Inforica in collaboration with Mindq Systems launced http://www.mindqjobs.com. Mindqjobs.com is a website that is going to cater to the needs of the student community. Here are 10 reasons why every graduating student that is preparing for a job or for higher studies has to join Mindqjobs.com.
Browse the job board for up to date job information that is curated and posted.
Create a professional looking profile by using the Resume Builder. Once your profile is ready share it as a standalone URL to everyone and then track who has viewed the profile.
Use the online material to prepare in various topics such as Quantitative, Logical, Programming languages and so on.
Take tests in different topics and see how prepared you are in terms of speed of answering questions and also accuracy.
Connect with others through the discussion board and discuss common topics.
Find solutions to common programming problems in different programming languages. Many technical interviews involve answering programming logic problems and this can help you build up that logical capability.
Evaluate your typing speed on the website and improve on it which shows proficiency with computers.
Get access to professionals to review your profile and ensure that it is written in a professional manner.
Access to downloads such as sample resumes and programming problems for you to try out.
Take sample tests of competitive exams. The IBPS bank exam and more exams are coming soon.
Getting my Galaxy S phone connected to Windows 8 laptop has really ruined my weekend. Usually I just connect my Galaxy S phone to my laptop and it all works fine with the device showing up in Windows Explorer but after installing Windows 8 on my laptop I try it and nothing happens. So I turn to my best friend in need "Google". After Googling for a bit I ended up with some interesting solutions
1. Reinstall some drivers - Did not work. Told me all my drivers were upto date.
2. Change some registry values - could not find the values to change.
3. Open the config file of Kies (software used to connect the Samsung phone to the desktop) and make some changes in it. Could not save the changes as some program or the other was using it.
4. Finally found a blogpost on the Samsung asking me to install Kies Mini which is another version of Kies and some operators of Samsung specifically block the phone from connecting to Kies.
Its easy to find content on Google if one is patient enough to search on the right key words. The problem always ends up being which content to trust and which content not to trust. Curated content is the answer. But with a large content base already there and as it explodes daily with new content added how does one constantly update the curated content so that it ends up being useful to people. Stackoverflow.com has kind of done a good job regarding this for programmers. Why I say it has done a good job is because when I see a link with stackoverflow.com for a question that I have asked, I almost always click it because I know the answer that I get from there will be the closest to answering what I am looking for.
Stackoverflow.com is building a series of such sites to provide curated content for users on a platform called stackexchange.com. But there are so many topics around which curated content is needed and this is just the beginning.
It all started on Thursday when I saw a post on one of the blogs announcing that there was going to be a Startup Weekend being hosted at ISB in Hyderabad. Something in that article triggered my imagination that it would be a fun event to attend to understand and feel the start-up ecosystem. With a lot of encouragement from the home front I was all game to go. I went ahead and bought 5 tickets to the event and then started to ask all my friends and colleagues asking them who would like to come for the event and the 5 tickets disappeared fairly quickly.
To tell you a bit about Startup Weekend, I copied a paragraph from Annkur's post, one of the organizers about startup weekend
"Startup Weekend is this 54
hours madness that brings together business folks, developers, designers
and jack of all trades like me to build a startup over a weekend. Ones
with an idea pitch it, voting follows and teams are formed organically.
These teams have to come back with a product / prototype / demo /
whatever by Sunday evening and present to the judging panel. In march,
Startup Weekend, which has as of today done over 100 cities and 250
action packed weekends, came to India."
Day 1: The first 14 hours - Product Concept, Team Formation, Branding and Technology Identification
On Friday afternoon about 2 hours before we were to leave we had no idea what we were going to pitch. So we called everyone we knew into a room to help us brainstorm and come up with ideas to pitch at the event. After about an hour we settled on 5 ideas and then used the next hour to narrow down the ideas to 3. We all then jumped into the car and started our 30 min drive to ISB. It was here that we finally gave shape to our ideas and wrote a pitch for each one of them.
On completion of our registration we had pizzas and a lot of coke to set the right mood and then it was onto the pitches. While having our pizzas we got talking to other participants there and this kind of got us in touch with other participants that can become team members. It is important to take this networking session very seriously and meet as many participants as you can. It is during this period that you can introduce your self to everyone present there and
also get to know about them as this can influence
the team formation as there is not much time later on if your idea is shortlisted.
