Pug’s Place

Today was my final final final exam. So ends my Master’s degree. The exam this morning at 7:30 am was in Computer Architecture Principles and despite (and because of) my paranoia I feel I did very well. No trouble, no stumping questions. My other courses went similarly trouble-free when they wrapped up last week. I’ve no doubt that when I check my degree certification on Monday night that it will say, “Master of Liberal Science awarded.”

The schedule is set for United Van Lines to pack and pick up all of my things here Monday morning, then to have my car picked up the first week of January followed by me flying out to Phoenix on a one-way ticket to move. It’s really going to happen now.

I wrapped up things at the office and have deployed a high availability Asterisk cluster using a distributed RAID array (DRBD, the Distributed Replicated Block Device) and a nifty failover-management bash script I carefully designed. We decided not to use Heartbeat due to the extra complexity it causes in routine maintenance. I wrote up a bunch of documentation and gave a bunch of pointers to my replacement.

Tomorrow afternoon I put on my robe and wizard hat, errm, hood, and walk across a stage to get a roll of paper and say “I done graduated!” Oh, and as is shown on the right, I now have a Student Pilot Certificate, so you can bet I’ll be hopping into a cockpit in January!

Last weekend was the first weekend I spent in Gainesville since the 14th of October. To recap, the month of lost weekends went like:

1. Weekend of October 21st: In Melbourne, FL interviewing with Harris Corporation
2. Weekend of October 28th: In Statesboro, GA competing in the southeast regional programming contest
3. Weekend of November 4th: In Phoenix, AZ interviewing with General Dynamics
4. Weekend of November 11th: In Boston, MA interviewing with Microsoft / Groove Networks

This put a major damper in keeping ahead of projects and general deadlines, which, of course, meant that I was in a state of pretty high stress for the past month. Ignoring the stress aspects, I did have a good time travelling around like this. I wrote about Statesboro and the programming contest already, and I posted an entry from Phoenix, so now I’m going to talk about my trip to Boston (and Odette!), then I’ll mention my interviews with Google, my plans for January and ideas about the future.

(Random note: The picture to the right here is one I snapped of a bee landing on a flower in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix)

Despite being a Linux guy, last January when I was contacted by a Microsoft recruiter I decided to go ahead and do some phone interviews with the company. My recruiter was quite interested in having me fly out to interview in person but since that was January and I don’t graduate until next month I asked to hold off on that bit of excitement until it was closer to the time when I was really going to be job searching. I would be willing to accept a job with Microsoft given sufficient incentive, so I wasn’t just leading them on, don’t worry. At the start of this fall semester my recruiter got back in touch with me and we began talking about once again flying me to meet with a Microsoft product team. Due to time conflicts with everything else that was happening throughout October (and the first week of November), this interview trip got pushed back until the second week of November. I readied myself to fly to Redmond, WA during the start of Winter. After plenty of mental preparation I received an email with instructions on reserving my airline tickets… to Boston, MA. Perhaps I was being dense but I had no idea that I wasn’t going to Washington. I was chatting with Odette at the time the email came through and our conversation went like this:

Pug: WTF!
Odette: ???
Odette: Holding chips good, wtf bad.
Pug: Wiping potato chips off hand so I can type faster…
Pug: holy crap
Pug: Mind if I come visit?
Pug: It appears that I’ll be in Boston in two weeks!
Odette: Ohmygosh!!

Moving forward in time two weeks, early on the Thursday morning of the 10th of November I drove to the airport to catch a 6:20 am flight to Boston via Atlanta. By 11:30 am I was with my gal again! Thank you, Microsoft! That afternoon Odette had both work and class to take care of and I had a phone interview with Microsoft folks in Redmond, WA, so we parted ways until evening. I made good use of the time after my interview catching up on sleep rather than doing homework as I had originally planned… Anyway, the next day was Friday morning and I had to make my way north of Boston to the suburb of Beverly, MA (formerly part of Salem, MA, actually) via train to meet with Groove Networks.

