My Interview At ALCATEL

ALCATEL is a leading MNC in Tele-communication field. One day I got a mail forwarded by my college’s placement officer. I was asked to mail my resume to a person working at ALCATEL. Our college friends didn’t have any idea about that company and we just forwarded our resume. Then we just left that topic. One morning I was shocked to see that the 1st round (Apptitude) was at Chennai on the next day. I was in my home town (Nearly 500 km away from Chennai). Then I packed my things in a hurry and started to Chennai that afternoon. I planned to go to Madurai (my nearest city) and then go to Chennai from there. Unfortunately I got into a government bus. I reached Chennai the next day. I refreshed myself and went to the venue as they mentioned in my mail. Actually I was the only person from my college. All others taught it to be a worthless company. But after going there I came to know that they are the No.1 in Tele-Communication field. I went to the exam hall ( It was actually their canteen ). Then they gave me the question paper. “1st round had 3 sections. 1st section had 30 questions from C-lang to be completed in 30 min. 2nd sec. had 30 ques. from C++ to be completed in 30 min. 3rd had 60 general aptitude questions to be completed in same 30 min “. They gave the ques. for next section only after the time alloted for the previous section was over. I forgot to mention a thing. ” Wrong answers will be awarded negative marks “. I did C and C++ sec on my own. Then the 3rd was mostly guess work because I was sure that I will never complete 60 ques. in 30 min. The exam was over and we were told to leave the hall. They told me that they will intimate the selected candidates before 8 p.m. of that day. I then went to beach to relax myself Then by 7.50 p.m. I got a call that I’m selected for the next round and was told to come to their office the next by 1.30 p.m.

I went there the next day. “The next phase had 3 rounds- 2 technical and 1 H.R. round. In 1st Technical they asked about the project done in our final sem. Then some ques. in C and C++. They also told me to write a few programs and to debug some programs. They also asked me the size of variables such as INT, FLOAT,… I managed it. In the 2nd technical rnd also the concentrated on C and C++ only. Then the H.R. round was a bit like stress management round “. I managed to answer them. They told me that they will intimate the selected candidates within a week. But I didn’t get through the process. Bad luck for ALCATEL Hey friends “make sure you will be able to answer any questions in a language you are going to tell them that you are good in and if your project is in computer field make sure you will be able to answer any questions they ask”. All the best

Parallelport Access Using VC# .NET

Parallel port or printer port can be used to control any hardware easily. In our project we first planned to control stepper motors through parallel port. We did our project in VC# .NET. Actually we didn’t know that .NET doesn’t have any inbuilt controls to access parallel port directly. We got stuck up and started to search for a solution.

Finally we found how to do it. The easiest way to do it will be to use a dll file that provides an easy access to the parallel port. Here is how u can do it:

1.Download the dll file from the downloads tab of this blog and save it to windows\system32\ folder.

2.Create a new class and name it as ParallelPort.

3.Copy the code given below to the class you created before:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
namespace ParallelPort
{
Private class PortAccess
{
[DllImport("inpout32.dll", EntryPoint="Out32")]
public static extern void Output(int adress, int value);

[DllImport("inpout32.dll", EntryPoint="Inp32")]
public static extern void Input( int adress);
}

4.Now you can send data using the command:
ParallelPort.PortAcess.Output(address,data);

5.The data refers to the decimal value of the data to be sent and the address is the address of the parallel port in the computer (usually it’s value is 888).

Worthless Jobfairs

A few months back I heard of an organization conducting interviews all over India. I was in Coimbatore to attend my friend’s brother marriage. Everything was going fine. Then I got a SMS that “Shiksha jobfair to be conducted at Madurai tomorrow. Wipro, IBM and 20 other MNC’s are coming for recruitment. I was so happy and taught it to be the most useful thing. In a hurry I started to Madurai that night in a government bus. Unfortunately I was forced to sit on the last seat of that big junk. After a great struggle I reached the college where the interview was to be held.

They collected Rs.200 as soon as we entered the college campus. The first round was apps. I wrote in a bit well. They then told us that results for it will be posted in their site within a week. After a week I was shocked to see my name in the list of selected candidates. They called us for the next round (Technical interview). Myself and few of my college friends went to that same college dreaming as a IBM professional. The second round also went fine. They told the same dialog “The results will be announced in a week”. I left that college awaiting the day of results…

A week passed. I checked their site… But there was no sign of results. Another week passed… but the site had nothing but “AndhraPradesh results will be announced tomorrow”. We guys in TamilNadu taught the our results will also be announced in a week or two… Then a month passed… still there was no sign of results. I lost my patience and called to the number that was mentioned in their site. They told us that they had some technical difficulty and will announce the results with 5 days. Now nearly 4 months have passed… still they tell the same answer “Tech difficultly…”. I wonder why those fucking organizations play with the life of graduates like us . Beware of such idiotic organizations friends…

Shiksha webpage

The Perfect Antivirus

NOD32 is an effective anti-virus that removes most type of viruses. I tried most other anti-virus (Avast, Norton,…) But this one was the best of them. But make sure that u keep it’s virus database up to date… ESET recently released the new version of it (Link to download it is at the end of this post). Updating the database is also very easy. It’ll be automatically updated when u connect to internet. It takes a bit long (For dial-up users like me ) for the first update. But if updated once the other updates will complete in a minute or two.

The recent version of NOD32 is available at the downloads tab of my blog… Check it out

Learn Web Designing

I always had so much interest to learn web designing. But the problem was that I didn’t find any materials that provide complete reference to all the web designing languages. Now I found one W3SCHOOLS provides us a complete reference right from the very basics in designing a site. It has tutorials for all the web designing languages( HTML, XHTML, XML, JAVASCRIPT, and much more ). Hope it’ll be useful to you too

Unexpected Victory

Yesterday(Apr 1) was a happiest day for me. After 4 months of struggle finally our project is ready The project was to design a printer to print the layout diagram on a single side copper board. I took care of the software part. I did it using c#.net This was my first project in c#(Actually i started to learn how to work with c# only the day our project stared). I never taught that c# will be so easy. I even wondered if we can finish the project when we chose it. But now after a great struggle and some help from my friend Sahas we made it