My fourth job offer

I got my 4th job offer on 16th. This time it's Google, Hyderabad. This concludes the Google honeymoon which started on Dec 6th last year and lasted for 101 days. The process involved 9 interviews (2 on phone, 5 in Bangalore and 2 in Hyderabad), numerous mails and a similar no of phone calls, and fetched me my first air-trip (to and fro Bangalore in Jet airways) and 2 Google T-shirts.

Interview 1 - Interview 8:
Algorithms algorithms algorithms algorithms.
Each interview involved 2-3 questions and would last for about 1 hr.

Interview 9:
It can't really be called an interview. The only question I was asked was the meaning of my name, which, for natural reasons, wasn't very difficult to answer. The rest of the time was spent in me asking questions while my interviewer stood near the board explaining me things. He explained me a lot of things related to Google, the policies, the interviewing process, etc. He explained me Google's 80-20 funda, by which a person is given 20% (i.e. 1 day per week) free time to work on anything. This one day gives a person the chance to develop something very useful and interesting. The end-product can be recommended in the review process (which takes place every 6 months) and might lead to promotion and other incentives. Many of Google's flagships product have emerged from this 20% time. Ex: Orkut, Adsense, Google News.

Some excerpts from Interview 9:
Me: This is my 9th interview. What does this mean?
Ans: Nothing. A person is interviewed till as long as the deciding committee feels that the candidate hasn't been tested in all aspects.

Me: Should I expect more interviews?
Ans: Not very likely. 9 interviews is kind of enough for a fresher. I had 13 interviews.

Me: How many people are there at Google, Hyderabad.
Ans: There are 300 people, but only 20 engineers. The rest are people in advertising, marketing, art, design, etc, etc, etc.

Me: What is SDE, SET, SQA, etc.
Ans: These are names given to positions. SDE -- Software Devel Engineer, SET -- Software Engineer in Test, SQA -- Software Quality Assurance. When a person joins Google, he's just assigned to one of these based on some heuristics during the interviewing process. The real allocation is done 6 months later. Google doesn't do the dirty kind of testing.. the ones like black-box testing, monkey testing -- these are outsourced.

In essence, the motive of the interview was to convince me that Hyderabad does exciting technical work contrary to the popular notion associated with the word test. He was successful.

Getting direct rendering on MSI Xtreme with ATI Radeon Xpress 200

Configuration:
MSI Xtreme motherboard x86_64, 512 MB RAM (with 64 M shared)
ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Series integrated on-board graphics

Problem: DRI not enabled with ATI drivers on Linux. Actually, after installing the rpm available from ATI's site, glxgears' performance drops. What runs at 400 FPS with vesa drivers, runs at 200 FPS with ATI's drivers (fglrx).

Solution: The kernel module wasn't getting compiled properly. ATI released new drivers on 8th, March. But that wasn't enough. It required some tweaking.
I used to get a missing <asm/ioctl32.h> error. There's no <asm/ioctl32.h> on my Fedora Core 4 (FC4-x86_64)
Replacing all such occurences with <linux/ioctl32.h> works.

Essentially:

• cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod

• Replace all occurrences of <asm/ioctl32.h> with <linux/ioctl32.h>

• sh make.sh (this should succeed. It should at least make fglrx.ko)
• cd ..
• sh make_install.sh

Besides, I need the fglrx64 rpm installed. The rpm released on 8th March didn't work for me. This one did.
So, finally I have direct rendering (confirmed with: glxinfo | grep direct) on FC4-x86_64. glxgears reports 733 FPS.

R & D Showcase '06: Display Wall

The R & D Showcase ended; a lot of fanfare, but the industry was uninterested (stupid Bush!). If the activity observed in the academic building is any criteria, it was succesful -- never before had I seen such activity going on in the main building. So many people moving around systems, tables, posters, and other people.

