Ankit's Blog

Life Here at MSFT

2009-07-10T11:05:00.001+05:30

Hi, for those of you who dont know, I am an intern with Microsoft.

So the disclaimer :
All posts here are my personal opinions only, nothing here can be taken to be the views/opinions of my organization in any circumstances.

Now that that is out of the way, lets talk about life here :

This is the first time I am staying away from home, so this is indeed a new experience for me. Staying in Hyderabad and actually working in one of the best companies in the world sort of expands your perspective. You can see really how challenging it is to run big companies, where every small detail needs to be taken care of and is taken care of.

Working here is a blast , especially with the free beverages and snacks (free gym is also included BTW). Also worth mentioning is our super cool campus. It houses 3 branches of Microsoft India, I work at the IDC (India Development Center).

I work in the LiveMesh Team (which is a great team with great people). I absolutely enjoy every second of being in this office, whether its the work, the fun or the games. The people here are just awesome, smart at what they do.

More than half of my internship is over and I have done work which I had imagined I would never be able to do. Thats the biggest thing I have learnt here, that one should never doubt himself or his abilities. Another thing I have learnt is that i will make a pretty good programmer :P , I seem to understand code pretty well and code well and fast also :D. I really surprised myself with the speed that I grasp sample code.

Thats enough for now then. :)

Hyderabad : The city of extremely bad drivers

2009-06-15T00:30:00.001+05:30

Hi, old readers would feel a sense of déjà vu with this post, in December 2006 i had come to Hyderabad to visit my brother. Little did i know that 3 years later i would be working in the same super cool office.

Now Hyderabad is a weird city, people here don't follow traffic rules. The roundabouts are as small as the traffic police pedestals of Delhi and the locals throw in some buffalos to make things more challenging. Havent gone around much in Hyderabad since I have a lot of work to do plus the folks around me are also lazy like me and would rather spend the Sunday in bed than on the roads exploring the city.

On an unrelated note, this Sunday got so boring that i headed over to office to play a little pool and TT, also spent some time at the Gym. I got absolutely pummelled at TT. Pool is another story though, have started to play pretty good.

The weather is is decent-ish, but we stay in AC all day at the office and at the company paid guest house, so i guess we don't really 'feel the heat' (no pun intended). I guess once we move into our own accommodation, things wont be this cool (no pun intended again) :P

Ok, by now 90% of the readers must have migrated to another time-zone in order to avoid my lame puns. So i will sleep now.

Welcome to Hyderabad :)

2009-06-06T16:11:00.000+05:30

Am here again in Hyderabad for the second time in my life. Stay tunes for more posts.

Going to Hyderabad :)

2009-06-02T14:42:00.001+05:30

Just a small note to let you guys know I will be in Hyderabad for the next 2 months, its the start of a new phase of my life and I certainly hope i enjoy it there. Watch out for photos from the land of the Char Minar and heavenly tasting Biryani.

So, did you vote today ?

2009-05-07T18:54:00.001+05:30

This makes it 3 out of 3 elections for me :)

Hoping you exercised your right to vote today.

Driving Manners

2009-05-05T20:04:00.001+05:30

I am in the middle of exams, but still take time out to write this post. I have recently started to drive to college, perhaps the 764 taking the dusty palam railway track instead of the multi crore and multi kilo-meter flyover the Govt. had so painfully constructed was the final nail in the coffin. So i drive around 25kms one side daily and one thing i notice is that people on the road are always angry. I keep relaxed and smiling while driving while most others i see are mad about something it seems. People cut lanes, cut other people off and never give the other person way.

Anyway, a nice incident to narrate now, today while going to college i saw an uncle in his matiz was in the wrong lane near Munirka, he wanted to go straight and was stuck in right lane which was stationary. I saw that he was looking to enter the middle lane and i stopped for him and gestured him to go ahead and join the middle lane. He did so easily as I wasn't trying to stop him. Anyway, it was so nice to see, he appreciated that i gave him the way and thanked me by gesturing to me 3-4 times, i gestured him back that it was my pleasure :) .