Groove is located in a truly massive office complex called the Cummings Center which was at one point the largest factory in the world. It’s not only very large, it also has an unintuitive method of numbering its offices. Despite getting there about 30 minutes early, by the time I found the right place I was only 5 minutes early. I learned that in anything other than clement, moderately warm conditions that walk from the train station would be miserable - some of it was without sidewalks, for example. Regarding the actual interview, Groove’s people greatly impressed me with their expertise and humor. I spoke to a couple of closet Linux fans, heard about Windows Vista upgrades failing, got to discuss C++’s implementation of a vtable and discuss non-blocking I/O, massively parallel algorithms, lock-free and wait-free implementations of common concurrent programming problems and other geeky topics of which I have decent familiarity. Groove (and by extension Microsoft) gave me my most technical interview, even in comparison to my phone interviews with Google engineers. However, the atmosphere was still light and humorous - I think it would be more accurate to say that I had a day of geeky conversations rather than a day of interviews.

The whole experience was a positive one, though I could not imagine myself living in the Boston area. Fall color might be pretty, but despite the unseasonably warm temperatures everything looked cold. That didn’t stop me from having a great time exploring Boston with Odette the following day. She and I began our Saturday with a walk through Harvard, then around Boston Common, the Public Gardens and the surrounding areas with views of several Emerson buildings, the old State House and other historical landmarks. I got to have my picture taken with the adorable statue depicting the protagonists of Make Way for Ducklings as described in this earlier photograph from Odette which pleased me to end. They were fuzzy ducklings and I was prepared! Our wanderings extended in the afternoon to eventually finding our way to the New England Aquarium where we spent several hours ogling the penguins, the various fish and the crush of people who were doing the same.

Night was strolling its way across the harbor at the time we departed the aquarium but we still decided to continue poking around the city - after all, how often am I in Boston? (answer: this was my first time in Massachusetts) So we wandered around some shopping areas near Faneuil Hall Marketplace, watched a street performance by a man climbing a free-standing ladder and then walked to the Paul Revere House before returning to Cambridge.

After a nice lunch at Zoe’s near Harvard Square, I flew back to Gainesville on Sunday to feverishly work on neglected homework. Anyway, I had a great time — thanks, Microsoft!

In the midst of these weekends out of town I was slowly progressing through phone interviews with Google’s new office in Phoenix, AZ. If you look up comments on Google’s hiring practices they tend to point toward multi-month interview processes. I didn’t have multiple months so I didn’t expect anything to come from talking with Google and I wasn’t surprised to find they weren’t even close to being able to meet my desired schedule. Anyway, their interviews were mostly problem-solving. Not much to say there except that I’m not going the Google route, but my cover letter did manage to get some attention, so agonizing over it had some positive effect.

Last week was my deadline to decide what was going to become of me in January and where I’d go to work. After lots of deliberation I did reach a decision: I’m moving to Phoenix, AZ and going to work for General Dynamics C4 Systems. This probably won’t surprise anyone since I’ve been talking about moving to Phoenix since high school, but the decision finally came down to the factors of “want warm weather” and “want Odette to be able to get a job in the area”. I’ve secured a sub-leaser for my room here in the apartment and am in the process of setting up a moving company to pack up and haul my stuff out of here around graduation time. Then I’ll be driving home for Christmas, having my car loaded onto a truck in January and then flying out and having my stuff (and my car) meet me there. Sorry, Jachyra - I’m not going to drive all 1,800 miles, so I won’t be stopping in on my way. Then I’ll have a residence where less than a 2.5 hour private flight will take me to Las Vegas, ski slopes or San Diego Beach.

Oh, speaking of: I’m studying up to start private pilot training in January. In moments of free time I’ve been reading Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook, studying everything that seems to be handy and trying stuff out with the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on a Windows partition installed for specifically for the purpose. I even bought rudder pedals so that I can learn how to drive a plane on the ground and make coordinated turns in the air. (I figure $200 on simulator equipment could save me considerable amounts of money in plane and instructor hours throughout my training.) The awesome flying weather in Phoenix and the surrounding areas also factored into my decision to move there, as does the idea that winter sports, mountains and beaches are within reasonable flight range.

