Tech Event conducted at Abacus 2010

Hello friends,

Back again after a month to another blog post. This post is about the event conducted by our class students(CSE H Batch) at Abacus, National Level Technical symposium organised by Dept. of Computer Science, CEG.

Event’s Name selected was “:P”, for no reason. But the contest was not meant to be that. The questions were about Microsoft, Windows, Linux, Google, Internet etc. There were around 100 teams participating and we had some tough time evaluating the answers.

This is the link to PowerPoint presentation we had displayed. And if you need answers, do comment here or mail me, I'll send to you, since displaying them here will not be that good. http://www.4shared.com/dir/gakBnshJ/sharing.html

The first round went on for about 40 mins and response was very good. While evaluating we found some answers to be very humorous (and funny) that,  many of us were completely
roflol -ing(:P). 

For example, question  3’s  one of the answers was, Lindsay Lohan is torvald’s wife.(Man!! how can it be .. ??). The Ultimate one was for question 10 where one team wrote “Alt+F9”.. (Get out of the Turbo C  world dudes..). We selected 6 finalists and there were answers which suggested that Google was used to find them, but no one cant stop the curiosity.

Second round was hands on(participants were given a lap top), where challenges were given and participants were asked to finish them and get the points assigned. The link above has the questions. This round went on for about 1.5 hours. Some of the questions were damn easy and others were very tough that one cant crack without googling, but we didn't give access to internet. Winners were selected based on the number of questions answered and the weightage to them.

Overall, the event was one of its kind at this year’s Abacus and I would like to thank all my classmates who helped to conduct this event and Abacus team for  making this event a grand success.

P.S: Questions were chosen by Arun.B(arun04ceg@gmail.com), myself(naveen.cse.csg@gmail.com) and Sanath Kumar(dayanandasaraswati@gmail.com).

Virtualization- Run any Operating System on your Machine

Hi Friends,

    Its been a month since my last blog post. I wasn't able to write due to various works I had in my college. In this post I am going to tell about running an OS(operating system) within another OS.

Most of us will have an eager to see how a newly released operating system will be looking like and what are the new features available or some of us will need to install some other OS other than what is in our system for some project work or for learning purposes and some of us will not be having enough hardware specifications to run a new OS. In these cases virtualization comes to our help.

There are many softwares available now a days to run an OS above another one, like VMWare, Virtualbox from sun(Now Oracle) etc. All are equal in functionalities and capabilities. I am going to explain how to install XP using Virtual Box(Box installed in Linux).

The most exciting part is that Virtual Box supports many Host and Guest Operating Systems. For eg. one can install Windows 7 over Linux (or windows of course) or install Linux(any possible Distros) over Windows(or Linux).

The various steps in doing it are below.,

1. Installing Virtual Box

Download Virtual Box from Virtual Box’s website.

Windows users can download the executable from here :
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.6/VirtualBox-3.1.6-59338-Win.exe

Linux users can select executable depending on your Distro from this page:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads
It can also be installed through package managers or “apt-get”

and Mac OS X users can download the executable from here:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/3.1.6/VirtualBox-3.1.6-59351-OSX.dmg

Windows users can just double click the executable and install.
Linux users’ installation depends on the type of file you download. If you are an Ubuntu User, I suggest you to download .deb file from the link above and just double click.
I don't have a Mac, but I think that the installation and the other features are same.

2. Configuring the Virtual box to install the Guest Operating systems.

Step 1: Starting Virtual Box.

• Windows Users can see in the Start Menu
• Linux users can find it in Applications->System tools

After the Virtual Box is started it looks like this..

You can see that I already have Windows 7 installed in the Virtual Box. “seven” indicates that.

Step 2: Creating a new Machine

Click on “New” button to create a new Machine, a new window appears.

Click the next button.

Step 3: Selecting Operating System

In the next screen select the OS you want as guest(That you want to install), in the next drop down select the version of OS (Distro also).

