A non-computer science person emailed me that she had an interview with a dotcom company next week, and wanted to know what she could do to prepare for it. I ended up writing a fairly sizable email, which I thought would be useful to others as well. Here’s my response:

I am assuming they have an idea about your background. If they know that you are not a CS person, then they should try to ask you questions that test your problem-solving abilities overall. Additionally, I guess they will ask you some basic CS questions so that they know that you can pick up CS skills when you’re hired.

Some questions are also posed as logic questions, but actually have a deep CS background. For example: “when you are doing laundry, and you need to fold your socks, and you have a big tabletop to put stuff on, what’s the best way to arrange them in matching pairs?”. One option is to take a sock, and then take another one. If they match, then it’s good. Else, throw the socks back in, and start again. Obviously, this is a bad solution. Look for “bucket sort” for a good solution.

You can compensate for this by just being very good at logic, but it does help to know some CS. Try to have an idea about computational complexity. You can ask any CS undergrad (senior, etc) about this.

1. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~hasti/cs367-common/notes/COMPLEXITY.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory

It helps to run through a few questions so that your brain is ready for the questions during the interview.

For problem solving, check out
http://www.techinterview.org/

I googled “dotcomcompanyname interview questions” and found some more links.

Hope that helps, Good luck!
-a

Here’s an idea I’m trying out. Here’s some text:

cat Idea.opml | tr ‘a-z’ ‘A-Z’ | md5sum
4dbb82a1048ff3e59ce5c7ccc58314ac – md5sum Idea.opml
a17de3abcf5e225d51e6eab412f25781 Idea.opml

This is some text I have written, but prefer not to publish. However, I can prove that I wrote this text before writing this blog post; since the text in this blog will be public to all, especially the search engines who will crawl it and immortalize it.

Later, I can simply say that the odds of me being able to crack the MD5 hash to custom-write a piece of text that is one out of many millions; double hashing it makes it even more difficult. This way, I can prove I wrote a piece of text at a certain time without disclosing it.

Do you think there are any flaws to this? Email me!

Last week, Kapil and I prepared a collection of all the programs we needed for our practicals this semester, and Kapil sent them out to all the members of our class. Yesterday, I got the same zipfile we sent back as an email, from a person outside our college. Also, someone uploaded the file to the BITBIS community filespace. Soon after that, I got two copies of the same 604 Compilers notes from two different people.

It's extremely interesting to see how information flows through which such high redundancy.

hello everybody, this is Arnab's mother here. A lot of you must be wondering why Arnab has'nt been writing for so many days... well, Arnab has had a relapse of his psychological condition, and hence has been forbidden from using the computer. However, he keeps telling me that his readers will miss him, so I thought I would keep you in the know. It would be great if you can send him some best wishes via comments to this post or email - so that I can print them out and read them out to him.

Kiruba and Codey point to this interview about PR & Blogging. Though the article is meant for large companies with minimum online presence, even small projects can become PR successes using blogs. I've made so many friends on the net by just searching and reading rants/reviews about blogsnob and then commenting on the blogposts.

Also, I think blogging teaches you how to communicate more effectively and cleanly. For instance, we got this email some time ago from an AdSystem customer:

This program doesn't appear to do what we need... Can you please let me know if this program will do what we want and if not, how to get a refund.

I finally took out some time (about 8 hours, actually) to make small changes to the 2 line profile on the right hand side column and finish the things I had planned out for this weblog:

Valid Code: This blog is now 100% pure, refined XHTML and CSS. I'd like to thank Sebastian Delmont for the really cool Validable plugin for MT that I used here. It autocorrects things like &s in URLs to generate valid XHTML.

JoelOnSoftware:

When I'm training someone to be a C++ programmer, it would be nice if I never had to teach them about char*'s and pointer arithmetic

I know exactly what he means. I am a C++ guy at heart, but this is why I use PHP for more or less everything nowadays. (link found via Rob Fahrni)

I wrote to Rob when I saw a Visio ad in my inbox today, and before I could even reply to his first email, he had googled me out! (yes, it's a word).

This is what I got in my inbox a few minutes ago:

Hi,
We found the following 9 broken links on arnab.org:

On page http://arnab.org/blog: 
http://arnab.org/properties.php : Not Found
http://arnab.org/blog.php : Not Found
On page http://arnab.org/blog/: 
http://arnab.org/blog/properties.php : Not Found
http://arnab.org/blog/blog.php : Not Found
...

For just $5 (US) per month we will check your website regularly, and warn you of any future broken links. Your website's visitors will thank you for it. [direct paypal link]

The broken links he sent were correct - so the email was pretty helpful, and I would consider it if it was a little cheaper. That's what I call good marketing.

...just back from the 3 day trip to Gurgaon. 40 emails to check, out of which 12 were spam. I was expecting more email, and less spam. well, whatever. Will definitely write tomorrow. Have to tend to TpT right now - people've started writing suddenly.