Will the discounts ever end ?

Traditionally discount sales used to be given a few times (1-3) every year, Diwali, Year ending and may be one more season. But now we have discounts all through the year. The purpose of a discount sale used to be one of the following (mostly)

• Beating competition during rush hours ! (Diwali, school opening)
• Money generation during dull season - Aadi / Sharad (Bad time to buy new stuff according to Indian mythology)
• Bring in new customers - Opening of a new store

Now-a-days discounts have only one purpose - increase revenue. The revenue increase is mostly at a cost, which is profit ! Most online marketplaces run on a loss so they can achieve increased review, which brings with it a lot of new customers. 

The question is, will this cycle end up with loyal customers or a failed company like Kingfisher...

Necessity is the mother of invention !

I use multiple devices on a daily basis and I own most of them. Most of us are in that boat ! Transferring and synchronizing data between these devices is becoming less of a head ache with Dropbox and Google Contacts. Photographs, contacts, files are easily synchronized between my devices and I have them where I go. But when it comes to sending a short piece of text from my PC to device like a phone number or URL I am stuck. Below are a few scenarios I face

• Send a number via chat on PC. The number is easily accessible on my phone, even though its available on google contacts.
• Open a map route on my phone that I chalked out on google maps on my PC
• Call a merchant who I looked up on JustDial.com 
• Call potential customers/applicants who send their number via email which I read on the PC
• Send an SMS with content available on the internet, which I've looked up on my PC
• Play a video on a tablet that I just saw on my PC to show it to my folks

I used Chrome2Phone but its restrictive in a sense since I have to open up Chrome and press a button to send any data. I wanted a simpler lazy way of achieving this. Some way where I do not have to perform any extra action, and its just available. After much hunting for an already available solution, I decided to build an app that would take care of most of my requirement. 

I had a simple requirement set

1. Synchronize text - URL's, numbers, YouTube video; between the PC and my multiple Android devices
2. Lazy, simple, no brainier way of doing it
3. Simple setup. I didn't want to connect to a peer-to-peer network when I move from office to home
4. Low bandwidth
5. Fire and Forget ! No need to revisit the app once its installed. 

The solution was to synchronize the clipboards of my devices for text data. But the challenge was to make it work fast without draining my already pathetic device battery. The service should use push notification, work over 3G/wifi without the need to setup a local network just like how chat clients work, not interfere with my current task, should not have any major explicit action to do like fire up an app just to send data. 

The end result was ClipboardSync. An android app that has a PC client. No restrictions on number of installs. Low processing and battery usage on the device and PC. Minimum bandwidth usage. And yes - Fire and forget. You install it once and then forget it ever existed. It does the required work without the necessity of you manually starting or verifying that its running. I've been using it for quite a while now and decided its time to let others save a few nerves and easy their lives. 

The application is available to purchase on the android market - Link. Other details can be found on the website ClipboardSync.in

Usability of Kaspersky support site

I had to visit the Kaspersky support and I was totally lost. I dint know where to go from there cos I was using one of those midget laptops (I now hate those things) but its equally bad on a normal 15" wide screen. Here's a screenshot of the page.



Guess where the links to the next page(s) are! Give it a though, there is no mouse over animation except for the pointer indicating its a link.

The link is actually the "Home Products" and "Corporate Products" text. Yes, only the text, not the image, not even the dark band behind the text, ONLY THE TEXT. Go check it out urself -> http://support.kaspersky.com/. And its this way on Chrome & IE. Didnt check FF or the others. The text look more like a header than a link.

This is a classic example of bad usability as its on the support page which leaves the customer totally lost. I was (and I'm a paying customer). Were you??? Let me know.

Americanised Ramayan

From a forward I got. Really hilarious :)

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" So, like this dude had, like, a big cool kingdom and people liked him. But, like, his step-mom, or something, was kind of a bitch, and she forced her husband to, like, send this cool-dude, he was Ram, to some national forest or something.... Since he was going, for like, something like more than 10 years or so.... he decided to get his wife and his bro along... you know...so that they could all chill out together. But Dude, the forest was reeeeal scary shit... really man...they had monkeys and devil s and shit like that. But this dude, Ram, kicked with darts and bows and arrows... so it was fine.

But then some bad gangsta boys, some jerk called Ravan, picks up his babe (Sita) and lures her away to his hood. And boy, was our man, and also his bro, Laxman, pissed... all the gods were with him... So anyways, you don't mess with gods. So, Ram, and his bro get an army of monkeys... Dude, don't ask me how they trained the damn monkeys... just go along with me, ok...

So, Ram, Lax and their monkeys whip this gangsta's ass in his own hood... Anyways, by this time, their time's up in the forest... and anyways... it gets kinda boring, you know... no TV or malls or shit like that. So,they decided to hitch a ride back home.... and when the people realize that our dude, his bro and the wife are back home...they thought, well, you know, at least they deserve something nice...and they didn't have any bars or clubs in those days... so they couldn't take them out for a drink, so they, like, decided to smoke and shit... and since they also had some lamps, they lit the lamps
also....so it was pretty cooool... you know with all those fireworks.... Really, they even had some local band play along with the fireworks... and you know, what, dude, that was the very first, no kidding.., that was the very first music-synchronized fireworks... you know, like the 4th of July stuff, but just, more cooler and stuff, you know. And, so dude, that was how, like, this festival started."


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4. Position of a number in a sorted array

4. How many comparisons are required to find the position of a number in a sorted array.

Answer: Using binary search it would require O(log n) comparisons.

find the k largest or smallest numbers from a set of n numbers

3. How do you find the k largest or smallest numbers from a set of n numbers

Solution:

Build a min/max heap of size K from the available set.

Time complexity: n Log K

Reverse a string

This is one of my favourite and has several correct solutions.

2. Reverse a string.

The best way would be to loop through half of the sting and swap the characters at either end (without using an extra variable!)