Such a nice warm and fuzzy feeling , I was in a good mood the whole day. I am sure all of us have gotten into wrong lanes by mistake, so when someone does, please let him/her get into the right one and don't cut him off. He/She will definitely appreciate it and thank you and your day will be brighter.

The Car ! - Jakiro

2009-04-16T19:11:00.002+05:30

The Geeky thing to do would be to give it a name, but am still looking for suggestions. It needs a service to check up on oil levels etc. and then it will be raring to go :) , dad very generously gave it our preferred parking spot for a day or two :D

Update : This car shall henceforth be known and referred to as Jakiro named after the great twin headed dragon !

Nostalgia etc.

2009-03-03T00:00:00.001+05:30

On my way to college in the infamous 764 bus, i couldn't help but feel nostalgic, for I could see students in their school uniforms doing some last minute revision for their board exams. Hard to imagine that 3 years ago i too was one of them and now i am only about 1.3 years away from graduating as an engineer. When you are in school you are in this great hurry to get to college and get your freedom.

But when you enter college you suddenly realise how good school was , the teachers, the school campus, your friends etc. Not that college is bad, I have the good fortune of studying in an awesome college but still cant help miss school a little. Especially since I can almost see my school from my home (2 minutes walk) and my college is 1.5 hours by bus from my home and i up-down everyday.

Here i must mention the obsession that we have with DTC buses. You can literally see students in sweltering heat waiting for a DTC, signalling private buses to move along almost in a teasing sort of way. And boy oh boy, the joy on their faces on seeing a DTC is something to write home about. Absolutely amazing. The fact is that DTC buses are faster, cleaner, less crowded and have much better seats than any blueline (did i mention free for us due to student passes). But somehow the number of DTCs on our route has been on a steady decline. That's what makes the wait even more worthwhile when you see that yellow face of the DTC bus with its huge windshields. Its pretty easy to spot a DTC from a distance.

Anyway, back to the present now. The midsems are on the horizon now and are fast approaching, sounding the start of the super study phase of the semester. Our cult fest Moksha wouldn't be as big as it is usually due to the recession that has also hit our sponsors. The recession also makes our placement season next sem very dicey, hopefully the effect of the recession wouldn't be that huge on our placements.

Also i am really enjoying doing Quant questions (kind of the ones asked in aptitude tests of placements also), i get this huge adrenalin rush on completing the questions as fast as possible, kind of like being back in school where there used to be battles as to who will finish his question first and announce the answer spoiling the party for others :P .

Also lots of exciting stuff planned for the summers. Plans which shall be revealed in due course.

Pretty long post, back to completing my uP prac. file now :)

Another new semester and time to get serious !

2009-01-10T13:35:00.001+05:30

Well its another new semester and now its time to get serious for the future. I had recently secured good internship offers for next summer but there is still a lot more to do. With the whole college preparing for CAT exams, its really weird to be one of the only few not attending any CAT class. Also things are looking bleak on the project side with MySQL source code refusing to compile on my and my partner's machine. It seems that project might be looking at a dead end, but i really hope not.

Last semester was ok-ish but not so great, hence the need to make this one spectacular. Anyway short story time, was just in my balcony, this girl walks up to the house, smartly dressed, shades on her eyes, dressed like a model actually. Opens the gate latch, then pushes the wrong side of the 2 door gate (one which remains locked). Struggles for 1-2 minutes. then calls up my neighbours whom she had come to visit to help her, they push the right door and voila ! , it miraculously opens :P , had a little laugh on the balcony. For legal reasons , this story may have been concocted at the spur of the moment to keep this post interesting. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is co-incidental.

Back to studies then, this semester i have Operating Systems, Advanced computer architecture, microprocessors, control engineering and database and information systems. All in all a very computer science-y semester.

Can you read this ?

2008-12-28T16:41:00.001+05:30

Google really makes me mad sometimes, what are their captcha team thinking ?

Tum Chalo !

2008-12-12T02:07:00.001+05:30

How many times have you blamed your country, if you see a problem, work to resolve it, or you have no right to crib about it.

