My pensieve

courtesy ::: math point

Think of any 4 non-zero digits, where not all four digits are the same. Arrange the digits in descending order and ascending order and compute the difference. For instance, if the digits are 3,3,2 and 1,

3321-1233=2088

Repeat the above step by rearranging the result into ascending and descending order and compute the difference.

8820-0288=8532

Reiterating,

8532-2358=6174,

Strangely,

7641-1467=6174

The process terminates when the number reaches 6174. We can use another example,

9750-0579=9171
9711-1179=8532
8532-2358=6174

and Viola! We get the same result again! Can you figure out why this happens?

last time i wrote in this blog, i was feeling very sad and disappointed with life. this time the situation has not improved any better. but i know the reason why i am feeling so. i havent been doing any good with my studies and that is why being treated as a waste body by everyone. however as always i am waiting for my time and i know it is going to come soon. just need to be very careful so that i dont do anything very foolish so that i loose any good friends. just want to complete my final year as soon as possible with some passing marks. have got bored of this daily life of leaving without any purpose. present plan is to start studying for CAT but again finding very little interest to do so. however the good thing that has happened between the last time i wrote in this blog and now is, i have gained good information about share market and trading. will try to collect more and more info about it.

it is about a week now since i started feeling like this. havent been doing any thing lately. just trying to get involved in whatever i find little interesting but unfortunately havent found anything much also. i watch movies but am never interested in it. i had thought IOTA would give me some chance to work on something seriously but unfortunately it is being postponed. I think this will continue till i reach back home on 28th. will have lots of things to do there. especially since i have my cousin bro’s marriage to attend. let us see how it turns out.

26th March — TCS(package–Rs. 3.15 Lakhs pa)
TCS was the first company to come for recruitment for our year in the college and also the first company that i tried for. So my journey of campus placement started from it. Written was cool and easy, a piece of cake in fact. Most of the questions were easy and verbal section which i have always been weak had already answers marked in the question paper. So i got selected for interview. It was my first interview since my interview of NTSE which was way back in 2003. So i was little nervous, what made me more nervous was the wait of around 6-7 hours. So when i my name was called at last for the interview, I just wanted to go and give the interview and finish it off and i no longer thought of the result. The interview room was a big hall with around 5 tables kept little away from each other. So at a time, 5 students were being interviewed by 5 different panels. I was interviewed by a panel which consisted of 2 members. Both of them looked friendly. But I was so nervous, that when I was asked to tell about myself, I simply babbled something which overall had very little sense. I first told about my branch and some personal details. Then i told them about my schooling which obviously wasnt at all needed. I told them something about studying in Varanasi and Hubli. Then I started telling them that I am interested in Opensource projects and that I am an active member of NITDGPLUG. While telling them this, I was so nervous that i forgot the name “NITDGPLUG” and had to think for few seconds before telling them the name. This must have given them an idea how active member I was of NITDGPLUG. Then I told them about my intrests in Sudoku and puzzle solving. When I said so, one of the interviewer said that he will ask me a puzzle. He asked me about the why -1=1 when you find its square and then square root them again. I just told him that since we were finding the square-root of a number we were bringing the possiblity of both positive and negative numbers into the answer and only one of them is right, which in this case is 1. Then he asked me if i knew C and C++ programming languages. I told him yes and so he asked me the definitions of some technical features of C++. I told him in my own words, some of them right and those which i didnt knew properly, i told him how much I knew and then said that i didnt know anything more. Then he asked me to write a program to sort an array using bubble-sort. I wrote some code, but didnt check it with any values. Then he asked me if I was sure and then he asked me to check it once using an example and also explain it to him. When I tried to explain it to him using an example, i found that i hadnt written that program correctly and i tried to correct it. He gave me some more time to correct it and asked me to explain it again. After that, He told me to always check a program with an example before saying it is right. The he asked me what subjects i have learnt in my college. I told him mot of the subjects i had learnt till then. He asked me if I knew DBMS properly, I said no. The he asked what else I knew. I told about OS and unix. I told them that i have been using Opensuse10.3 regularly. They asked me many questions from Unix and its commands. I asnwered most of them as i had used most of them myself. Well that was the end of interview. I had very less hope of getting into TCS after the interview because i knew that i had screwed it big time. The only hope I had was that i am from Comp Sci and they might give some preference to me. And that is what happened. TCS took 200 students from our college and I was one of them.
30th July—Tejas Networks(package-Rs.5.5 Lakhs pa)
Well Reddy had asked me to prepare seriously for this company as he had said that not many prefer it and there is a very good chance of getting into it if i knew networks properly. I had taken his suggestion seriously and had studied networks lectures in holidays. However, I wasnt eligible to sit in it when it visited our college as it had kept a cut-off of 7.5 CGPA. So it rejected me.
4th August—NOVELL(package-Rs.6 Lakhs pa)
Before Novell came to our college, there was a lot of confusion in our department. It seems that Novell had asked for a list of 40 students available and ofcourse these 40 students were selected on the basis of their CGPA. And i stand at 52nd-53rd position in our dept according to CGPA. and since some of them werent intrested and some of them had got placed in Tejas, I had somehow reached the 44th position and still had to convince 4 students above me in the list, to not to appear for the company so that i cold get a place in the list. However i wasnt interested in any such business. But still i thought of atending the PPT of Novell and in the PPT, no conditions were told and hence i was able to write the written exam. Actually, according to me, this was the only company in which i had a very very bleak chance of getting selected as i had tried to do an internship in Novell during summer, though i hadnt done anything useful. However written according to me was easy and there was also an essay to write about linux in it. So i wrote about how i have been using linux for past 8 months and reason why i was relutant to shift to linux because of addiction to AOE and blah blah….. End result was that i couldnt clear its written. So again I got rejected.

