Undoing Some Mistakes

Have you got that realization that you have been unjust to so many things in life? That moment kills you.

I have been suppressing this feeling for quite some time now. As always; there have been excuses to kneel on. Life has been hanging between mundane and painful actions. Nothing enjoyable. Why?

Perhaps it is because I am still looking for the right moment. I still cannot define what it is? When I joined MS, we asked our seniors a question: How do you secure an on-campus job?

The answer was simple: "You have to be at the right time, at the right place".

I never did an on-campus job. Reasons many. Excuses galore. I still wish I had done one. Perhaps I never could grasp what it meant in the first place.

I watched luck by chance movie today. An Akhtar trend special, simply put, it should be on your next weekend movie list. It is that simple supper with all the right mix of palatable items with nothing overwhelming the other and exactly filling your stomach, leaving you satisfied and content. Give a listen to song the song "Yeh Zindagi Bhi" by Loy Mendonsa & Shekhar Ravjiani. The overall soundtrack is remarkably light & relaxed.

Diving deep, I found subtle nuances which ask questions so bold that even my soul fell silent and had no answers. I felt alone (and hence writing this blog).

I could relate to few, I got lost in others. Mistakes have been made. Undoing them would take a lifetime now. The question is: Have I realized it yet completely? Perhaps not.

It is today that perhaps I get a feeling what is the right moment. But still it is vague. And believe me I feel the pain.

Thanks to everyone who has been around for so long time with me. I am here now; 25, at the cross-roads - whatever I have achieved it is because of you. So you must know this and I have to speak it aloud - You are the Best!

Moving out of Gainesville

I am at the Charlotte (NC) airport and thought of writing the blog as I have loads of time before I board my connecting flight to Newark. My flight from Jacksonville had engine problems (US Airways 3222) and the cascading delays have resulted in this wait. But thanks to airline staff, I got my schedule changed from flight departing at 7:55p to one at 6:15p. That leaves me 20 more minutes.

Today is special. Finally making a move out of Gainesville, FL. Home of the Gators. It has been a heck of a stay for the last 18 months or so. So much so that while doing an internship in summer, I was desperate enough to get back. You can say it was a lousy summer experience, but believe me I felt like I missed school and wanted to be back at any cost. I felt at home as soon as I reached the Gainesville Airport back in August.

I feel sad today. Gators won the National Championship this year. I watched each and every game as if I had adopted a new religion. I started watching so much football that even till today I check the espn/cbs websites for school recruits for the next year game. I wish the Gators all the best and with Tebow I have supreme confidence and pride to state that we will go and have another one next year. Go Gators!

Back to me. It is going to be NY/NJ destination for an unknown amount of time. I am moving to the capital of US (I mean common, who goes to DC). The city, the culture. The events, the who&whos you see in televison. The madness, the blood rush, the competition, the die hard attitude and over all home of the New York Giants. Its going to be the start of another chapter. And I am as excited as anybody. And did I mention that my work kind of relates to reporting what happens in Wall Street? (Its just kind of; ok might be - I accept, I have no clue yet)

Low and behold, there is much to do in upcoming days in NYC. Places to go, things to do, people to meet. If you know of anything I might be missing out before Feb 9th, write in a comment here. If you are in NYC/NJ and would love to show me some places around, drop me a comment. Whats on Feb 9th; thats my joining day at work. So, before I get married to my workaholic schedule, lets get to enjoy for some more time the bachelorhood. Better, if you have a Giants Game Ticket, lemme know and I might* sponsor the party.

So, Adios Gainesville.

*Offer expires soon

Yet Another Interview

An interview call makes you really excited - you think of all the possibilities and aftermath. After the process is over, you are drenched. It might leave you elated if you have done exceedingly well or tired/fatigued if you failed to make a mark. So why am I talking about all this?

After the Bloomberg offer, I send denial emails to few companies I was being interviewed with. Believe me, its hard to send in such emails because I understand how much effort has been put just to get that call. I was lucky I did not try for many and not too hard (Y! rocks in some sense none the less).

I finally applied to Microsoft and going to have an interview on 16th. Everything was going on nice and fine. Till this happened and perhaps I have not had good sleep till yesterday. I can go for a deep slumber now as I don't have much hope from today's encounter :-|

I got an interview with Google. [Please do not ask me about questions - I cannot discuss, nor the emails;]. While I did not expect much preparation, I punched in several lines of code as this was supposed to be a coding exercise. I was doing fairly well with one fear that what if the question does not click me.

What I have realized is that if I know the solution well, I can jot down the code without making a lot of mistakes. Believe me, my code would show up with fewer compile time errors and hmm, a few runtime ones (those which are really really evil and happen only on full-moon days).