I remember i was in class five or four. I was taking part in the hindi story telling contest. My story was "Apna kaam swayam karo" (loosely translates as do your own work). Today i will tell that story again. There was once a farmer, he was travelling on a bullock cart and was going through some mud when one of his wheels got stuck. He wondered what to do !

A few students were passing by, he asked them to give the cart a lift, they ignored him and walked on. Then the village policemen passed from in front of him and also ignored his pleas. Then some more farmers were coming, he asked them to help push his cart, they said they were in a hurry. Finally hours passed and almost everyone had an excuse or totally ignored him.

Defeated, he finally got down from his cart. The mud was knee deep, he started pushing but couldnt really lift the heavy bullock cart. The same students from the morning were coming back, seeing the farmer pushing the cart, they decided to chip in, but the cart was still stuck. The policemen were also passing from the area, seeing the students and farmer , they decided to help too and so did the other folk who had turned a blind eye to him earlier. Together they lifted the cart out of the mud and the farmer thanked them all.

Hopefully you do understand the moral of the short story.

Are you a good citizen ?

2008-11-29T20:41:00.001+05:30

My second elections and the second time I voted , the poll officers did a lousy job in applying the ink, ruined my whole finger :P

So did you vote ?

Microsoft Dreamspark : Free software for students

2008-11-07T23:43:00.001+05:30

Good news for those who arent part of the MSDNAA, you can get free software for development from MSFT.

Addressing students and academicians at IIT Delhi – where the DreamSpark program was unveiled - Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corp, said, “We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems and catalyze economic growth. Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students like you to explore the power of software and encourage you to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs.”

Microsoft developer tools

Visual Studio 2005 Express
Visual Studio 2005 Professional
Visual Studio 2008 Professional
Visual Basic 2008 Express
Visual C++ 2008 Express
Visual C# 2008 Express
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
XNA Game Studio 2.0
12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club

Microsoft designer tools

Expression Studio 2, including

o Expression Web

o Expression Blend

o Expression Design

o Expression Media

Microsoft platform resources

SQL Server 2008 Developer
SQL Server 2008 Express
Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
Virtual PC 2007

Training Resources

IT Academy Student Pass

Log onto http://www.dreamsparkindia.com/ for more :)

Finally Another Post : Complete Randomness

2008-09-20T01:39:00.001+05:30

Well its time for another post, people at college are bugging me for another post. I never knew so many people at college read my blog so eagerly :P (i know a lot of you are grinning).

Well since i am pretty much not doing anything else for the past few weeks, lets talk about my subjects. I had missed a week of college (actually i was ill for 12 days) due to hugh grade viral fever which thankfully wasn't dengue (both serology and antigen tests were negative). Anyway the point being i had to work extra hard to recover all the lost ground. This week was 5 midsem tests back to back.

1. Computer Graphics - This was really the subject in which i had missed the most and had to work the hardest to recover. But i am happy to say i learnt all line clippings by myself, and not to mention Bresenham's for Ellipses and Parabolas. Was back in class for polygon clipping.

2. Computer System Organisation (also sometimes taught as Computer System Architecture) - My favourite subject. We had everything from design of basic computer to Assembly programming coming. Thankfully our teacher lessened the course by excluding Microprogrammed control and only hardwired control was in for midsems. Studied from Morris Mano, paper had a big design question apparently from Carpinelli.

3. LIC - Linear Integrated Circuits - All the course was done while i was ill, learnt everything by myself from notes from various sources. Its basically a very numerical subject with emphasis on Op-Amps.

4. Discrete Maths/Algos - We are now over with the discrete maths part (Predicates et all) , moving onto Algos now.

5. IOME - This is basically management, organisation and industrial economics. A good subject , really nice to see what managers are taught to think like.

Now that my semester-ly post about engineering subjects is over, a burden seems to have been lifted off of me. So whats next ?

I am thinking of giving the GRE in December, lets see how that works out. Surprisingly i told this to a friend and he said isn't that too late, then i told him engineering is a 4 year course and he wasnt ready to believe me (:O) , i guess a lot of people in DU think all courses are 3 year long.

Need to clear out a few things, also need to get a good project (don't want 'em good universities rejecting me :P)

Its also amazing to see the lengths people are going for CAT preparations, i mean they are learning vocab like their lives depend on it and they discuss it like an old India Pak cricket match.

