Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I am planning to buy a Sony FS-790 notebook to replace my old and obsolete Dell Inspiron 8200. Here are the specs on this baby:

15.4″ WXGA TFT with XBRITE Technology
Wireless LAN (802.11 b\g) / Intel
NVIDIA GeForceTM Go 6200 with TurboCache
Intel Pentium M Processor 760 (2.0 GHz)
DVD+R Double Layer DVD±RW Drive
512MB DDR-SDRAM (DDR2-400, 512 MBx1)
120 GB Hard Disk Drive-Preloaded with 5 Sony Pictures movie titles.
3 Year Onsite Service Plan plus Accidental Damage Protection for Notebook

This will cost $2230.98, but I can’t find a better combination of power and portability anywhere else. Critical elements are the high-end graphics card, large hard disk, writable DVD, and widescreen LCD. I will also probably buy a 1 GB stick of RAM sometime in the immediate future.

If you know something good or bad about this Sony notebook, please leave a comment before it’s too late! Or, if you have a better suggestion, drop me a comment ^_~

I am flying home this winter on the 17^th of December, to return January 8^th. This time, I booked two direct flights with Jet Blue because I like to gamble with life and death. The total cost of the trip will run about $400 plus great inconvenience to myself.

17 Dec 05	New York, JFK 6:55pm	Phoenix, AZ 10:35pm
08 Jan 06	Phoenix, AZ 11:35pm	New York, JFK 06:00am +1

Jet Blue does have a great online booking system, though… very user friendly!

Did you know that there are some Google Blog Search RSS feeds that don’t validate?

It looks like Google’s having some internationalization issues! The specific errors in question are:

Your feed appears to be encoded as “UTF-8″, but your server is reporting “ISO-8859-1″
line 4, column 315: description contains bad characters (18 occurrences)
line 6, column 75: title should not contain HTML (3 occurrences)
line 9, column 41: title contains bad characters (2 occurrences)

I just had the brilliant thought, “What if you answer an illegal interview question on your resume?” For example:

So now anyone who reads my resume has violated my right to keep my race and ethnicity out of the hiring decision. Although it’s my fault that information was disclosed, I can certainly argue that it now affects the hiring decision!

I just had a first round interview with Microsoft here on campus at Cornell University. I attended the tech career fair yesterday and dropped my resume, and got emailed to setup a time today to do the first screening interview. The guy who interviewed me didn’t have a copy of my resume, so I gave him one. His first comment, “Ohhh, so you worked for Amazon, did you?”

It seems that Microsoft is hungry to snap up current or former Amazon employees. How lucky for me.

Then we got into the interview, where he asked me to describe some software tests I’d worked on in the past, so I told him how I wrote lexical, syntactic, and semantic tests for our compiler last semester as unit tests. “Good” testcases for each stage called the compiler on their (and preceeding) stages only and would not generate exceptions. Invalid testcases were expected to throw exceptions. This way, we could throw dozens of different tests into the “valid” and “invalid” folders of each stage and completely automate most of the early testing.

To show I could test something, I had to write a function to identify equilateral, isosceles, and scalene trianges, returning a different integer for each. Then I discussed a test matrix for this function, which covered standard cases, negative or zero integers, overflow, NaN, floating point considerations, etc. Also, the permutations required to test non-equilateral triangles. The function looked something like:

<?php

function whatTriangle($a, $b, $c){
    if($a === $b && $b === $c)
        return 0;  // equilateral
    if($a === $b || $b === $c || $a === $c)
        return 1;  // isosceles

    return 2;    // scalene
}

?>

Finally, we wrote another function to remove duplicate integers in an array. Woohoo! This was a standard MSFT coding question they’d ask in an interview–always something about arrays:

<?php

function removeDups(&$arr){
    $j = 0;

    for($i = 1; $i < count($arr); $i++){
        if($arr[$i] === $arr[$j]) {
            continue;
        } else {
            arr[++$j] = $arr[$i]
        }
    }

    return $j;
}

?>

This is a code sketch for a function that removes duplicates and returns the last index in the newly deduped array. If you were to do it properly, you’d want to check bounds and such and modify the length of the real array by resizing it.

Note: I am saving this post until I hear back from them again!