KSRTC ...shrewd enough

we (our college mates) were planning to go to goa... so we were deciding whether to book a bus or a train. We checked out indianrail.gov.in and then thought may be we cud find something similar for ksrtc ..so we googled for it.
And guess what ...much to our surprise we found KSRTC site. it was www.ksrtc.org

They have one thing cool in there.....
They didn't care to put the database i guess ;)

but they have all searching facility in place... how?? whenever u check for a schedule u'll be provided with 2 combo boxes. one for the source station and one for the destination station. The problem is that it wont allow u to select anything for the destination combo box and when u click on submit button, the java script pops an error that destination not selected. Well...i guess Indian janta cannot be fooled by gimmicks anymore now( at least in tech savvy bangalore)

cool code....

check this code out....(go to the basics of c to find the answer).. someone asked it on blug-prog:


#include"iostream"
#include"sys/types.h"
#include"unistd.h"
using namespace ::std;

int main()
{
pid_t child_pid;
printf(" hello world !! \n");
child_pid = fork();
}

(i have used "" instead of greater than sign as my blog editor had trouble workin with them... thats why cout was changed to printf)

if u put the "\n", u'll get one "hello world !!" as output but if u remove the endl u'll get two "hello world!!" as output... reason being that the programs are not flushing the buffers and the child is inheriting unflushed buffer...causing it to print it twice( as told by Imidi kiran on blug)....

this stuff was cool...

Eclipse is GREAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

Note: All characters in this story are real and any similarities to the non existent are purely co-incidental :)

I'm one of the few programmers who are crazy about C/C++ and think java is too similar to these languages to be learned in its entirety. I started coding in java an year earlier. I used eclipse IDE and still use it. So yesterday I went to A3 office( for those who don't know what's A3.. its a branch of Aztec.. I work in A2) .. had some thing to integrate some applications using java. I fired up my vi (eclipse wasn't there.. and am ok with vi, use it for c/c++ coding) and started coding.
First thing that happened was I typed something, typed a '.' and waited for the field to autocomplete.... I soon realised what I was doing.. it was hilarious....
Next I compiled my code... and unexpectedly I got a million errors( classpath dependencies...) ..and I was surely not in a mood nor did I have the proper experience to resolve them... Fortunately my PM had an Ant file ready...
The process went smoothly ..but I learnt one thing... LEARN JAVA BEFORE JUMPING TO ECLIPSE or any other IDE.

Now am back at my box.. working on Eclipse...Of course industrial productivity comes before personal learning.... (and eclipse is doing a good job teaching the syntax)

Industry experience!!

So here I am, working on a supercool project, but working in the industry in a typical office environment has its own pitfalls although there are innumerable perks.... ( The pitfalls are clearer if u r intelligent, PS:Modesty died the day i was born)

Here's what generally happens: I finish the job assigned to me,quite ahead of the schedule, and ask my PM for more job. It happens so frequently that my PM probably feels that i'm bugging him/her. So i thought why not take it easy and surf the net and give my reports at some intervals( atleast that way i wont feel the guilt over bugging him/her)... so i open my blog or start chatting and someone stops by my cubicle, looks at my computer, and says that i'm more interested in chatting than doing work!!!! I guess i'll take some time to adjust!!!

Some cool updates

Well yahoo is introducing a weblog with content sharing and internetworking... in a nutshell that is flickr+lj+blogger.... seems its going to give other blogs a run for their money. check out this link:

Yahoo Blogs

Well check out Microsoft's latest attempt to strenghten their losing market position in India:

Microsoft sucks

;-)

Scripting is GREAAAAAAAT

Yup....
so I learned the hard way today that one cannot stay without scripting...
I always used to avoid it for its inefficiency. Whatever be the case I used to parse using C/C++ (my first love)... Now that I was coding in java I thought to use it since it had better constructs than C/C++.

But Rohit, the Linux geek & resident of my neighboring cubicle, kindda motivated me to just give scripting a try... now I was left with the choice of perl or shell....
I had already been pissed of by perl's inadequacy of throwing error messages( or rather my inefficiency to code in it) so I thought to give shell a try....and guess what...IT WAS WONDERFUL

Since the question of inefficiency was overshadowed by the supercool machine I was working on so I used it. I called it from a java program and BINGO.... 1 hour work done in 5 minutes flat.

Will be writing a lot more scripts now .. I guess!!

Links to Ponder!!

Well today is a great day for India... not because Shiv ratri and women's day have coincided on this very day ;)

We have reached a new milestone in this nuclear age... check this link to find out
ARTICLE on this accompalishment

Well i wud also like to bring into notice something microsoft is doing these days( ofcourse they r jobless to design something that futuristic) ..check this link out too.
Microsoft?? check it out

Was I wrong??

Well something happened which made me introspect. It all started on Thursday morning... I got a call from TCS for an interview... I was overjoyed at the prospect... didn't care much for the job but for the tech interview. The fact that I had offers from three software firms without even going through a proper tech interview bored me....
I'm the kindda guy who love being reminded that I lack somethin... its my belief that having knowledge means knowing what you dont know...uuuh enough of this crap..now i'll tell exactly what happened.

yup so I got a call and went to SJM towers( in bangalore obv).. filled a form and just for the heck of it wrote 6 lacs as my expectation for the starting salary.( the pursuit was followed by my colleagues Ravi and Shyam)...

So cutting the long story short... I went in to give my first tech interview... and he asked me "what is the diff b/w c and c++, wats polymorphism" ... I felt sick... he expected that I cram the book and vomit out the rehearsed excerpts.... I didn't fare well... not even when he asked me an example of dynamic overloading... cursing myself I went thru the ordeal... next was HR round.... my turn was last and Ravi and Shyam had already pissed him a lot so the HR personnel directly asked me if my expectation were the same... I said yes... my pitch was high.. almost aggressive... actually I was quite frustated by the work environment there... it was like some government office in UP minus the pan spit spots...

I asked the Hr what kindda job I might be doing if I make it through... he said nothing for the first 3 years.. may be testing, documentation and or customer support... and if luck I might work on the code after that... It was outrageous.... I had written research as my preference so he told me that the Company's req doesn't match my prolfile ... I gave him a "I Dont Give a Sh** Look" and walked out...

I dont know whether I was being a snob or what... but I really dont like the idea of letting my brain decay...
And for all the TCS people reading this.. I pity u guys..

Atlast someone read this blog

I must admit that when i sarted blogging i felt that no one wud ever read it... but still i added the link to my signature and just prayed for someone to read and comment on my blog and my photos.

I had lost hope completely but liked the idea of jotting down my experience on the site. Atleast i will have a part of me preserved in this form. It felt like a frozen snapshot of a moment articulated. I posted the links to my groups and spammed my friends to read my blog and comment on it.

Finally my efforts paid of. Mansi, a friend of mine read my blog and has asked me to enable anonymous comments. Of course i'll do that, she's the first person to read my blog (actually second ..rohithv was the first).... In case u r reading this Mansi, thanks.