one of most beautiful pieces
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. (1)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized (2) upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust (3) restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (4)
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, (5)
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter, (6)
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, (7) come from the dead
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern (8) threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, (9) nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
(1) A passage from Dante Alighieri's Inferno (Canto 27, lines 61-66) spoken by Guido da Montefeltro in response to the questions of Dante, whom Guido supposes is dead, since he is in Hell:. The flame in which Guido is encased vibrates as he speaks: "If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy."
(2) Anesthetized with ether; but also suggesting "made etherial," less real.
(3) Cheap bars and restaurants used to spread sawdust on the floor to soak up spilled beer, etc.
(4) The great Renaissance Italian artist.
(5) Cookies and ice cream.
(6) Like John the Baptist (see Matthew 14: 1-12)
(7) A man raised from death by Jesus (see John 11: 1-44).
(8) Early form of slide projector.
(9) Shakespeare's sensitive hero known for procrastination.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Friday, March 03, 2006
Some technical questions
The following is a list of questions which have been floating around some
Internet circles. They are excellent prep questions for a technical interview.
I haven't made any attempt to clean them up, spelling or organization wise.
Don't bother asking me for the answers,
1) I don't have an answer key.
2) It'd do you good to think.
1. Given a rectangular (cuboidal for the puritans) cake with a rectangular
piece removed (any size or orientation), how would you cut the remainder
of the cake into two equal halves with one straight cut of a knife ?
2. You're given an array containing both positive and negative integers and
required to find the subarray with the largest sum (O(N) a la KBL).
Write a routine in C for the above.
3. Given an array of size N in which every number is between 1 and N,
determine if there are any duplicates in it. You are allowed to destroy
the array if you like. [ I ended up giving about 4 or 5 different solutions
for this, each supposedly better than the others ].
4. Write a routine to draw a circle (x ** 2 + y ** 2 = r ** 2) without making
use of any floating point computations at all.
5. Given only putchar (no sprintf, itoa, etc.) write a routine putlong that
prints out an unsigned long in decimal.
6. Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of
2. [No loops allowed - it's a simple test.]
7. Given an array of characters which form a sentence of words, give an
efficient algorithm to reverse the order of the words (not characters)
in it.
8. How many points are there on the globe where by walking one mile south,
one mile east and one mile north you reach the place where you started.
9. Give a very good method to count the number of ones in a 32 bit number.
(caution: looping through testing each bit is not a solution).
10. What are the different ways to say, the value of x can be either a 0
or a 1. Apparently the if then else solution has a jump when written
out in assembly.
if (x == 0)
y=0
else
y =x
There is a logical, arithmetic and a datastructure soln to the above
problem.
11. Reverse a linked list.
12. Insert in a sorted list
13. In a X's and 0's game (i.e. TIC TAC TOE) if you write a program for
this give a gast way to generate the moves by the computer. I mean this
should be the fasteset way possible. The answer is that you need to store
all possible configurations of the board and the move that is associated
with that. Then it boils down to just accessing the right element and
getting the corresponding move for it. Do some analysis and do some more
optimization in storage since otherwise it becomes infeasible to get
the required storage in a DOS machine.
15. Give a fast way to multiply a number by 7.
16. How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You
don't know how exactly the books are organized beforehand).
17. Linked list manipulation.
18. Tradeoff between time spent in testing a product and getting into the
market first.
19. What to test for given that there isn't enough time to test everything
you want to.
20. First some definitions for this problem:
a) An ASCII character is one byte long and the most significant bit
in the byte is always '0'.
b) A Kanji character is two bytes long. The only characteristic of a
Kanji character is that in its first byte the most significant bit
is '1'.
Now you are given an array of a characters (both ASCII and Kanji) and,
an index into the array. The index points to the start of some character.
Now you need to write a function to do a backspace (i.e. delete the
character before the given index).
21. Delete an element from a doubly linked list.
22. Write a function to find the depth of a binary tree.
23. Given two strings S1 and S2. Delete from S2 all those characters which
occur in S1 also and finally create a clean S2 with the relevant characters
deleted.
24. Assuming that locks are the only reason due to which deadlocks can occur
in a system. What would be a foolproof method of avoiding deadlocks in
the system.
25. Reverse a linked list.
26. Write a small lexical analyzer - interviewer gave tokens. expressions like
"a*b" etc.
27. Besides communication cost, what is the other source of inefficiency in RPC?
(answer : context switches, excessive buffer copying).