Display Wall
The Display Wall was unprecedented this time. The 3x4 matrix utilized 12 systems. The combined setup with a 6.25 megapixel resolution, 8.704 GB RAM, 1 TB storage and 36.2 GHz of processing power was cooled in a separate room (#215). 11 of the 12 systems used had the same config as the ones in lab-5, and the ATI graphics drivers were unusable in Linux (shame shame ATI).

Sincere thanks to Parry and Tarun for installing Fedora on all the systems, SMR for helping throughout thereafter, and Vardhman for the pics.

Some common questions asked about Display Wall:
Q1: What are you doing apart from just cutting an image and displaying on those systems?
Ans: Those are not images. They are rendered from a 3D model. The model has 13 Million triangles, and is a bit too heavy for even the most serious graphics cards.

Q2: Why not use a projector instead?
Ans: A display wall is different from just projecting using a projector. Projecting a display merely increases the scale, not the resolution. And if you sit near to a projected display, you'll start observing blocks. However, in the case of the display wall, the combined resolution is far greater than that of a single system. You can of course replace each monitor with a projector, and the total resolution is herculean.

Q3: What's the front-end and back-end?
Ans: I don't know, and I don't care.

Google Google everywhere

Google did this. Google did that. Google started this service. Google started that. Google reintroduced this, and in style! Google has become the order of the day. If you read Slashdot, you'll realize that Google is not covered once every day, but about once every few hours. These people are as happening as their tools are awesome, as in too good to be true. With every product they come up with, it's closer to their objective of Organizing the world's information, in line their fundamental Do No Evil ideology. When I had been to Google's Bangalore office, a noteworthy point in a "Google's Truth" board hung on the cafetaria wall said: Success need not necessarily come through evil.

With so much attention focussed on a single organization, Google has raised the eyebrows of all the evildoers. All their efforts are directed to demolish this leviathon. Will the Google magic stay? Or it's just an ephemeral dream? In which case I'd rather not wake up. Therefore, I hope Google remains unvanquished with their "Do no Evil" ideology. Touchwood.

World vs. Blog World

There's a striking similarity in the ways the blogging society is evolving with the worldly society of yesteryears. Essentially, there's a lot of parallelism between worldly societies and blogging-societies -- both appear to have similar traits.

For instance, in a worldly society, some people talk while others listen. In the cyber society bloggers write while others read -- communication.
In a worldly society, people respond to talks, ask questions, volunteer comments. Likewise, in the cyber society, readers post comments to blogs, ask questions, volunteer suggestions, etc. People respond similarly in both worlds. Worldly society or cyber society, if taunted, one feels bad; if challenged, one feels charged; if accused, one feels hurt; if congratulated, one feels happy.

When the no of guests visiting you become large, one hires assistants (secretaries, PAs). Likewise, when the no of posts and comments becomes unmanageable, you resort to RSS feeds, and blogreaders.

Stepping further, in worldy societies, we have chaos when everyone starts shouting at the same time, mostly when their speech doesn't make sense. In the cyber society, a similar confusion results from a cluster of unconnected, senseless posts -- sum total 'zero'.

Therefore, when someone calls me unworldly, I don't exactly acquiesce. I'm worldly in my cyber-sense. I ain't social. I'm cyber-social. I'm blog-social. So what if I don't visit others' places, can't respond energetically while talking face to face? I visit others' blogs and can comment. That's cyber-expression. I'm cyber-worldly.

Sending mails with php

PHP has this mail() function to send mails. However, it's more than
plain vanilla to use it to send mails, esp if you don't have a fully
qualified domain name (FQDN), i.e. all systems on the LAN. Of course you
could use network/socket functions to connnect to the smtp port of your
mail server, but below I describe something simpler.

1. Edit /etc/mail/sendmail.cf to add your relay server:
You should have a line beginning with "DS"
Append to it your mail server.
DSmail.iiit.ac.in

2. Start sendmail

3. Use the mail() function, as is.

Note: Of course, this works only if the mail server allows you as a
relay host. i.e. your system must be trusted. All systems on the LAN,
generally, are.

