My Blog!

An exciting last year in college and my awesome first job

2011-09-24T19:14:00.000+05:30

Its been a long time since I last updated my blog. The reason is not that I didnt want to or that I didnt have time for it. I just didnt do it. I have thought about a post numerous times, but have never actually written it. So today I thought, lets do it :)

A lot of things have happened since my last post.

The last year in college was pretty exciting! Got two gold medals (:D :D) and we won the overall team trophy at Envisage'11 (as a result of which, quite surprisingly, we featured on the home page of the college website as well ;)).

And after I got placed in the first company I applied for on-campus(Microsoft), the Amazon-g trip and the free (!!) trip to California for the Facebook interview, I finally joined Google (as a Software Engineer :D) and here I am at Bangalore, writing this post from my new MacBook Pro (;))!

To be very honest, I was a bit disappointed to land up at Bangalore. I was almost ready for Hyderabad. But 2 months later, I dont think I could have been happier. Bangalore is awesome. I had heard some great stuff about the weather here, but there is nothing like actually experiencing it yourself. You wake up each morning and breath fresh cold air, you sleep late at night with awesome weather around you. It all feels so great!!
Its only when you go out on streets that you feel the pollution is a bit too much. It is when u r struck in traffic for a really long time that you feel a bit disappointed, but then like all places around the world, Bangalore is not perfect. But I like it!!

Google is just amazing! I am in a great team and I really feel like I've got exactly what I wanted. I am in the mapmaker team (:D), which allows you to update the ever-changing maps. To enable users to edit every aspect of a map is a very challenging problem and team at Bangalore is working really well to solve it. There are a great bunch of passionate Software Engineers here and sometimes you dont mind working late at nights or in the weekends when you feel a little more effort on your side could make so many millions of users of your product happy!

Google and Bangalore seem to be a deadly combination :)

Well to conclude this post, the times gone by have been exciting and the future seems to be better ;)

The Amazon-g Trip !!!!!

2010-11-12T16:40:00.000+05:30

10 Nov, 2010. 3:30 AM : I got up. Yes that's right, I got up at 3:30AM :) And still its not the reason why the day will be remembered. (Remember, remember the 10th of November !!!!!). I knew it was going to be a gruelling day. Had to catch a 6:15 AM flight :) Got ready quickly and was ready to leave for the airport by 4:45.
Around 5:25 AM : Should have reached airport by now. Was very near to the airport, when we took a wrong turn by mistake. We thought we will take a U-turn and this should not be a problem. It would not have been a problem, if we were not running short of time. As it turned out, that wrong turn even resulted in the front tyre of my car being punctured. When you are late all your activities take a little longer than usual!
Somehow was able to find an auto on an empty road and reached the airport by 5:40.
At the airport: At the boarding pass counter:
Lady: Please come in line.
Me: Please allow me. I am running a bit late.
Lady: Which flight are you on?
Me: The 6:15 flight to Hyderabad.
Lady: Sorry, you are required to reach here at least 45 minutes before the scheduled departure. You cannot board the flight now.
Me to myself: Wow! Another twist in the tale. This is gonna make a great blog post :P :)
Me: Please mam. Pls do something. I have already done my web check-in. Passed her my ticket. I was traveling Business Class (Yes, Amazon had booked me on business class!!!!!).
Lady: Let me see.
She called someone and told them that she had a business class passenger with her. And it worked! She gave me my boarding pass :)
Now that I had the boarding pass, I was sure I'll make it! Jumped the line for security check and got over it quickly. Boarded the flight safely. Thanks Amazon for the business class ticket. It was the first time I was traveling in that class.
On the plane: As soon as I sat on the seat, the first thing that came to mind was that I had forgotten to bring a camera! Damn, no pictures :( (That is why this will be an all text post, unlike some of my earlier picture only posts!).

