Air Nirvana ( Got the job :P )

After countless written tests and two interviews I finally got the job offer from Airvana ( A mobile broadband company). This was the second written test which I cleared. The interview was very simple and straight forward. You can obviously outperform when somebody asks you something from your areas of interest. Main focus during interview was IntelligentMirror and VideoCache, you can guess the rest ๐Ÿ˜€

Before The Interview

**FUNNY PART**

Checklist before going for interview

  1. Company’s website’s page rank
    • Airvana.com (6 years) has a page rank (Google) of 5. Well thats good. Equals to my website Fedora.co.in (less than 1 year).
  2. Company’s website’s Alexa rank
  3. Domain Availability
    • Checked for Airvana keyword and airvana.in and airvana.co.in was available. Mouth watering. Isn’t it ๐Ÿ˜€ But somehow convinced myself not to spend another couple of dollars.

**STRANGE PART**

Both Saini(s) of my batch ( Me and Pankaj Saini) are placed together ๐Ÿ˜€ WTF!!!

Well, finally I am not a jobless anymore!!!

PS : Congratulations to Pankaj and Yogesh ๐Ÿ™‚

 

Innovation and Invention

A few days ago, I attended a PPT (PrePlacement Talk). Frankly speaking, it was the only talk that turned out to be of some use of all the talks I attended till date. The speaker was a Vice President of the company. While delivering the talk, he reached a point where he started explaining the different between Innovation and Invention. And the explanation was mind blowing. I thought I will share it with everyone ๐Ÿ™‚

Invention

Invention is something which creates the need. For example,

  • Edison invented the electric bulb. And suddenly everyone felt that they needed the bulb for light. Before the invention everyone was happy with candles, oil lamps and whatever else. So, the invention of bulb created the need.
  • Graham Bell invented telephone and everyone was dying to get a telephone connection. So, it again created the need of a telephone connection.

Innovation

Innovation is something which is created by the need. For example,

  • Within few years of invention of bulb, people felt that the light from the bulb hurts their eyes. And they started feeling the need of something which will not affect their eyes and will also serve as a source of light. So, somebody came up with a fluorescent lamp. The need forced people to innovate.
  • With increasing popularity of phone, people felt the need of phone on the move. So somebody came up with cordless and then mobile. Again forced innovation.

All that is fine but then what is research???

In case you have further insights, please share ๐Ÿ™‚

 

The Mobile Blah – 2 ( Job Offer )

THIS IS MY 101ST POST

I wrote about a mobile blah almost two months ago and something similar happened today. Previously they were looking for a PhD but this time scenario was totally different ๐Ÿ˜€

Me, Deepak Vig, Dharmeet Hora were having lunch in our favorite mess “Yuktahaar”. Deepak’s phone rang. He started talking to someone and started looking at me. I thought it was Randeep, who has called and asked Deepak not to say anything about me. But he passed on the phone to me. Though I didn’t want to talk, I had to.

But I was totally surprised on listening a lady’s voice. (WTF!!!) Why Deepak would pass on his girl friend’s call to me ๐Ÿ˜›

  • Lady : The one who called.
  • K : Me ๐Ÿ™‚

Note : Every single line is true to my knowledge. Confirm with Deepak or Dharmeet if you don’t believe me.

Lady : (Awesomely politely) Hello!

K : Hello. (Surprised!!!!)

Lady : Is this Ravi?

K : (WTF!!! Now who is this Ravi??) Yeah. (Turning to polite mode.) I am Ravi.

Lady : I am calling from SOME consultancy services? (Sorry guyz, couldn’t hear the first word clearly due to some disturbance.)

K : (Having no clue of whats going on.. continuing the talk) Ok.

Lady : Are you looking for a call center job?

K : (Feeling damn happy about it. Finally somebody is offering a “JOB“. Raising the voice with confidence.) YEAH!! I would love to hear about it.

Lady : (Feeling that she finally caught someone ๐Ÿ˜€ ) We are conducting an interview tomorrow at 10AM.

K : (Whenever you feel like conducting it ๐Ÿ˜› ) Ok.