Fed up with windows.. for the Nth time

Today, I got fed up with windows, for the N-th time again. I wished to
get the Volume License keys for WinServer 2003 (IIIT has a paid MSDN
subscription). I have the username/passwd and I know it's available on
their site. But all that I get after logging in to the msdn subscription
page are advertisements to their products, features-list, and junk. As
if we paid for the subscriptions just to view their ads. There's a pile
of junk CDs (of softwares, apps, everything from M$... all legal)
available in the server room. They gather dust.

I roamed around on their site, and I landed to all places except where I
could possibly find anything useful. Junk Junk Junk everywhere. And
their ads at other places. Going to a crack-page and getting a key
appears quicker. I fail to realize how people can tolerate such stuff
from M$ after all the money that they pay.

Movie: Home Delivery

I saw "Home Delivery". I feel shamefully sorry for that. If the director's old father was kidnapped, his mother was about to be hanged, his poor sister was about to be raped and his wife and children were about to be thrown into bubbling acid, the plight of the director forcing him to make such a "movie" can be understood. Not otherwise

The effort, a confused mixture of all possible genres, is comparable to a retard who discovers a box of colors for the first time and overturns each and every color on his first drawing.

(liftoff from my yesterday's diary entry)

When Indian Politicians start blogging

At some places, politicians have taken to blogging. Makes me imagine how it'd be if some of our Indian politicians take to blogging. Sure, some of them will have to be introduced to keyboards, and some will need to be taught to recognize ABCD.. but, oh, don't stray into details. Let's try to see through the mind's eye how it'd all be:

I'm sure AB Vajpayee would     leave lots         of white         space         between *sentences*             to compensate             for the                     temporal latency             in his speech. L K Advani would have tonnes of Hinduism-propaganda speeches on his blog, but he'd be careful enough to slip in praises for Jinnah, in one corner. The entire RSS *workforce* would get angry and bombard his blog with spam-ic comments, but he'll still continue to be at the top (it's adsense, you see). Sonia Gandhi would write in Italian, but we wouldn't have understood any of her anyway had she written in plain English. The rest of the Gandhi dynasty (Rahul, and siblings) will post flattering comments at their dear mummy's words of wisdom. Manmohan Singh would have his *own* blog (at the request of Sonia), but most of his posts would be symlinks to Sonia's. Yes, I know, he's intelligent. That's why I said *most*. The remaining rest would have some intelligible junk on economy, gathering flies, as the CPI would force him to keep them offline (the CPI don't blog -- they can't actually, it's a bit too revolutionary for them to digest). Who else.. ah... how can I forget Lalu! He'd have his blogpage on a Yadav's server, with free internet from a Muslim ISP. The wallpaper would be adorned with cowdung, and his posts would consist primarily of bullsh*t. The domain-name would be registered in the name of Rabri (yeah, for name-sake only). In cooperation with Congress, he'd enforce a 40% reservation for OBCs for posting comments on his blogpage.

There'd be some nice blogs too. Blogs of youngsters like Arun Jaitley, Chidambaram, Mahajan would make sense. Uma Bharti's blog would be in Saffron fonts but she'd be confused with supporting the posts of BJP or her esteemed Guruji. She'd keep switching between the two, until at one time the BJP kick her out permanently from their blog-circle.

In essence, our politicians will be a lot more interesting and little less pathetic, if they take to blogging. And not to mention, WE, the people of India, would have at least some say on their posts (thru comments, that is).

My phone too is being tapped

First it was Amar Singh who complained about his phone lines being tapped by Congress. Down south, Jayalalitha joined in support with similar grievances. Chandrababu Naidu too acquisced but insisted that he'd join the fray totally only when he had proof. L K Advani too had a gut-feeling that his phones were being tapped and that he suspected it was Congress. After so much attention-tapping, I thought I can also garner some share of the pie. I too have a gut feeling that my phone is being tapped -- so what if I don't have a phone! It doesn't really matter, does it? It's blame blame game; and I'd too like to blame it on Congress. Come CBI, get to action, start hunting for the culprit. :)