We all stood in a line and started to make our pitches one after another in fairly quick succession and it was down to the voting. The results were announced and since there were some ties we had 15 ideas that were selected and out of the 3 ideas that we pitched 2 got selected, Park-e-mon and Feriwala. We quickly formed into our teams and the Park-e-mon team consisted of 4 members Krishnamraju (Developer), Jeevan (Developer), Shahnawaz (Sales and Marketing) and Sudeep (Team Lead).
Soon after forming the team it was all work from then on. We had to decide on the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) i.e. the least amount of functionality that can be coded on a weekend and that will show the functionality of the application being built. At the same time we had to fill up a brief description of the product and also submit other paper work like the team details and stuff. We closed the day at about 2:00 AM with a clear idea of what was our product and the division of tasks for the next day. We had a mobile component and also a web component so each developer took one, the other two of us came up with a product validation strategy and branding which we had to complete before 11:00 AM the next morning, this included coming up with a survey, presentation demonstrating our product, name of the product, logo and buying of the website URLs and shortlisting one or two potential clients to meet and check the viability of the product in the market.
Day 2: Hours 15 to 40 - Market survey and Development
The next morning while the developers were hard at coding the product, we spoke to a couple of mentors that gave us very valuable feedback about the product. There were altogether 5 mentors that were present the whole day but we had time to talk to only 2 of them. After this the business development team went out to meet some potential customers. We met the owner of a construction company that builds commercial spaces, an architect and the parking administrator of a large mall. After having met them the idea fine tuned itself into a truly promising product that can be taken into the market. The business development team touch based with the developers who promised to have the product completed which finally happened at about 5:00 AM in the morning.
Day 3: The final 14 hours - Presentation, Fine Tuning and Pitches
After a few hours of sleep it was the start of Day 3. We all headed back to ISB, while the development team was fixing all the final issues in the product the business team worked on the presentation and the video that was going to demonstrate the usage of the product. We were done by about 4:00 PM and the pitches were to start at 5:00 PM. A few practice runs and it was time to make our pitch which went well. The pitches were all well managed. You were given 2 min to setup while the previous team was answering questions and then your 5 minutes started as soon as the previous team was done. On completion of the 5 minutes, there is 2 minutes of questions where the judges and audience were free to ask any thing. How to ensure that you make the best of the pitches
Ensure you are ready for any eventuality, during our pitch the internet was very slow and so we could not show a live demo but our video bailed us out. So have a back up plan to show the demo.
Practice your pitch and ensure that it does not cross 4:30 min. It will finally end up being 5:00 min.
Check out all the connections before hand and do not let the members of the team doing the pitch operate the laptop, unless there is no other option.
Once all the pitches were completed it was time to announce the results and our team the Park-e-mon team came first. It was a nice surprise as there were some very nice product ideas that were very well presented. On the whole the learning experience was amazing and also the opportunity to interact with so many different people in an environment where you are all thrown together and forced to work on an idea and this brings out the best in everyone.
There are a lot of universities that have made their courses online which usually involve a professor taking a class and the class is recorded and published on the internet. These are usually complex courses that are long and very involving and it takes time and patience to complete them.
On the other hand there are courses for school children which are usually custom paid programs that cost quite a bit. These programs are delivered via custom programs for children to watch and learn.
I came across The Khan Academy which has videos for teaching children Math and Science and has a lot of videos related to banking, finance, investing, venture capital funding and so on. All these videos are done by a single person Salman using paint as a whiteboard and with him explaining the concept. The wonderful part is the simplicity of the whole delivery mechanism and the effectiveness in using this delivery mechanism to teach a concept.
All the videos are free and are available on you tube. Happy viewing and learning.
With all the scheduled power outages that we are having in Hyderabad for close to four hours a day and the central government fighting for its survival over getting nuclear fuel to meet our future energy needs here is a club in London that is generating electricity out of a bouncing dance floor. Read the explanation below about how they are generating the electricity.
It's interesting how once upon a time all these innovative ways to generate electricity would have just been just too expensive but with the cost of traditional ways of generating electricity going up such innovative ways are not only becoming a style statement but they are becoming affordable to implement.