The guy sitting next to me, asked the hostess about entertainment system on-board. The air-hostess refused and the guy promptly took out his MacBook Pro and tuned into Quantum of Solace! I wasnt carrying my laptop but didnt even need it. Experiencing the Business class hospitality for the first time was more entertaining than any film on my laptop.
Overall, the experience in the plane was awesome. Enjoyed every bit of it!
Hyderabad: At 8:15 was back to the city which I have visited most often, after of course my home, Delhi. The weather as expected was awesome. The Amazon cab took us (me and Akhil) to the office.
Akhil had reached 25 minutes after me. He had traveled by the an Indian Airlines flight (Economy class :P).
11:00 PM: Reached the Amazon office. The HR was waiting for both of us. She asked about our flights, breakfast and after 5 minutes, we were ready to start our interviews!
Akhil was the first one to start. I had to wait for an hour for my interviewer!
At 12:30 my first interview started and lasted till 1:30. When I came out, the HR told me that Akhil had started with his second interview and when he completes, we will proceed for lunch. My interviews would then be after lunch.
I had heard a lot of negative comments about food at Amazon, and after 2 months at Google, I was sure that I cant like the food anywhere else! But my empty stomach didnt stop. By 3, I was ready for my next interviews. Now, I was the first one to go. Akhil had to wait a bit. My interviews happened back to back from 3:15 to 4:15 and then from 4:20 to 5:20.
By the time I came out, Akhil was finished with his interview and told me that we were again very late for our flights. He had to catch a 7:15 flight and hence should have left for the airport, by at max 5:15. Luckily, my flight was delayed to 8:25. Probably, now it was time for Akhil to experience the same thing! But he wasnt travelling Business class and we hadnt even done web check-in. :(
We rushed quickly and thanks to the driver, we reached the airport by 6:30 (Just 45 minutes before the scheduled departure!). But thankfully, Akhil had no problem this time and boarded the flight easily. And then came the news that my flight was further delayed to 8:55 :(
Had to wait on the airport alone. And to add to it, my phone got switched off due to low battery!
At 9:10 the plane finally took off and at 11:15, I was back to Delhi! Back home :)
Now just hoping that the hard work pays off and Amazon announces a great result!!
Fingers crossed...........

Moments after The Microsoft offer :)

2010-10-20T20:52:00.001+05:30

All four selected students (2 leftmost and 2 rightmost) with the Microsoft interviewers (in between) ;)

Sharing the joyous moment with friends.

My First two days at the Games Village !!!!!

2010-10-04T20:02:00.000+05:30

With the Canadian Gymnast team after their welcome ceremony

The awesome facilities for the athletes to unwind

The group of 'Village Operations Assistants' assigned with the canandian team

Watching the athletes train at the Games village

At one of the flats for athletes

US NSA access in every copy of Windows

2010-09-17T21:04:00.000+05:30

Did you know that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has an inbuilt backdoor entry in every copy of Windows?
Read more...

My first Pay Cheque!!

2010-07-04T03:17:00.002+05:30

On July 2, 2010, I got my first pay cheque from Google :)
Well the amount Rs. 13,519 may not be great but its good to start with and the fact that I got it from one of my dream company "Google" makes it perfect for me.

I joined Google India, Hyderabad office as a Software Engineer in Test (SET) Intern on 14th June, 2010.
Google payed for my flight tickets, is taking care of my food and accomodation and still paying me a monthly stipend of Rs. 25000 :D
The facilities here are awesome. The Engineering Guest House, located in the posh area of Banjara Hills, is a 3 storey building. It boasts of TT Table, fooseball table and home theatre in the common area and TV, AC and 24-hour net connection in each room.
The Google Office (Omega building), located at Jubilee hills is almost 7 km from the Engineering Guesthouse. It is a 6 storey building with floors 1 to 4 mainly occupied by AdWords: Google's main source of revenue.
Google's Engineers occupy the top floor of the building. The office boasts of a bakery, snooker tables, Bunker rooms (for Sleepy engineers), Gym, Massage room, fooseball tables and even a library. There are break-out areas on each floor where people come to simply relax. Google actually follows a 70-feet rule which states that wherever you be in the google office, food will not be farther from you than 70 feets. Not to mention that the food at Google (office or guesthouse) is absolutely free :)
I am having a great time here and the time I spent here will definitely be one of most memorable moments!

Sample Thrift Program for Server in Java and Client in C++

2010-06-25T18:49:00.024+05:30

Objective: To create a Java Server which prints ping on the console output each time a C++ Client connects to it and calls the function ping().

I use Facebook's Thrift for implementing this IPC.

