Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

There you go, I have now joined the google-ad-world. I'm not sure exactly how AdSense works, but i think if anyone clicks on a link above and buys something, i get some of the proceeds. Probably unlikely to happen, but if Google are nice enough to provide us with Blogger, I may as well help them out i guess. In more bloggish news, there was another TopCoder match for money...but I did rather badly, so I won't be able to shout anyone anything at the UniBar, I'm sorry :p I did however last match manage to get the fastest submission for a question, for the first time ever :) And the design I won has almost finished development phase, so that'll be over soon, and the one i've just started has had a 5-day extension, because they had to change things (even though they actually made it easier...) :D Tomorrow I have the annual checkup with my diabetes specialist...time for the H1bAc results. Kinda like a 'have-you-been-a-good-boy' lie-detector test to see how my blo...

PatFute 3D has it's memory leak removed. Turns out I was creating a new font every time I wrote anything to screen and never deleting them. And by 'creating' I mean getting openGL to automatically create a new bitmap of the character set of the font, which gets quite large in size very quickly. Anyhoo, it's fixed, and you can get it from here . If that doesn't work, go here first and click on the 'PatFute 3D' link :D Oh, and as the headline says, the ACM results are offical! We can now claim to be the #1 team in Australia, so now can start practicing and planning for our trip to San Antonio, Texas. So long as it's not flooded by any hurricanes, I hope, for our sake and more importantly the sake of all citizens of USA, that Rita doesn't hit land.... in TC (TopCoder) news, the project which I won ages ago has finally reached development stage. Which means now I have to answer questions from 10 or more coders who are trying to develop what I've des...

Wow...you know before how I was talking about waiting for something BIG to happen? Well, i think it just did. You see, uni mid-semester break just started. But no, it's better than that :) On the friday, the first episode of the new survivor series started, and I played the first game of indoor for three weeks. Depsite the loss, was great to get back and survivor should be interetsing... But no, it's better than that :) On saturday, Adelaide Uni hosted the state-wide final for the ACM-ICPC, a world-wide university programming competition where teams of 3 from all over the world compete. For this stage, it's just teams from Oz and New Zealand - about 100 in total. It's a 9-question, 5 hour competition, so from 11:30 til 4:30 on saturday i was programming for 5 hours straight, while supplied with free pizza and drink for lunch. But no, it's better than that :) My team was me, another first year, and a second year student, so pretty young overall. We'd all gone th...

Just a quick post saying: BlogWatch now has added functionality - ShareWatch (but, it's still gonna be called BlogWatch, because i like the logo and i can't think of a better name :p). Basically, you can track a virtual portfolio by adding in shares (ASX only for the moment, sorry for any overseas ppl) - just make sure you know the ASX code for it. Also put down the number of shares you have (dw, you can edit this later as needed) and whenever you update the page you can see the value of each of your shares, as well as the total value of your portfolio. Enjoy!

I've had a strange feeling over the last week or so that I'm just counting down the days, waiting for something BIG to happen....only problem is, I have no idea what this thing is, any suggestions? Anyway, i've been thinking about acronyms (as one does) and have come to the conclusion that: 1) Microsoft is trying to trademark as many 2-letter acronyms as possible. They've already taken XP, NT, MS, XL, IE, ... i mean, there's only 676 possibilites, when should we start getting worried? So long as they let me keep PC for my initials without having to pay royalties. 2) Linux, on the other hand, is trying to associate itself with three letter acronyms: KDE, BSD, gcc, GNU, ... note that sometimes, to avoid clashes with with Microsoft two-letter-acronyms, recursive definitions are required (Gnu's Not Unix, for example, instead of simply NU, same goes with KDE). Notice that, by using 3 letters, Linux has many more possibilities for extension, but requires a bit more wo...

Hmm...weekends are nice. Especially ones which last 4 days :) Although, i guess you can't call the first two days 'weekend'...techincally you could almost call it 'work', trying to progress in two tournaments. yet....bad news > both were cutting down to the top 100, and as i'm ranked just a bit above that, i guess i could've been expected to miss out in both of them, but was a bit depressing to lose twice in two days. To make it worse, the only reason i failed in the TCO was due to a *really bad* problem statement, which redefined the word 'optimal' to mean 'must be strictly better than everything else, otherwise there is no optimal' and followed this up by giving a bad example which made it seem like they hadn't redefined a word...many people failed the question, those lucky enough to have spotted the change were able to get enough challenges to progress :( However, weekend should be nice...time to relax. Where 'relax' means w...