The Pensieve

After being tortured to sit through one too many series of never ending serials, here are a few rules or patterns that I had observed: Design patterns on serials or movies The-Not-Good-as-it-seems Pattern: If it is too good to be true, it is a dream and in real-world, it will happen exactly the opposite The-One-is-not-enough Pattern: One of the primary character will have two wives and will struggle between the two (or more?). Medical-Miracle Pattern: Someone will get amnesia and later will be always be cured. Double-Trouble Pattern: If twins are born, they will get separated to meet again 20 years later. Of-course, there will be scope for impersonation. The-Cryptic-Prophet Pattern: Swamijis, gypsies, sadhus will usually be able to give cryptic clues on what is about to happen next The-Cycle-of-Life Pattern: If a primary actor's family is portrayed as being very rich, chances are they will become poor. Conversely, the family opposing the hero / heroin will have the lifestyle op...

One of my favorite ploy to those who newly joined my previous company was to give them a command line application and ask them to find out how it worked. This magic command line tool happens to guess your gender if you give your name. char lastc = argv[1][strlen(argv[1])-1]; printf("%s is a %s\n", argv[1], (lastc == 'a' || lastc == 'i') ? "She" : "He"); Basically, it checks to see if your name ends with an 'a' or an 'i' and if it does, assumes that the person is a lady. Chances are, 95% of most Indian names fall into this category and this simple app seems to do magic. Most were able to (after a few tries) guess the grand algorithm, but a few poor souls could not, which eventually leads to step number 2. Step #2 is, as they were unable to decipher the algorithm, I said that I will provide with two separate command line apps called whois she and whois he . I also mentioned that as I had not done the validation part prope...