I'm Feeling Lucky!

I have completed my college life. No more exams, no more results, no more bunking first half and sleeping and lots of other things will be no more. At this point, I want to take some time out, share the experience of my amazing roller coaster ride and thank the people who mattered and have helped me get where I am today (and where I will be in a few months :-P).

The Dream

Just like every computer science student, I had a dream too. My dream started along a bit early. Right from my school days, I had two role models. I had only one dream. I found a few 6 year old messages in my gtalk log where i was cribbing to my friends about my dream of working at my dream company at its headquarters.

The Start

I got through a really good job during my on-campus placements. It is at this point most people get carried away, but somehow i managed to not fall into that trap and thereby miss my dream. I chose to do my final semester internship in another company so that I will have bandwidth to explore other options. Btw, the workplace where I am doing my internship is awesome (this place is so awesome that I just can't stop boasting about it whenever I talk of internships).

Ok coming back to the topic, naturally the first step was to prepare for other companies' interviews. I started doing that and decided to apply to a company by end of March. Thankfully, one of my friends knew a person there who could refer me and get me an interview (btw, my friend happens to be a really wonderful human being who has helped me whole heartedly whenever i needed any help. He also happens to be my college senior and i am heavily indebted to him!). Off went my resume into the company and i got an automated "thank you for your interest in us" email.

The Phone Call

Then the recruiter called me and was ready to set me up with interviews beginning with a phone screening. I was told I would get a call by 11 AM. The interviewer had some issues in dialing in my number so it got delayed by 10 minutes. One of the worst 600 seconds of my life where I was tensed to the core. Once the interviewer called me, time flew off. Einstein was right.

I felt quite confident. Eventhough i didn't nail the interview, I felt it was far away from being tagged along a tweet as #pathetic. Few days later, I got an email from my recruiter stating that I have cleared the phone screening and will have to visit their office in Hyderabad for on site interviews.

The Visit

I was plagued with sickness and was in a severe low health for a few days before the interview. They flew me from Chennai to Hyderabad on the evening before the interview. I have been informed that I would be picked up by a cab as soon as I landed at Hyderabad. That was the first "awe" moment of the trip. The cab driver was standing at the arrival lounge with a placard that had my name.

I couldn't have dinner that night, couldn't have breakfast on the day of the interview. Somehow i reached the office. The first thing I noticed was the sheer enormity of the Hyderabad office. It was just too good.

Thankfully Air India was flying that day!

Once I reached the office, I had to have a sticker with my name printed on it (a temporary id card sorta thing). Since it wouldn't stick to my t shirt, i had to stick it around my arm like a watch!

And then there were 6!

Then started the interview process. There were 6 rounds each comprising of 45 minutes to one hour. I had a lunch break in between for half hour and eventhough i couldn't eat much (because of my illness), i was totally mesmerized by the food court that they had. The interviews were over around 6 o clock in the evening and I came back to Chennai the same night. It was a long day and i was totally down with illness at the night.

The Wait

Next came the worst part, waiting for the results. I don't know what to write in this column, but there a few things and people that helped me overcome this strenuous period. My work at internship gave me some distractions but night times were a nightmare where I barely slept for 2 or 3 hours.

The Surprise

Then came the call on 17th May, stating that I have gotten through and that I will be intimated about the work location in a day or two. I was wonderstuck, I had no words to describe what it meant to me. I mean, it was my dream ever since from when I was at school. Fortunately, I was with the people I love when the call came and I could not have been more happier.

As it turns out, the call on May 17th wasn't the happiest moment in my life. That came a few days after, when I received my offer letter. It was a totally unexpected freaking surprise. My salary was mentioned in US dollars. I was searching the letter to know my work location (as I was most eager to know whether the work location would be Bangalore or Hyderabad). When I found it, my heart just froze, I mean, it just froze. It was my dream location. It was what I dreamed about in my school days. It was whose pictures I posted in Orkut years back when it was my dream.

It was a DREAM COME TRUE !

The People

None of this would have happened if not for the really supportive people around me. I have an amazing set of F.R.I.E.N.D.S from college and school. I really owe them for all their support over the past howmanyever years I have known them.