Bihar beckons

"Bihar Beckons" -- This was the title of a full-page advertisement in The Economic Times inviting investments in Bihar on the occasion of the Pravasi Bhartiya Diwas! Ever since I gained consciousness, this is the first time terms like investment, development, GDP, etc are beginning to be talked about my infamous home-place, Bihar. Nitish Kumar, the new chief minister, sure showed a lot of hope to re glorify the lost prestige of Bihar during this meet of over 1000 NRIs. If these efforts have their way, and I hope they do, Bihar too would be able to shrug off its 15 years of misrule and anarchy and march towards something better. Elsewhere I've even read that the chief minister has a scientific bent of mind, and he has plans to replace the cowsheds in the chief-minister's residence with a video-conferencing facility connected to all the district headquarters. Perhaps, Nitish should have a chat with Chandrababu Naidu over some of these things. Till then, a long way to go for Bihar.

My third job offer

I received my third job, this time from Nvidia, Pune. The interview, scheduled at 9:00 in the evening didn't start before 10:30, and that left me enough time to grab two episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. on a vacant PC I found near the interview spot. The interview began with one of my projects, video streaming to a (wireless) PDA and the interviewer delved into Multimedia-related questions (what factors affect the bitrate of a video stream, what's q-value, how does it affect the bandwidth requirement....). This was followed by a question that I did not answer in the written test (which I did solve then), and a simple question on probability -- that's it. 1:30 AM -- results out.

gdb generic error

I had gdb-ing my application to figure out the reason why it had been
misbehaving for long. It had been so long that gdb tried to console me
with: "Cannot find user-level thread for LWP 7912: generic error"
I didn't particularly like the "generic error" phrase. What was it
trying to say? Is it trying to console me by stating that this error is
a generice error -- as in, everyone gets it -- and that I need not get
so annoyed? As if to say, everyone has a bad day -- just that it's yours
too today!

gcc commentary

Gcc has some humorous commentary built into it. I tried the datatype "long", and then tried "long long" and just for fun tried "long long long" and here's what it says:
    error: ‘long long long’ is too long for GCC

Curiously enough, gcc doesn't remark similarly for "short short". I expected it to say: error: 'short short' is too short for GCC!

Interesting.

I eat shocks.. everyday

I'm eating shocks..literally. Electrostatic charge runs down by body and to the plate when I put forward my hand to pick it up after having finished my meal. I get a shock right after my meal, three times a day, everyday! I understand that there's something about electrostatic discharge which should be blamed, but it's kind of queer. If you are sitting with me on the mess table, you can almost hear the sparking sound while poor I get the shock (Paresh, Tarun, Ketan, Ranta, etc confirm this). I had heard about electrostatic discharge rendering electronic components useless and that you need to ground yourself before you touch things like the computer motherboard -- to avoid damaging the board. But here I am, without a single capacitor or transistor in my body, and I keep getting these shocks on a regular basis.

There are some strange observations about this phenomena:

1. This phenomenon started only after I returned back from home after my Diwali hols. I was perfectly okay before that. I used to wear the same clothes and eat and sit similarly. Did I burn a bit too many crackers in Diwali? Or do I have an evergreen Diwali with me now?
2. I get up 1-2 times before finishing my meal to load some more things from the counter. On these occassions, I don't get any shocks as I pick up my plate. It's only when I'm finished with my meal, my stomach is filled, and I get up finally, that I get these shocks. As a hit-and-try experiment, I once retired my meal without having filled my stomach, and lo..I did NOT get the shock. However natural this electrostatic discharge phenomenon be, how does it predict if my tummy is unfilled?

Well, untill I find explanations to the above, I'll keep getting shocks meal after meal, three times a day, everyday.

Being Bangalored ... interesting

A shamelessly direct lift-off from someone else's blog. The usage of Being Bangalored even figured in this week's India Today, and I decided I'd rather yield to the temptation. Here you go:

Strange but true. "Bangalored" is a verb which has been recently accrued in the english vocabulary. A person is said to be 'bangalored' if he lost his job because the work got outsourced to bangalore or any other city in India. "He got bangalored last week" is an example of its usage.