Wednesday I’m going home for Thanksgiving and one of these days I’m going to do some video editing.

In other news, the hood of my car (and two cars next to it) was spray-painted by vandals Friday evening. I got to give a statement to the local police and spend some time Saturday morning carefully applying pure acetone to the affected areas to clean it off without damaging the car’s real paint job. More graffiti was sprayed on the walls here in the breezeway, too.

I get my Master of Science degree in Computer Science on December 15th.

Pug’s Place is seeing a lack of posts of late. The regularity of posts to this blog is basically inversely proportional to the amount of stress I am under at the time. Unfortunately, right now my backlog is reminiscent of a Faustian nightmare. Movies to edit, projects to do, homework to do, make-up homework to do, programming team contest in a couple weeks, find someone to sub-lease my apartment… and then the extremely broad line of “find my job.”

As is apparently necessary, everything must happen at once. In addition to school and the midterm exams which happen this month, this is also the month of the programming contest and of most January-openings’ interviews. Every company to which I’ve spoken wants me to interview with them this month, and unfortunately that implies that they’ll be wanting answers regarding the inevitable job offers within about two weeks of having spoken to me. This presents a nasty time dilemma: I have no interviews in my desired area of the country, I don’t have the time to apply to enough jobs to gain these interviews because of all of the aforementioned activities, yet if I do not get these interviews in the very near future I won’t have time to evaluate their offers against the pending ones.

In the mean time, I have built a new computer and haven’t been able to enjoy it yet. I’ve been letting Resmiranda (2.0 or whatever designation you like) update her entire system slowly over the past few days: when I get a spare minute between classes I’ve been shelling in and fixing compilation problems and the like and setting her back on her way. Yes, Gentoo has upgrade problems… however, it should be pointed out that most of this system hasn’t been upgraded/updated since March 2004, so many of my problems have been that packages I formerly used now no longer exist, have been renamed or the like. (In Gentoo-speak, I had 53 packages being blocked when I first tried to emerge world, so I had to research and fix all of those first). The new Resmiranda is a beast, like the old one was in 2002 when I first built her.

• 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (soon to be overclocked)
• 2 GB G.Skill DDR2 800 SDRAM
• Silent (Heat-piped) Gigabyte-branded GeForce 7600GT
• 2×80 GB PATA primary drives in a RAID-1 (same drives from Resmiranda)
• 160 GB SATA-3 secondary drive containing random stuff (and a legal WinXP install for games )
• Antec NeoHE 550 W near-silent power supply
• Antec P180B noise-reduction high-performance black case

So, she is nearly silent (without the case lights you can’t tell she’s on or not) and is crazy powerful. Let me tell you, having two CPUs makes compiling things much more fun. Of course, that’s basically all I’ve done with her so far, homework and letting Resmiranda compile software upgrades to herself. Ah well, one of these days I’m going to do some game playing again.

One of my two classes this summer is actually doing “research” with Dr. Fishwick. In reality, what I’m supposed to do is put together a 3D library, a Physics library and maybe a networking library to get a collection of tools for making 3D simulations. He wants this so that he can give it to students in his undergraduate Computer Simulation class next fall and let them create more interesting 3D projects than what is possible with Processing, the current tool they use.

I’ve got until the second week of August to put together two things:

1. A cross-platform tool-kit consisting of at least a 3D library and a physics library with class-tailored usage instructions and examples
2. and a version of SCHUA remade with this tool-kit as a “large” example.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been spending enough time on this yet. I originally intended to be done with all of the serious coding by the first of June and, hell, I haven’t even started. After spending all morning and some of this afternoon working on remedying this I have rediscovered my problem from late April: I can’t even get demo applications for my candidate 3D and Physics libraries to compile (e.g., turn from source code into executable binary code).

