A window into the mind of a computer engineer
Photo by Wi Bing Tan
A little over a year ago I posted about switching back to the Dvorak keyboard layout. I have stuck with it since then and that is pretty much all I have used. I thought that I would give a quick update as to how that is going and what else is going on in my keyboarding life.
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Back in October I had the opportunity to compete in the 5th annual IEEEXtreme programming competetion, a 24 hour challenge to complete as many programming problems as possible. There were a total of about 16 problems, released roughly once per hour or so. Our team completed around 5 or 6 problems (some were remarked after the completion of the competition due to a bug in the test system, so I am not sure about the final tally). Our team started with 3 members, but unfortunately we were down to 2 about 8 hours in, but we still felt as though we managed to do pretty well. We recently got the results back and were pleased to discover that we came in 240th (out of a total of 1515 teams), putting us in the top 16%! We also came in 14th place in Canada and 3rd place at our home University. I somehow managed to miss this event every other year it has happened but have always wanted to go, so I am glad that I got this final chance to compete.
Hi everyone. Sorry for the down time. The ISP I was hosting with suddenly decided to make my system change IPs every 5 minutes, then I got busy with work so I didn’t have time to fix the problem. I have moved my server to a hopefully more reliable network and will post some life updates in the next couple of weeks.
Photo "borrowed" from Leif Norman (click image for source)
This past Saturday was Nuit Blanche here in Winnipeg. Some 30,000 people went around the city checking out various exhibits of art and culture. One of the exhibits at the art gallery was ARTcadia. A bunch of displays setup with indie games and hacks. I had the NES-chuck out again and it saw a lot of use. Click here for some more pictures from the WAG.
While similar to Re:Play, the core difference for this event was that the games were setup as displays rather than booths. Because of this, there wasn’t someone around to provide instructions on how to start the game (ie. how to access the start and select buttons). We had a sign up with some instructions, but few people showed any interest in reading the signs. I may have to re-evaluate how this thing works for any future public displays.
CBC was running a contest called “Culture Vulture” where you have to go to cultural events and text in the posted word for an entry. SkullSpace must be getting some attention because the keyword posted at the WAG was “hacker”.