I ain't kidding people. Google it up I say. Lot of people in US got bangalored that it became an issue during the US presidential election. Thats exactly when this word was coined.

Dictionary defintion :
Bangalored adj. (said of a corporation, project, or employment) having been relocated to India; having lost business or employment due to such a relocation.

Here are some quick links to 'Bangalored'..hmm it feels really awkward to even pronounce it.
Click: A and B.

And guess what..one such similar verb is "Shanghaied" which means kidnapped. "Shanghaied" - this word even exists in Webster's dictionary. Try and see yourself. Shanghaied has been known since about 1870, at first in the sense of kidnapping a person to make up the crew numbers on a ship, but now more generally to be for ced into doing something against one's will. There is one more... 'Sodom' from the Bible.

Morality and the Constitution

I always used to wonder why the opposition starts demanding the ruling party(-y+ies) to own MORAL responsibility whenever they falter. I mean, why moral responsibility. Why not constitutional responsibility? Why not legal responsibility? Turns out, they can't. The government is not constitutionally/legally responsible for anything. I repeat. The government is not constitutionally/legally responsible for anything. There's not a single law (or even a suggestion) in the 395 odd articles of the Constitutional crap that can hold the government responsible for anything. The opposition, therefore, keeps blackmailing on moral grounds, for, it can't do anything better.

In other words, the government can do whatever it pleases. The Supreme Court, the highest court of appeal in India, will keep expressing discontent, but they can't do anything either. Their hands are tied. They are just supposed to interpret the constitution -- not act as per righteousness. In such a scenario, I feel that the government is actually very very moral whenever it does anything. What else, if not morality, stops it from modifying the constitution to make amendments that ensure that the same party keeps winning every time? What else, if not morality, stops them from framing laws making their rule permanent? Nothing. Pure morality. All strong words like sovereignty, democracy, liberty, et al, combined don't have enough power to stop this -- and yet, we have the government performing at least some degree (+ve or -ve).

G B Shaw mused:
Democracy is a device which ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

What recently happened in my home-state, Bihar, raised similar demands for moral ownership. A "constitutionally elected" assembly was dissolved because the governor did not deem the majority party deserving enough. That was on 23rd May. Four months later, the Supreme Court wakes up (why??) to announce that the governor was wrong. It was constitutionally wrong, but nothing can be undone. Who owns the constitutional responsibility in this case? Oh, I see -- The can-always-be-blamed Mr Nobody. The opposition, unfailingly, has again renewed its demands for the government to own moral responsibility! And the prime minister, it seems, has agreed that he cannot disown moral responsibility. Oh, how cute. I love you. Please go to hell (on your own money).

So hopeless is the nature of the holy constitution of the largest democracy of the world (yeah, it's India) that I wonder -- Isn't this collection of 395 articles no more than a huge and perfect crap-book? What's the use? I tried to reason out some possible uses of the bulky constitution.

• Use as Toilet paper

Given the bulk of the constitution, each member of the Lok Sabha can get one paper each for toilet-paper usage. Assuming that all the MPs go to the toilet daily (I doubt it, though), it won't last more than a few days, however. Besides, a majority of them won't like using toilet-paper. But those who would, perhaps they can use both the sides of the paper, one side each day.

• Use for literature study

I confess, I learned a whole set of new words when I first chanced with the constitution. The only knowledge I have of heavy-weight words like sovereign, secular, democratic, republic, fraternity are derived from my school civics book describing the constitution. Besides, the composition is enticingly poetic. I still remember:

"Article 32 confers upon the citizens of India the right to constitutional remedies. ...."

Ah, don't worry what this right is -- 'tis too impractical. This is the only place in my 22 years of life that I have seen the "confers upon" phrase being used, and I find it sweetly poetic. Perhaps the makers of the constitution mistook this exercise as an endeavor towards the Nobel Prize for Literature. They didn't get it -- and they died of shock. "We, the people of India, having solemnly ....." is another favorite and by-heart.