First of all install Thrift:

To get a thrift tarball file go here and extract it. Before installing it, we need to resolve some dependencies which can be resolved by running the following command on an Ubuntu machine:

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev automake libtool flex bison pkg-config g++

To get a list of dependencies for other platforms, consult this:

Now to install thrift simply run the following commands from the thrift folder you just extracted:

./configure

make

sudo make install

This should be sufficient to install thrift on your machine. Later though I still got the following error while running the executables for which I had to copy my thrift library files from /usr/local/lib to /lib:

error while loading shared libraries: libthrift.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If you still face some problems, try consulting this or leave a comment.

Now with Thrift setup on your machine, lets begin the real work!

First of all we write a sample.thrift file:

namespace cpp Test

namespace java Test

service Something {

i32 ping()

}

And then a C++ client:

Run: thrift --gen cpp sample.thrift and I get a couple of autogenerated files in gen-cpp folder. You can build them to get the Server.cpp file, but you have to write a C++ Client yourself. Ways to build your C++ Server and to write a sample C++ Client are clearly explained here.

My C++ Client thus looks like this:

#include "Something.h" // One of the autogenerated files

#include[<]transport/TSocket.h[>]

#include[<]transport.TBufferTransports.h[>]

#include[<]protocol.TBinaryProtocol.h[>]

using namespace apache::thrift;
using namespace apache::thrift::protocol;
using namespace apache::thrift::transport;

using namespace Test;

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
boost::shared_ptr socket(new TSocket("localhost", 9090));
boost::shared_ptr transport(new TBufferedTransport(socket));
boost::shared_ptr protocol(new TBinaryProtocol(transport));

SomethingClient client(protocol);
transport->open();
client.ping();
transport->close();

return 0;
}

Your C++ Client is thus easily ready. You can check that its working fine by running the C++ Server and pinging it through the C++ Client. If this works, your C++ Client is ready.

Java Server

Now this for me was the most difficult part. When I run: thrift --gen java sample.thrift

I get a Something.java file in a gen-java folder.

Then I wrote a Server.java file myself by taking help from the Java Server given in thrift/tutorial/java/src. The exact Server.java is as follows:

import org.apache.thrift.TException;

import org.apache.thrift.protocol.TBinaryProtocol;

import org.apache.thrift.protocol.TProtocol;

import org.apache.thrift.server.TServer;

import org.apache.thrift.server.TSimpleServer;

import org.apache.thrift.transport.TServerSocket;

import org.apache.thrift.transport.TServerTransport;

import Test.*;

public class Server {

public static class SomethingHandler implements Something.Iface {

public SomethingHandler() {

}

public int ping() {

System.out.println("ping\n");

return 0;

}

public static void main(String [] args) {

try {

SomethingHandler handler = new SomethingHandler();

Something.Processor processor = new Something.Processor(handler);

TServerTransport serverTransport = new TServerSocket(9090);

TServer server = new TSimpleServer(processor, serverTransport);

// Use this for a multithreaded server

// server = new TThreadPoolServer(processor, serverTransport);

System.out.println("Starting the server...");

server.serve();

} catch (Exception x) {

x.printStackTrace();

}

System.out.println("done.");

}

I am using Eclipse IDE for developing my java project.

Now here are a lot of dependencies which need to be resolved.

First of all in the new Java Project, I had created, I added my Server.java to the default package and added the Something.java to a Test package.

Hence my package hierarchy now looked as:

ThriftServer(Project Name, You can give any)

-src

--default package

---Server.java

--Test package

---Something.java

Now you need to go to thrift/lib/java and have a look at the README file present to install the java libraries required.

just run the ant cmd from thrift/lib/java in your terminal and you will get a libthrift.jar file in the same folder.

Now to resolve the org.apache.* imports in your project, add this jar file to your project. You can have a look here to see how this is done.

After doing this, you will still be unable to resolve import errors for org.slf4j.Logger and LoggerFactory.

To resolve them, download slf4j-1.6.0.tar.gz from here.

Extract it and add the following two jar files to your project:

slf4j-api-1.6.0.jar
slf4j-simple-1.6.0.jar

Now your project should be completely-error free and ready to run.

Just right-click on Server.java and goto Run As-> Java Application

You should see "Starting the Server...." in the console indicating the server is running fine.

Now run your C++ client from a terminal and you should see ping on the console in Eclipse each time you run your client.

This indicates your Server-Client architecture is ready and fully functional.
Now you can use it to create some great stuff or atleast try and solve some good puzzles on the Facebook Thrift Puzzle Server!!

Enjoy!!

