Google India Code Jam (GICJ) 2005

The newspaper advertisement yesterday announcing the Google India Code Jam for 2005 has created quite a stir here. Notwithstanding the bragging rights associated with winning a coding competition open to the whole of South Asia, it offers a total of 16,00,000 rupees in prize money to the top 50 coders and a chance of an offer of employment from Google.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP)

"A classic is a book everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read!" - Mark Twain.

Most coders seem to agree that the TAOCP books are classics, but there seem to be precious few who have actually read it. Moreover, I read some alarming highly-moderated comments on Slashdot recently where people claimed that TAOCP is not as useful as it is made out to be and one should read some other book instead.

To be frank, the TAOCP books would have met a similar fate to the other classics on my bookshelf had it not been for the fact that I read them when I did not know yet that they were supposed to be classics! This was thanks to my father who brought Volume I ("Fundamental Algorithms") from his office library to me seeing my interest in computers while I was in high school. I read it from cover to cover delighted by the ground-up approach, the no-nonsense attention to details, the quirky but immensely insightful use of MIX and the wonderful exercises. I asked him to get the other volumes too, but could not read them as thoroughly as I had the first one.

To this day, whenever I have a doubt or I feel like knowing something more about a particular coding problem, I turn to one of the TAOCP volumes and I have seldom been disappointed. I just wish the newer generations of coders understand and appreciate this.

As an aside, among the few reasons that I respect Bill Gates as a person is because of the following quotes attributed to him:

• "If you have read this book [TAOCP] from cover to cover, send me your resume!"
  
• "The only magazine I take the time out to read is The Economist"
  

(These are as I remember them and therefore not perhaps correct verbatim.)

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Dial-up Speeds Under Linux

I was not happy with the dial-up speeds I was getting under Linux compared to Windows and finding no simple way of improving it, I just changed the modem initialisation string from "ATZ" to "ATZ0&K3%C3+MS=12,1,33600,56000;" after reading its manual.

This has had an amazingly good effect on the speed - it is not a placebo effect as my wife initially claimed since I could prove it using kppp speed graphs. For the curious, it says "initialise to the default modem profile (Z0), use hardware flow control (&K3), use all compression (%C3), use V.90 (56k) with automode turned on to negotiate the best speeds and only accept a minimum speed of 33600bps and a maximum of 56000bps (+MS=12,1,33600,56000;)".

However, as a user I shouldn't have to tweak things like this - they should automatically have been taken care of in the first place!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

glibc 2.3.4

On my machine, glibc 2.3.4 compiled rather painlessly with GCC 3.4.3 and using Linux kernel 2.6.10 headers. It installed nicely and has been running quite smoothly with all the installed applications that I checked it with. The only "application" that has shown problems with it is the (binary-only) "nvidia" X11 driver. Fortunately, the alternative "nv" driver does work properly, so I'll stick to it till Nvidia updates its driver to work properly with NPTL and 2.6.x kernels.

So why do people bitch so much about glibc?

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellaneous

Returning from my vacation (Goa!), I found that my Hotmail account was thankfully still there despite the deluge of spam that it was being subjected to in the last couple of weeks. Of course, it had exceeded its quota quite early on, so even some genuine messages must have bounced.

Nokia mobile phone users might find this information useful.

glibc 2.3.4 was finally released yesterday. Time to mess with my machine's happiness. ;-)

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

GCC Wiki

Daniel Berlin's GCC Wiki is now officially hosted on GCC's web site. As soon as I came to know of it, I vandalised it with a stub article for GCJ. Others will hopefully add more material to it and make it actually usable by GCJ newbies.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Spam

My Hotmail account with its tiny 2MB of storage is getting spammed real hard these days by some idiot peddling male organ enhancement pills. The situation is so bad that my account exceeds its storage limit overnight and leads to bounced genuine messages!

The messages are routed through different SMTP servers (most likely compromised boxes) and have different "From" and "To" headers. They do however have the same "Subject" and message body on a given day. This makes it well nigh impossible for me to create any filter to weed these out.

I don't know what will happen as I proceed on a week long vacation. :-(
If you wish to reach me, please use my Gmail account instead of the Hotmail account.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

A Tinkertoy Computer That Plays Tic-Tac-Toe

I came across this reproduction of an article by A. K. Dewdney in his "Computer Recreations" series in Scientific American. I am not exaggerating when I say that this was the series that fundamentally altered the way I looked at computers and programming. I long to read such articles now... ~sigh~
Of course, I already own copies of "Armchair Universe" and "The Computational Beauty of Nature", but a regular series like this would be quite welcome.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Making Room for Linux

Without ntfsresize to help us out, we could not have made room for a Linux installation on an unfortunate PC that had a complete Windows 2000 infestation on its entire hard disc. All hail Free software!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Hosting Zero

For some reason, the guys at Hosting Zero suddenly offered to host my site for free! So I moved my web site there. They seem to have far more facilities than Tripod where I used to host my site and have no irritating advertisements and popup windows.

Let us see how this works out. A big thanks to the guys at Hosting Zero - do check them out.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)