Indian Olympians at 2008 Summer Olympics

2008-08-16T22:54:00.002+05:30

Ah well, it seems cricket hogs all the limelight in India, so here is a short post about Indians doing well in the Olympics (some of them are already out, but did well nonetheless).

1. Abhinav Bindra (he also blogs :P) - The golden boy, everyone now knows about him.

2. Akhil Kumar - 54kg Boxer - Currently in Quarterfinals, defeated world champion in pre-quarters.

3. Jitender Kumar - 51kg Boxer- Won his match today in style, really aggressive boxer.

4. Vijender Kumar - 75 kg Boxer - Didnt watch his bout today, but he won, defeated opponent in style (13-3) , his next bout is really tough.

All three boxers above are in quarters :) , best of luck to them !

5. Leander Paes/Mahesh Bhupathi - I have fond memories of watching them do their magic in Wimbledon, i never used to watch tennis but watching them play used to make me feel proud. But things fell apart, ever since the public and ugly spat made ten times worse by irresponsible media looking for spicy news, the magic has never really been recreated. Nonetheless, they are great Olympians. But they were creamed by the Swiss pair led by Fedex :(.

6. Saina Nehwal (often mistakenly called as Sania Nehwal for obvious reasons) - She came to limelight when she won the Phillipines Open, coached by Pullela Gopichand (who refused to endorse cold-drinks unlike money hungry cricketers) and supported by Mittal's Champion trust. She lost out in a 3 set match in the quarter finals, but is a great player to watch out for in the future. I remember we had a quiz questions about the first Indian lady to win a 4 star badminton event, everyone wrote Aparna Popat, i wrote Saina Nehwal.

7. Sania Mirza - India's first top 50 ranked woman tennis player, her runup to the Olympics was marred by injuries and hence couldn't do well.

8. Anup Sridhar - Great future prospect, defeated in round of 32 by Japanese Sato.

A lot more Olympians worth watching are taking part in the Olympics and this post in no way does justice to all of them, just give them a little support and to show them that we Indians are proud of them all :)

If there is a mistake/omission, let me know by the comments column.

High Tech Obsession ?

2008-08-10T15:53:00.001+05:30

Loved this !

Cloudy Day Drive , Photos!

2008-07-26T14:36:00.001+05:30

Dont mind the photo quality, its taken on a cloudy day with low light, a 2MP camera and from inside the car with windows rolled up, so the image quality aint great.

John Carpenter on Who wants to be a millionaire

2008-06-18T00:49:00.001+05:30

If you haven't seen this man, you haven't seen anything

What's up doc ?

2008-06-07T12:39:00.001+05:30

Well its been a long time since i updated the blog, been really busy doing other stuff like studying, playing games, searching for stuff to spend money on etc. Anyway there is a lot going on with me.

Firstly i got a new laptop, its a DELL Inspiron 1525,in totality it cost me around 1026 USD (including tax and customs) and is awesome. The only thing lacking is a good graphics card. In order to make the Inspiron smaller and sleeker DELL have removed support for an external graphics card on this laptop. The laptop has a 2 GHZ processor with 4 MB cache. It has all the finer things in life including built-in Bluetooth, webcamera and an IR remote to control Windows Media Player and Powerpoint Presentations. It also had touchscreen media buttons. I compared it to an old Dell Inspiron and it kicked butt both in terms of design and performance.

I also got a Bluetooth mouse to complement it. It was paid for by my brother :P. Its the Logitech V470 and it connects seamlessly without any dongle or receiver to my laptop.

All i gotta do now is learn how to install Windows Xp on this Dell machine. ;) , currently i have Windows Vista Home Premium which aint so bad also. In fact i am starting to like Windows Vista, especially the Aero interface.

Also the laptop is so glossy , you can see my ceiling and my hand taking the photograph. It turns heads wherever you are and everyone comments on how cool your laptop looks.

Free Almost !

2008-05-23T18:32:00.001+05:30

I had my last theory exam today. The blog is lying neglected due to the extreme study pressure.