My first in an international journal

2010-06-11T22:18:00.006+05:30

The moment has finally arrived. My first research Paper in an International Journal titled : "A Robust Algorithm for Local Obstacle Avoidance" by Puneet Kumar, Nikhil Jindal, Akhil Jindal, Sidharth Chhabra was published in the prestigious International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering(IJCTE), Vol. 2, No. 3, June, 2010 pp.1793-8201.

Wow!!!!! One of my most memorable moments.........

Troika 2010

2010-03-17T14:04:00.005+05:30

4 events organised, 5 wins, 6 hectic days!!!!!!!

2010-02-24T23:29:00.012+05:30

These must have been the most hectic 6 days of my life.

It all started on 19th February, 2010 when we had our BYTES 10: The Online Programming Contest under the aegis of Troika 10 : The annual Technical Fest of IEEE-DCE(now DTU). I was the event head.

The contest was of 6 hour duration from 8PM to 2AM and 41 languages were allowed. 5 problems were given and Imran Khan from IIIT-Allahabad won the contest. The contest went well with unfortunate hiccups due to silly error in the test cases of 2 problems.

While sleeping at 3AM on 19th, had no intention of going to Sankalan at all. But fortunately, I woke up early on 20th morning and luckily decided to go to Sankalan as have been doing from the last three years. In my first year at Sanakalan, I couldnt clear even a single prelim. The performance improved a bit in the secong year when we cleared One prelim(Algorithms) and came second in that event. Just recently, we had gone to Technophilia, a similiar fest organised by JNU. There we cleared two prelims: Algorithm (came first, had topped the prelims as well :) ) and Logic (came second).

With this background, we were expecting a better performance at Sankalan this year. But what turned out was something we hadnt expected even in our wildest dreams.

There were three teams from DCE (Core2Duo@DCE: Akhil and me, DCERockers: Sidharth and Gaurav, Banned: Ujjwal, Uday, Yash, Vinay and Sailesh) which together won 6 first positions, 4 second positions and 2 third positions. 12 awards in total meant one-third of the total prizes in the whole fest. This was just Awesome. Team Banned even won the overall Team Trophy. In total DCEites won almost Rs. 16, ooo in cash prize.

Akhil and me came first in Algorithms, second in Debug and Overnight Programming.

Participating in Overnight Programming was a first one for us. Didnt sleep for 48 hours continuously on 20th and 21st(Sat, Sun). Icing on the cake was that we hadnt slept on 20th due to 8hour Overnight Programming from 11PM to 7Am in the morning and then had Algorithm at 9:30AM on 21st. We were physically completely exhausted but the competitive spirit in us kept us going (:P).

3 prizes and Rs 3400 was a nice reward!

From Monday, 22nd February Troika 10 officially Started. And along with it started Phoenix: The annual Technical fest of CSI-DCE Student Chapter. On the first day, they had Cranium: On-the Spot Programming Competition and luckily unlike last year akhil and me cleard the prelims. The mains were of 1.5 hours and had 8 problems. We solved 6 problems and came second. We wer defeated by the same guys from Jaypee who had defeated us a day before in the overnight programming @ Sankalan. Here, they had also solved 6 problems but did this earlier than us. The night was spent preparing questions for BITS. No wonder Akhil and I had our dinner at 12:30 in the night.

Next Day, We had Ether Avatar: The multimedia-based Quiz. Anoop Sir had come up with a great flash interface for prelims. The improvements in the mains was also comendable. This event totally belonged to him as was last year. Luckily, Akhil and I also won (first prize) Algorithms at Phoenix. Truly speaking, after JNU(Technophilia) and DUCS(Sankalan), we were expectiing this. :)

23rd was one of the most special day for us. I had two of my events on this day: Bits-The On-the spot Programming Competition and BOTS: The AI Game Challenge Competition.

The last night was spent finalising the PHP code for prelims for BITS. The questions for mains were yet to be fully finalised. After seeing the performance of Jaypee guys at Phoenix and Sankalan we decided to increase the number of problems in mains from 6 to 9. The problems were finalised while the second years handled the prelims. Just when the mains were about to start came the news that I had cleared the prelims for Linux Challenge @ Phoenix. there was no way I could leave BITS and had to sacrifice it (Not that I would have surely won if I had taken part :) ). The mains went well and all the 20 teams shortlisted for mains appreciated the questions (:P).

