Higher studies

Earning a PhD at a great university has been a dream I’ve been cherishing for the last 4 years. And for all I know, the motive for that has been nothing more than “doing good work in a field I love”. Now that the 4 years of my undergraduate education are coming close to an end, I’ve started to feel like graduate school admissions are nothing more than good, rather *great* academic performance. Sure it might matter if the work experience on your application is *exceptionally research oriented*, but the fact that a moderate profile gets rejected just because of moderate grades makes me a little sad at times. For one simple reason – I’ve never wanted something so badly for myself.

*DE

I’ve always been a hopper. As in like, I’ve always kept on hopping between stuff. When I say stuff, I mean a Linux distribution, and things like that. I still haven’t bought a Macbook, so these tiny little annoying things are going to bother me for quite some time.

I cannot use Windows for any work that I intend to do. Even if I try to, I cant. Setting up things are just plain pain. Plus every other tool I need to work with almost always doesn’t support Windows. So I cannot use it. I *need* a Linux distribution to work on. I started with RedHat linux, then moved to Fedora for quite some time. Then I moved to Ubuntu. Then I tried my hands on Debian. Then I gathered some guts and tried Gentoo (which I used for one full week, before I got pissed off by its everything-compiles nature). Then came Archlinux, and *that* put an end to all my distro hops. But that’s an altogether different story (maybe a different blog post on that).

But this post deals with the DE, rather than the distribution. I’ve always been a GNOME user, until a few months ago when I decided I should switch to something else. So I installed XFCE, and quite liked it. It was stable, fast, and gave me almost everything I could ask for in a DE. But then there were some problems with the xfce4-panel package; it kept on crashing on startup (and at times at random). I searched on forums, but didn’t find anything. I should have bugged some good folks at Archlinux/XFCE, but then decided I should try something else. So I went ahead and installed LXDE, which again, suited me fine. In fact, I’ve been using it as my main environment for quite some time now.

But now, I think I should go back to either of GNOME or KDE. There are tiny little annoying things that bug me too often in light weight DE’s. I probably wouldn’t mind spending those extra machine resources on a full blown DE, as long as I don’t have to tinker around to make things work. I’ve probably done enough of that. I need something usable. Now until and unless I don’t have a job, I wont  buy a Macbook. So until then, its either one of GNOME or KDE. GNOME scares me. The last GNOME version I used was 2.26, and it took horrible, really horrible times to move from the login screen to the main desktop. I have some not so bad memories of using KDE from an internship. I’d probably give KDE a whirl this time. The latest KDE version looks awesome!

Interviews

There is this thing about interviews. This weird thing. That I’m just a little too stumped in them. I know I know the answers. And I know the questions I have been asked aren’t difficult at all. They just need a concentrated effort for like 2 or 3 minutes, and you can come up with a solution. Of course that might not be an O(1) solution, but still coming up even with an O(n^2) algorithm should be decent for a start. You can always have a discussion with the interviewer (provided he is nice; both the interviews I’ve been through were with pretty nice interviewers), and then improve upon the solution. And the whole activity is fun. Optimizing stuff, removing unnecessary executions, cleaning up the code, is really a fun activity.

So interviews are basically fun. Until you put me in the room, that is. Maybe the reason for this whole thing is that I’ve given just 2 interviews, but I’m usually a little nervous, not being able to think when someone is watching each and every step of mine. Both the interviews were with the best companies in India, and just thinking that this could actually screw my chances of working with some of the best minds, irks me.

For instance, the interviewer asked me to reverse a linked list. Now I’ve done this question like a hundred times before, and I know the solution, which is nothing more than trivial. But, at that time, all I did was getting lost between arranging the pointers. The function to reverse a linked list is no more than 3 statements (a recursive one), but for some strange reason, I couldn’t perform it at that time. Sad.

Just for my own sake, I’ll write down the solution here. I hope the solution is correct.

void reverse (struct node *start) {
if (start->next == NULL) return;
reverse(start->next);
start->next->next = start;
}

No more than 3 statements in the entire function (I’m assuming it does the job). Nothing more than trivial. But there is this really weird thing about interviews.

Maybe its just the fact that I’ve given only 2 interviews. I need to bring my brain to the work-while-some-is-watching-you mode. Lets see how long it takes. I hope I don’t screw up any more interviews.

Hello GSoC

This is probably my first post that appears on Planet Python/SoC, so hello everyone! I’m Siddhant, an undergraduate student at Delhi College of Engineering, India, and I’ve been accepted to work on PyVCAL by the PSF in this year’s Summer of Code. Essentially my project involves getting more and more Source Control Management APIs supported in the PyVCAL backend, so that it becomes solid enough to be used for just about any SCM system. I initially wished to submit a proposal on introducing a web based commit facility for the Basie Project. The main motivation for this was, if someone wants to make any *minor* changes, it shouldn’t be *absolutely* necessary to open up a terminal, checkout the code, make changes, and then commit it back.

I thought it would be awesome if we could just convert a source code view into a textbox, fill it up with the contents of the file, make those *minor* changes and commit it back, all within the browser. Nifty, but it might not be that straightforward. Also, even if we disregard all those issues, PyVCAL needs to be solid enough to do that task. So I made a proposal on getting support for more SCM backends working in PyVCAL, getting a *great* deal of help from the people currently involved with its development.

Finally, what I’m hoping to work on this summer is, getting different SCM API’s working in read/write mode in PyVCAL, so that it provides an API solid enough to be used with just about any SCM system. I’ll try and update this blog about the progress.

All the best to everyone!

The iPod Touch saga

I got myself a shiny new iPod Touch last August. That time I kept on drooling on how sexy its looked, how sleek it was, and how awesome the UI was. The accelerometer, the touchscreen interface, and the beautiful yet simplistic UI, kept me hooked on to it 24X7. Off late, I don’t find it that interesting. Yes it surely is one of the most amazing device I’ve ever seen, but the whole restrictiveness things kills the fun. It makes me think that its just an over priced music/video player, which allows you to install applications for a price, and which lets you surf the internet over wifi. Without iTunes, you cant do anything with that device. You need iTunes to install applications, to copy videos, to copy music, to do just about anything. My initial experience with iTunes wasn’t very good either. I have a 16Gb iPod, and around 25Gb of music. The moment I plugged it in, iTunes automatically started syncing the entire music library on my computer to the iPod. It even gave me an error message when it couldn’t find more space. Dumb.

The whole thing is, that since the iPod is an amazing piece of hardware, it would be awesome if there was any alternative OS available for it. Linux on iPhone/iPod should be out in a few months. And there would be nothing like getting Android/Maemo ported onto it, possibility of which is very less.

For now, maybe I’ll just jailbreak it.

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