 

Step 4: Setting the RAM (to be used by the guest OS)

Set the amount of RAM you need to give to the Guest OS. Of course it can be higher than that is available and also when you give more than half the size of your available RAM virtual box throws warnings.

Step 5: Settings for Hard Disk size, allocation and location

The Screen below asks whether to create a new Virtual Hard Disk or use an existing one. Its better to create a new one. So selecting that option should be done.

In the screen below select the dynamic storage, so the memory in your Hard disk will be used whenever required. In the consequent screen give a name for your Guest and also specify the size of Hard disk you need to give to guest. I have allocated 4 GB for my guest.

Step 6: Confirmation

All the settings will be shown and just click on the Finish Button.(you would have to press finish in two screens that follow).

 

3. Installing Operating System

Now that all the settings have been set, you you need the specify the iso from which installation should take place.

In this screen you can see that a new space for new OS has been created. Now click on the settings of that OS, screen below is displayed.

Select ISO image file and select Xp’s iso (by giving the location of the ISO File).

After that select Ok and click on Start or right click on the OS’s option and click start. It should come like this.

The procedure for installing is the same as you do in normal case. After installing XP in virtual box it looked like this (:P). This is run inside Box.

After installing it works like a normal Operating systems and you can use it easily.

I have also installed windows 7 in Virtual Box(in ubuntu) and it looks like this..

 

There is another way to install the OS if you have a friend already installed guest in his/her system. There is a format called as Open Virtualization Format(OVF) and you can get a ovf image from one of your friends or from another machine where guest is installed. There is an export feature and ovf gets created.

And in your system select import and selecting the ovf file will just import. Work done(:D) easily. No need to install over it again .. :)

Though this post looks long, its filled with lot of screens and an easy installation manual(like).

If you feel anything about my post drop in your comments and if you have any doubts in installing or using the Virtual box or any other related software also just drop in your comments, will reply you in very less time. If you generally like my blog, follow it or follow on Twitter at www.twitter.com/dsnaveen

Add-ons one should have with Firefox [Updated]

Add-ons one should have with  

This post was actually written for CEGLUG’s magazine TUX, I am sharing for my blog readers.                            

In this post I'm going to tell about the most useful Add-ons or extensions that can be used with Firefox Web Browser, varying from Web Development to Entertainment. Let me start with most known and used add-on Firebug.

Firebug:

            Firebug allows us to edit, debug, monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page. You are seeing a site and say "wow", how this has been coded? There is always Ctrl+U to show the source code. But it’s very difficult to find some parts in a big web page. For this Firebug offers "Inspect", with which you can just move the mouse over a part of page or a frame or an image, it will show the source code in a window. This is one of the cool features Firebug provides.

                The other things that can be done are:

        Tweak CSS to perfection- means we can just change code then and there and see the effect of change dynamically reflected in the webpage.

        Visualize CSS metrics- Firebug will be our eyes and it will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, borders, padding, and sizes for us.

        Monitor network activity- To see how much time is taken to retrieve an Element in webpage.

        Explore the DOM- Firebug helps us find DOM objects quickly and then edit them on the fly.

        Quickly find errors- Firebug marks error in a page with a red cross and gives a detailed information of that error.        
             

           

Chickenfoot:

   The next add-on we will see is Chickenfoot. Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser's sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of JavaScript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

For example, lets type go("google.com") and press Alt+R to run the script. Google.com will be loaded. Now if you give as remove("advanced search link") and run the script, the advanced search link will be removed from your page. Isn’t it great? Yes, it also offers various other JavaScript editing tools.

DataFox:

 Next is DataFox. This is a Bandwidth usage finder for Dataone Broadband users. It takes hell lot of time to login to the dataone site and check for our usage. Most of the times (in my case it happened) website tells “Time Out” and ask us to login again. This is when I searched for an add-on and ended up in this. DataFox is a bandwidth usage monitor for BSNL’s DataOne and MTNL’s TriBand broadband services. It gives us with lot of preferences that will help us to use it more effectively. One preference I have enabled is that "Update on Start Up", so that every time I open browser, DataFox will display my usage, so that I can manage the available resources well J.

