was not going to be technical, so I don't think they will be attracting many people.

Back from NITC

These past three days were spent blasting at NITC. We had an inter college basketball tournament there. We had the first match on Monday evening with GEC Thrissur. Their team was below par so Thomas (our star player) didn't even play that match and we beat them with a comfortable 20 point lead. In fact we started showing off at the end of the match (which ,in retrospect, could have been limited ). Our next match (the semis) was to be against CET. We had two players from CUCEK, so they said that they will protest if we made them play against them and hence disqualify us. We respectfully obliged to their suggestion and beat them by more than 20 points. If felt nice ;)
The last match was against NITC (the home team). At the onset of the match we didn't play well and they had a 16 point lead before we scored our first basket. At the end of the first half we were down 21 points. Then we decided that we will strengthen our defense and give it all. Slowly and steadily we started to catch up and at one point we were just down by 3 points. Unfortunately at that crunch situation I missed two underbasket shots (and according to Thomas that cost us the game ). We lost by 7 points but we gave them a nice fight. The crowd there was very decent unlike ours and some of them also appreciated some of our shots and they didn't even abuse us. We got the certificate and the prize money and we blasted the night in the hostel, where we were staying. We returned the next morning.

The NIT campus was very nice and quite .... we changed all that for a period of two days ;)

Wipro

Wipro was here for campus placement yesterday. I gave the written exam and cleared it. Today was my technical interview, which I promptly took care of ;). The tech interview was smooth, I had a nice time bragging about my project. The HR interview was also ok. I'm right now impatiently awaiting the results. Hope I get through.
[update]
I got through all right yahoooooooooo.... it is a real nice feeling hope my other friends are also placed soon, then we can all go and freak out..

A late update

Its been a long time since I blogged anything (mainly because I didn't get time for it). I was resting for two weeks due to chicken pox. Then we had our internal exams (which still are not over) and now companies have started coming to campus for placements. The first one will be Wipro on 18th. Then we have two more companies coming on 20th and 23rd whose names haven't been disclosed yet. My preparation for campus placements is ok. I'm a bit apprehensive about the interview. Lets see how everything goes. Fingers crossed.

Chickenpox

I woke up this morning feel a bit weak and tired. I was feeling a bit feverish too. Then, I noticed that I had rashes coming on my chest. My worries were confirmed in the evening when the doctor announced that I have Chickenpox.

I have been asked to take 2 weeks bed rest. I guess I won't be able to give my internal exams.

Beach boyz

It was a real nice end to a rather boring day. The day started with the systems programming lab.. in which I couldn't even do some simple programs (I will take care of that). Fortunately we had only one hour in the afternoon.
We had some major plans for the evening... Me and Auto were going to give the guys our birthday treat. So we picked up some KFs and left for Cherai in one maruti and one Dio. We were having fun the whole time during the drive. When we arrived at the beach it was totally empty, it was like as if we had our own private beach. We had a nice time chatting, making tunnels in the sand, doing long jumps, doing cartwheels and somersaults and (my favorite) watching at the expanse of the ocean in front of us. We had our dinner (which was very nice) and spent some more time on the beach. We returned when we realized that it was getting to late and that the tide was rising too much.. all in all it was one of those days which I would never forget...

Time control in computer chess part 2

I finally managed to get around the problem which I was encountering in the time controlled search. The problem was that most of the time , even when the search was going deeper it was giving a bad move (due to time restrictions) than a shallow search. So what I did was modify the algorithm to something like this:

search(-INF,+INF,4,&line);

best_move=line.argmove[0];

for(i=5;i<MAX_DEPTH;i++) {

search(-INF,+INF,i,&line);

if(!timefail) {

best_move=line.armove[0];

continue;

}

else {

return best_move;

}

}

With this the computer had a shallow best move before going deeper.

Time control in computer chess

I hadn't made any major attempts at improving my chess engine. I had just added some features to the evaluation routine. So, I thought why not add time control to it ,so that it doesn't always do a fixed depth (4 ply) search. I looked up some texts and came up with a way to do an iterative alpha beta search with time control. I was able to implement it, but the results were bad. The chess engine started playing badly. So I reverted back to the older fixed depth search. (Sigh..)

Another finals

Finals seem to be unlucky for me. This time it was the university sports basketball finals (B.tech vs Rest of CUSAT). We had a fairly good team, but it was a bad day for us. In the first quarter , at one point , we were down 15-0. Somehow we started to catch up but we couldn't make the lead go away. For the rest of CUSAT team , anything they shot at the basket was falling in. For us it was the other way round. We were defending well and also playing well as a team, but the baskets were just not falling in. The ground support for the Rest of CUSAT team was also pretty prominent and I and everyone else got abused lavishly. I played the whole 4 quarters like my other team mates (Pylee, Steve, Kirtan and Arun Thomas). All in all we put in the best that we could, but we still lost. The final score was something like 49-26. I guess we will be able to take care of them next year.