Lady : Please bring your resume and two passport size photographs.

K : Yeah. Sure.

Lady : We are offering Rs. 10000/- per month for the job.

K : Thats nice. Do you offer benefits other than the compensation? (Few MNCs offer pencils and caps as “Other Benefits” ๐Ÿ˜› )

Lady : (Never expected something like this from a guy looking for a call center job ๐Ÿ˜› ) Pardon please?

K : (Repeating in a much clearer voice) Do you offer any benefits other than compensation? Like insurance ๐Ÿ˜‰

Lady : (Feeling sorry about it) No.

K : Ok. Anyways thats a nice package.

Lady : Do you know our address?

K : Yeah. (As if I visit their office every other day, looking for a job ๐Ÿ˜› )

Lady : Ok. Be there at 10 AM with your resume and two passport size photographs.

K : Thank you very much for calling.

Lady : Thank you. Have a nice day.

K : You too.

Well, finally got a job offer ๐Ÿ˜› Later, Deepak told that the lady was looking for some ‘Ravi Kiran’.

PS : Forgot to ask her name ๐Ÿ˜‰

 

The best new year gift

We just received a mail from IIIT-H help desk stating

New year special proxy server has been created for all users as gift from
IIIT Server Room staff. There are no moderations done on that proxy so all
websites are accessible. Even better there is no connection limit per IP
or per user on the new proxy.

Proxy is accessible at IP _SNIP_ on port _SNIP_. Please feel free to
download as much as you want from this new proxy server.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Regards,
IIIT Systems Help Desk

Probably the best gift I have ever received.

 

Auto Spell Checkers are bad, sometimes

Auto Spell Checkers in Firefox, Thunderbird, Spicebird, Tomboy Notes and whatever else have totally changed the way I write English. Previously (two years ago) I used to make tons of spelling mistakes while writing blogs but these days I hardly make a mistake while blogging, sending mails, taking notes etc. But this enhancement in technology has made me dumber. Previously, I was confident about the spellings I knew but now I am not confident about spellings of anything I spell. Today, I was writing an application (for what?? secret ๐Ÿ˜› ) and got damn confused about spellings of “committee”, “admission” etc. (double m, double tt, double s ?? ๐Ÿ™ ). After two failed attempts, I wrote the application in word processor and took a print out. Damn easy, huh!!!

 

My first interview for a job!

After failing few (will be disclosed later) written tests in a row, I got a call for an interview. I was pretty surprised as I never expected it to happen. Initially I was nervous because I don’t know c/c++/data structures/algorithms. All I know is Python, Computer Networks, a few Open Source technologies and how to use them to generate cash. Well, after waiting for four hours, I got a chance to meet the interviewers (two). I was nervous as it was my first interview. They asked me for the resume. Below is the conversation.

  1. Interview #1
  2. Interview #2

Note : Almost everything below is true and few sentences have been added to make it humorous.

  1. A : Interviewer 1
  2. B : Interviewer 2
  3. K : Me.

Interview #1

A : Tell us about yourself.

K : (I never expected this as its the most difficult question of all.) I am a simple guy interested in open source (Throwing random sentences). I believe in on the spot implementing/coding my ideas. Whenever I get a new idea I just code it without spending too much time on thinking about it.

A : What if you face some problem with your idea later?

K : (Suddenly Shiben’s this post popped up in my mind.) I try to fix it and if it doesn’t work in few tries, I just throw the code and recode it (Thanks Shiben for writing that wonderful post).

A : So you don’t do any research before implementing the idea. Do you like research?

K : Not really. A bit. (Lying) I don’t like research. It means a lot of time.

A : So, you participated in Google Summer of Code. What is this?

K : Its a Google funded project in which Google invites applications from several open source organizations and select almost 120+ organizations. Then candidates from all over the world proposes their ideas or picks up projects from organizations’ ideas.

B : You proposed your own idea?

K : Yes.

A : What was it?

K : IntelligentMirror. An intelligent caching system which caches RPM/DEB packages from several mirrors on the basis of package name and not the domain name or protocol. Its a squid plugin.