I had communications today, the exam was so tough that most people, even the super toppers were left bewildered. But my exam didnt go so bad, infact it was good.

Thanks to the super huge amount i devoted to communications as i had scored pathetic marks in the mid-semesters, and if there was one subject i was going to flunk this semester, it was going to be communications. I wont be failing now unless something extremely drastic happens. Hopefully that wont happen.

Anyway i wont know until next semester when the results come out.

I have 2 exams left, on Monday i have my data structures viva and on Friday i have my Linux/Unix winter training viva.

Wish me luck !

Make it worth the time

2008-04-22T20:21:00.001+05:30

I was catching up on some data structures,i have been really busy studying this sem. So i am reading this lecture by a professor and i found that sense of humour is really a universal attribute. Even while teaching , the prof found a good joke in his sorting class ::

2F1.1. Fraud and Deceit; Forgery; Offenses Involving Altered or Counterfeit Instruments other than Counterfeit Bearer Obligations of the United States.

(a) Base offense Level: 6

(b) Specific offense Characteristics

(1) If the loss exceeded $2,000, increase the offense level as follows:

The federal sentencing guidelines are designed to help judges be consistent in assigning punishment. The time-to-serve is a roughly linear function of the total level.

However, notice that the increase in level as a function of the amount of money you steal grows logarithmically in the amount of money stolen.

This very slow growth means it pays to commit one crime stealing a lot of money, rather than many small crimes adding up to the same amount of money, because the time to serve if you get caught is much less.

The Moral: ``if you are gonna do the crime, make it worth the time!''

Not the ROFL kind of humour, but subtle humour :)

Found it worth sharing, from here

Trip To Pune

2008-02-23T23:07:00.001+05:30

I recently went on a short trip to Pune to attend to some family matters, the trip was intentionally kept as small as possible in order to ensure minimum missing of college classes. If there is one thing i have learnt in college, its that missing classes is pretty bad for your marks if you are the non-rattu and non-jugadu student.

Well anyway, here are some photos of my trip (bad quality and quantity of pics as dad forgot to carry the digital camera, so it was left to Nokia N72 to show its magic) ::

Photos from the plane, including the famous Mumbai Jhuggis near the airport, the Pune airport was closed BTW. So we took a taxi from Mumbai to Pune. On the way we ate at Dosa Plaza which boasts of around 100 different types of Dosas. I can safely say their Mysore Masala dosa was 10 times better than Sagar Ratna and probably at half the price.

Also some photos from a Mall in Navi Mumbai :

Interestingly there is no photo from Pune in the ones i have posted :P

Inspirational Video

2008-02-13T20:42:00.000+05:30

Found this on the Orkut page of a friend !

Force Fest 2008 Quiz

2008-01-25T21:27:00.000+05:30

So i had hosted the Force Fest 2008 quiz, a small turnout due to the timings, anyway i will post the questions soon, till then here are the Xerox ads discussed in the quiz.

Pleasures of an External Hard Disk

2007-12-25T22:36:00.000+05:30

I recently purchased a new Seagate Free Agent hard disk, the 250 GB version. The hard disk is a sleek external harddisk which comes assemble by Seagate only and comes with a 5 year company warranty.

I had gone to Nehru Place to purchase the external hard disk, there the dealers tried to lure me into buying cheap Hitachi hard disks enclosed in local Intex casings. What they do is that they take regular internal hard disks and mount them in casings of cheap Chinese companies, these casings have an IDE to USB interface so that these internal (externalised) hard disks work with your computer. In fact one of my classmates had bought one of these makeshift external hard disks and as expected , the disk is giving him problems and he has given it for repair.

So anyone looking to buy an external hard disk , be warned , the dealers at Nehru Place will try to shove these assembled notebooks in your face, beware of them.

Coming back to the pleasures part, its great to have a huge external storage. I can keep all my multimedia in the external drive while keeping my hard disk space for software. I recently installed Visual Studio and Windows Mobile SDK so needed space for that and my Windows Xp partition was really out of it. I was able to generate enough space by moving less commonly used files from the internal drive to the external one.

As far as the Visual Studio goes, i use an original licensed copy from MSDNAA !!!