Infosys, Cordys at MEC

My Eighth Semester at MEC has begun and my first happy news is that I am placed in Infosys!!
The Infosys Recruitment Drive was on 17th December,2009. Out of the 180 students who had taken the written test, 48 of us cleared and 46 finally made into the company.

The written test consisted of 2 papers:
1. Logical and Analytical Reasoning
2. Verbal Ability
There was individual cut offs for each section.
HR Interview followed and I was fortunate to get a very experienced, energetic and jovial person from Infosys to interview me. He made me feel quite comfortable during the interview.

Yesterday i.e 18th December, "Cordys" came for recruitment in MEC. I was again one among the 17 lucky people who cleared their written test which consisted of Aptitude and Technical Sections..
First Tech Interview went really cool! I had almost confidently answered all questions...but was rejected! Maybe it was because I said yes, when asked if I was placed in Infy. :-P

I am just wondering if I have to go for higher studies or industry straight away!!! I would be very happy if I get some experienced advice regarding the pros and cons of my above concern.

Couple of companies had come in the seventh semester for campus recruitment in Model Engineering College. Capital IQ, Subex, Smartcrowds were among those, but they just took a handful of our students.

Many more companies are yet to visit MEC in the months to come especially after the 6 month freeze in recruitments to IT industry.

Now Hope to improve my skills in various departments with a free mind!!!

Bye!

Seminar : Ethical Hacking

My Academic Seminar was on : "Web/System Security through Ethical Hacking"

The PPT that I presented can be viewed below (View in fullscreen for clarity):

The Presentation was basically classified into 3 parts :

Part 1: Hacker Definition, History, Classes; Ethical Hacking- Need for it, Skills, Anatomy of Attack
Part 2: Classes of Attack - Authentication, Client-Side, Command Execution, Information Disclosure etc..
Part 3: Few Hacking Techniques in detail - Injection Exploits - SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting; Google Hacking - Google Hack Queries, Google Hack Database (GHD), Google Hack Honey Pots (GHH).

The Presentation was followed by a Demonstration that I prepared to show SQL Injection, XSS Attack, Remote File Retrieval (Retrieving "/etc/passwd" file from the remote server through the browser using Path traversal technique), OS Commanding (Executing OS Commands in a vulnerable remote Web Server through your web browser).
The Demo basically consists of a Web Site I made in HTML-PHP-MySQL-Perl CGI (OnlineBanking) which is vulnerable to the above mentioned web attacks...

I hope the presentation and Demo went well...

Hope all viewing this presentation will develop an awareness regarding computer Security and take preventive measures in their systems and websites to keep Black Hats at bay.....

Signing off for now...bye!

Mindtree Remote Internship

This post was supposed to be written 2 months back..But I thought I would post it after Mindtree declared the results for the best project and very deservedly, our project has been chosen as the best among the other teams from our college and we would soon be given cash prizes too... :-)

Now about the Internship Programme:

The whole of May I was occupied with the Mindtree Remote Internship Programme.
Our project: Course Evaluation Record System was a pretty simple Java-JDBC one.
Nevertheless, we learnt a lot about how softwares are being made in the Industry.

We made the design documentations using the UML Umbrello Open Software.
Our Coding IDE was "Eclipse", an open source software and it was quite interesting to work in it. We overcame common problems related to classpath, package hierarchy etc.. Adding Logger was a new experience for us in coding . But the unit testing phase called the JUnit Testing was the biggest challenge for us as we had never coded for testing the already written production code. It was a bizarre experience. We had to change the layout of our production code altogether to suit the test code that we were writing. Thus we learnt from many mistakes and completed and submitted the project (did a bit of refactoring too) well before time.

It was a good experience for us to go through the metamorphosis of software development according to industry standards. I hope this would benefit us in some way while looking for career opportunities in Corporate world, especially in this time of recession.


Destiny has lot of surprises. I was destined to get Mindtree Internship, when I was denied internship from IBM.

Bye for nw..
Signing off

A Painful Trip 2 IBM, B'lore

What shall I say? What is the definition of "Luck"? What is the science and history behind some people getting lucky always, some people just getting a chance to touch victory for a sec and then being send back to the same olden days and some people always unlucky..?

It is the 2nd time this year, I am missing chances to convert some big opportunities into realities..!! Is it called fate? Who decides fate?

