Skip to main content

Code Jam 2005

I tried my hand against around 5000 other programmers in Google's Code Jam 2005. Last year Windows corrupted the hell out of itself halfway through, when I had foolishly not saved any work. The time and concentration lost rebooting killed me. (I had the infamous anti-aliasing problem for my 500pt question. The lowest qualifying score from that group was in the 170s, IIRC. Google dialed down the difficulty considerably this year.)

This year I went into battle armed with Visual Studio 2005. TopCoder doesn't recognize any of the beta additions, but Studio 2005 has a pretty decent Emacs mode. Instant 10% productivity bonus!

The alert reader will have already noted the use of the past tense in the first sentence and concluded that I didn't make it into the top 500 to qualify for the next round. Correct; I missed the cut by 4 points (732 to the 100th place guy's 736).

Ouch. I'd kinda rather have been way outclassed than lose by 4 points out of 1000. Now I'm kicking myself for wasting time checking and re-checking that I hadn't missed something in the 750 pt problem before submitting. It was just so much easier than last year's 500 pt question that I thought I couldn't have solved it that quickly. Having to shake the rust off my C# (what do you mean, you have to declare types? That is so last century!) didn't help either.

Maybe next year they will have Python and the top spots won't be so completely dominated by C++ people with dozens of topcoder-specific macros. Grr.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...
43 comments
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

Troubleshooting the ps3 wireless network connection, including error 80130128

My father got a ps3 for Christmas, but ran into some problems getting it on his wireless network. The first one was "connection error 80130128" after configuring it to use DHCP. I couldn't google anything useful about this; just a few other hapless victims asking if anyone had any ideas. Fortunately Dad had his laptop there too and noticed Windows complaining that two machines on the network were both using the same IP. So, over the phone, I walked him through setting up the ps3 with a static address: on his laptop, run -> cmd ipconfig Read the "gateway" ip. Put that into his browser to go to his router's admin page Find the DHCP settings for his router to see what range of IPs it hands out; pick one outside that range Set up the ps3 with that IP, the router IP as primary dns, and an opendns server as secondary This made the connection test happy. But when he tried to go to the playstation store, it gave a DNS error. If he repeated the connection te...
7 comments
Read more