Mircea Bardac /random_thoughts

The 3rd Data Structures and Alogorithms homework was a real challenge. It didn’t only require a good programming, but also some algorithms knowledge. We have received 2 versions of the same homework last week: one easy homework and a difficult one. The difficult one comes also with a bonus.

When you see the possibility to achieve more than the usual through programming, you can be sure you’ll find me there. I’ve chose the difficult version. The problem consisted of determining the convex hull for a number of points on a 2D surface. Well, if I think that I’ve done it before, but with another algorithm, I can’t really say it’s difficult. The big challenge was actually the STL implementation which should have been made both memory and time efficient. It worked well after patching it several times because of wrong behaviour in special cases.

Well, the day had come. The planned interview at HP managed to be exactly in my busiest day, just like the presentation before. Everything went really well and my CV was highly appreciated. I was accepted to take part at the future training. A test will follow after the training in order to decide the best suited persons for the HP promoting activities.

My long term ‘relationship‘ with Junior Achievement Romania lead me to HP. JA Romania requested the students it is working with some CV’s for HP because they said they need new employees. I didn’t know what exactly the job was about, but I still sent my CV.
They called and invited us at HP Demo Center for a presentation. Unfortunaly, the meeting was set on Thursday, one of my busiest days. I had to sacrifice some Maths classes in order to satisty my curiosity. It worth the sacrifice. I found out today that they need part-time promoters. People that will promote in different places (business centers, IT fairs, hypermarkets) the HP products. This was exactly what I was looking for, since my time does not really allow me to have a full time job. An interview will follow shortly.

Finished my first DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) homework tonight. It consisted only of STL programming, with no special algorithms involved.
It has been a tough start because of several things. The most annoying thing was the fact that I had to correct the notes I took at faculty, after experiencing some errors. The main reason for their appearance was the fact that I have never worked with STL before and I couldn’t check at the same time what I was taught. The introduction into STL we had was missing some #includes at least. Besides this, in my search to gain some more STL knowledge that I was taught (it was obvious that it hasn’t been enought), I found out a better way of solving my first homework than the one sugested at the course.

This was also my first program in KDevelop. I found some nice features of it that made it act really professional. I haven’t figured out yet how autocompletion works for class members (typing “.” or “->” after an object variable). The strange thing is that it autocompletes everything, including the words in the comments, the variables etc. One thing that really helped me was the integrated documentation interface (I had the feeling that it came with the documentation, but found later that docs were actually online - it didn’t bother me since I have a permanent Internet connection).

Finished downloading the binary packages of KDE 3.2.0 for ArchLinux 0.6. I’ve sacrificed some hundred something MB out of my 1.5 GB traffic limit per month only for KDE & some other missing packs from the base ISO CD. Now I’ve realised why ArchLinux occupies only one CD. It does not have KDE or Gnome on it, it has only Xfce (which looks quite slick, but I need a little bit more flexibility).

At least now I can say I have a beautiful interface