You know, I’m not all that inexperienced with programming. I’ve written a few applications, held a few jobs, captained the UF Programming Team, etc. I’m not all the unfamiliar with Linux, either, but ye gods, getting [OGRE and GangstaWrapper] or [Ogre and OgreNewt] or [Yake] to compile together is driving me batty.

For my own sanity I’m going to vent for a moment. Don’t take any of this as gospel, these are opinions with possibly nothing but an emotional foundation:

• OGRE compiles very easily.
• GangstaWrapper sounds like a great OGRE physics middle-ware. Too bad you have to read 16 pages of forum posts to find out that no one has touched it in over a year so it doesn’t compile cleanly.
• OgreNewt sounds like a great Newton Game Dynamics Library. Too bad it doesn’t compile cleanly in Linux. Oh wait, there’s a specific out-of-date source distribution for Linux the main author won’t host. Too bad its server is flaky and generally down. Including now.
• The Newton Game Dynamics Library is a professionally-packaged product produced by a real company. Too bad its demos don’t even compile out of the box on my system.
• Yake sounds great. Wow, its build instructions for Linux both look complicated and possibly compromised. I don’t much like the idea of having to SSH into a random box with a guest account to acquire source code…

I’m getting rather annoyed, but I think I’m going to tough it out and try to just make Yake compile. With Yake, at least, if I can get it to work it comes with its own wrappers for physics, networking and all that other stuff.

If I can just make it work… gah.

Other news: I’ve switched to Opera. I’ve decided I don’t have enough RAM to run Firefox anymore - the memory sieves are just too large. This might be short-lived, we’ll see…

So… I’m back from spending ~10 days in Greenville, South Carolina having a mighty good time with Katie, Jen and Cort. I had a wonderful time and did plenty of fun things with highlights like:

• Seeing the Furman Symphony Orchestra and Oratorio perform Mozart’s Symphony No 38, Prague, Great Mass in C Minor and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy. Katie was in this Oratorio making it extra special.
• General fun hanging-out-with Jen and Cort (at whose apartment I was so generously allowed to stay)
• Attending Furman’s Honors Night to see Katie get an award for her poetry.
• Eating a lot of really good food prepared by Cort, who is a very competent chef (Thank you Cort! Thank you Jen!)
• Attending Katie’s induction into Phi Beta Kappa (WOOHOO, KATIE!).
• Lazing around Furman and Furman’s library reading good books like ones starring Lord Peter.
• Watching the Furman Theatre’s rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which was very well performed and wholly enjoyable).

All in all it was a wonderful vacation. And while this isn’t the proper medium for expressing gratitude to my hosts, I’m going to do it anyway for they were of exceptional kindness: Thank you again, Cort and Jen!

I was greatly amused at just how sparse Furman’s campus is, even during peak times during a primary part of their school year (their Spring term isn’t complete until the end of May). The density of students walking around is very, very low compared to UF. Of course UF has 10 times the student body but Furman’s campus is tiny compared to that of the whole of UF. I mention this because now I am for the first time taking summer courses here in Gainesville and, amusingly, the student density here is very similar to Furman’s right now. The campus is practically deserted. Thus the title of this blog post: UF in the summer does look like Furman in the spring.

Both my classwork and my office-work are looking to be greatly interesting and worthwhile. I’ll blog about the former and perhaps some general notes on Asterisk (the open source PBX) at a later date.

So, what’s been happening with me? Time for an overdue update…

Class Projects

Today I turned in all of my final projects for the semester. I had one of these for each class and they were all, of course, due on the same day.