How can you optimise the communication? (ans : communicate through shared
memory on same machine, bypassing the kernel _ A Univ. of Wash. thesis)
28. Write a routine that prints out a 2-D array in spiral order!
29. How is the readers-writers problem solved? - using semaphores/ada .. etc.
30. Ways of optimizing symbol table storage in compilers.
31. A walk-through through the symbol table functions, lookup() implementation
etc -
32. A version of the "There are three persons X Y Z, one of which always lies"..
etc..
33. There are 3 ants at 3 corners of a triangle, they randomly start moving
towards another corner.. what is the probability that they don't collide.
34. Write an efficient algo and C code to shuffle a pack of cards.. this one
was a feedback process until we came up with one with no extra storage.
35. The if (x == 0) y = 0 etc..
36. Some more bitwise optimization at assembly level
37. Some general questions on Lex Yacc etc.
38. Given an array t[100] which contains numbers between 1..99.
Return the duplicated value. Try both O(n) and O(n-square).
39. Given an array of characters. How would you reverse it. ?
How would you reverse it without using indexing in the array.
40. GIven a sequence of characters. How will you convert the lower
case characters to upper case characters. ( Try using bit vector
- sol given in the C lib -> typec.h)
41. Fundas of RPC.
42. Given a linked list which is sorted. How will u insert in sorted
way.
43. Given a linked list How will you reverse it.
44. Tell me the courses you liked and why did you like them.
45. Give an instance in your life in which u were faced with a
problem and you tackled it successfully.
46. What is your ideal working environment. ( They usually
to hear that u can work in group also.)
47. Why do u think u are smart.
48. Questions on the projects listed on the Resume.
49. Do you want to know any thing about the company.( Try to ask some
relevant and interesting question).
51. What are your geographical preference?
52. What are your expecctations from the job.
53. Give a good data structure for having n queues ( n not fixed) in a
finite memory segment. You can have some data-structure separate for
each queue. Try to use at least 90% of the memory space.
54. Do a breadth first traversal of a tree.
55. Write code for reversing a linked list.
56. Write, efficient code for extracting unique elements from
a sorted list of array. e.g. (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 9, 9, 9, 9) ->
(1, 3, 5, 9).
57. C++ ( what is virtual function ?
what happens if an error occurs in constructor or destructor.
Discussion on error handling, templates, unique features of C++.
What is different in C++, ( compare with unix).
58. Given a list of numbers ( fixed list) Now given any other list,
how can you efficiently find out if there is any element in the
second list that is an element of the first list (fixed list).
59. GIven 3 lines of assembly code : find it is doing. IT was to find
absolute value.
60. If you are on a boat and you throw out a suitcase, Will the level of
water increase.
61. Print an integer using only putchar. Try doing it without using extra
storage.
62. write C code for
deleting an element from a linked listy
traversing a linked list
efficient way of elimiating duplicates from an array
63. what are various problems unique to distributed databases
64. declare a void pointer
a) void *ptr;
65. make the pointer aligned to a 4 byte boundary in a efficient manner
a) assign the pointer to a long number
and the number with 11...1100
add 4 to the number
66. what is a far pointer (in DOS)
67. what is a balanced tree
68. given a linked list with the following property
node2 is left child of node1, if node2 < node1
els, it is the right child.
O P
|
|
O A
|
|
O B
|
|
O C
How do you convert the above linked list to the
form without disturbing the property. Write C code
for that.
O P
|
|
O B
/ / / O ? O ?
determine where do A and C go
69. Describe the file system layout in the UNIX OS
a) describe boot block, super block, inodes and data layout
70. In UNIX, are the files allocated contiguous blocks of data
a) no, they might be fragmented
how is the fragmented data kept track of
a) describe the direct blocks and indirect blocks in UNIX
file system
71. Write an efficient C code for 'tr' program. 'tr' has two command
line arguments. They both are strings of same length. tr reads an
input file, replaces each character in the first string with the
corresponding character in the second string. eg. 'tr abc xyz'
replaces all 'a's by 'x's, 'b's by 'y's and so on.
a) have an array of length 26.
put 'x' in array element corr to 'a'
put 'y' in array element corr to 'b'
put 'z' in array element corr to 'c'
put 'd' in array element corr to 'd'
put 'e' in array element corr to 'e'
and so on.
the code
while (!eof)
{
c = getc();
putc(array[c - 'a']);
}
72. what is disk interleaving
73. why is disk interleaving adopted
74. given a new disk, how do you determine which interleaving is the best
a) give 1000 read operations with each kind of interleaving
determine the best interleaving from the statistics
75. draw the graph with performace on one axis and 'n' on another, where
'n' in the 'n' in n-way disk interleaving. (a tricky question, should
be answered carefully)
76. I was a c++ code and was asked to find out the bug in that. The bug
was that he declared an object locally in a function and tried to
return the pointer to that object. Since the object is local to the
function, it no more exists after returning from the function. The
pointer, therefore, is invalid outside.