A : Tell us about this Intranet Chat Service (another project).

K : (Told everything I knew about it).

B : Tell us something about squid.

K : Squid is an open source proxy server used to hide thousands of machines behind a single public IP or to control what users browse in a shared network environment.

A : What is public IP?

K : (Answered)

B : What is difference between public and private IP?

K : (WTF?? I am not a kid. Answered.)

A : How do you hide a thousands of machine behind a single public IP?

K : NATing.

B : (Thinking that I just know fancy terms) What is NATing?

K : (Requesting a paper) Explained every single packet level details of NATing by drawing nice diagrams. (Interviewer tried to confuse at several stages but in vain).

A : (Feeling helpless, whispers to B) Lets ask standard questions ๐Ÿ˜‰

K : (WTF??? Feeling doomed ๐Ÿ˜› )

B : What is polymorphism?

K : (Abusing the interviewer at heart) It is some fu**ed up idea using which we can do few things which often confuse me and sometimes confuse the even compiler.

A : (Passing a sheet of paper to me) Write an example of polymorphism?

K : Wrote a function
int function(float a);
int function(char a);

B : Can I change return type of second declaration?

K : (Feeling awesomely confident ๐Ÿ˜€ ) No.

A : If I change char to double in second function will there be a compiler error?

K : Sorry sir. I am confused.

B : Define a class String and few functions on array of characters?

K : Wrote a class somehow with a few functions.

A : Write the copy constructor?

K : (You are torturing me. Don’t push it too much) Somehow managed to write a fu**ed up copy constructor
String(String & str) {
string = str;
}
(I know its wrong. Don’t point out.)

B : Why did you write this (the C++ this)?

K : To reference the member variable of current instance of the class.

A : You never declared it. How can you use it?

K : Its provided by C++. You know I used char, int also. (Dumb ass!!)

A : Ok. (Looking at my resume) You have interest in blogging.

K : (Feeling a bit relaxed) YES!!! I have three blogs. One technical, one about life and I bought a digikam a few months back and started a photoblog as well.

B : (Laughing) Interesting!!!

A : Why do you have some many blogs?

K : Because I love buying domains. Then I need to put up something on those domains. So, I write blogs ๐Ÿ™‚

B : How many domains do you have?

K : Around 15.

A : Where do you host these??

K : I have my own VPS hosted in US.

B : How much does it cost?

K : $50/month.

A & B : (Looking at me as if I kicked them in balls) WTF!!!! Where do you get all this money???????????

K : [snip] secret ๐Ÿ˜€

A : Thank you. I think we have asked enough questions.

K : Thank you!

I left the room. After that I returned to OBH (Hostel). I was not hoping that they’ll call me again for another interview. But I did wait for the call till 9:30PM. After that I went to bed. I was about to fell asleep that Kapil Bajaj called and asked me to report in Main Building. I was sure that this will be either a light round in case they are sure to count me in or it’ll be a revenge round in which they’ll ask questions about things I don’t know.

Interview #2

I entered the room and the interviewers were different this time. A bit more nervous then the last time.

  1. C : Interviewer 3
  2. D : Interviewer 4

I grabbed the chair. C picked up a sheet of paper and started writing on it as if he is a BIG BOSS.

C : (Writing an expression on the paper) Remove the extra brackets from the expression.

K : (Understanding that its a revenge. You employ people for software development or removing the brackets from an expression????) Having no clue of the solution to the problem tried writing something on the paper. (An image of “Ajay Somani” teaching removing redundant braces from an expression flashes in my mind. And I was like WOW!!). I gave the solution (I know there are two terms infix and postfix, but don’t have a clue about which one is infix :P) that we’ll start putting things in a stack and will throw away the opening and closing braces which doesn’t have a symbol or character in between them. And will pop them out to get an expression without extra braces. (What a guess?? ๐Ÿ˜€ and it worked).

D : Can you optimize it?