ColorZilla:

            This is a cool add-on that gives you the HTML code and RGB code of any color you can see on your browser. Very handy for those designing interfaces. The other features are Online Palette Viewer, Allows viewing, bookmarking and sharing any color palette, provides a permalink URL that represents any set of colors, online Eyedropper shows colors in RGB, HSV and additional formats.

Live HTTP Headers:  

             Live HTTP Headers is an add-on that helps us to view the http headers in real time (i.e., while the page is downloading). It helps us to see which kind of web server the remote site is using, see the cookies sent by remote site etc.

ChatZilla:

                        ChatZilla provides the features of an IRC Client from your browser. This add-on allows us to use many chat rooms, easy for searching rooms on a particular topic and supports logging and file transfers too. IRC is particularly useful for Open Source Geeks who like to contribute by fixing the bugs and writing new add-ons for the available softwares.

Adblock Plus:

                        Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now you can get rid of them. Yes, Adblock blocks ads, applets, flash, embedded-media etc. If you find something annoying in a webpage that is not blocked, just Right-Click on that part of page and just choose “Adblock”. It will not be downloaded again.

iMacros:

                        iMacros is very similar to Chicken foot, but without the extensive JavaScript. If you want to automate something with JavaScript (and use the JS DOM) – use ChickenFoot, if you want to automate something graphically – use iMacros Record and replay repetitious work. Anything from filling out forms, remembering passwords, testing forms etc.

           A great time saver for those using badly coded websites, which reloads the form again when we have submitted with some kind of error in input. Just press Record and fill the form. If form reloads again empty saying “Time-Out” or an error, just press Replay Button. Your form will be filled in automatically.

Text Link:

                        This small add-on allows to double-click on an URI that’s not been linked. Without this extension, when you discover an URI text not linked, like "http://www.ceglug.org/ you just have to Double-click on the URI text rather than copy-paste or drag-drop. Then, Firefox loads it. It saves lot of time.

Moonlight:

                        Next time you see a website telling “Download Silverlight for better functioning” and you use Firefox ( I don’t think you would be using IE .. :P), just download Moonlight which is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Linux systems. This supports moon-shine media player and also all the possible codecs.

Speed Dial:

                        If you had used Opera Browser, you would have seen the speed dial feature. This Speed Dial is an add-on for our Firefox browser which provides direct access to most visited websites. But unlike the one in Opera this has more functionality like adding more dials than 25, and a lot of customizable features.

Updated.. 27-04-10

 

Echofon:

                  Echofon is an excellent and an useful extension if one is ardent user of Twitter. Installing this adds an Icon into the status bar which shows updates in your tweets. It  notifies when your friend tweets and also gives a text box where in one can type their tweet.

 

Another feature that is most exciting is., when you see a link and you like to tweet it to your friends, that can be done in a single click.

 

Read It Later:

                  This add-on allows one to save the pages you need to read later. Every link can be saved and you can view the pages later without any internet connection.This is not it, you can also sync saved pages between devices like your Iphone, Ipad, Android, or any other smartphone. (Sync between computers also possible).

 

Though there are many add-ons, these are some of the add-ons one must have with Firefox.

I hope this article would be useful to everybody. If you have any queries try googling or binging :D.

