Faraz's Blog

Alright, I didn't have a very good feeling after the initial phone interview. So, I'd thought I didn't make it. The reason being, I was feeling that I didn't give correct and complete answers to all of the questions as I wrote in my other blog post regarding the first interview.  What was interesting though, was that the interviewer was never looking for the correct answer, because there wasn't one.  What he was looking for was to see my thinking process progress, and how do I respond at problems, which I believe, I did well in during the initial interview.  So, three days later I got an email from the Microsoft recruiter, stating "Congratulations, Microsoft wants you to fly out to Seattle for an in person interview". I was definitely excited seeing that email, because I hadn't been expecting it, but this definitely gave me an idea of how to prepare for the interview and what would be going through the minds of the interviewers at the Microsoft Headq...

To be released April 10, 2010.

I'd applied to Microsoft through our University's career services, which basically asks you to create a profile and fill out all necessary information at www.microsoft.com/careers. I received first correspondence from one of the recruiters through email about a month ago. I was asked to email back to him my updated resume, my schedule, an initial evaluation form which tries to kind of get to know about your interests, technologies you're interested in, your past experience and your desired positions at Microsoft Software Development Engineer/in Test and Program Manager. (SDE, SDET and PM). Once, you send these things back to the recruiter, he will schedule the first interview, usually conducted over phone (or on-campus which ever is feasible). The next email the recruiter sends you is with a bunch of resources like websites, blogs, suggested readings, books etc to prepare from. Since, it's the initial screening, I found that the interviewer basically tries to scan your ...

This is the second paper I co-authored with my professors. It's an extension to the previous work in the area of Activation Timed Influence Networks (ATIN). This paper suggests that in an ATIN model, actions can be constrained and these constraints are defined in an Action Dependency Matrix (ADM). Using these constrained actions reduces an enormous amount of effort in the calculation and determination of optimal paths between the initial pre-conditions and final effects across the network. You can find this paper in the Special Issue of Informatica Journal website from  Informatica, Special Issue on Information Reuse & Integration.

This is simply amazing. It's like you'll never be lost or none of the places around the world would be unknown to you. Travelling around the world would be so enjoyable with these apps. Embedded video from CNN Video

This was a huge effort by our group of 8 graduate students including me in the Graduate level Software Project Management course during the first semester at George Mason University. We were given a case study which comprehended the allocation of budget, resources and a time frame given which we were supposed to come up with a project idea and develop a SPMP (Software Project Management Plan) which must conform to the given resources and details. The whole project was divided into eight phases (or eight deliverables for us). We delivered each phase after every two weeks almost. And compiled the whole document to formulate the complete Project Management Plan for a Patient Management and Tracking System. Following is just a major outline of the Plan: Introduction Deliverables Definition of Process Model, Organization Structure and Responsibilities Identification of Constraints and Dependencies Risk Management Plan Staffing Plan Technical Process defining Methods, Tools, Standar...

To the right pane of my Blog, I have added a Gadget which contains the javascript for launching the GoogleEarth interface which I obtained from Google Code PlayGround. The following button calls the init( )  method in the script and launches the GoogleEarth Application in the Gadget. Make sure you have the GoogleEarthAPI installed already, if not it asks you to download/install the API which is a matter of few seconds. And then attempt it again. Press this button to launch the GoogleEarth API.

This is one of the best and most useful resources that Google provides. The Google Playground gives you a bunch of APIs and code segments which are as easy to use as simple copy/paste into your application, and there you it is up and running. Check it out at  Google Code PlayGround .

This is my favorite TECH show. Every episode always has new and upcoming technologies and peripherals with lots of innovative ideas and activities which you can execute at your home. Check it out at  TEKZILLA .

One of the best applications of Lego MindStorm's Robots.

This is the first research paper I co-authored. An Activation Timed Influence Network  (ATIN) is an extension to an existing formalism called the Timed Influence Network  (TIN) which is based on Bayesian Network and has been experimentally used in the area of Effects Based Operations (EBOs). This paper was published in the IEEE Information Reuse and Integration Conference  2008  held in Las Vegas during July 13th-15th 2008. I had the opportunity to present it. You can download the paper from  Activation Timed Influence Networks .

I have tried to summarize a bunch of J2EE Projects which I completed in my graduate level course  Component Based Software Design . You can view the detailed report by clicking  J2EE/Component Based Software Design Projects . This document contains detail description of five projects implemented in the Component Based Software Design Graduate level course at George Mason University. Each project is the implementation of an Airline Reservation System but with some new functionality and new design decisions. The following J2EE projects were developed for an Airline Reservation System with different technologies to support  travel agent  and  airline HQ  functionalities i.e. adding an airline, searching for reservation, reserving a seat etc.  JBoss Application server  and  Oracle10g  Database were used.   A Java  Swing  application developed using  RMI  and  JavaBeans  to provide the above fun...