Another bunch of people whom I really owe a lot are my friends in twitter. It was one of the main reasons why I was able to achieve my dreams. Every discussion (the technical ones) I had in twitter had been a value addition to me. When I think of it, few people come to my mind immediately. Thanks a lot guys, eventhough we've hardly met in person, you are a vital part of my life.

Thanks are due to my parents who have been alongside me for every single decision I took in my life. They trusted me totally and I hope I have justified that trust to a certain extent now.

Apart from them, I sincerely thank all of you who have been a part of my life over the past 22 years. Without you people, I will not be where I am today.

Conclusion

I am joining my first full time job in a few months. I am living in dreams when i think of the fact that i am going to be working in the same place where people like Prabhakar Raghavan, Matt Cutts, Guido van Rossum, Joshua Bloch, Robert Love (and not to mention Larry Page and Sergey Brin) work. My life cannot be more close to perfect than it is now. Once again, I sincerely thank each and every one of you!

I'm Feeling Lucky!

-Vignesh

P.S.: I have not mentioned about one very important person in this post. That is completely intentional and the reason for that being lack of words to describe what that person means to me. :-)

Pre School Problem - A programmer's approach!

Flashback - A few weeks ago

I came across this question in facebook. It said, "This problem can be solved by pre-school children in 5-10 minutes, by programmers in 1 hour, by people with higher education.. well check it yourself :)"

I shared this post and we had few nice sessions of fun with my colleagues in office. Myself and a colleague of mine were discussing about this and i told him, "the best part about this puzzle is that it cannot be solved programatically". And we carried on with our lives.

Train Journey - Last night


Last night when i was travelling by train, I had gotten a side lower berth and hence couldn't sleep (i have grown too tall to fit in to side berths :-( ). So, i had to while away time. I was tweeting, finished through a couple of stanford algo and nlp class videos. Then i had nothing to do, phone was almost running out of charge and so was the laptop. So i closed everything and started staring outside the window. Various thoughts came across, and one among them was "is there no way to programatically solve that facebook puzzle?".

Thus I started thinking about it, the first solution that came to my mind was to convert the numbers into a linear system of equations and apply linear regression on it. Then, the value of the co-efficients would give the mapping between a number and how we arrive at the solution (explained in detail below).

Coding Session - Today


I came home had a nice sleep. When i woke up, the first thing i wanted to do was to test out if my theory works. Obviously python (numpy) was the toolkit in my arsenal that would help me do this quicky. So here are the steps:

• Convert the input number into co-efficients of 0 or 1. For example, 2172 would translate to [0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0]. (i th element denotes the number of times number i occurs).
• Now we have the coefficient matrix ( of size n x 10 where n is the number of inputs).
• We also have the constants column vector which are the known outcomes
• Now, we apply linear regression on this system to get the output
• Output will be a mapping between a number and how much it contributes to the output (0 maps to 1, 1 maps to 0, 2 maps to 0 and so on.)
• So to compute the outcome of a new number, merely sum the mappings of the digits in that number.

The whole program is embedded below:

The output of the program is:

['0 maps to 1', '1 maps to 0', '2 maps to 0', '3 maps to 0', '4 maps to 0', '5 maps to 0', '6 maps to 1', '7 maps to 0', '8 maps to 2', '9 maps to 1']

As we can see, that's a perfectly valid mapping!

Moral of the story:

1. Mathematics is really powerful. 
2. We can teach a computer much faster than we teach a pre-school kid. ;-)

-Vignesh

DOMCA - Days of my lives!

Note: This is a personal article about my college.

Department of Mathematics and Computer Applications, more commonly known as DOMCA within PSG Tech. It is the place where i spent 5 years of my college education. I have come across many students who have been a part of this department over the past 10 years, mostly through social media like twitter or facebook. But nowhere have i seen an article/post that talks about the fame and pride of this department. So I decided to do that part and this article is my small contribution to the department where i lived for 5 fun filled years.

To begin with, the department offers 4 masters programmes none of which is a BE/BTech/ME/MTech programme. Now, its really tricky to be in an engineering college, especially one of calibre as high as PSG Tech, and to belong to a department that doesn’t have an engineering programme. There will be a lot of internal politics and complexes going on among students between engineering and non-engineering stream within the college, and obviously DOMCA’ites find themselves in the minority (as there are around 15 to 20 different engineering programmes compared to 4 programmes in DOMCA).