The first one being the GSoc2009. My mentor gave me all hopes saying my proposal was great and he liked to see me doing their project this year etc etc..
But finally what happened....It seems I was ranked 6th among all the applications they received and unfortunately the organization got only 4 slots from google...and thus I was out of the whole thing...Maybe I should have chosen a project that they wanted to get done with urgently...But how the hell am I supposed to know which are the projects important to them...!!
The mentor even apologized saying they would surely consider my proposal next year....but an opportunity missed is lost forever...

The 2nd one was our trip to IBM, Bangalore on 8th May to engage in their tests and interviews to get selected for doing their Summer Internship Program. The opportunity was great!! Thanks to the Placement Cell students of our college!!
But inspite of clearing their aptitude and technical tests which only 11 among all of us did, I couldn't make it in the interview...Though I believe I answered well for most of the questions, I was not considered among the three who made it...I think I was not able to convince my interviewer that I was capable of doing Java programming, though I had completed Java and J2EE courses from NIIT last year...
But still some hope remains..as the rest 8 of us will have a telephonic interview within a week and maybe I hope to convince them what I am capable of... :-)

Its summer vacations now for 2 months, all of us frm college are trying to get engaged in either internships or other computer studies to add more value to their resume...coz this is the time of recession....u knw?
Currently I am doin a remote project for MindTree - Course Evaluation System...we r doing it in Java ...its pretty simple one...jdbc and mysql being the main domains....hope to finish them soon... so thats it...
I am curious to know- if life is programmed by fate then is there any need for emotions like hope, expectations, ambitions, aspirations etc...
But a great movie/documentary I saw few months back named "The Secret" says its not so.....but i am still confused!!! Looking for a satisfying explanation....:-)

bye...!!

Aspirations 2020

Hip!Hip!Hurray!! MEC WINS!!!

We sailed through to the State Level Finals in the Online Programming Contest conducted by the Infosys as a part of their Aspirations 2020 and finally emerged the Winners beating some of the best programmmers of Kerala (eg. students from CET, Rajagiri,etc..).
The Prize: A Trophy for the College, and a Sony PSP 3004 PB(PlayStation Portable) for each one of us.

Ya...It was a great experience...The finals was conducted at the Park Center and Bhavani Infosys Campuses, Technopark, Trivandrum...It was on March 19th.
Our team consisted of 3 members: Myself, Manu Thomas (leftmost in photo) and Suraj Shenoy (middle). Quite depressingly and ironically, only one team participated in the contest from whole MEC.


Pic: Park Center was where they conducted the events except programming....

Aspirations 2020 is being conducted for the first time in Kerala. Apart from the Programming Contest, there were other events like Paper Presentation, Distinguished Students, and Quiz. This event had been conducted through various stages, first there was the Teaser Round, then came the College round, then the Inter-College and finally the State Level Round. Unfortunately, there was no National Level Round this year. Infosys is planning to keep it from the next year.

Signing off for now...bye!!

GSoC 2009

Its by surprise that I decided to give a try at the Google Summer of Code 2009 (GSoC2009). I have now finally ended up sending a proposal to an organization. The funny part is that I am in the middle of my 6th semester university exams!!! One exam is over...5 more to go!!
The GSoC Student Proposal Submission deadline ends at 7:00 P.M GMT, April 3rd. I know as I am writing this post that its just one hour more for that deadline.
Anyway, I thought I'll spend some time blogging..... :-)

About GSoC: In the first week, I didn't spend time at all in searching for any projects....I had almost dropped the idea of participating on account of the squeezing university exam schedules. Around 2 days back, I just scanned through some organizations and their ideas...most of them were really hard for me coz I don't have enough experience with open source...
But I stumbled upon a project idea where the basic requirements were pretty ok for me. They were Linux, Bash/Perl/Ruby/Expect, Mysql. I thought I would give it a try...but it was actually yesterday that got some time to read through the ideas of the project.
Details of the project can be obtained from the link: http://wiki-oar.imag.fr/index.php/Test_Suite_Proposal.

The mentoring organization is OAR and the project I have decided to send proposal for is OAR Testsuites.

The main idea about this project is that the student has to create a framework and suites of tests to check proper functioning and installation of the OAR batch scheduler which is a resource management software that takes care of more than 5000 nodes in a cluster. Sounds really techie, right?
Did a little bit of research today morning and found out a few things that I could use it to send with my proposal. The Testsuites for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), referenced in the above link, really gave me an overall structure of the way certain tools like "EXPECT" could be used to create framework and "Plugin Technology" be used to develop test programs....The whole open source world is really interesting....

Anyway, I have taken the whole day from early morning for proposal and am happy that I have been able to atleast participate in an open online scholarship event like this.