I contributed to this software modeling and architectural design project, we developed for the graduate level  software modeling and architectural design course. We were given a requirements specifications document related to a zone monitoring system, from which we started the preliminary design process. This preliminary design was presented and critiqued in the preliminary design review session. After which certain required changes were made in the design and the final critical design was presented in the critical design review session. Both design documents can be viewed from   Preliminary Design Document  and Critical Design Document .

We developed software requirements and specifications for the project called GREAT (Grade Reporting and Attendance Tracking System) in one of my graduate level courses. We had a team of four and the client group had four people also. We conducted regular meeting and interview sessions over every two weeks. And came out with this Software Requirements Specifications Document (SRS). You can view this document by clicking  GREAT SRS Document .

Microsoft is coming up with some serious gaming innovations.

I t's been a while that I used to do Arabic Calligraphy. Still trying to get better at it.

I wrote this swing application to do the RMI implementation for one of my grad-level course project assignments. The underlying architecture is based on RMI. Following is the use case diagram for the implementation. Use Case Diagram: Airline Reservation System Following is the package diagram of the project. The application was written in NetBeans 6.5. Package Diagram Class Diagram The following image shows the Airline Headquarters user interface view. The HQ can enter new airplane records or can view all records present in the database. The "connect to Server" button performs the Naming.Lookup to look for the bound remote interface object. Considering that the remote object is already bound to the  java.rmi.Naming . Once the instance of the remote object is obtained, all functionalities can be performed. Airline Headquarters UI View All Records UI The following images show the travel agent user interface view. A travel agent can search for a seat or can r...

1. SUPPORTED LANGUAGES: a. Mercury WinRunner: It makes use of its own C-like test script language. No other language support is provided. TSL is easy to use & very user friendly. b. TestComplete: It makes use of C++ Script, C# Script, Jscript, VBScript and DelphiScript. What I have found using TestComplete is that it is not user friendly in terms of coding. It requires significant effort to get used to the syntax of the scripting languages supported unlike Mercury WinRunner. 2. EASINESS: a. Mercury WinRunner: WinRunner is very easy to use because of its C-like syntax. b. TestComplete: User has to get familiarized with the syntax of scripting languages in order to use it. 3. FEATURE ENRICHMENT: a. Mercury WinRunner: Mercury WinRunner has relatively less features as compared to TestComplete, e.g. to test an application, it needs to be run through script. Moreover, the objects (buttons, labels etc) stored during the recording are mapped onto a GUI Map Editor and ne...

I conducted a comparison a little while ago for the following versions of the automation tools: • Mercury WinRunner 8.20 Build 8520 • QA Wizard 2007.0.0 Build 2358 1. SUPPORTED LANGUAGE: a. Mercury WinRunner: It makes use of its own C-like test script language known as TSL. No other language support is provided. TSL is easy to use & very user friendly. The scripts can either be recorded or manually written or a combination of both can be done. Scripting in TSL is quite similar to writing code in C language and is prone to syntactical errors. b. QA Wizard: QA Wizard makes use of its own proprietary scripting language. The language constructs are somewhat similar to Visual Basic. But, it still requires some effort to get used to the syntax of the scripting language. The scripts are viewable in text & grid views to provide experienced & novice programming experience, respectively. According to “Seapine’s WinRunner Comparison”, Users can ...

A very resourceful repository of APIs

I had been using Protege 4.0 which is the latest version for now, and had been trying to use the Graphviz API in it, but I guess, the latest version of Graphviz (2.24) has some bugs and is not compatible with Protege 4.0. If you install Graphviz 2.24 which is the lastest version, Protege 4.0 will be unable to display the graphs and throws some exceptions. After trying to avoid using Graphviz and hammering my head for a couple of days, I tried Graphviz 2.23 which seems to be working fine with Protege 4.0. Just download version 2.23 of Graphviz from the following link: http://www.graphviz.org/pub/graphviz/development/windows/ and Set the Dot Application Path in Protege 4.0 using the 'Preferences' menu item under File Menu. You have to point to the "dot.exe" file which is located in: ...\graphviz-bin-2.23.20090611.1518\release\bin\dot.exe The version number shown above is the one which you must have downloaded. Once, you've set the Dot Application Path properly, ena...

A simple EJB contains remote/local interface, and a class which implements that interface along with an optional configuration file (XML). For the following example, JBoss Application Server 4.2.3.GA has been used where the EJB would be deployed and tested. You have to add the following external JARs also from the JBoss Application Server client and server libraries to be able to import the javax.ejb.* libraries and the @Remote Annotation: - From ...\jboss-4.2.3.GA\client\: Add jbossall-client.jar and jnp-client.jar . - From ...\\jboss-4.2.3.GA\server\default\lib\: Add ejb3-persistence.jar and jboss-ejb3x.jar Now, let's start writing the EJB: Remote/Local Interface: Consider the following interface: import javax.ejb.*; @Remote public interface MyRemoteInterface{ public String SayHello(String name); } A Bean implementation class: Now, write the implementation of the interface as follows: import javax.ejb.*; @Stateless public class ...