K : (baah!! I somehow managed to do it. Now what???) Having no clue about optimizing the above, I started throwing some random ideas. Devised one idea and showed to C but he caught it and proved me wrong. Took some more time and devised one more funny idea.
Expression : (((P+Q))*R)
Solution : We have two variable i and j with I pointing to first element and j pointing to last element. We enter a loop and start decreasing j and increasing i. When we see opening braces at expr[i] and expr[j], we throw them. And when there is no braces at either expr[i] or expr[j] or both we continue and jump over symbol and characters. While I explained the idea, it somehow worked for the expression. I badly confused the interviewer with my invention ๐Ÿ˜› He was like WTF!!! How can this piece of crap work?? I was about to laugh. I enjoyed the moment. It was one of the best moments of the day. He spent almost 2-3 minutes figuring out my newly invented algorithm and finally managed to prove it wrong.

D : See, this doesn’t work.

K : (Thinking, “Why are you telling me?? I know it doesn’t work ๐Ÿ˜› “) I am sorry sir ๐Ÿ™‚ (Controlling my laughter).

C : (Writing two numbers on the paper) This number ( character array 4568123) is rotated around some number and the original number is (character array 1234568). How would you get the original number from the rotated one?

K : (Having no clue about the domain of the problem) Thinking of swapping numbers here and there. Tried every possible combination but nothing seemed to work. What happened to my pool of ideas ๐Ÿ˜› (An image of “Kapil Bajaj” teaching inorder, preorder, postorder traversal flashes in my mind. Kewl!! I don’t have a clue about trees and whatsoever things related to those creatures). Now the big task is to make a tree out of the character array. (While I was telling these to Sachin Goyal. He suggested that plant the first character and water it until it becomes a tree ๐Ÿ˜€ ) I drew the array in some random orders on the paper and made a tree of some sort with 4 as root and 568 on the left subtree and 123 on the right subtree. (Now, all those organic structures like methane, ethane started crawling in my mind. I somehow remembered the rotation thingy). I rotated the fu**ing thing around 4 and it worked. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. What a confidence I had at that time. I described the process to the interviewer as if solving tree problems is the easiest of all the problems.

C : What is order of problem?

K : (No clue about the problem itself. How do I know its order? ) Kept quite for sometime and kept myself busy with the problem itself ( I was so happy that I couldn’t get my eyes off the tree structure).

C : (Asking again) What is order of the problem?

K : (Thought about it for sometime) log(n). As the integers are in sorted order. Interviewer looked a bit convinced.

C : (Traping me) How will you make a tree out of that character array?

K : (OMG!! Not again! Tried to explain the impossible.) We’ll take the first character as root. Now we’ll build left subtree. We’ll go on putting the integers in the left subtree as long as they are in same order. In that way the order will break at 8 and after that we’ll start building right subtree (This somehow seemed to work).

C : (Totally frustrated by my guesses which were eventually working) Is this a BST?

K : (The only thing I know about a BST is that it is Binary Search Tree) Yes. (Confident as if I am the one who invented BST ๐Ÿ˜› )

C : (Trying to trap me further) Wrote two string “ABCDE” and “CDEAB” and asked to write a function to detect if they are rotated version of each other or not?

K : (Thinking that these are not integers and my awesome ideas are not going to work here ๐Ÿ˜€ ) We’ll somehow make a tree of a string, then traverse it (Leaving the traversal type for interviewer. I said only traverse it, because I don’t have any idea about how do we traverse a tree in inorder, preorder or postorder. So didn’t want to invite more problems). And then we’ll compare the result.

C : Ok. Thank you. Lets go.

And that was it. My adventurous innovations about trees stopped there ๐Ÿ˜€

All in all it was total fun being interviewed. I enjoyed every single moment of both the interviews.

PS : I am not correcting any grammatical, spelling mistakes.

 

Back Links to VideoCache

This post’s aim is to boast a bit about my plugin videocache and generating some more backlinks for the website ๐Ÿ˜› Recently videocache was discussed on a lot of Thai tech forums. They helped me a get a lot of traffic and exposure for the plugin.