Since not much research could be done on the day of submission, I don't have much confidence about getting shortlisted to do the project. If I am, I have gotta a hell lot to learn about great stuffs like High Performance Computing, Grid computing etc...Though this idea might sound great for any open source developer, I am really starting to get nervous!!:-(

Let me concentrate on my exams now...next is Digital Signal Processing(DSP)...
Hoping to have a nice weekend.....

Bye!!

P.S. My blog readers (stat counter) have gone above 1000, glad to know that!!

Brainfuck++

Finally our mini project (BrainF**k++ or BF++ Interpreter) is complete and we have presented the project quite successfully.

Our Idea: We were quite impressed by the simplicity the traditional BF language provided and the addiction it guaranteed...(To know more about BF - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck ) and at the right time we found a white paper submitted by "Jared Derinsk" about an extension of BF called the BF++ which takes BF outside the world of the Turing.

No doubt, Ruby was the best language suited for making our interpreter. Ruby being a very very high level scripting language reads like Poetry and is known for its flexibility and forgiving syntaxes.
To know more about Ruby and fall in love with it, visit : http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Our Project has now been released in sourceforge. All those who like to get a taste of the fun its gonna provide, delve into this beautiful language and contribute to making it fully bug free.

Download our project "Brainfuck++ Interpreter in Ruby" from:

http://brainfckpp.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!!

A Marvellous Flute Composition

Back to blogging again.....This time, I want to share with all carnatic music lovers about some masterpiece flute compositions by Kudamaloor Janardhanan.

Actually, I happened to come across his mellifluous compositions being played from CD while attending my friend's brother's marriage. But couldn't get to know more on that day...Next time, I had been to a jewellery shop with my mom, the same pleasant music invaded my eardrums.....soothing it was ...shudha sangeetham....
And when I enquired about it, I was shown this CD...Manorama Music's "Madhava Murali" by the maestro Kudamaloor Janardhanan....I rushed to a nearby "Music World", but to my dismay, there was no stock of this CD....the same news was waiting for me when I went to another music shop "Planet M".

Deeply saddened, I searched Google for any downloadable version of this music...Bad luck there also....
Next day, my mom gave a request for this CD at Planet M and two days later, we received a call....and I rushed off and bought the CD. Its price is Rs.125/-. Definitely a worthy purchase....Peace, enjoyment and entertainment fully guaranteed. When you are stressed, plug this music into your ears, and this is I would say the best relaxation you would get.



The six songs contained in this CD are:
1. Krishna Nee Begane (Yamuna Kalyani),
2. Alaipayuthe (Splendid one in Kanada....One of my favourites...)
3. Karuna Chaiva (Yadukula Kamboji)
4. Kripaya Palaya (Charukeshi)
5. Enna Thavam (Kapi)
6. Rara Venu (The artist has explored all the intricate nuances of this Swarajathi in Bilahari).

There are few more of his releases...one is Swathi Murali and another is Mohana Murali...Swathi Murali compositions are available in 4shared.

Hope all music lovers will get their hands on this priceless property....Njoy!! and please dont forget to leave ur comment....

Signing off,

P.S. Guys, Please let me know if there are more compositions like these...by different artists...

Bye.

Eventful Entry

Its bin around 5 months since I have seriously blogged....Quite often I had started some interesting topics and then saved it as draft promising to complete the post the next day but ultimately ending up eating my own words....I guess that is how life is for all ordinary people who keep deadline for the activities they do.

Ok...Now its my second month of this sem....sports is over and now it is Arts going on for three days in my college. The four houses this sem are Gladiators, Samurais, Titans and Pirates (me).


After a lot of head boggling, our mini prjct group(cyriac,me,abin,sandy) finally decided on the project "BrainFck++ Interpreter in Ruby language"....During the christmas hols we had to decide between lisp interpreter and the currently selected one...Our earlier selections like Boot Process Parallelizing etc..seemed to be very complicated and had to be rejected...anyway this selection seems to quite doable...the advantage is that the programming domain we have chosen is Ruby which is considered as the one of the emerging scripting languages in the industry.
Buying the name, Brainfck or BF is a very simple interesting esoteric turing complete programming language having just 8 symbols to do the various tasks...Our project aims at adding few more extra features like File Handling and Networking to BF and make a BF++. A little bit of Socket Programming has to be done...

Dunno when the placements are gonna start and all that...
A couple of all batch mock placement tests were carried out early this month...and still more to come...The recession is a worry...on top of that corruption like the Satyam Fraud Case etc...are leading to an IT plunge...
Hoping everything thing would become fine.......signing off ...

bye.