But despite all that, the department have managed to produce students of world quality (yes, you read it right, i said “world” quality) excelling in mix of qualities. Its more of a “you name it, we have it” kind of place. Starting from the orientation talk on my very first day, to the last hour of class I attended and the last exam i wrote in my 5th year, i thoroughly enjoyed every single moment i spent in the department.

Key #1 to any department is their students. None of the programmes offered by DOMCA admits students through the government’s single window system, which means there are no school level state toppers in DOMCA. Yet, we somehow manage to groom ourselves through five awesome years of college experience that gives you an example for almost every possible situation that you would ever face in your life.

Key #2 to any department is their faculties. I am not going to claim that all the faculties are awesome. Some of them are really top notch (by this, i mean "world" class). Some of them are lame. But what makes DOMCA faculties unique is their willingness to learn, their willingness to teach us what we want rather than teaching us whats prescribed in the syllabus.

An even more important factor that decides the success of any department is student-faculty interaction. This is something that i personally think DOMCA nails to perfection. All faculties are friendly. Some of them, "literally" friendly. Whenever you have a problem, academic or personal they are there to help you out. I can even quote some of them as best examples of purity by heart.

Every person who is at DOMCA right now, or who are going to be a part of this wonderful place, rejoice it. Your sophisticated office cubes can never match TCS Lab. Your super duper fast multi core giant machine in office can never beat the fun offered by the dabbas in CC. I really wish i could be back at the department some day.


There are a lot of shortcomings, but in the long run, you hardly remember the shortcomings as you remember the good things. So, that's where this post is coming from, all the good things i have been through in the past five years.


This may not be Carnegie Mellon. This may not be Stanford. But our hearts really are proud every time we quote that we are from DOMCA in PSG Tech. So, according to me and possibly many others who were a part of this wonderful department, this isn’t just a department where they teach you subjects, this is an ecosystem that has been built upon human values.


To quote Sheldon, “I love PSG Tech, But my feelings for DOMCA are much greater. It is the singular location in space around which revolved my entire universe."

-Vignesh

Social Photos - Move photos between Google+, Flickr and Facebook!

Introducing Social Photos - http://social.foamsnet.com

A spin off project from my earlier Orkut Deja Vu. This cool web app lets you transfer photos between Google+, Facebook and Flickr using an intuitive drag and drop interface.

Do check it out and leave your feedbacks! :) Once again, the URL is http://social.foamsnet.com

-Vignesh

Having, Giving, Sharing and Receiving!

I was at at a local pizza place yesterday for dinner with a friend. After we had dinner there were two slices of pizza left and i asked the store guy to pack it for me. When we came out of the restaurant, there was a young lad who looked like a beggar and was asking us for money. My friend handed over the packed pizza to him and his face just lightened up. He sat on the platform and starting opening the box very eagerly.

Thats when we realized, giving feels really good. Whether its a material or whatever it may be, giving feels really good. No wonder teaching is the noblest job ever. I have been reading a lot of novels and philosophy books off late. In many of those, people are really thankful for even for the silliest of things, for example, one of the characters i read was thankful just to be born an American during world war 2. Why can't we be thankful for the fact that we don't struggle to get a meal thrice a day without giving a damn? Thankfulness and Gratitude are something thats highly underrated these days. In the modern era, how many of us even bother to thank fellow human beings for the smaller helps that they do to us?

Lets have a look at the major festivals that we celebrate every year. Tamil new year, Pongal, Birthday, Wedding Anniversary, Diwali, Christmas, Ramzan, and much more. Out of these we buy new clothes atleast for two or three of them. Just think of choosing one of these festivals every year, and instead of buying new clothes, donate it to people who can get more basic needs out of that money. Trust me, it feels damn good. When a kid sells drawing books in street, buy them. It will hardly cost 5 or 10 rupees. But the impact that it will make on the kid is significant.

I am no expert in moral values, but i think smallest of gestures can make us feel good and proud. Let us take a stand, feel good ourselves and more than that, make a difference in someone's life.