NinjaBoggle
In my Concurrent Programming course we had to demonstrate our knowledge of concurrent techniques and applications of parallel algorithms by developing a multiplayer Boggle game in Java. The concurrent part comes from the server having to handle many games and many players simultaneously without slowdown. The parallel part comes from solving Boggle: In order for the game to score your answer it needs to know whether the randomly generated board contains the word you guessed. So thus it has to solve the Boggle board before players are allowed to guess. This is a parallelizable problem (a stupidly simple one, admittedly) and we had to develop an algorithm which would solve the board on a computer with more than one processor efficiently. E.g., if you had a 8 processor computer it should solve it in roughly 1/5th the time of a single processor computer.
NinjaBoggle meets that requirement with flying colors. It solves a 4×4 boggle board in ~30 milliseconds on a 8 processor computer or about 300 milliseconds on my desktop computer, Resmiranda.

At the project demos last week NinjaBoggle was the unchallenged ruler.

NinjaBoggle was a collaborative project with my friend Mikel. Together we developed a slick GUI client, a robust server which has been tested with hundreds of simultaneous players and games and, well, a fun game. I’ll be releasing the source code shortly, but if anyone wants to challenge me to a game of NinjaBoggle, just let me know. I can put the server online.
Chord
For my Operating Systems course we had a very ill-defined final project. It took me all three weeks it was assigned to complete, partly because the project description contained many, many English and factual errors. The amount of incompetence demonstrated in the project’s description is nothing short of hideous. Anyway… The project itself was to implement a peer-to-peer network, in particular the Chord distributed hash table protocol. Only, slightly different.

This project just counts as evil. I finally got my implementation to work on Saturday night after throwing away the project description and simply reading all of the original papers which describe the protocol. I put more than 38 hours into simply debugging this project and about 10 or 12 more doing the actual code writing. Again, simply evil.

On the plus side, I’ve now implemented a reasonably complicated and very robust peer-to-peer application. With a few more hours of coding I could add file transfers to it and make my own Gnutella or Kazaa-like peer to peer network… One other piece of amusement: If I were still living on campus I would have gotten banned from the network for testing this project as it would have violated the Dept. of Housing’s no-server / no peer-to-peer policy.

Remote Key-logger
And in my Network Security class my group decided to do a cop-out project and develop a Windows-based key-logger with remote log transfer abilities. The majority of my work on this project went into making Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 work in my Windows install in VMWare.

For your reference, yes, the key-logger works rather well. It has some advanced filtering features like only logging keys and mouse-clicks in windows or text boxes that involve words like “password”, “social security number” and “account number”. It also, as the name implies, transfers its log in a obfuscated format to a remote web server every couple of hours to simplify the task of retrieving this possibly-compromising data. I wrote the remote-transfer routines, the standalone log reader and tweaked a bunch of other stuff.

Yes, it shows up in the process list in Windows — we didn’t do anything really nasty with it. We’re not black-hats, after all.

Finals

Now that those three projects are turned in all I have to do for the next week and a half is study for my final exams. I have one this coming Friday, one next Wednesday and one next Thursday. I’m ready already, but I’ll be studying, no worries.

ACM Election

Tonight was the officer election for the local Association for Computing Machinery chapter. No, I didn’t run for anything (the job of managing/coaching the programming team is too time-consuming in the fall already), but I did print up signs saying “VOTE FOR TIM! Invest in oil!” and “The Flying Spaghetti Monster votes for Tim!”. Tim is one of our top members of the Programming Team and was the current ACM Treasurer. He’s fiercely devoted to the club and with 12 signs scattered throughout the meeting room I figured that Tim would be a shoe-in for the presidential position. I was wrong. He lost to a guy named David that I’ve only seen once before. How disappointing.

