August 2004 - Posts
I had a heated argument with my friends today. Again I was the only one to talk for Microsoft.
A guy was called and asked a few questions. The questions asked and his answers go like this.
Q: Who created 'C'?
A: Dennis Ritchie
Q: Who created 'C++'?
A: Bjarne Stroustrup
Q: Who created 'C#'?
A: Microsoft. I dont know the name of the person.
Q: Who created 'Linux'?
A: Linus Torvalds.
Q: Who created UNIX?
A: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
Q: Who was the cief Architect for Windows NT?
A: I dont know the name of the person. I know Microsoft created it.
This guy answered exactly the same way my friends wanted him to.
Why is this so? Even I have thought about this many a times.
Take any book on C#. 90% of the C# books say
"Microsoft came up with a new language called C#".
Why there is no mention of Anders Hejlsberg? OK I understand C# team is a huge one and all the resources were provided by Microsoft. But still this guys name should be mentioned in every C# book. ( I dont know whether it is there in Microsoft Press book. -Atleast there it should be present-)
Even AT&T is a company and they provided the resurces needed for the development of 'C'.(I understand it was more of a research company)
The same is the case of OS. Why nobody knows who was the main man behind Windows NT kernel? Majority of the books on Visual J# dont mention who were the men behind it.
OK you can easily know it. Its not a secret. I agree to that. But why is it not so open or public. Why many people dont know about Anders Hejlsberg or Eric Gunnerson?
This one seemed to be the quite acceptable solution for the Gas station problem.
Just browse or look in your state statistics to find the Number of people working in Gas Stations in your city/country. Divide it the average number of employees in a Gas Station . That gives te average number of Gas Stations.
For quite some time Iam trying to find the best possible solution for the very famous interview question- ”How many Gas station variants are there in your city?”.
I love this question. Probably this the the best way to test a person's problem solving/approaching skills. But I still dont know what is the most convincing solution for this question. I hope you will be able find the number of Gas Stations by a typing in a simple google query:-) Aint that true???????
Congrats
Pooja. Wish You a passionate career and a wonderful life at Microsoft.
Yesterday I noticed a very strange feature of GMAIL. When you are sending a mail to a gmail user you can insert a '.' (dot) at any position in the username of that person. The mail reaches the person!!!!
My gmail id is bharathganesh@gmail.com
But if you send a mail to bharath.ganesh@gmail.com (or) b.harathganesh@gmail.com (or) bh.arathganesh@gmail.com (or) bhar.athganesh@gmail.com (or) bha.rath.ga.nesh@gmail.com ...... the mail still reaches me.
i.e. You can insert any number of dots within the username. Great right??
Look at this. I sent a mail to b.h.ara.th.gane.sh@gmail.com but still the mail reached the inbox of bharathganesh@gmail.com
 bharathganesh@gmail.com |
From: Bharath Ganesh <rbharathganesh@yahoo.com>
To: b.h.ara.th.gane.sh@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 02:47:38 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: gmail wonder
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Add sender to contacts list | Trash this message | Show original
This is amazing. Check It Out.
Bye.
So dont regret for selecting fistnamelastname@gmail.com instead of firstname.lastname@gmail.com . You can still use the latter!!!
I dont know whether the reverse works. Does that work????(removal of dots)
I thank Tosh Meston for sending me an Orkut invite.
For those who dont know Tosh---Tosh Meston works for the Outlook Web Access Team and he blogs here.
Before getting deep into Social Networking Research I would like to get an invite to Orkut. Could anyone send me an invite?
My name: Bharath Ganesh
email: bharathganesh@gmail.com
These days Iam getting quite interested in Social Networking Research. I liked this a lot. You can find some good research stuff here.
National Film Awards are announced.
As expected Meera Jasmin got the best actress award for the great Malayalam movie 'Padam Onnu-Oru Vilapam'. I had already blogged about this film a few months back. A very very low budget film. This shows that the money invested does not influence the success of a film in any way. Padam Onnu_oru Vilapam is perhaps one the best films I have evr seen. I always used to say my friends that this film will get a national award. The story goes like this:
It's all about the hapless Muslim girls in the interior parts of Malappuram (AKA, Mangalore), close to north Kerala. The film forces us to think on several sensitive issues, which seem to have gone unnoticed for several decades. A Muslim girl becoming a mother at fourteen and a grandmother at 30 is something, which would not be digested at this time and age.
Malayalam filmmaker T V Chandran brings to light the atrocities faced by the women in the little-known facet in the parts of Malabar, particularly the Muslim heartland of Malappuram in north Kerala in PADAM ONNU: ORU VILAPAM.
Probably this film might set a wave all together. Atleast a section of the Muslim society might listen the message let out by Chandran. The theme of this film is inspired by a short story called 'Shahina' written by Aryadan Shoukath. Shahina played by Meera Jasmine is a student in the tenth who is preparing for the board exams. Emerging successful with merit she hopes to study further. All her dreams are shattered when the musaliars (Muslim clerics) decide that she should not be allowed to study further.
Like the other girls in her community she is married of to a man double her age. Her husband is already married once and is a father. Shahina protests by not letting her husband consummate their marriage. She also inspires her husbands first wife to revolt against the harassment she faces. Shahina's protests but her defense comes to an end when her husband rapes her. She goes for a divorce, but what she does not realize is that the result of the rape is growing in her womb.