While writing this post, i couldn't help but remembering this dialogue of Joey's from Friends. Listen to it and have a good laugh :)

-Vignesh P.S.: Did someone figure out the head fake about this post ? It is a desperate attempt to prove that this blog is still not dead :)

This, That and More - The story of our Farewell :-)

Its the time of life that almost everyone has to experience. There is always a time when extreme fun ends. The farewell to college life is the event where one really realizes what he/she has done over the past 5 years, how lame he/she has been over the past 5 years, where he/she realizes the actuality that this part of life is going to end soon.

It was one such day in our lives. October 8, 2011 - The day that made many people who hadn't knew what a tear was previously in their lives cry their ass off.

The day was full of surprises. It wasn't just the day. The whole tale of farewell, right from the informal invitation to the formal invitation to the awesome ride to the farewell venue (which we never knew till we got there) was full of surprises.

Suspension Memo

Let me rewind back a few days to start telling this story. It was a usual day in college and I was with my friend in a nearby pani poori shop. My phone started ringing and at first I was kind of amused to see that it was my dad calling me (usually he never calls me unless its some emergency). I picked up the call and he said, "hey whats happening in college? we have received a letter from college that looks very threatening. it says you are suspended!". At first thought, though i was shocked, I definitely knew it was some prank. Then i asked him to read it out fully and confirmed it was indeed a prank. It was the informal farewell invitation that i was talking about! Many people fell for the letter. Few girls even started crying right away when their parents called!

(Click to Enlarge)

Handmade Invitation

Two days before farewell, the juniors asked us all to assemble in a classroom during lunch. It was quite a small classroom and there were 130 people in it. Needless to say the amount of noise we were producing would definitely turn all the heads to look at us. Then, each one of the juniors came and gave us an invitation. My first thought on seeing the invitation was that it was really awesome. For one, it was totally handmade. 70 handmade invitations? Thats a loooooootttttt of work to do!! It also had a nice picture of both our batches together. As one of my friends rightly pointed out, "anyone can spend a lot of money, but putting in effort for preparing 70 invitations really shows love!".

Note that, its just two days to farewell, and we don't know the venue yet.

Trailer

To add to all the expectations, the juniors released a trailer video for the farewell. Still, no clue of the venue! They kept us guessing!

The D Day - Assembly at IM Amphitheater

Even on the day of farewell, we didn't know the venue. We all gathered at IM amphitheater, 5 or 6 juniors were along with us to direct the proceedings. When everyone was there, the first instruction was to "Proceed to Peelamedu Bus Stop". People started fussing! What? Bus stop? Really?

The Journey to the Venue!

The first surprise of the day was parked at Peelamedu Bus Stop, we weren't going to take a city bus. There was a specially arranged bus which was waiting to take us to the venue! Even the bus driver was properly trained to play along with the lines of juniors to keep up the suspense of the venue!

The bus first started westward (towards lakshmi mills), so the first thing we did was to strike off of the major hotels on the east (jennys club, park plaza and le meridian). The bus journey was on and so was the music and dancing within no time. The bus slowed down and stopped in front of Tristar Deja Vu! Everyone shouted saying, "Yaay! We've reached! Our guess was right!". One of the junior guys got down and talked to the hotel security. He came back into the bus and said, "This hotel is very bad, olunga paint kooda adikala, we'll go somewhere else!". That was the heights of surprise!

Then the bus took a "U" turn. Everyone was able to guess the venue after the U turn! It was definitely one of the three hotels which we struck off earlier. The journey went on, along with the music and dance. We crossed jennys club and park plaza. Now everyone knew the venue! It was Le Meridian!

Le Meridian - Kovai Ballroom 1

Amidst of really personal warm welcome, we entered the room. My first thought on entering the room was "WOW"! I was totally speechless, it was amazingly decorated and well lit.

First item of the day was to celebrate the birthday of an unlucky junior soul. Unlucky because there were around 70 people waiting in the queue to wish him with birthday bums! There was a nice bigg cake with which we celebrated his as well as few others' birthday who fell in the proximity of few days.

Next was a video depicting how we have evolved over the past 5 years. The video rekindled many nice memories from our past. It indeed amazed me to know how much everyone has changed in personality over 5 years. Then came a tea break.