• Use as a flare

There still are several parts of the country that suffer from freezing cold. The pages of the constitution can burn for quite a while to provide some warmth. I'm told the pages are good, and hence, they should sustain fire for quite some time.

• Making Kites

This is a perfect usage. Use the pages as kites. Boring holes in the pages will give additional delight and attaching a tail would suit the page's content to a T.

That's it. No more practical uses of the crap called the Constitution of India. Sorry founding fathers. None that I can think of presently. And no -- it does not deserve the Literature Nobel, either!

Al Qaida's Hiring

It's true. Al Qaida's Hiring.

I had heard and read that the economy was going strong, that the bears were unable to hold back the bulls who had been raging the stock market with each passing day. But that the upbeat mood has tingled till Al Qaida too still trickles me. So, they've placed proper advertisements asking people to join their force.
Someone please take up the issue with our placement officer. Schedule a Pre Placement Bombing (akin to PPT) soon. :-)

Thy OS is thy religion

Imagine the Year 2015 AD: Barely 10 years from now

The world is casted based solely on one demarcation: your religion,
except that it's not actually Hinduism or Christianity, or Islam but
instead your OS. Your OS is your religion; it represents you, teaches
you, guides you and inspires you. There are great heroes to sing of --
they've done groundbreakingly significant work in the upliftment of your
OS (Linus, Jobs, Gates to name a few). The preamble of the crappy
Constitution of India is rewritten to include the term "equality of all
Operating Systems". To the phrase "equality in protection by law
irrespective of caste, creed, color, sex, sect" is appended "or
operating system".

There'll be some secular political parties, some pseudo-secular, and
some infamously communal (with deep religious attachment towards their
OS-es). There'll be communal wars in the name os OS-es.

And then there'll be some Nazis who won't tolerate any disgrace to their
religion -- either use their OS, or die! Takeovers follow when some
profilic superpowers try to spread their religious colonies throughout
the globe (or every other planets perhaps). Divide-and-rule based on
your OS still works. There is widespread anarchy in the name of one's OS.

Then there'll be a Mahatma. He'll be too lazy to attach himself to any
OS -- if you format his system and install your OS, he'll acquiescedly
offer his other PC as well (his forefathers used to offer the other
cheek when slapped on one). He'll be assassinated by a virus of the same OS.

Children's names rhyme with the OS internals -- Kernel Prasad, chmod R
Shastry, Insmod Pandey, Modprobe Chaurasia, Ipod Vidyadhar, Zotob Gates,
Bill Nimda, etc. Marital and funeral rituals are tied closely to the
nature of booting and crashing of your OS, respectively.

Whoosh! I'm waiting for 2015.

Halting the gears

It's general knowledge that glxgears can be used to get a quick peek of a graphics card's performance. glxgears is fill-limited, that is, the frames-per-second (FPS) depends on the size of the window. I describe here a small exercise with glxgears: Halting the gears.

Increasing the window size decreases the FPS. However, the perceived sense of rotation (clockwise or anti-clockwise) of the gears appears to switch as you increase the window size. That is, as you drag the corner of the window and make it larger, the gears will appear to be rotating clockwise and then at a point they'll apear to be moving anti-clockwise and then again they'll appear to moving clockwise at a point... and so on. This is akin to the rotation of a fan wherein you can sometimes feel the blades moving in a direction opposite to the blades' actual direction of motion. So, after making x no of rotations, if a point p on the periphery of a gear lands ahead of it's original place, the perceived sense of rotation is the same as its actual rotation direciton. However, if the point p falls short of its original place, the gear will be perceived as rotation in the opposite direction.

The Exercise: Drag the corner of the window to increase the size and bring it to the point such that the perceived sense of rotation of the gears is just about to change. At this juncture, it'll appear that the gears aren't even moving -- as if they're halted. It's a bit difficult to manouvre the size to a perfect standstill, but it's worth the pains!