Tutorials in English and Other languages

  1. Youtube Cache with Squid + Lighttpd on Ubuntu
  2. caching youtube squid 2.6.STABLE14 di easyhotspot (xubuntuย 7.10)
  3. Caching Youtube dengan Squid di Debian
  4. Youtube Caching using Squid
  5. VideoCache: Plugin para Squid que cachea videos
  6. Squid, SquidGuard, YouTube Cache i AdZapper
  7. ใ€ๅŽŸๅˆ›ใ€‘็ปˆไบŽๆžๅฎšlinuxไธ‹็š„squidๅšyoutube็š„cache
  8. Mambang Newsย :ย Squid youtube caching

Other Backlinks from forums

  1. squid youtube cache
  2. ITP: videocache — cache audio and video files from websites
  3. Python on PFsense
  4. Setting cara menggabungkan 2 line speedy gimana ya..??
  5. only youtube taken from squid 2
  6. Squid zph and Mikrotik
  7. VC5 with webproxy – Caching youtube?
  8. Squid Wiki Pages

And a lot of other backlinks from other Thai forums but they need you to login to view forum posts, so not posting them.

PS : Everybody is in their true colors these days ๐Ÿ™‚

PPS : Work is going on for a third squid plugin ๐Ÿ™‚

 

Yours truly’s birthday party / Angeethi / Barista / City Center

Well, It was my birthday on October 25th and today I threw a party. We left for Angeethi at 7:30PM. The journey was fine as the roads were not crowded due to festival season. We were in Angeethi in almost 45 minutes. Got a nice place to sit. Well, after browsing the menu we eventually discovered that there was no soup. Had to order Paneer Tikka and Hara Bhara (chu****pa) kabab which unexpectedly turned out nice. Main course was also cumsi cumsa.

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Angeethi

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Angeethi

Ajay’s photos can sometimes be really unexpected.

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Angeethi - Ajay

Koi isko (Ajay) ko bhi khana dedo

Afer having dinner at Angeethi, we moved on to Barista which is on the ground floor in the same building. This was first time I was visiting Barista. I ordered something randomly and fortunately it was good. It was fun at Barista. The ambience of the place was really good (from a newbie photographer’s point of view ๐Ÿ˜› ) and pics came out real good.

I don’t know what I was doing when somebody clicked this pic ๐Ÿ˜›

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

After that we moved on to City Center just for browsing random stuff in crossword (a book shop in City Center). After roaming around and clicking pics in city center we moved out.

Sambhav has made these two awesome gifs from the photos we clicked in city center and barista. Hats of to his skills.

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at City Center

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at City Center

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

Kulbir Saini Birthday Party at Barista

PS : Though its only a day left for diwali, city is not really decorated. Almost no lights ๐Ÿ™ This shop which I found opposite to City Center is one of few decorated on the road no. 1.

Krsala Designer Jewellery

Krsala Designer Jewellery

 

Not going home on Diwali, yet another time

Ever since I got into IIIT, I never celebrated Diwali at home. And diwali in south India is not really celebrated with much enthusiasm as compared to north India. Last year I might have gone home but the laziness factor overpowered me and I chose to stay back at IIIT. This year, I was thinking of going home.

I woke up at 7:00AM on Oct 19th to book ticket in Tatkal. But the almighty computer caught my attention and I was browsing random stuff till 7:30AM. I left for the station in a hurry and discovered a huge line for reservation. While standing in the line, I was just thinking how railways and airways completely looks like a computer network. Assuming rail tracks as wires, trains as current, stations as switches, junctions as routers, local MMTS network as VLANs, airways as wifi and people as packets who want to flow through these. The entire transportation system translates to a computer network. AC/Sleeper/General translates to different quality of services. Both of them have the same problem, they are overcrowded. Anyway I was there in the queue for 40 minutes and I could move only 8-10 feet. And a few minutes later, I realized that Tatkal quota was over. Yipeeee!!!! We have crossed the allocated bandwidth limit. Check back laterz. I got back to IIIT and successfully continued browsing after that.

I could have tried for the ticket the next day but again the laziness factor overpowered me and now I am ready to celebrate Diwali at IIIT yet another time ๐Ÿ™‚