SAMSUNG– wasnt interested as i didnt like the work we had to do there.
CSC–wasnt interested as its package was very less.
AMAZON–wasnt allowed to sit. because of low CGPA.
MICROSOFT–since the written was subjective, couldnt clear it.
ONMOBILE–had lots of hopes to get into it as the its written consisted of only puzzles. luckily cleared the first round, but i did it only because i had copied the answers from Shilpa. however my puzzle solving ability was tested and i came to know the reality in the second round. I didnt clear it and i was sure of it after the test itself.

When I downloaded the movie from dc++, as I had heard very good comments from non-gulty friends. That was the main reason why i thought of watching it. I had great expectations from the movie but unfortunately, it was not upto my expectations.
The story is about 8 students,4 boys and 4 girls who have just joined an engineering college. They become friends because of the ragging process that they face and in very little time they become very close friends. Till now, it was fine. But then the ragging gets intensified and surprisingly, one of them slaps a senior. That was the first incident which took the film away from reality. And the reason was because even the senior was behind the girl and he was using seniority funda and forcing her to come with him for a movie. And amazingly, to settle this matter between juniors and seniors, someone i dont know whom, comes in between and arranges a meeting and in that meeting they decide to settle this matter in a way simple manner, a cricket match. Well i suppose everyone had just watched Lagaan and when Britishers can agree to decide matters by the result of a cricket match, then why shouldnt the college students follow the same. After all, for every system in India, we follow the British style. Well my disappointment doesnt end here.
During the cricket match, in which the seniors have State level players(as in all movies), there is a fat boy in the senior team and to lure him, what the juniors do is throw a boiled egg on the ground in which they mix some drugs (I dont know which one, but i surely would buy loads of those drugs!!). And the fat boy picks it up from the ground during the match and eats it(what happened to hygiene!). The effect of the drug is that instead of fielding the ball, he kicks it outside the boundary line(Sorry, i forgot to say, The fat boy is fielding at boundary!!Imagine Inzamam ul haq fielding at boundary, India would have won so many matches). And after all this, junior team wins the match and guess what it is the end of their ragging period. You see, we werent so lucky. Even our year guys had won the college cricket tournament in first year but till then our ragging period was already over :(.
After all this bullshit which made me loose all the interest I had on the movie, the story goes on like any other movie involving friends. there is some difference among friends and then they fight amongt eachother. In between there is also fight in between all the couples and blah blah blah.
The only good thing that i found was the way they show how all these friends in their final year, concentrate on their futures and the way they show how all of them are sad for leaving the college. Well i might have liked it because even now i am in my final year of engineering. However i always try to find some good point in any thing, and this is what i found in this movie.
Also please remember that i have not discussed about the boy is in love with a senior right from the first day of the college and how one of them proposes a college teacher who reacts by showing him a box which contains all the love letters she recieved from her students(hehehehehe) and also the way the placements are held in their college.

In short, I would say even though the frist 15 mins and the last half an hour was good enough and the theme was wonderful and different, the writer sadly fucked the story in middle.

I would give it a rating of 5/10. But again the theme was good but it was badly put into a story.

well i started reading about Gtk when i started fixing usability bugs in evolution and the main thing i found about Gtk was that it has many many functions.

• The bandage was wound around the wound.
• The farm was used to produce.
• The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
• We must polish the polish furniture.
• He could lead if he would get the lead out.
• The soldier decided to dessert his dessert in the desert.
• Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
• A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
• When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
• I did not object to the object.
• The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
• They were too close the door to close it.
• The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
• I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

today atlast i have fixed the bug in Evolution . I had tried fixing this bug in my holidays for around 15 days. But due to some or other reason evolution used to crash with whatever code i had written. At the beginning, I was trying to destroy the categories-dailog and restart it. But later, after jjonny’s advice, I tried to reorder the list instead of restarting the dailog. But still I was not able to write any correct code. However, today I dont know how I did it.

I slept at around 2 am(strange considering that i had spent night-outs for last 8 days). I was feeling so sleepy that i thought it was best to sleep. But I woke up at 4:45 am. Since I had nothing to do for entertainment(due to some missing dependencies, I have not been able to install any video player in Opensuse 11), I thought I should try to fix the bug. So I again started to write fresh code to fix the bug, as I had re-installed Opensuse and due to my foolishness, I had lost all my previous codes. After about half an hour, I had completed writing about 15 lines of code which was very similar to codes that i had tried earlier. And when i re-builded Evolution, strangely the bug was fixed.

Ofcourse, now i have to see whether my patch will be accepted. If it is accepted, then it will be my first bug that i have fixed successfully. let us see.
UPDATE: The patch was accepted. Yippee, my first contribution to free software. :).