The film concludes with Shahina walking to the river with the clothes she has to wash and the child bundled in her arms. As she performs the task of washing the toddler huddles in the clothes lets out a painful wail.
I plan to see this film again this week :)
Microsoft India Academic Developer Program is perhaps at its best now. At teched Academia on Aug 10th they launched the Student Project Program. www.studentprojectprogram.comThey specify a set of project specificaton at this site. The student can select anyone and implement. In addition the student is free to choose any of his own projects with the consent from his mentor and Microsoft india.
All of the projects that are listed in thier site are Application projects. No system side projects. The projects are like-Banking, Event handling, Crime Record System etc.. to name a few. I have applied for a system side project. Hope they allow me to do to my project under this programme.
Even the projects of the finalists in Imagine Cup-2003 were mostly application oriented.
Have the traditional Computer Science Projcts like Operating System Implementation,Compiler Design etc lost their charm??
Should the University specify the language to be used for developing apps for the lab curriculam?
Iam doing my Computer Engineering in Chennai, India. Computer Engineering does not deal with any language/technology as such. It just specifies the concepts and theories.
Consider for example a subject common in all Computer Engineering Courses- 'Object Oriened Programming'. The syllabi should deal only with the concpets of OOPs in a language independent way. To a certain extent I go by the fact that you need a base language to explain these concepts. But still it should be the students right to choose the language. The university should never choose it. This is Computer Engineering and not Computer Programming Class.
This semester I have a lab called Internet Programming lab. A great lab if yopu choose .NET. My university specifies JAVA + JAVASCRIPT.
And my staff says Iam not suppose to use Visual J#. This seems to be abselute Non-Sense. The university's aim should be to teach me Web Programming and it should be least concerned with what language I use or what platform I choose. A person may be an expert in C# and may suck a big time when it comes to JAVA. (I dont compare C and C++ to C#). No university can be blamed for making C/C++ as a compulsary course.
These days Microsoft India Academia is also trying to influence the universities and colleges to include C# and .NET framework as part of their curriculam. That too is unfair.
The student should be given the total freedom to choose the language in which he wants to do his work.
Mythreyee Ganapathy, Senior Product manager, Microsoft India says Getting good talent is Microsoft's biggest challenge in India.
Look for the channel9 India video here
She works in India as part of Microsoft Research University Relations. She is supposed to improve Microsoft's relationship with the academic community.
OK, to a certain extent I agree to her. The reason for this is that, In a country like India the degree of potential of a student has no relationship with the college/University he studies in. It is not that the IITs are the only place where you find techies. You can find great geeks at at average engineering colleges(Mythreyee was talking about getting freshers) also. But here the ratio is 1 in 500. So if Microsoft is really interested in discovering that one student it has to go to each of the 2500 colleges in India. That is impossible. But they can atleast think beyond the IITs and NITs. These are not the only places where you can search for geeks. The recruitment policies of Microsoft needs to be a lot more open. Probably they can conduct a kind of screening round or elimination round. This round may be made online. And this round may be open to any person irrespective of the collee/university he (she) comes from.
The Microsoft India Academia Team plans to reach each of the 2500 colleges in India as part of its Academic Evangelizing. Probably the Microsoft Research University Relations team can go hand in hand with them.
Remember: University relations doesn't mean having relationships with just the IITs and NITs.
The death of Henri Cartier Bresson, the photographer-artist is a great loss to the Photojournalism industry.
Cartier has done miracles with his 35 mm Leica camera. He is perhaps one of very few artists who can do Journalism with just a camera.
These days we cant see many photojournlists. Photographers dont understand journalism and Journalists dont get well with photography. Cartier has some historic photographs to his credit. He had shared a very close relationship with my country-India.
He was with Mahatma Gandhi 15 minutes before Gandhi was assasinated.
After Gandhiji's death Cartier published a photoessay on it. Photographs of Gandhiji's Funeral and whole of India mourning were all great artistic ones.
The most famous Photograph in that photoessay is that of Jawarlal Nehru announcing the assasination of Gandhiji to a large crowd in New Delhi.
Talking about Nehru, I get reminded of another great great photo taken by Cartier.
A photograph showing Jawaharlal Nehru sharing a hearty talk with
lady Mountbatten. This is probably one the most strongest evidence of Lady Lord Mountbatten having an affair with Jawaharlal Nehru.
Yesterday we had a session called "How to think like a True Programmer" at our .NET user group (Chennai .NET User Group-Student Chapter). It was a talk by Microsoft MVP Thameem Ansari. It was quite interesting. He talked about general programming practices, writing defensive code, smart code...
Here also the Patterns Vs Patents issue came up. He was in favour of Reuse. According to me, there exist certain apps which need creative thinking and innovative approach. There can always be a better way to do such apps. That is were we should explore. When doing such apps you can either go for patents or patterns. Not both of them. A challenging compnay should give the freedom to start from the begining to its employees. Atleast when Time is not a factor we can avoid using patterns. Thameem did'nt seem to be with me. He was partially agreeing with me. But I'd personally hate to work for a company which doesnt give me freedom to do new things.
Software Development is a highly innovative process.We are developers and not Repository Matchers.
So I would go for Patents and not Patterns. You??