Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

Results are out - ended up coming 55th. So, barring any major incident {like...Outbreak of the Asian flu virus in Poland and Russia} causing 7 contestants to not be able to attend, looks like I *just* missed out. Turns out if I had submitted Q1 a bit faster {like...a minute or so} I would've made it, and I knew a solution for Q2 it was just a slow one. However, I was glad I managed to get a working {albeit slow} solution, so that was nice :) And now my rating has jumped above 2200, which means i am "red", or everywhere my name appears it's in red. Red is the highest you can get to, and I think i'm the 4th australian to do so, which is pretty cool - just gotta try and stay there :D However, with the commonwealth games on, and AFL/NRL starting, I had to wonder: why is it that the average man-in-the-street could name the top 50 or so football players from their state, yet the #1 programming in the whole country, who happens to be also in the top 10 in the world, is v...

Sorry...news just in - got through the round of 200 for the TopCoder open, now I'm in the final 100, and next thursday get a shot at the top 48 who get to go to Las Vegas!! Oh...and the hrm...nice prize money associated with it ;) Anyway, I said I'd actually say something blog-ish this time, so here goes: Recently, I heard about a Law tute which happened at Adelaide uni :: it was a group exercise, the tute was split up into smaller groups of people, and given 20 mins to work on a problem, to see how they interacted with eachother - sounds ok so far. Trouble is...the problem was the well-known logic puzzle of the Fox, goose and bag of beans (or whatever combination of objects you like...i think it was fox/duck/grain in this case. Now, being a well known puzzle with a simple solution {at every stage, you've only got one move which is not pointless or illegal, except one where you have two choices *both* of which lead to a solution} I wouldn't have thought it unusual for ...

Quick update - i know i've been pretty lax of late, hopefully an interesting update will be coming soon. Anyway, this is just an announcement that Blog Watcher v1.3 is now in Beta :: that is, I've made all the changes I was hoping to, now it's just a matter of finding any unwanted behaviour. So, enjoy the new changes, play around with it, tell your friends, whatever :p However, news is that two contests have started at blogwatcher! #1) Bug Watcher: To encourage the finding of bugs, a Bug Watcher list has been set up, featuring the names of all the people who have found bugs in the site. If you find a bug you think needs fixing, send it to me at my gmail account, and I'll update the list. Winner will be determined...some time...and win...something. Note that a 'bug' in this case is unexpected behaviour, not just something you think I should add that I've been too lazy to add so far. #2) Stylist: The style sheet for Blog Watcher is very nice {kudos to Dale and...

Lessons learned this week: 1) Latte Iceshakes are very nice on a hot day, esp. if you want to stay awake and 2) Playing tennis for an hour in heat, then staying up to program in a contest at 3:30am til 7am, then playing soccer from 3pm that day is kinda tiring...esp. if you're unfit :D Hope everyone is enjoying being back at uni / school / work / whatever - 12 contact hours per week for me, no days off, and about 6 or so un-timetabled prac hours, but i can even do them from home so it's not too bad. This is mainly a programming-related post to say that blogwatcher is still going through its changes, but much closer to a state I'm happy with. Once I do some bug fixes, and remove the 'VIEW' buttons and make clicking on the links update the database, I'll probably take it out out of update-mode and v1.3 will be complete. Hopefully with the improvements I'll be able to release it to more people and the server will still cope. In other news, looks like I just mi...