Just before BOTS was about to start, Sachin did something we are never gonna forget. The organising tema was seting-up the big screen for BOTS, when suddenly huge roars started emanating form the mech canteen. Within a second, the whole area was empty. No one could afford to miss the historic moment.

Sachin finally completed his 200 and BOTS took off. Second years won the event!

The day finally ended and I got back my lost laptop (did I mention I had lost it during the prelims of BITS?). My mobile charger though, after 2 days is yet to be found :(.

Still these 6 days were just AWESOME. Have never had so much learning and so much fun at the same time.

Am gonna remember them forever.......

IPTSE, Winter School 2009

2009-12-23T01:39:00.005+05:30

During the final presentation

Another one, during the same time

During a pizza party by the CMU prof. on the last day

The Speech Track students with the CMU prof. in the centre.

I had a wonderful opportunity to be a part of Internship Program in Technology Supported Education(IPTSE), Winter School 2009, a partnership between IIIT Hyderabad and CMU.

Winter School 2009 had three tracks: Speech, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning(CSCL) and Educational Games and was held from 10th to 22nd December 2009 at IIIT-H.

I and Akhil were in Speech track, which turned out to be the best one amongst all three. In the first three days, we had lectures and panel discussions about Research, life of a researcher, education system in India and similar stuff. We were given basic presentations about projects in each track.

Then we had to choose our own group projects and had to complete them in the next 8 days. On the last two days, we presented our work and gave demos.

Overall it was a great experience. We learned a lot. The CMU profs were awesome. I worked under Dr. Bhiksha Raj. He always had a solution to all kind of wierd problems we had. His knowledge of the field is awesome. He has in-depth knowledge about everything, is an expert in Maths, Algorithms and probably every field even minutely related to Speech.

Our work was related to extracting Prosody (pitch, intensity, duration) features from an input speech and superimpose them on an output speech of a speech to speech translator. Our presentation might be uploaded on the CMU site as well!!!

IIIT-Hyderabad is also great. There is a wonderful research environment here. I can come or leave the lab whenever I want. All labs are open 24-hours. Even the guards have computers (though a bit old) with net access. They are almost always found watching telugu movies, especially in the night.

On the last day, we went to Dominoes with our prof for a pizza party. It was probably the first time, I went out to eat with a prof. Really, all CMU profs were really helpfull. They all seemed really excited and energetic about the work they were doing.

Some of the memories I have of winter school will probably stay with me throughout my life!!

Hat-Trick!!!

2009-11-30T04:03:00.002+05:30

Recently my 4th sem results have been anounced. And yes I have scored a hat-trick!!!!

It is for the third consecutive time that I have scored the highest marks in my department. I got an awesome score of 89.75% (just 2 marks less than a 90 :P).

It feels great!!!

Hope to continue this great run!!!!!!!!

Exciting puzzles

2009-11-29T01:05:00.002+05:30

Hey, I came across a really great place for solving exciting puzzles.

Make sure you visit it atleast once: http://gurmeetsingh.wordpress.com/puzzles/

Windows connection of Google Chrome

2009-03-25T19:52:00.002+05:30

Wall Street's Collapse May Be Computer Science's Gain

2008-09-28T13:09:00.000+05:30

Computerworld (09/26/08) Thibodeau, Patrick; Weiss, Todd R.

The recent collapse on Wall Street may make a career in computer science or IT more attractive to students, who largely left those fields following the dot-com bust of 2001. Stanford University computer science department chairman William Dally says students are returning to computer science because they like the field and not necessarily because it can make them rich. Boston College professor John Gallaugher says he has already seen a change in student interest, with many students contacting Gallaugher and expressing an interest in switching from finance. Following the dot-com bust, computer science enrollment declined until it reached a low of 8,021 last year, down from 14,185 in 2003-2004, according to the Computer Research Association (CRA). Meanwhile, offshore outsourcing also scared students into avoiding technology careers. Now, companies are suffering from a shortage of technology professionals, and the looming baby boomer retirements will only add to the problem. CRA analyst Jay Vegso says economic conditions appear to impact the choice that students make when choosing a major, and students currently choosing majors may be looking for safer alternatives. Stevens Institute of Technology's Howe School of Technology Management associate dean Jerry Luftman says the major difference between today and the late 1990s is the type of student that businesses need. While technical skills are important, Luftman says companies also want students with management and industry training, strong communications abilities, and marketing and negotiations skills. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that IT jobs are among the fastest growing; openings for networks systems and data communications analysts are expected to reach 402,000 this year, up from 262,000 in 2006.