Next was a funny game. It was named "Balloon Bamblimaas!" :-) We were divided into 6 teams. Each team had to choose a person, who will sit on a chair. Rest of the team members have to place a balloon in the first person's lap and burst it by sitting on it! Team who bursts the maximum balloons will win! It was a fun game and as one of my friends very aptly pointed it out, "S.J.Surya kooda indha maari oru game a yosichirukka mattan da!" :-)

Then there was dancing for quite a while with various pairs formed by the juniors! Also, there were special performance by two awesome dancers of my batch, Santhosh and Michael along with the awesome dancer of the juniors batch, Shyam!

Then was the game named "Queen of Sheeba" (never mind the spelling). The queen will ask for an item, which we will have to fetch from some junior and hand it over to the queen. It was ultimate fun. The first thing that queen asked was for a t shirt. One guy was literally stripped in the process of obtaining the t shirt! ;-) Then was many other fun things like cigarette packet, hair clip and gold chain.

Amidst of all things we had lunch. Usually when we get free lunch, that will be the talking point. But in case of yesterday, no one even bothered to say "yaay free lunch". So much was the effect it had on all of us!

Then, there was a challenge wherein guys were asked to wear saree on stage with girls' help orally from their seats, followed by a cat walk and dance! Few of them did it quite successfully!!

Next was, they gave us all a token of rememberance. They had a song for every one of us and kept us guessing who the next person was. The gift was really awesome! It was a wooden piece with each of our photo carved in it along with a statement from their batch! So personalized and so amazing! It was really wonderful! They also gave us a booklet which had feedbacks about our batch from faculty, seniors and juniors.

Then came the feelings part of the day. The part which many thought can get over easily but went in the totally opposite manner. A video was screened. The video again showed various pictures of us over the 5 years. In the last scene of the video, few juniors were talking about things we'll miss and things they'll miss after we go away from college. The scene was well shot with only candle lights. The lights in the auditorium was switched off during the video screening and we were all totally into the video. The last sentence in the video was, "idhellam en panrom edhuku panrom nu engaluku therila. aana neenga therinjukanum nu nenachingana konjam pinnadi thirumbi paarunga! (இதெல்லாம் ஏன் பண்றோம் எதுக்கு பண்றோம்னு தெரியல. ஆனா நீங்க தெரிஞ்சுக்கணும்னு நெனசீங்கன்னா கொஞ்சம் பின்னாடி திரும்பி பாருங்க). Next moment was the one which made many cry. We all turned around, all the lights in the auditorium came on, 70 juniors were standing with each of them holding up a heart shaped balloon in their hands! That was totally the moment of the day! Unforgettable for life!

What happened after that was quite undescribable with words. Overall, it was indeed an amazing day. I was so happy to see the effort that the juniors have put in, in even the tiniest of things. Their attention to detail and level of personalization was highly amazing. In the end, the day concluded with a simple formula, Xanthronz + Embergs = Xanbergs! As one of the facebook statuses aptly described it: 9 A.M - Xanthronz! 11 A.M - Embergs! 5 P.M - Xanbergs!!

Kudos to every single junior who has worked hard and showered your love to make this day make a mark in our hearts permanently!

-Vignesh

Google DevFest 2011 - Bangalore!

Atlast, I attended a professional developer meet! And it couldn't be better. It was the Google Developer Fest organized by Google at Lalit Ashok Hotels, Bangalore. Most of the speakers were from Google headquarters, working on key Google products like Android, Chrome, Maps and App Engine.

The registration process went on very easily as they had a QR code in the confirmation mail, and used an android phone to take a picture of the same and verify the registration. Also, they had queues based on alphabets range. The T-Z queue was empty while the other queues were having atleast 20 to 30 people in it. For the first time in my life, i experienced an advantage of my name starting with V!

In this post, I am sharing the raw notes which i took during the keynote and various other talks. Hope this will be of some use.