77. A real life problem - A square picture is cut into 16 sqaures and
they are shuffled. Write a program to rearrange the 16 squares to
get the original big square.
Internet circles. They are excellent prep questions for a technical interview.
I haven't made any attempt to clean them up, spelling or organization wise.
Don't bother asking me for the answers,
1) I don't have an answer key.
2) It'd do you good to think.
1. Given a rectangular (cuboidal for the puritans) cake with a rectangular
piece removed (any size or orientation), how would you cut the remainder
of the cake into two equal halves with one straight cut of a knife ?
2. You're given an array containing both positive and negative integers and
required to find the subarray with the largest sum (O(N) a la KBL).
Write a routine in C for the above.
3. Given an array of size N in which every number is between 1 and N,
determine if there are any duplicates in it. You are allowed to destroy
the array if you like. [ I ended up giving about 4 or 5 different solutions
for this, each supposedly better than the others ].
4. Write a routine to draw a circle (x ** 2 + y ** 2 = r ** 2) without making
use of any floating point computations at all.
5. Given only putchar (no sprintf, itoa, etc.) write a routine putlong that
prints out an unsigned long in decimal.
6. Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of
2. [No loops allowed - it's a simple test.]
7. Given an array of characters which form a sentence of words, give an
efficient algorithm to reverse the order of the words (not characters)
in it.
8. How many points are there on the globe where by walking one mile south,
one mile east and one mile north you reach the place where you started.
9. Give a very good method to count the number of ones in a 32 bit number.
(caution: looping through testing each bit is not a solution).
10. What are the different ways to say, the value of x can be either a 0
or a 1. Apparently the if then else solution has a jump when written
out in assembly.
if (x == 0)
y=0
else
y =x
There is a logical, arithmetic and a datastructure soln to the above
problem.
11. Reverse a linked list.
12. Insert in a sorted list
13. In a X's and 0's game (i.e. TIC TAC TOE) if you write a program for
this give a gast way to generate the moves by the computer. I mean this
should be the fasteset way possible. The answer is that you need to store
all possible configurations of the board and the move that is associated
with that. Then it boils down to just accessing the right element and
getting the corresponding move for it. Do some analysis and do some more
optimization in storage since otherwise it becomes infeasible to get
the required storage in a DOS machine.
15. Give a fast way to multiply a number by 7.
16. How would go about finding out where to find a book in a library. (You
don't know how exactly the books are organized beforehand).
17. Linked list manipulation.
18. Tradeoff between time spent in testing a product and getting into the
market first.
19. What to test for given that there isn't enough time to test everything
you want to.
20. First some definitions for this problem:
a) An ASCII character is one byte long and the most significant bit
in the byte is always '0'.
b) A Kanji character is two bytes long. The only characteristic of a
Kanji character is that in its first byte the most significant bit
is '1'.
Now you are given an array of a characters (both ASCII and Kanji) and,
an index into the array. The index points to the start of some character.
Now you need to write a function to do a backspace (i.e. delete the
character before the given index).
21. Delete an element from a doubly linked list.
22. Write a function to find the depth of a binary tree.
23. Given two strings S1 and S2. Delete from S2 all those characters which
occur in S1 also and finally create a clean S2 with the relevant characters
deleted.
24. Assuming that locks are the only reason due to which deadlocks can occur
in a system. What would be a foolproof method of avoiding deadlocks in
the system.
25. Reverse a linked list.
26. Write a small lexical analyzer - interviewer gave tokens. expressions like
"a*b" etc.
27. Besides communication cost, what is the other source of inefficiency in RPC?
(answer : context switches, excessive buffer copying).
How can you optimise the communication? (ans : communicate through shared
memory on same machine, bypassing the kernel _ A Univ. of Wash. thesis)
28. Write a routine that prints out a 2-D array in spiral order!
29. How is the readers-writers problem solved? - using semaphores/ada .. etc.
30. Ways of optimizing symbol table storage in compilers.
31. A walk-through through the symbol table functions, lookup() implementation
etc -
32. A version of the "There are three persons X Y Z, one of which always lies"..
etc..
33. There are 3 ants at 3 corners of a triangle, they randomly start moving
towards another corner.. what is the probability that they don't collide.