On the plus side of things, we ordered 10 pizzas and 10 2-liter bottles of soda for this meeting. 11 people showed up. I managed to fit two 2-liter bottles of soda into my backpack and acquire them for the good of my apartment. There was much rejoicing. I’d have nicked a few boxes of pizza but I couldn’t figure out a way to strap them to my bicycle…

Civ IV and computer components failing

I got my copy of Civilization IV last week, much to my excitement. I haven’t had much time to play it due to all of my projects but I’ve been looking forward to the coming reading days as excellent opportunities to intersperse study with building an empire to stand the test of time. However, much to my annoyance my periodic hardware problems in my computer came to a head tonight: my SIIG ATA IDE controller I use for my second hard drive fully failed at around 8 pm tonight. No longer will Resmiranda boot with the card installed, so it’s destined for my trash can. Without this card I can’t use my second hard drive and without that drive I cannot operate my RAID0 array which has Civilization IV installed. My RAID1 array is still operating without that hard drive but I’ll have to wait on the replacement before I can get back to my new game. I’ve ordered a new card (with 2 Serial ATA ports on it in addition to the IDE port) but it won’t be arriving until Saturday at the earliest.

Ah well, that just means I’ll be doing more reading and less hard resetting of Resmiranda since that card won’t be locking up the system anymore.

I’ve also had to order a new battery for my UPS: During a routine demonstration of what a UPS does (yanking the power cord from the wall) a most unexpected thing happened: my computer lost power. The whole point of a UPS is to keep the computer running from its battery even after power has been lost to the building… but if the battery’s dead then that’s difficult to accomplish.

The stupidest part about all of this is my UPS is connected to my computer. On the 11th of January it started alerting my computer daily that its battery was dead and needed immediate replacement but I never bothered to look at that log file. Whoops. Lessons learned…

Linux Users Group

Last week I organized a GnuPG/PGP key-signing party with the local Linux Users Group. A key-signing party is a meeting where several people who use public key encryption get together and authenticate each other in person and then sign each others’ encryption keys to build a “web of trust.” This is important because without some sort of trust mechanism it’s impossible for anyone to look at an encryption key purporting to be mine and be certain that it’s not fake. If you’re interested in seeing the initial GatorLUG Web of Trust (includes a graphic), look at this page on the GatorLUG website.

In addition to organizing that key-signing party I also was at the last minute drafted to give a presentation on GnuPG, encryption and privacy at the meeting. And when I say “last minute” I mean it — the person who was supposed to give the talk cancelled during the meeting, so I was volunteered to stand up with the mic and blindly explain public key cryptography, the whole “web of trust” thing and why all of it mattered. I know I didn’t do all that well, but nobody complained, booed or threw Cuban food so I wasn’t terribly offensive. Chalk that up under “acceptable impromptu presentations…”

Summer Prospects

Summer is nearly upon us! Or me, at least. I’ve got several things lined up. First, my school schedule for the summer looks like this:

• Tuesday: Programming Language Principles, 2pm - 5pm
• Thursday: Programming Language Principles, 3:30pm - 5pm
• Whenever: Individual Research with Prof. Paul Fishwick, the Aesthetic Computing guy

Beyond that I’m applying to the Google Summer of Code and considering a part time job with the University’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research with a bunch of Gentoo Linux hackers. I’m going to do at least one of these two things, possibly both… I might end up busy for the next few months.

Six months of work on the part of a club I’m fairly involved in, Florida Free Culture, paid off last night. We sponsored Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to come and speak at the University of Florida about Free Culture and Universities. The event was an absolute success: the 300-seat ballroom had standing room only. (I’m not sure where The Alligator got their “audience of about 500″ line in their article, but that’s far too high…)

To get Jimbo here we had six months of planning, fund-raising, advertising and periodic madness. At the end of things the event was co-sponsored by our Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Accent (UF’s cultural speakers group) and Student Government. It wasn’t easy: a core group of 8 of us managed pretty much every step of the way.

One of the local newspapers, The Alligator, misprinted the start time of the event so thus we had to open doors a full hour early of the event (instead of just 30 minutes). As you can see from these photographs, we had people there 45 minutes and even an hour before Jimbo was to speak. And those who came so early stayed, that was the most amazing part. Jimbo arrived and made his speech about Wikipedia and Free Culture at 7:30. Afterward there was a panel discussion centered around similar topics: Wikipedia article writing as a teaching tool, Open Access to scientific journals, Free Software and University IT and finally Equal Access to Essential Medicines in Low/Middle Income countries.

