Interview Questions - 1

Interview Month: February
Interview Position: Software Engineer
Interview Duration: About 30 minutes
Interview Company Type: Networking

1. Whats the library used for threading in C on Unix based systems ?

2. What is the pthread library call used to create a new thread and the parameters to the call?

3. How do you think the pthread_lock() is implemented ?

4. Will this work for multi processor/core systems also ? {This question asked in many interviews}
Dont know a proper answer to this question yet. Any links would be helpful.

5. What is malloc? System call or Library Call? Why?

6. At what times does malloc invoke a system call? Does it always invoke?
Answer is something regarding maintaining buckets. Check out malloc implementation details

7. What is a hash-map data structure? How does it store data?

8. Advantages and disadvantages of using a hashmap. Give examples of systems where you would not use 1.

And I am back....

The desire to key my thoughts couldn't keep me away from here.

Hey everyone, look I am back.

Bloody Hell

I have been trying to give it a thought, but I am tired now. I need some1 to design a proper looking frontpage for my website which has a lot of space and holds absolutely nothing. Bah !!

Rain ideas, good Lord.

Oh yeah, I plan to post my Bahamas pics there. :D

SVN problems over the web

The other day I was configuring my SVN over Apache for my Lab server. I had almost set it up and it was almost looking perfect when it failed to commit. So everytime i tried to commit it would give me this strange looking error.

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (500 Internal Server Error) in response to MKACTIVITY request for '/repos/testrep/!svn/act/b5cf039a-95ed-11df-a9f1-a38cb1af4ec0'

I am running SLES 11 and my web server runs on a virtual host and this was my subversion.conf file [relevant section] located at /etc/apache2/conf.d/subversion.conf :



DAV svn
SVNParentPath /srv/svn/repos/
SVNListParentPath On

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Commiting to repository requires a password"
AuthUserFile /srv/svn/user_access/svn_passwdfile
Require valid-user



So after a lot of trial and error and in an attempt not to make a fool of myself before the professor, I tried changing the line in my subversion.conf to this:



The old error was gone, but a new error showed up

So my final modified line ended up looking like this.



And then it worked like cream.

How I came up with the idea? It was after I read stuff from here

Man !!

It was a bright sunny day. I was drowsing, on my chair, with my head swaying from left to right like a pendulum with a frequency much slower than of a grandpa clock pendulum.

Suddenly I dreamt of coding. Wham !! I woke up, got my coffee and sat to work.

Damn. I was supposed to write some network shit. I realized I had swallowed the taste of network system calls. So I issued a man command:

Wabbit@ubuntu:~$ man accept
No manual entry for accept

What the fuck man ?

If you face such a problem, download and put the manpages-dev package

root@ubuntu:~# aptitude install manpages-dev

And it was done !!

Ahem!! So I coded.

gdm was not starting on bootup

I had a sudden problem, I dunno how I came to it, but my gdm never started up when my laptop was booting.So the login process was not only long but damn boring as well, which included, inputting your password thrice :)

So I decided to change it. What I did was opened the dir /etc/rc5.d and edited the shell script named S30gdm and changed the value of

HEED_DEFAULT_DISPLAY_MANAGER=false (from true)

Then it worked for me ;)

gdm was not starting on bootup

I had a sudden problem, I dunno how I came to it, but my gdm never started up when my laptop was booting.So the login process was not only long but damn boring as well, which included, inputting your password thrice :)

So I decided to change it. What I did was opened the dir /etc/rc5.d and edited the shell script named S30gdm and changed the value of

HEED_DEFAULT_DISPLAY_MANAGER=false (from true)

Then it worked for me ;)