Mission ADR

2008-09-20T15:43:00.006+05:30

One of the biggest achievement of my college life has been the project ADR i was part of. Here i'll be descibing how it all began....

Mission ADR(Autonomous Defence Robot) was started by 3 of our seniors Varun Jewalikar(2K6 COE), Chandan Kumar(2K6 Civil) and Ankit Agarwal(2K6 Production Engg.). The aim was to build the robot to take part in TechX challenge being organised by Defence Science and Technology Agency(DSTA), Singapore government in 2008. They had registered the team as 'Team DCE' and wanted team extension when we joined the college in August 2007. Interviews were held in the college on 6th september,2007. Candidates were interviewed by the three students and the faculty advisors D.S Nagesh sir and M. Kulkarni sir. The results came out on 24th September and me and my brother(Akhil) were amongst those selected. We were called to room no. IW-FF16 where we later set-up our CEAR(Center for Excellence in Advanced Robotics) lab. Ankit was responsible for Image Prosessing, Chandan for Mechanical Systems and Varun for Electronics and Computer Programming. We were to work with Varun.
The work started after our 1st sem mid-sem papers. Akhil and i were first given the task of studying Assembly language. We studied '8051 Microcontroller and Embedded Systems' by Mazidi. We started 8051 uC programming. Then we moved on to make Autonomous line follower. By October we had well settled in the team and the progress was good. I hope to follow this up with more on subsequent posts.

Answers

2008-09-19T18:47:00.012+05:30

So here are the answers of the puzzles. I hope u don't need them as u solve them urself!

Puzzle 1
1- 60 degrees Anti-clock-wise(ACW)
2- straight or 180 ACW
3- 120 Clockwise(CW)
4- 60 Clockwise
5- 120 ACW

Puzzle 2
Answer in the order from left-to-right, top first.

4 3 10 6 5 12 11 8 9 1 7 2

Bold numbers are the numbers which were already given in the problem.

Puzzle 3
Answer are given from left-to-right, in the order of increasing row numbers. '.' represents a blank white cell

1 0 . 1 0
0 . 0 1 1
1 0 1 0 .
. 1 0 0 1
0 . 0 1 1
1 0 1 0 .
. 1 0 0 1
1 0 . 1 0
0 1 1 . 0
0 1 1 . 0

Puzzle 4
Answer tells the directions of arrows in Clock-wise direction starting from the top-left arrow

SE SE S S W SW W NW NW N NE N E NE E SE

Puzzle 5
Answer tells the the number or the alphabet in the cell from left to right, starting from the first row till the last row

A C B 3 1 2
2 1 A C 3 B
1 A 2 B C 3
B 2 3 1 A C
C 3 1 2 B A
3 B C A 2 1

Puzzle 5

2008-09-19T18:47:00.009+05:30

This one should be done quite quickly.

Rules are simple:

You need to fill the grid with numbers 1,2,3 and alphabets A,B,C.
Conditions are:

1,2,3 represents height of three distinct towers.
Numbers outside the box shows the number of towers visible from that point(1 outside the box shows only tower 3 is visible from that point and other two shorter buildings are hidden behind that).
Alphabets outside the box shows that same alphabet will appear first in the corresponding row or column.
Each row and column should contain 1,2,3,A,B and C exactly once.

Puzzle 4

2008-09-19T18:47:00.008+05:30

This one's a bit simpler :)

Rules are simple:

You need to fill the blank boxes with arrows.
Conditions are:

All arrows should point towards the grid.
The indexes written in the grid shows the total number of arrows pointing to them.
The specified arrow directions are E(east), SE(south-east), S(south), SW(south-west), W(west), NW(north-west), N(north), NE(north-east).

Puzzle 3

2008-09-19T18:47:00.006+05:30

This is another kakuro type puzzle.

Rules are simple:

Fill white cells with numbers 0 & 1
Conditions are:

.Each row & column must have exactly two '0's & '1's
The numbers outside the grid show the number of '0's (top number) and number of '1's(bottom number) in corresponding directions.
Some white cells might be left blank.

Puzzle 2

2008-09-19T18:47:00.005+05:30

Here's another puzzle i enjoyed solving.