Keynote - Android
* 550k+ activations per day
* Complex Screen density vs Size matrix - unifying everything => android
* Always use DPI (density per square inch) for specifying assets
* Honeycomb features
* Fragments
* Loaders - wrapper on top of asynctask
* Action bar
* Tabs
* Animation framework
* Compatibility library
* Multiple APK Support

Keynote - Bleeding edge HTML5 - http://india-devfest-keynote.appspot.com
* Interestingly, this keynote isn't called as "Chrome", though most of the topics were Chrome specific
* 160M active users
* Page Visibility API
* Prerendering
* Offline capabilities
* Web animation - CSS3, WebGL
* Native Client
* Future
* Web intents
* Fullscreen content - Fullscreen API
* Web Audio API - Real time processing and analysis of audio
* WebRTC - Real time communication
* Be updated
* chromestatus.com
* updates.html5rocks.com

Android Market - Tony Chan
* 250k + apps, 6B+ downloads
* In app billing, carrier billing
* Licensing
* All licenses allowed
* Code Obfuscation
* Don't reuse sample code
* In app billing
* Sell only digital content
* Reports for developers
* Device Filter
* Ability to exclude handpicked devices
* Multiple APK
* Filter by specific segments (platform version, screen size, etc.)
* App available as one product listing
* Apps upto 4GB coming soon (50mb app + 2gb archive)
* Pay attention to graphics - Featuring in android market depends mainly on that

Android Fragments & Open Accessory ADK - Tony Chan
* Fragments
* Fragments need not always have UI
* Fragments are an investment for the future!
* Fragments vs <include/>
* Fragments (optional UI, has lifecycle, not standalone, no direct interaction with intents) vs Activity
* Open accesory & ADK
* USB Device basics (Descriptor, etc)
* Open Accessory -> A USB host device that can communicate with an android device (e.g. Arudino)
* Use Android Accessory Protocol for communication

Building Integrated Apps on Google Cloud Technologies - Alfred Fuller
* App Engine intro
* Google Storage
* Store data in google's cloud
* Access via RESTful API
* Objects of any type (100GB / object)
* OAuth / Web browser
* Prediction API
* Machine learning API
* Upload training data -> Build model -> Predict new data
* Many machine learning techniques, Asynchronous training, Many platforms access
* BigQuery
* Analyze massive amounts of data in seconds
* SQL like query language, REST, RPC, etc.
* Batch jobs (Mapreduce)
* App Engine Identity API (For secure authentication)

Google Apps Marketplace - Claudio Cherubino
* Google Apps as a pure platform
* Google Apps APIs
* Success Stories
* OpenID SSO & OAuth
* Provisioning API
* Gmail contextual gadgets
* Sidebar gadgets in Gmail/Calendar
Twitter: @ryguyrg @scottmcmullan @stevenbazyl

Chrome Developer Tools - Boris Smus
* Basics - Cheat Sheet
* Revision history for all changes made inline in dev tools
* Aim to transform this into an IDE
* Commandline API - console.log takes n parameters, copy(), inspect() and $0
* Javascript debugging - See call stack, Pretty print
* Breakpoints - Line, Conditional, Exception, DOM, Event, XHR
* Future
* Extensions can extend developer tools too!
* Use chromiumer
* Remote debugging (--remote-debugging-port=31337 , Blackberry PlayBook only)

Google Places API - Chris Broadfoot
* What is a Place -> Abstract & Concrete
* Available as a web service and as a part of javascript maps library

Designing UIs for Phones and Tables
* UI Patterns for Honeycomb
* Action Bar
* App Icon - Where am i?
* View details - What can i see?
* Action buttons - What can i do here?
* Multi Pane Layouts
* Take advantage of screen real estate
* Consolidate multiple related screens into a compound view (similar to iframe in web)
* Screen rotation handling - Stretch (Settings), Stack (Calendar), Expand/Collapse (Gtalk), Show/Hide (Gmail)
* App Navigation
* Beyond the List
* Think and use innovative UIs to replace traditional lists (carousel, slidestack, etc.)
* Do's
* Aim for single APK
* Use compatibility library
* Customize visual design completely, if straying from Holo theme
* Support both landscape and portrait
* Extract dimensions for phones and tablets
* Use theme/style/etc. to reduce redundancy
* Marry OS visual style with your brand
* Don'ts
* Assume API level >= 11 (tablet)
* Assume xlarge == tablet (7" inch tablet is large)
* Use small font sizes
* Overuse fill_parent; Avoid excessively long lines of text
* Think tablets are big phones

Btw, the lunch was awesome too! :-P Overall, a great experience! :-)

-Vignesh