But when I do not know of the solution, somehow I am good at explaining them but if asked to explain as well write the code simulateneously, I falter. I perhaps manage to pitch in the overall picture correctly by picking up the grassroot problem; but when it comes to finishing it up - I just go eerie with design blunders. I am not sure what screws up my frame of mind. Is it the constant pressure which mounts every minute of the interview or is it that I have exhausted myself of that creative juice by not taking ample rest before the interview.

A lot of things can be spoken after the interview - the fact is plain & simple. There is room for improvement. I might have polished my coding standards and understanding of c++ a lot better. Given a known algorithm, I can write up the solution quickly and efficiently (something which again I need to work on; I found that I tend to do a lot of pre-optimization; something which brings in those runtime errors - there is a simple solution to this :: Hold yourself till you execute the code). I need to write in more and more code; code which makes me think while I write. I am more of a paper-pencil guy who likes to solve the problem separately and code separately. But this has to change. I don't know how! But perhaps more practice and more experience.

Now that I have begun with one down, lets see how I fair at the MSFT interview. I am not preparing for the same because I prepared a lot for today's interview. I want to take it all in the light spirit. Perhaps over-preparation spoils the party.

Summary:
1. Do not optmize before you execute. Let your code be verbose. You need to make that cut.
2. Relax, relax, relax
3. ?If the solution does not strike to you and you have to start coding any how, What should you do? - Try to find out.

Not just the pursuit, I am happy today

Well not just that I am sober, I am typing this at almost the stroke of the midnight making a lot of spelling mistakes and correcting them. So you know how difficult it is for me to keep it grammatically right till now (pardon me if I really made any).

I finally could score a job offer and look forward to join NYC for the next year. It's a dream to work in NYC. It reminds of so many things I have missed out and I have high expectations from myself as well as the firm I am joining.

I have time for almost Feb 9th to enjoy and make out something finally of this Masters. I know this degree gave me a lot of things to ponder and speculate. But still, the ambitions are not yet fulfilled. It is long road and I need to envisage it. This is perhaps the first step, or perhaps the first success of the few bold steps I have taken in the recent past.

For the die hard techie fans:

From now on::::

From now on::::

Whenever you compile using g++ and use inline ............................... yes u use inline to make your program faster;

Use g++ -O2 or -O3 ...... then only it takes into effect. AND, use gprof to actually measure it, otherwise there is no point in making a function inline - really absolutely no point at all.

Learn how to profile your code today before it is too late, regardless it is jprobe or gprof. I am sorry for the intoxication :)

Inactivity around

I need to order some fizzy drinks I guess.... something really fizzy!

For the past 3 days, since my internship has ended, suddenly I see myself sucked into a land of inactivity. All I do is sit in the Joe's chair (remember the one they had in Friends') and ponder on what should I do next and which one should I do first!! Of course, as you have guessed by now, its not that I can't figure out what to do next, but the list is so damn long and vast - I just can't come to a consensus on what to begin with. So the past 3 days, I have been just day dreaming. At nights, I sleep for 12 hours putting the blame on jet lag "I came from California last week, you know".

Semester just began. I can't still get used to the fact that their is no office to attend. I am a "office" person I guess, while I hate discipline. I can never go to office at 9, technically I can - I would be just half asleep. But if thats not there, there is a big void. To fill it in I come with these strange ideas to fill in my mind and the the rest of the day goes by dreaming and creating castles in air.

I have a long list of software upgrades lined up which include FF3. I am still not sure if I should reformat my laptop to run Ubuntu instead of Vista. I perhaps should do it sooner but I want to know how good Eclipse + Java 1.6 runs on Ubuntu - if you have tried it out, please leave a comment.

I am looking for doing something more this semester. Will probably look forward to build something on python, try my hands on web development and write some big chunk of server code in c++. While all of these targets towards getting myself noticed for a job interview, I sincerely think this is a long term fruit. And throwing away vista would be perhaps the first gear to kick in. But the only difference is that I am running out of time and I can feel it. I feel it really hard now.

Its high time I get high ... aghh .. I mean I dream big ... I mean .... you know what I mean.

[Give me some fizzy drinks]

Making Sense of My Life

I turned 25 today!

Thanks to my new roomies I had quite an awesome night yesterday and the day passed in standing the subsequent repercussions of the party.

Now as the night has fallen in and I have sometime to think and write this blog - I again fall back to the very question I have been asking myself for sometime now. And now that I have crossed the 25 mark, it becomes all the more meaningful.

I have no idea as what to write here - there are so many things going in my mind now that I am LOST!