P.S: Thanks to Sanjeev for giving Ideas to write about the last two add ons.  :)

A post with Windows Live Writer

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Microsoft Interview Questions

Hi all,
       Here is my first useful post in this blog.I will be posting about my experience with Microsoft interview. Team from Microsoft visited my college this December (for placement) and I had been fortunate enough to attend the test in which I learnt a lot. Here I give the questions asked for me in both written and subsequent rounds.
Written Test:
      The test had 4 questions and time given was about 1 hour. Questions were

1. A program was given and we were asked to debug the code so that it works as desired. The program's aim was "finding the meeting point of two linked lists".  It was quite simple and some of errors were like in allocating memory, some logical errors. But its doable.
2. Given a Circuit (with resistors), we need to calculate the total resistance. Input will be like AB-5ohm, BC-6ohm, BC-10ohm, BC-20 ohm, CD-5 ohm. BC has been repeated twice implying they are in series. "Write a program  by implementing efficient data structure for storing and calculating the total resistance". I used stack using linked list and implemented which works for almost all combinations of circuits (but didnt work for some :D).
3. "Write test cases for reversing words of string ". For eg. "This is nice" is input string and output is "nice is This". We need to write test cases for this program,(not the program for it). Writing some 5 to 10 will do. Start from some of the very simple cases like for eg. "Check whether the program in accepting input".
4. You have been asked to write features of an "Universal Remote Controller".  Eg. "It will support TV,System, DTH etc". 

  The interviews in MS will be a loop process where a person has to attend interviews in a loop(every interviewer will interview us once). We need to satisfy all the four to get into MS. These are the questions asked for me in the three iterations of the loop I attended.(Totally 4, I was thrown out after 3. :D) .

Round 1: 

It lasted for about 1 hour and 15 mins, with the questions mostly from what is written in your resume.Some of the questions asked were,

• What were your challenging projects? I named one and I was asked to write test cases for that. Interviewer was not satisfied until I gave around 10 test cases.
• Deletion of a node in linked list.. seems pretty simple , he was expecting a code with good coding standards. From there discussion went upto locks and mutexes in OS. 
• Print a Random word from a file. Input is "path to a file", constraints- No extra memory like hashing etc. All the words in the file should have equal probability.
• Rectangles overlapping questions, write test cases.(I had seen this already). This is a popular MS question. I started writing immediately after he gave the question(without asking much details). Seeing that he asked whether I had known the question earlier, I said yes.(Reason I am saying is, at the end while he was telling the points he noted in this laptop during the course of interview, one was the points was honesty. It counts in interview :D). I have seen here.

Within 5 mins I was called for second round and questions were,

Round 2:
This time I was asked just one question and interview lasted for 1 hour 15 mins.
"Given a large number with many digits, propose a method or data structure to efficiently store them. Addition, subtraction, mult, division should be supported by your design."  He asked for a valid(working) C++ code .

Immediately after that round I was called for the next and this round lasted for just 20 mins.

Round 3:
Given a matrix, we need to transform it in such a way that  if an element is zero, we need to zero out the contents of corresponding row and column(of that element). Only minimal extra space allowed, test cases was also asked. I gave some solutions,but he didnt get satisfied as the I used more space than what he asked.
eg. if the matrix is
1 1 1
1 1 1
1 1 0
the output matrix is
1 1 0
1 1 0
0 0 0.

These were the questions asked for me.For all the rounds we need to write the code in paper and he ll be monitoring us from the other side of desk.Some may be asked to write the code in board also. Please feel free to discuss the solutions here and ask any doubts if u have.

Things I learnt from MS interview :

• Thinking aloud, interviewers need to know what you think abt when they ask questions. 
• Coding with standards.
•  How to answer questions if we dont know the solution.

These were some I learnt.  There are many sites that give microsoft questions and if u want to prepare just google "microsoft interview questions" and u ll get numerous sites. All the best for your job interviews. :)

For microsoft internship questions, see this post by my friend.
http://blog.ceglug.org/sanath/?p=54

Life, the Universe and Everything (Hello World)

Hi all,

       Well, this is my first blog post. I thought of actually writing a blog for a long time now and now finding interest to do so :). In this blog one can find everything about me,my interests,about programming,about interviews, about sports(cricket, tennis,F1), about new tech things (err..list keeps on going.. so stopping here :D). Let me see if I can blog well.. :)