Rules are simple:

You need to fill the following key board with numbers from 1 to 12.
Conditions are:

Each of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 should appear exactly once.
The number in shaded key equals either sum or difference of the neighboring white keys.
Two inequalities should be satisfied.

Puzzle 1

2008-09-19T18:47:00.002+05:30

Lately, i have developed a lot of interest in solving puzzles. So here i hope to share some of them.
This is the first puzzle.

Rules are simple:

Draw a path from starting to finish point(represented by DOTS) .
Conditions are:

The path must visit every node exactly once.
Some of the nodes are marked. The path must make same moves at same numbered node(say your path should turn 60 degree clockwise whenever it encounters 2)
For different marked nodes, moves must be different.

Try it. I found it to be very interesting. Hope u like it too.

End of First year!

2008-05-26T16:03:00.002+05:30

So in no time, the first year of my great college life has come to an end.Seriously, the year got over quite quickly. It seems just like yesterday, when we joined the college. As expected the seniors ragged us (but not very severely). We have to call our seniors 'sirs'(or 'mams').
And now, suddenly we have graduated to the title of 'sirs'. Now we are eagerly(or wickedly) awaiting for the fresh batch of 'freshers' to come.
The college has been great.
In first sem, first year students were divided into various classes branch wise and then roll no wise. Akhil and I were in different classes. Akhil had some Electronics students also in his batch. Luckily he had Varun and Rishik(both in DCE ECE then and before with us in the same class in school with him). I made a number of new friends in college. I met sidharth, nipun, rahul and many more.
In second sem, COE(computer engineering) students were again distributed into 2 batches of 45 students each (Akhil and me being in different ones :)). This is when akhil and i had the group with which we generally hang-out now. We had Mohit, Dheeraj, Varun, Sidharth, Nipun, Rishik, Ishan Bose, Mayank Kapoor in our group. Also we had Troika '08(the annual technical fest of DCE) in this sem. Troika was a great fun. We were also involved in Mission ADR in our first year. This enabled us to take part in the 'Paper Presentation Competition' in my first year itself. In fact we took part in various competitions in Troika and luckilly even won some :).
We came second in the 'Hardware Conceptualisation' competition and 'Linux' Challenge. We were third in 'Bots', the AI challenge and 'Bits', the On-the-spot Programming contest. We had earlier won the pre-Troika Bits contest and earlier in first sem, the Programming competition during the IEEE thursday events as well. This gave us the excellent opportunity to meet the seniors also which later on turned out to be a great edge. We later on made our 'Team Phenom' for the ACM ICPC contest with our next year senior Ujjwal Dasgupta(I might give details about the contest in a subsequent post).
Overall, the year turned out to be fabulous. We met new people,made friends, learnt a lot new things and got some achievements under our belt too. And yes, i came first in my Department in Second sem scoring a whopping 84%. This was the first time in my life that i bagged the first position. I was amongst the Top 3 in my batch in school in XIth class, which in itself was a great feeling. But the feeling of getting the first position was something just out of this world. I had earlier in school got highest marks in one or two subjects but my overall rank was never 'one'. This was just the best thing which could have happened to me. My overall Depatment Rank(DR) after first year was 2!
Of course, the transition from school to college was great. We have a lot more freedom here, alot more decision making about what to do, when to do and even how to do. We decide on our Time management and many times have to decide about making a choice between two things.
These are some experiences which we never had in our school.
First year of college would always be memorable to me.

My Blog!!!!!

2008-05-26T15:25:00.000+05:30

So this is my first post on my first blog!
I actually came to know about blogs in XIth class when one of my classmate(Ankit Aggarwal) gave a presentation in school on 'Blogs'. To be very true, the idea didn't interest me at that time. I thought it a sheer waste of time. I had a few friends- most of them were from the school and remaining were my friends near my house. So i used to meet all of them almost daily. There was no point in making a blog. I didn't have any friend very far away. Besides, i could mail them anyway. The net point being, blogs never interested me.
But then we grew up. I left school and reached DCE(wow!). But then i had to leave my school friends. And i saw my collegemates( for ex: Nipun(nipunkanha.blogspot.com)) having some exciting blogs. This encouraged me to have one too.
And here I am with my first ever post on my blog. I hope you all will like it. I hope to be regular atleast during my summer vacations.
I hope to be ready with my next post soon.
Watch out!