Hung Truong: The Blog!

Song Currently Stuck In My Head: Fame!

So it’s partly due to Karaoke Revolution Party having the song, and one of my friends’ 80s pictures, but I totally have the song Fame stuck in my head now. During Christmas time, I got the aforementioned Karaoke Revolution game. My sister did pretty well singing it; I’m a little too young to remember the actual show.

I did try it later on though. It’s pretty darn catchy and soulful. Which means I’m pretty bad at singing it. I guess I just need some practice. Here’s the lyrics in case you found this page searching for them:

Baby look at me

And tell me what you see

You ain’t seen the best of me yet

Give me time I’ll make you forget the rest

I got more in me

And you can set it free

I can catch the moon in my hands

Don’t you know who I am?

Remember my name

(Chorus)

Fame

I’m gonna live forever

I’m gonna learn how to fly

High

I feel it coming together

People will see me and cry

Fame

I’m gonna make it to heaven

Light up the sky like a flame

Fame

I’m gonna live forever

Baby remember my name

Remember Remember Remember Remember

Remember Remember Remember Remember

Baby hold me tight

Cause you can make it right

You can shoot me straight to the top

Give me love and take all I’ve got to give

Baby I’ll be tough

Too much is not enough

I’ll grab your heart til it breaks

Ooo I got what it takes

(Chorus again, like a few times)

Sometimes the lyric is listed as “People will see me and die,” but that sounds kind of wrong to me. Like can someone be so famous that it causes death? I hope not.

Google Phone Interview #1: The Aftermath

So I finished my first phone interview with Google. Overall I thought it was very fair and I didn’t get the types of mind-bending puzzles that people claim they are asked.

I won’t disclose the questions I was asked, not because they asked me to, but because I think it would undermine the effectiveness of the interview process itself. Plus I have a feeling that Google “Googles” to find questions posted online and doesn’t use them anyway.

I had a chance to describe a project that I had worked on. I chose Notecentric, since it was more complex than Anime Nano and I could say that I worked on the entire thing by myself. I did a pretty simple (and nervous) high level overview of the system and my reasons for creating it.

The first question I got was a simple data structure implementation efficiency question. I’m pretty glad I studied my data structures beforehand. It took me a while (and a few hints) before I came to the correct solution. It was sort of a “well duh!!” moment, but I’m glad that I at least reached it. Though it took a while, I thought I did well in rationalizing my ideas and explaining why they wouldn’t work quite right. Plus coming up with a solution to a problem is very stressful with a real life Google Engineer listening to you think it through! I think the interviews are mostly to see how you think, not how quickly you can derive the right answer.

The second question was a pretty open ended one about role playing as a Google Engineer. I guess that’s as vague as I can get without actually saying what the question was. I think the question was more about seeing how much I knew about Google and how I would behave in the company itself. I think I did fairly well in this question, going through a lot of edge cases and coming up with ideas that might those handle edge cases, etc.

I also had a chance to ask a question about Google. I asked about the 20% projects, as it’s something I find really unique about the company. I also gave the interviewer a feature request for Gmail, though she wasn’t directly working on that project.

Overall, I think the interview had its desired effect. Google learned more about my thought process and critical thinking skills. I probably won’t hear from the recruiter again until Monday at the soonest, since it’s the weekend now. Hopefully they’ll have another phone interview or even an onsite interview lined up for me shortly.

Cooking Mama DS Sort Of On Sale At Amazon.com

So Cooking Mama, the game where a woman yells at you for not cooking well, is sort of on sale at Amazon.com. It’s usually $20, but right now it’s $16. Good enough for me! I was thinking of picking up this weird title and the 20% off convinced me.

I also picked up Nodame Cantabile volume 1 so I could get free shipping. And I used my $25 Amazon.com credit card gift certificate, so it ended up being like $.30 total! Yay!

Because The Graphics On Level 3 Aren’t Gonna Tighten Themselves Up…

Back when I still had cable, and access to G4TechTV, which is now just G4, and considerably bad, there was this awesomely bad commercial.

Two guys are playing video games when their boss walks in. Instead of yelling at the guys, she tells them she has another video game that needs designing! Oh man, they’re video game designers! And it’s their job! They just finished level 3! And they need to tighten up the graphics!

The commercial ends with the dude on the left saying that his mom said he’d never get anywhere playing video games. How wrong she was.

The phone number for Westwook College Online is then presented with a caveat: Not intended for residents of Texas or Massachusetts. Obviously these states have banned video games altogether. Or perhaps they don’t recognize dead end online degree programs? Either way, it’s nice of the college to warn people ahead of time. Maybe they should also include, “Not intended for people eventually seeking a job of any kind.”

Google Phone Interview Set For February 9th!

I got an email from the recruiter at Google today. My phone interview is set for February 9th, so I have 4 good days to get ready for it. I’ve been looking at the giant algorithms book, just refreshing myself on stuff like O notation, common sorting algorithms like mergesort, and stuff like that.

I should probably move on to more complicated algorthms next like Dijkstra’s Algorithm and dynamic programming algorithms like the all pairs shortest path algorithm. I don’t think Google would ask me about specific implmentations of these, but it would be good practice to get back into the mindset of designing algorithms this complex, since I haven’t had to do so in a while.

I saw a sample interview question from some blog asking about defining a function f(a,b) to return a string that is all of the characters in a (in order) that are also in b. They ask for an order n² as well as an order n algorithm. The n² one seems trivial, but I can’t think of how to calculate a set intersection (which is what I think the problem boils down to) in order n time… I could try and prove that it would be impossible to do it in n time, but I don’t really want to do that either. Plus I’m not sure if it is impossible…

Edit: Okay, so apparently they’re “strings” for a reason. The N solution is pretty easy. I was trying to solve a more complex problem in N, when I just needed to take a look at the actual question being asked. I guess I should do regular sanity checks during the interview and not try to accomplish more than they ask.

Well, back to the book for me.