Creating "Mood lights" animation with OpenCV

The other day I went on a typical London walk near Thames, and as always loved the lights, reflections and the view. It was amazing! One thing I really liked was the RGB mood lights on the bridge that transformed from every possible color in a way that it made the whole experience amazing!! Here is a glimpse from my instagram.

Since there was a sequence of colors involved, I thought I would at least try to replicate these mood lights using OpenCV. Turns out its not very difficult to make this animation at all. I wrote an algorithm for doing this using some clever tricks that did make it simple and interesting. Here is a gif showing how cool the animation looks when you execute the code.

Interview experience with Google

This may sound unbelievable but it all started a few months back in late 2013, when I saw a really cool movie called "The internship". Of course I had been thinking about applying for a software eng. intern position at Google for a long time, but it was this movie which made me get up from my couch of epic laziness and start preparing for the experience that was to follow! Unlike the movie, my story doesn't end with me getting a position at all, but it certainly is about the interesting path for a learning experience. So after watching the movie, I started preparing my application and submitted it within a few days. Pretty standard details were required for submission at this point. 

Algorithm to check Sudoku puzzle!

I have got a couple of interviews this week, which I love preparing for as it a good way to refresh my C++ and at the same time, I get to implement some pretty interesting algorithms.

As most of us would do, I have been searching for the past few days about frequently asked interview questions and have been trying to solve most of the algorithm design questions myself. This post is about an interview question asked by google interviewers for an internship position. The question is about checking if a Sudoku Solution is correct or not.

Puzzle picture taken from: www.puzzles411.com