Where's my education leading me to?
Will I regret ever that I did not try to take up the line of research?
Or will I regret of not taking up the challenge I once set for myself - Did I fail myself and all the people who had faith in me?
What point in my personal life have I reached on?
Have I fulfilled any of my personal goals yet? And do I know what are the next ones slated for me?

And believe me, there's many more .....

I guess I am in no more control of my surrounding and I am just flowing through the river of life as others around me. I have finally become one with the floating mass. Is that what I wanted? I know I can never be same as them - its just an illusion which I might wish to have. Still, even in my dreams, I had thought of something better. True Life is something different; failing even in your dreams is scary.

Is this the end of the road - Or a new beginning? Where's the light?? I expect the big bang to happen soon.

Amen.

Algorithms Mania

Things have been about algorithms lately. Someway or the other. Explaining about dynamic programming to my roommate, convincing people of P != NP consequences and how to move in with things or for that matter taking in witty interview questions or listening to continuous video lectures on NP Completeness and working on all possible sources to get my assignment done (yes, that should be done in polynomial time to meet the submission requirements, ya ya! I know I got freaked out lately).

My algorithms instructor has got me. I would agree on this. He has been great all the sem making us feel good about appreciating algorithms. Note that, I did not say that we are learning to write new algorithms, but merely understanding the beauty of existing ones. It is really fascinating that all what we have learned as of today and for all of those whose concrete proofs are available (in form of textbooks) have been accomplished before 1970s. Or, I will say mid 1970's to be on safer side. For the past 25 years this field, undoubtedly has contributed a lot but in direction which would seem a dead end back then.

The algorithm diaspora covers puzzles from all walks of life. From scheduling small things to building and optimizing complex motives, we rely on algorithms which would be executed by machines and would give us result based on our input set. What is particularly worth noticing here is the problems being discussed are no where in the domain of computer science. For example, the original problem on "3D Matching is NP Complete" had to do with polygamy and marriage between 3 sexes. Is the society ready for anything like that? No, not at all. But still this small problem if solved, would motivate people to link problems to this one and solve them. Or for that matter the N-Queens problem which has a 2^n solution. Come on, I did not see any value of that problem when I learnt about it in my undergrad class. But something of that sort can be transformed to problems in graph theory, wow! I could not envision that. So, yes it amazes me that how much application this field has in whatever walks of life we are in.

So, that brings on to us with questions which are asked during interviews and are supposed to be cracked "On the Spot". Hmmm. Quite a lot of expectation. Performing under pressure is never easy. But if you want to compete against a MIT undergrad who can churn in these solutions without taking a single class in this area, you better hold some ground in this subject. I would classify the problem being asked into 2 categories - One that is crack-able and the Second which are attempt-able. My point is that its good for you that the third category which contains a can of problems which are unsolvable to be as rare as possible. Why? Because you ain't any einstein, so you need not solve problems which he solved. Also, everyone is not in einstein's company, so they won't ask questions which only einstein could solve in his lifetime.

But still, given a problem, it is the approach which matters. Sometimes all you need is to invert the problem upside down to see it naked and surrendering to you. Sometimes you need to get hold of a pivot point for the puzzle to crack. How can I get it right everytime? Wish I knew the answer. The only answer I got was : Practice, practice and practice. You see things when you dive into it. Effort put in makes the picture a lot clearer in this subject. And the best part is that, when you are able to connect those dots, you feel like getting eternal bliss. You feel like you just cracked the $1M Netflix question, when actually what you have done has been done-undone-redone atleast a billion times.

Lately I have been thinking it would have made a lot of sense if the subject had been divided into 2 parts (Algo-I and Algo-II) and taught during our undergrad classes. It is the heart and soul of computer science, come on you need to give some time to it!

Why so much of a rant on algorithms. Because what I am going to do in the next 8 months has everything to do with algorithms but would not be specific to it. While it is true that I would be using existing ones, but the fact is that I am free to choose them and that makes it more difficult because it tests my understanding of the subject and how good am I in expressing my problem and transforming it into a solved puzzle of this subject. So why am I so afraid? The truth is that I did not do justice to this subject. I got busy with projects and blah blah and neglected this. But everytime, I tried to get hold of whats happening in the course, I just wished that I could have paid more attention to it. I am not great in solving puzzles, but I have noticed that by taking small steps towards breaking down the complexity of these questions, we can increase the likelihood of us cracking them down in minutes. All it requires is TIME. You give undivided attention and there you see things happening. But I must tell you that, it is something which cannot be done in 2 days. I know of the consequences of that statement and I am ready to accept it.

Next time you see someone in Computer Science scribbling something on a paper and cracking his head, give him some free space and time :) Not that you abandon him. Because what he is trying to do is work out his mind. And that makes him a healthy person in some aspect of life!