34. Write an efficient algo and C code to shuffle a pack of cards.. this one
was a feedback process until we came up with one with no extra storage.
35. The if (x == 0) y = 0 etc..
36. Some more bitwise optimization at assembly level
37. Some general questions on Lex Yacc etc.
38. Given an array t[100] which contains numbers between 1..99.
Return the duplicated value. Try both O(n) and O(n-square).
39. Given an array of characters. How would you reverse it. ?
How would you reverse it without using indexing in the array.
40. GIven a sequence of characters. How will you convert the lower
case characters to upper case characters. ( Try using bit vector
- sol given in the C lib -> typec.h)
41. Fundas of RPC.
42. Given a linked list which is sorted. How will u insert in sorted
way.
43. Given a linked list How will you reverse it.
44. Tell me the courses you liked and why did you like them.
45. Give an instance in your life in which u were faced with a
problem and you tackled it successfully.
46. What is your ideal working environment. ( They usually
to hear that u can work in group also.)
47. Why do u think u are smart.
48. Questions on the projects listed on the Resume.
49. Do you want to know any thing about the company.( Try to ask some
relevant and interesting question).
51. What are your geographical preference?
52. What are your expecctations from the job.
53. Give a good data structure for having n queues ( n not fixed) in a
finite memory segment. You can have some data-structure separate for
each queue. Try to use at least 90% of the memory space.
54. Do a breadth first traversal of a tree.
55. Write code for reversing a linked list.
56. Write, efficient code for extracting unique elements from
a sorted list of array. e.g. (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 9, 9, 9, 9) ->
(1, 3, 5, 9).
57. C++ ( what is virtual function ?
what happens if an error occurs in constructor or destructor.
Discussion on error handling, templates, unique features of C++.
What is different in C++, ( compare with unix).
58. Given a list of numbers ( fixed list) Now given any other list,
how can you efficiently find out if there is any element in the
second list that is an element of the first list (fixed list).
59. GIven 3 lines of assembly code : find it is doing. IT was to find
absolute value.
60. If you are on a boat and you throw out a suitcase, Will the level of
water increase.
61. Print an integer using only putchar. Try doing it without using extra
storage.
62. write C code for
deleting an element from a linked listy
traversing a linked list
efficient way of elimiating duplicates from an array
63. what are various problems unique to distributed databases
64. declare a void pointer
a) void *ptr;
65. make the pointer aligned to a 4 byte boundary in a efficient manner
a) assign the pointer to a long number
and the number with 11...1100
add 4 to the number
66. what is a far pointer (in DOS)
67. what is a balanced tree
68. given a linked list with the following property
node2 is left child of node1, if node2 < node1
els, it is the right child.
O P
|
|
O A
|
|
O B
|
|
O C
How do you convert the above linked list to the
form without disturbing the property. Write C code
for that.
O P
|
|
O B
/ / / O ? O ?
determine where do A and C go
69. Describe the file system layout in the UNIX OS
a) describe boot block, super block, inodes and data layout
70. In UNIX, are the files allocated contiguous blocks of data
a) no, they might be fragmented
how is the fragmented data kept track of
a) describe the direct blocks and indirect blocks in UNIX
file system
71. Write an efficient C code for 'tr' program. 'tr' has two command
line arguments. They both are strings of same length. tr reads an
input file, replaces each character in the first string with the
corresponding character in the second string. eg. 'tr abc xyz'
replaces all 'a's by 'x's, 'b's by 'y's and so on.
a) have an array of length 26.
put 'x' in array element corr to 'a'
put 'y' in array element corr to 'b'
put 'z' in array element corr to 'c'
put 'd' in array element corr to 'd'
put 'e' in array element corr to 'e'
and so on.
the code
while (!eof)
{
c = getc();
putc(array[c - 'a']);
}
72. what is disk interleaving
73. why is disk interleaving adopted
74. given a new disk, how do you determine which interleaving is the best
a) give 1000 read operations with each kind of interleaving
determine the best interleaving from the statistics
75. draw the graph with performace on one axis and 'n' on another, where
'n' in the 'n' in n-way disk interleaving. (a tricky question, should
be answered carefully)
76. I was a c++ code and was asked to find out the bug in that. The bug
was that he declared an object locally in a function and tried to
return the pointer to that object. Since the object is local to the
function, it no more exists after returning from the function. The
pointer, therefore, is invalid outside.
77. A real life problem - A square picture is cut into 16 sqaures and
they are shuffled. Write a program to rearrange the 16 squares to
get the original big square.