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Okay, I went through the interview. I was interviewed by a panel of three people, on the Virtual PC team. It started outgoing pretty good. Then, they started asking questions… I was asked to name what a number of DOS Command-line script commands do. There were a few that I didn’t recognize. One of them PushD I remembered afterwards what it did. Let's see if I can rebuild the list this time with discriptions.
MD = Creates a directory. PATH = Displays or sets a search path for executable files. DIR = Displays a list of files and subdirectories in a directory. NET LOCALGROUP = Retrive/modify users on the computer. PUSHD = Saves the current directory then changes it. Restored using POPD START = Starts a separate window to run a specified program or command. IPCONFIG = Windows IP Configuration. PROMPT = Changes the Windows command prompt. DEL = Deletes one or more files.
Next I was asked to test these two applications one was a very simple calculator, the other a Triangle determinater. I did okay I brought up a few good tests but on reflection there is something I should have brought up; I was with the Virtual PC Team. I should have thought to test their applications on different platforms. Duh! Why didn't I think of that on the spot!
After that I was given a Microsoft famous Brain teaser question, even though they are supposed to be discouraged now days. I was given a problem where a balance scale was drawn up on the white board and nine balls. One of the balls is lighter than the others which are all alike. All of the balls are the same size. I was asked to find the lighter ball. Boy did I flounder on that one. Here "http://sakharov.net/puzzle/weight.html?SRC=sakharov&STAT=9Z2&TTL=2" See if you can work it out before continuing on to the answer.
One thought I had while heading home was to bounce them and the one that bounced higher or lower could be the one. But that is not the answer. So what is the answer?
Separate the balls into 3 groups of 3. Place 3 balls on the left side of the scale and 3 balls on the right. If they balance out, you know that the heavier ball is not one of those 6. If one side is heavier, you know that the heavier ball is one of those 3. Then once you know which set of 3 has the heavier ball, you choose any 2 of them and weigh one on each side. If they balance out you know the final ball is heavier. If they don't balance, well, obviously the heavier ball is the one you are looking for. From: Casey, Yahoo! Answers
I was sort of close at one point but, I had for some reason assumed that I had to weigh every time to get the solution. I have realy never been very good with this kind of Brain teaser puzzle. Oh well. Next time, maybe.
I really don't think I have the job. Which could actually be a good thing since when I read the email all the way through I found out that it would only be a three month contract, which could put me with a hundred day break allot sooner than would be good.
Update: 21 Feb 2007 5:22 PM, I recived word on the interview. "Hey Alma, The team decided to go with a no hire decision. I will provide more feedback tomorrow. Zeshan"
Woo, hoo. I have another Job interview with Volt, at Microsoft on Virtual PC, tomorrow. One of the requested skills is C#, So I'm not very expectant about getting the job, but I'm hopeful.
They also want Kernal Debugging skills, Hmm. Maybe I should try to learn to connect the Debugger to IE and try to figure out what the problem is I have been seeing lately.
I have run into a few interesting browser issues over the past few days.
On Sunday my Mom decided she wanted to print this Blog out so she could take it up and show my Dad. She was printing from Firefox and found that it only printed three pages, all of which were missing most of the Blog. So I launched Firefox myself and sure enough, the first page would print the Title then the second page the Table of Contents and other stuff on the left side and the third page would print the first page of the Blog body of text. So I decided to print Preview in IE where it showed up perfectly. I then tried Netscape's Browser with the same results as Firefox, which shouldn't be too surprising; since the latest Netscape Browser is just a modified version of Firefox now. Opera did a pretty good job in the Print Preview, but I have become accustomed to IE7's Shrink to fit so the extra page with almost nothing on it makes me cringe, and for some reason it was set to print the backgrounds by default. It's a simple task to turn off print backgrounds but it would have used allot of ink. What my Mom eventually ended up doing was opening the page in IE6 and printing it that way. It worked for her.
If I were to venture a guess Firefox simply doesn’t know how to handle printing IFrames properly.
Now, Ie7 isn't perfect either. I have been experiencing this rather frustrating phenomenon while looking on-line for jobs. I would go to a page of Jobs and middle click a few links, that look like Jobs I could do, to open them in separate tabs, then go to the next page and then look over the Jobs in the other Tabs. If it is a Job I am definitely not qualified for I would close the tab and continue to the next until I am through the tabs and then come back to the page with the lists of jobs and repeat the process. After doing that for a while IE7 would suddenly close all instances of IE open and play the error sound. There isn't even an error reporting dialog, it just closes.
I decided yesterday that I would trace down the problem. I noticed that it happened on opening the new tab, and it seemed to have something to do with the number of tabs opened. So I opened an IE window and clicked the New Tab button until it crashed. I counted 55 Tabs including the original tab created. Then I started over again this time I clicked the New Tab button and then Double Clicked the newly created tab to close it. Doing it this way I counted 62 Tabs, including the first tab, before it crashed. I tried several more times to make sure I could reproduce it consistently, which it did, unfortunately I don't have another Machine with Windows XP on it, to see if it is a problem with my machine, or with something that is installed or whatever.
The only ideas I have as to what the problem could be; is that there is a possibility that there is a variable not being reduced when a tab is closed so that it overflows. Or that the tabs are kept in memory until there are simply too many open and once again an overflow occurs.
Update: 21 Feb 2007 9:00PM, I finaly attached WinDBG to IE and caught the exception. It seems that it has to do with the IE Dev toolbar. It is trowing an access violation error. Interesting.
Well, I had a job interview at Microsoft today. One of the Volt reps set it up for me with the Content Access and Protection team, to execute Manual and Automated tests and maintain pools of machines. I thought it went fairly well up until the whiteboard test.
I was given a scenario to diagnose I believe it was the Expedia website. He created a diagram of a web server with two SQL database servers one containing web content and the other searches and other related content. Then he told me that customers had reported that they would go to the site and would get a page not found error page.
So I started fumbling around trying to figure out how to diagnose such a problem. I thought Hardware and brought that up. He said what if you don't have access to the hardware? So I thought of Remote access. And he asked what if you don't have remote access? I thought of Pinging the server. He said okay you ping the server and it comes back okay but the page still doesn't show up. I thought is it only the main page that isn't working? He said that the main page comes back with no page found and the flight page comes back with some of the content such as pictures as missing. Okay, that sounded like the content database is corrupted or the interface between the database and the web server is broken intermittently.
Well the interview ended shortly after this. He went to talk to his boss and then returned to tell me that I would find out in a day or two if I had the job. Then he escorted me back to the lobby. On the way I mused over the problem and remarked about it and he said he just wanted to see how I would diagnose such a situation.
A couple of hours later the Volt Rep called and asked how the interview went. I really wasn't sure. So he sent off his email and a couple of hours later called me back to say that I just wasn't what they were looking for. Oh well. He said he submitted me for another position we'll see if anything turns out.
