Last day of my internship at Yahoo!

What an eventful day it was! Here, I am going to narrate about a particular incident.

As almost every intern here does, I decided to write a thank-you-lets-keep-in-touch mail to the intern group and my team members. After the initial stuff about how wonderful it was to work at Yahoo, and how I had a great time and how I liked the internship, it was time to say “thank you”. During my stay, I had this wonderful opportunity of attending the summer school on information retrieval. I got an overall idea of what information retrieval is all about, the challenges, some interesting problems in the field and innovative approaches taken by the researchers. So I wanted to give a big “thanks” to my mentors (Yes, I had two of them!), my manager and to Muthusamy Chelliah, head of academic relations of Yahoo! And as it happens, I have this weird notion (given that I thought of \m/ as Garfield, this should not come as surprise :P) that “calling people with their surnames is rude”. For example, say there is one dude called Kapil Sibbal. I find saying “Kapil, I need to talk to you about foobar” perfectly fine but I somehow think that it would be rude if I say “Sibbal, I need to talk to you about foobar.” (Especially, when he is not of my age.) And nobody around here calls him “Muthusamy” or any variant thereof. So I wrote “I am thankful to Arun, Chelliah sir, Shravan and Shrikant for giving me such a wonderful opportunity to attend the summer school.” Shrikant is name of my manager. And I realized, even Shrikant is quite elderly and senior and I should add a “sir” after his name too!

After writing that one line, my mind again drifted back to my memories of the internship, in search of things which I should mention in the mail. One really nice thing I realized was… For quite a few days I had been having my lunch with my team members – 5-6 of them. The topics on table ranged from kickboxing to google+ and land acquisition by the Chinese in west Bengal to innovative use of ad-hoc networks by firefighters. I enjoyed my time there interacting with these people and they treated me like just another team member – one among them! So after getting lost for some time in nostalgia, I again came back to the mail… I must thank my team-mates… Then I listed their names and wrote some words of gratitude. While hitting the “send” button, I did not have the slightest bit of an idea about what was waiting for me in the afternoon…

Sleep sort in JavaScript and closures

     There is this "genius" sorting algorithm called "sleep sort". I don't know what came to my mind, but I decided "let's do it in javascript!". I thought that it won't take more than 2 minutes. Starting with such wrong and over confident assumption, it was a journey into the details of javascript which I had never bothered to pay much attention to. I learnt quite a few things on the way and will share the same in this blog.

     Here is the code which I wrote off :

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array = [1, 9, 4, 8, 2, 3, 6];

for (i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
    window.setTimeout ("console.log(array[i])", array[i]*1000);
}