It’s been long since I’ve posted anything. I have decided to start blogging again. A lot has changed since my previous post. I graduated from Amrita, worked at an awesome tech startup and now I’m a Master’s student at KTH. Hopefully I’ll fill in details about what I’ve been doing the last 3 years in future posts (Purpose of this post is to make sure I do). Ciao 🙂
Author: Vishnu Ramesh
What I’m upto
Its been a long vacation from the things I love the most. I’m back again 🙂
Its vacation time and I’ve got lots of free time. To be specific 24hours per day. So I decided to learn Java. Something I’ve always wanted to. Next semester I’ll be learning it anyway. So I thought I’d take a head start. Another thing that’s been keeping me busy is a wargame called bandit hosted by overthewire.org. It’s really interesting. Worth a try if you’re wasting away your vacation at home. Everybody is bound to get bored eventually unless you fill in your vacation with some fun stuff like I did. Anyway bandit is really easy. It provides you with necessary know-how required at each level. It’s just another fun way of learning. In my opinion, the best way of learning.
Hope you too try something awesome and enjoy. Good luck
InCTF ’12 – National Level “CapturetheFlag” style ethical hacking contest
Yet again, Amrita University & Amrita TIFAC CORE in cyber security proudly present InCTF ’12, National Level “Capture the Flag
" style Ethical Hacking contest.
InCTF’12 is from November 2011 to January 2012. It is focused exclusively on the student community. You can participate from your own university and no travel is required. No prior exposure or experience in cyber security needed to participate.
Prerequisite to participate is familiarity with any programming language. Working knowledge of Linux is highly desirable but not necessary; learn essential skills as you participate!!!We help you learn if you get stuck!!
1. Form a team (max five members from your college)
2. Approach a faculty/mentor and request him/her to mentor your team
3. Register online at http://inctf.in
Great Rewards!
25K | The winning team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 25000/- |
20K | The first runner-up team receives a cash up to prize of up to Rs. 20000/- |
15K
10 K
5 K
|
The second runners-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 15000/-
The third runner-up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 10000/-
The fourth runner -up team receives a cash prize of up to Rs. 5000/-
|
Special Prizes*
- Teams are awarded prizes based on their performance
- Deserving teams are well awarded. Exciting prizes to be won.
Website | Email | Facebook
*Cash prizes are subject to their performance and participation in the CTF round. Only teams who connect to the VPN server and successfully gain points in the CTF round are eligible for prizes. In addition, cash prize winners of InCTF '11 are not eligible for prizes in InCTF '12.
Contest experience – Infosys CampusConnect Aspirations 2020
This is the first time I’m taking part in a real programming contest. Had so much fun and learned a lot more. My teammates were Sai Vikneshwar (Third year CS) and Aswin Akhilesh (Fourth Year CS). They are really good at this. I’m glad I got this opportunity to work with them. At first I had doubts if I could keep up with them. But it turned out to be a really good learning experience. There were 7questions and 5hours. Within the first our we read all the problems and started with what we felt was the easiest and could be submitted. The problems were pretty tough. The lab was pretty much filled up in the beginning. The contest was a crash course on vectors for me. I had never used vectors before. Knew it was really cool. We had to work using an arena which they supplied. The interface was pretty lame. And we had to stick to a directory structure which they specified. That again was lame. I did not like the lack of freedom. For all the problems they had supplied a header file containing a class and a function. We just had to complete the function according to the given instructions. This was the first time I’m dealing with problems like this. In the problems which I’ve seen before we just had to get the output correct. Anyway we managed to solve one problem. It had no compilation errors and worked perfectly with all test cases we tried. But the arena just refused to accept our program. It was compiling our program as if it was a c program, but ours was cpp. Anyway I learnt a lot today. I was able to keep up with the code 😀 Great experience. The last time I sat five hours at a stretch in lab was for our end semester lab exam for C programming in S2. But back then the problems were simple and we were working on mooshak. I really admire mooshak. Its a really cool software and fun to work with. Mooshak gave me my first A+ grade 🙂
Oh I also learned a lot about pointers, scope of variables, debugging and is the first time I’m actually noticing varriables getting destructed when their scope ends.