We had a very interesting issue in a project where the client was reporting an error in a screen that had hundreds of input fields but the client was not able to give us reproducible steps for the error. All that the client said was that the error was coming when a certain subset of values were selected in the input fields and the subset did not remain the same each time. In this case without reproducible steps it was virtually impossible to solve the problem.
After a bit of thought, what we decided to do was to use Snagit video screen capture and record the screens of a group of developers using the screen causing the error extensively. Once we had this video we played it back and identified the points where the error was occurring and we could then rewind and take a snapshot of the screen just before the error occurred and also write down the steps that led to the data that caused the error. With this information we were able to identify a pattern that was causing the error and solved the problem easily.
Interesting problems always makes you think out of the box. If you have some experiences similar to these please leave them in the comments section.
You have password protected an Excel file and have subsequently forgotten the password
Got an excel file that is password protected and you want to access the contents of the file
Today I was in the first situation and after a bit of googling I came across the following application Excel Password Remover 2008 which is an add-in to excel.
It's very simple to use this tool
Download the add-in password.xla and save it at any location on your hard disk.
Load the add-in into excel by going to the following menu option Tools -> Add-Ins. Click on Browse in the window that pop-ups and find the password.xla file that is saved on your hard disk. It will then appear in the add-ins Available list. Make sure the checkbox next to the name of the add-in is checked before you click on ok. Once you click on OK you should get two new menu items in the tools menu Unprotect sheet and Unprotect workbook.
Open the file that you want to unprotect (note that you cannot use this tool to open excel files that are password protected to even open them. There are other suggested tools on the website but I have not tried them out). Click on Tools -> Unprotect Sheet and after a few seconds you will get a message that the sheet is unprotected.
Once you have unprotected all the sheets save the file to your hard disk and all the password protection would have been removed.
There is a negative side and positive side to such a tool
Password protecting excel worksheets is really not helpful as you can easily break the password.
You don't have to worry if you forget the password as there are tools such as this that can break it. The worry was there as Microsoft never gave a method of recovering the password if it was forgotten. I think password protection is a half baked solution they implemented in Excel.
Does the image above look like your scrap book each morning you open it. Do these messages irratate you and only waste your time as you have to patiently delete each one and every time you delete one there just seem to be more that come.
Ever thought of blocking the user that is sending the spam. After a little bit of digging around this is how Orkut expects you to do it. Below is a descriptive screen shot of how to block and unblock users. First you have to go to the profile of the user that you wish to ignore and then move your mouse over the more>> link and thats when you are presented the option.Let us say that you have accidently ignored a user (would be so hard to do given how complex the task is) then the screen shot below shows how you can un-ignore that user.
Blocking users is so badly implemented.
First of all the help link is hard to find. In case you'll have not noticed it - the help link is present at the bottom right in the middle of the screen. Once you go into the help there is no link on the main help page giving you ideas about what to do with spam and junk messages. Being in the age of spam I would have expected this to be a topic of interest for Orkut.
On searching for spam I am presented with this long winded article about how Orkut is commited to fighting spam and right at the bottom of it you find the following "You can also report individual spammy scraps by checking the box next to the unwanted scrap and clicking the report spam button. The scrap will be immediately removed from your scrapbook and the orkut team will investigate the report. " Notice that it does not say anything about adding the user to the ignore list and I checked that it does not. Even if you do report someone for abusing the form that you have to fill up is like filling up a complete legal document.
Coming to the actual process of blocking a user I am not sure why Orkut has made it so hard to do especially when there are easier ways to do it like adding a button under delete called spam. The funny thing is that they have a delete button at the side of each message and a Delete Selected Scraps at the top of the table containing the scraps. But they don't have a spam button at the side of each message but they have a Report Spam on top.
All of this clearly shows that orkut has not put thought into how they want to handle spam and I think this is a serious problem as the number of spammers has grown considerably.
Does the image above look like your scrap book each morning you open it. Do these messages irratate you and only waste your time as you have to patiently delete each one and every time you delete one there just seem to be more that come.
Let us say that you have accidently ignored a user (would be so hard to do given how complex the task is) then the screen shot below shows how you can un-ignore that user.
