O' Henry

If you watch football then you know whom i am talking about. It is "Thierry Henry", one of the greatest footballer and the best striker in Barclays Permier League ever.

So how did it start ? If you are an Indian then you know the importance of cricket to football. To be true, nobody gives a shit about European football here. For me also it was a transition from cricket to football. Back in 2005, there aroused a question in my mind. Whenever i used to go to Chandigarh or Delhi, i will always find some of the people wearing football t-shirts with big number 14 along with Henry written below on the back of it, while some of them had a bald headed guy and an O2 on it. I was aware of EPL before also, but never actually cared about it. Just like any other person you will either be Manchester United fan or Anti-ManU. So to speak, i was Manchester United fan. I have never watched one complete game of Manchester United before 2005, but whenever there was a conversation, i will enter as a ManU guy :D . In TV also quite a lot of times i will see this bald headed figure scoring goals, but just ignored it all together. But then in 2005, time came, when i was like who the hell is this guy.

So started reading about him. It was just after watching 8-9 goals of him that i thought "Man, football is worth watching". Started following the league, and still a ManU fan( I told you it is by default ). Transition occurred, i became a fan of Arsenal. He was scoring goals for Arsenal which no one had ever thought of. Sheer guts to try those kind of things. Defense was as good as it could be. ManU, rather take any team for that matter, was helpless against him.

So many years have gone, and have realized one thing, Thierry Henry was the most dominating striker in english Premier League ever. It is sad that he left EPL. Amazing thing is that he didn't stop after leaving EPL. Continued his form, and with Barcelona won all championships in an year for the first time. Barca has never achieved that feat before. And now in NY Red Bulls, he is at the top of ratings. ;)

Yahoo Summer School

I am attending Yahoo Summer School on Information Retrieval at Bangalore currently. Since it is being organized by Yahoo and IISc. ( Indian Institute of Science ) Bangalore focus is on the research and various other aspects of Information Retrieval. Till now i have attended the lectures by Mounia Lalmas, Mark Sanderson and Ronny Lempel.

Sessions were very useful, interactive. Ronny's lecture was just amazing. He talked about the real world  problems and how to deal with them. What data structures to use for storing information, advantage of one over others, the best thing is that he mentioned complexity of various methods and the trade-offs between space and speed.

Post Edited on Jul 8 :
Rest of talks were as good as before. The first two days of the lecture were introductory, where the very basics of IR were taught. After that the talks were more specifics, here is the Schedule. Since i have already done IR course at IIIT I was aware of most of the content of Mounia's lectures. Mark's Lectures on IR Evaluation were very good for people like me who have just started in this field.
"Click here to get the lectures"
They also provided with the video lectures for the whole event which could be found here.

Microsoft Summer Internship Interview 2011

Microsoft came to our campus to select Summer interns for 2011. Internship process was like this.

There was one written round, where they selected 36 students from 150+ students. Written round was normal, questions were solvable.

Then there were two rounds of individual interview. Questions asked were easy, at-least for me as i code regularly ;)

During 1st interview they asked me two questions. I solved both of them. I was solving one of the problem in a bad manner, so he gave me a hint. I picked that and re-answered what he wanted to listen. After 1st round, from 36 they selected around 12 students for 2nd round.

Second interview was all good. I learned a lot from 2nd interview. The women who took my interview was very cool and explained things perfectly. After 2nd round, they selected 6 students.

Final interview was at MS-IDC, Hyderabad. They asked 8 questions in this round. I answered 7 of them correctly, all were very easy. Had no idea of the eighth one. I was not selected in the final round. Out of 6, they took 3 interns.

Have a good CGPA(Cumulative Grade Point Average), there is lot of weightage for it in Microsoft internship interview process.

Few tips :

• Brush up the basics of Data Structures and Algorithms.
• Have a good CGPA.

All in all, a good learning experience and will come back strong next year.

Cheers !!!!

Challenge Problems SPOJ

KAMIL

for i in range(10):t=raw_input();print 2**sum(t.count(i)for i in'DFLT')

10.times{q=1 gets.gsub(/[DTFL]/){q*=2} p q}

1st one : python
2nd one : ruby

POLYBIUS

for i in range(input()):
 for j in raw_input():
  j=ord(j)
  if j>73:j-=1
  if j>64:print 2*j-j%5-119,

Language python

SUCCESS

main(){brk(printf("%m"));}

Language C

SIZECON

s=0;gets.to_i.times{b=gets.to_i;s+=b if b>0}
p s

Language ruby

Spamming

#!/usr/bin/python
import smtplib

sender = 'admin@zzz.ac.in'
receivers = ['xxx@gmail.com']
# sender = in mail transcript it will show this sender address
# receivers = actual address where we want to send the mail

message = """From: name 
To: name 
Subject: Test Mail, plz ignore

how are you ?

"""

smtpObj = smtplib.SMTP('students.iiit.ac.in')
# do change smtpObj according to your position
print "Successfully sent email"
smtpObj.sendmail(sender, receivers, message)

When this python code is run, it will send the mail to the addresses mentioned in receivers which is a list in python. prototype is similar to gmail. It does show the ip address in the complete info of the mail. But there's a way to hide ip in proxy servers. Try it.

About the Blog

I may be a little late in writing this post but still it has to be clarified as what this blog refers to. Here i am going to point to the things which i think are worth sharing and some of them are going to be completely random.

SPOJing Ends

I think i have done enough questions in spoj and time has come to practice somewhere else, some place where there are more people to compete with. Even though in spoj i couldnt go beyond 335, but that's enough to say that i am no more a rookie :)

PS : My spoj handle -> arpit_s