Yahooooo!

Yes, I’m a yahooligan as of 1:30 AM, September 15th, 2006. I’ve had the good fortune of Yahoo taking part in my college’s campus recruitment drive. I actually waited for Yahoo to come along and I’m happy that my wait for yahoo has ended fruitfully. I will be working as a software Engineer in the Products Engineering group in Y! R&D, Bangalore.
The interview was a gruelling 5 rounds: 2 written rounds, 1 technical interview and 1 coding round. The coding round was the highlight of their process, where we were given a problem, which we have to design and code, As for my interview, I was asked to write an HTML parser. Thank god(or P Mohan!) that I learnt Python. I was pretty sure that i wouldn’t be able to do it in C(it was too low level), C++ with STL was worth a shot, but i didn’t want to take the risk (My affair with STL is a very recent one). I was contemplating on coding it in C++ when they announced that coding can be done in any language of my choice. The rest as they say is history…
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my parents and my brother for believing in me and supporting me all the way, My teachers(acadamic and otherwise) and all my friends : you guys are the best teachers I could have asked for.

New Cell Phone

Finally decided to buy myself a cell phone. 2 hours down the road and i can see how demanding/amusing/annoying a cell phone can be.

Incident 0:

My first sms announcing my entry to cell-dom. And i forget to put my name there. Received not-so-warm wishes from my friends. I find the keypad not as friendly as my qwerty keyboard.(Not that i type well in that, but hey Its much worse here!)
Incident 1:

Message 1: Hi

Message 2: cell vaangittiya? (you’ve bought a cell?)

Me: Who is this?

Message 3: guess (right! like i have ESP. I have enough trouble looking at things 4 feet infront of me)

Me: I don’t have the patience for games. Who is this?
Message 4: it’s Me da.(oh damn, sorry man. i couldn’t recognize you the first time you messaged me.)

I didn’t have the heart/nerve to reply to this Einstein after this.

Incident 2:

The High point of the day was when i told my friend Velu that i got myself a cell phone. He just said one line that defined it perfectly

“welcome to the world of useless gadgets”

Let’s see if he’s right

On Sorting and why you should attend classes

Back in my 3rd Semester i always used to wonder why i need to study so many sorting algorithms when we don’t use them anyway. I knew it was for us to “start thinking” but i never really applied it to my course of life.

Fast forward four semesters and it dawned on me while skimming through Skiena’s Programming Challenges

” You’ve quite possibly seen a dozen or more different algorithms for sorting data. Do you remember bubblesort, insertion sort, selection sort, heapsort, merge sort, quick sort, radix sort, bin sort, Shell sort, in-order tree traversal and sorting networks? Most likely your eyes started to glaze by the time you made it halfway though the list. Who needs to know so many ways of doing the same thing, especially when there already exists a sorting library function included in your favourite programming language?

The real reason to study sorting algorithms is that the ideas behind them reappear as ideas behind algorithms for many other problems. Understand that heapsort is really about data structures, that quick sort is really about randomization, and that merge sort is really about divide-and-conquer, and you have a wide range of algorithmic tools to work with”

It only then after some after-thought, that i found these as proof for what he said

The MRQ problem

http://acm.mipt.ru/judge/problems.pl?problem=105

Typical Divide and conquer, infact a senior of mine solved it using an algorithm that was very similar to merge sort.

Finding the kth smallest number – Uses a modification of the quick sort algotihm

Sigh, i wish i had listened in class.