Krishna Bharadwaj

Blogging after a long time, Don't know whether it was because of internals ;)

The All India Microsoft student partners meet was held in Goa this year. All MSPs were excited about it. Anil and Lakshman got the tickets reserved. We left to Goa on the eve of 10th October. The journey was awesome, Lakshman was the target as usual ;), kept teasing him through out the trip :P. It started raining at round 9:30, Lightning was more powerful than any camera flash ;) It was very good to see. I slept for a while and got up at around 4, we had reached Karwar by then. I could see the beach, it was probably the first time i saw some beach in the night, it was amazing.

Events started on day 2 of Shaastra.. A copy of schedule was given to all of us. We had a look at it to see what all events we could participate in. The Rubik's cube workshop was scheduled at 12, Code Breaker prelims clashed with that. We chose to attend Rubik's cube since we had missed the Network security Orientation program which was needed for Code Breaker. In the mean time samartha asked me to join him for Code Breaker prelims since he was alone.The questions asked were really nice.

Its almost 3 to 4 months since the Shaastra publicity team came to our college.. (Shaastra is the annual Technical fest of IIT Madras). Few of us had decided to come for it at any cost this year.. Since it will be the last chance to come as a student.

Apart from Johnson trotter, Permutations can be generated in many ways. The two methods i'll be discussing here are :

1. Recursive Method
2. Minimal Change Method or Bottom up approach.

The following question was asked in the programming round of Yahoo! recruitments last year in our college.. Here's the problem statement.

A program to check whether the spelling of a given word is correct or not. If not, word suggestions must be provided. A dictionary will be provided which contains one word per line. (~ 42,000 words, 102 KB).

Many keep asking me this question, "How do i improve my programming skills?". I used to ask the same question to my friends who were good at it ( Not that i'm too good at programming now :P ) But i have definitely found certain places where one can enhance their programming skills. Before one gets started with these, it is important to have good knowledge of Data structures and Algorithms. So best would be to code all the lab programs we had in 3rd and 4th semester once again ;).. All the sorting techniques are very important!!

Programming is fun, many will agree with this.. Here is a programming language which makes it more fun with its syntax.. Its called the LOLCODE . I personally found it really cool. The way they have defined the tokens is simply awesome. Some of the tokens are

Begin = HAI
End = KTHXBYE (ok thanks bye :P )
Print = VISIBLE
True = YARLY
False = NOWAI
Error = O NOES

I wanted to share a couple of things regarding placements and how it is from a placement coordinators' point of view. This is my first post about placements so before anything else, one quick round of introduction of placement coordinators who have made the hectic work, a little enjoyable!

FreeRice! I liked the concept of this site very much.. Lakshman was the one who introduced me to this. Its basically a vocabulary game, A word is given and we have to select the definition from a list of specified options. There are different levels, the level gets tough as we progress. The concept I was talking about is this "For each correct answer we give, the sponsors of FreeRice website (the ads we see on the bottom of the site) donate 20 grains of Rice to the UN Food program".

One of the main advantages of using FOSS(Free and Open Source Softwares) is that we get the source code along with the program.. All this time i was just using them, but never tried to get the source code and see the code that was making the program work.. Few weeks back i decided to do so. I asked madhu about how to get the source code and build it.. He told me that GNOME would be the best package to start with.. He gave me some links where i could get all the information about building GNOME..