So we went to Anna University today for Mathrix ’08 and it was actually pretty nice. I left early in the morning and caught a share auto to the CEG campus where they were going to hold the events. While we were travelling it started raining like mad, and when I got off I had to take refuge along with some other people in a traffic policeman’s shed. The only problem was I had to keep standing. Ah well, better dry and standing than wet and sitting.

So I managed to get inside Anna University and to the venue in time. Yay! First on the list was:

C Debugging:

A while ago, someone mentioned something about this event in Arun’s blog and I found it hard to believe that such crazy stuff would be asked. My mistake, I should’ve heeded the warning. It was crazy man, CRAZY! There was a little timer in the corner and it would keep ticking down the seconds till twenty five minutes had run out. On the screen there was this box with code that usually goes something like this:
Find the output:

#include
int main()
{
int i = 24;
int * Iptr = &i;
[gibberish looking stuff involving TRIPLE POINTERS! Which sane person uses freaking triple pointers?!!]
[some more stuff]
return 0;
}

Triple pointers?! What hater-of-all-things-human uses triple pointers? And then to make it worse they had questions about a pointer to a pointer to a character pointer returned by a function that accepts a pointer to a character pointer. Man, you know what? I don’t know the damn language, I’m going to say that, and I’m never going to be able to program stuff in anything other than python if its all like this. Jesus, imagine writing Hello World. No way, I’m not going near C unless I’m in a Hazmat suit. Needless to say we were near the bottom of the pack, if not last. On the way out this girl organising it asked if it was easy, I said it was ‘Interesting’ – which it was, it gave me insight into my programming skills. Then there was:

The Quiz:

I had to walk through the rain to get to the quiz, and I was drenched by the time I got there. No umbrella you see. Waste of time standing inside traffic booth. Anyway, the quiz itself was pretty nice, not too tough except for the last page that was full of computer science stuff and had some weird questions about definitions. Since there were no negatives we guessed :) It turned out well, I have to go for the finals tomorrow. That’ll be cool, I bet they’ll ask all sorts of engineering stuff and I won’t know anything. Ah well, worth a shot I guess and besides, it meant I didn’t have to go to class today :D

Incidentally, about that traffic policeman, a really sad thing happened. He was sitting there waiting for one of those police vehicles to come by, and when the fancy Hyundai Accent showed up he ran up to it in the rain and tried to talk to the cops inside, but they just said they weren’t going to do anything and sped off all nice and warm inside their car. All he wanted was a raincoat, he was grumbling about how they could’ve just given him the raincoat.