We had more than 40 people stay all the way through the whole panel (even though it ran late). Plenty of good questions were asked of both the panel and specifically of Jimbo. Oh, and we should have a complete audio and video recording of the whole event, so expect that on-line in a few days. Afterward came pictures, informal conversation and Jimbo signing E.’s Wikipedia shirt. She’s still ecstatic about that.
According to E., the staff of our venue were pissed about the event running late, but they were courteous to us nonetheless. And also as E. suspected, after the event I went out with three of our panelists, some of Florida Free Culture and a few other folks to The Swamp to have dinner and chat until midnight-thirty (For note, the new Monte Carlo Wrap is rather excellent).

Ah, success is good.

Today was the third of my three midterms, this one for CEN 5540: Networking Security. For this exam we were allowed a double-sided letter-sized page of notes, which is somewhat nice since the material has so many names and methods discussed.

I met with some classmates in the lab a few hours before the exam. Most of them spent most of that time cramming ever more information into their crib sheets, using 4 and 6 point fonts and eliminating all white-space. I, too, was adding information to my crib sheet but I’ve never been good at making these things - they’re too much like outlines, and those of you with whom I went to high school know that I outlined only at a very general level. So after I filled 80% of the front side of my sheet with 12pt font, I decided to take up the remaining room with something a little more entertaining.

My associates thought I was mad, wasting precious crib-sheet space like that.

I never had to look at my sheet during the exam, let alone would I have had time to do so. 50 minutes to answer all of those questions left no time for searching through notes. Thus I have proven my choice of adding Snoopy as a vital note on Computer Security to be a good choice indeed.

Yesterday, Saturday, UCF drove up here for that Programming Contest I effectively organized. It went … fine, though it started late due to a series of printer problems. This was problematic since printer access during a competition is an absolute must: when you have three people using one computer, it’s highly useful to be able to print your buggy code and fix it on paper while another teammate is coding their solution to a different problem.

After moving everything into place and setting up the whole contest my brain was already mostly fried. This wasn’t helped any by my team’s handicap: My team, the most elite UF team, joined the most elite UCF team in attacking a different problem-set than the other 7 teams. In particular, we had to handle the 2004 ACM Collegiate World Finals problem set [PDF]. The other, less experienced teams luckily were given a problem-set containing some much easier problems (to keep them from being discouraged… like my team was! ). Unfortunately the world finals problems were very, very tough and we, the UF elite team, were very out of practice in comparison to UCF’s elite team (since they’re going to world finals in a month). So… we got stomped. But hell, that happens sometimes and I’m sure it was good for us anyway.

We had 28 UF students, 6 UCF students and 5 UCF faculty/staff there. I, as the organizer, had the fun of worrying about everything, setting up most of the technical stuff and then eventually giving the speech at the end, awarding prizes and shaking peoples’ hands. Yay.

The big thing for me is that it is OVER. Now all I have to do is get the school to reimburse me for all of the things I purchased with my own credit card (like all of the food)… Note to self: I’m never organizing another one of these.

Oh, and the other big thing is that in addition to being OVER, it seems to have served its purpose - most of the UF competitors were new to the sport and are now very interested in joining the team. That was the reason we did all of this, to inspire more people to join up. Here’s hoping that worked.

The rest of the weekend has been spent reading and then performing an aborted trip to the Osceola Gun Range which was, no joke, full. We couldn’t park. Ah well, we’re going to beat the crowd next weekend.

Tau - 11 days until Spring Break.

Sometimes Findory finds articles I really do want to read. That’s why I keep going back there for my random news. Like this article, “Pa. County School Board Cuts IB Program“. It’s brief (sadly) but contains a truly remarkable excerpt expressing the Zeitgeist for those of us in the audience who are intimately familiar with the IB program.

This remarkable excerpt is (emphasis mine):

The Upper St. Clair school board voted 5-4 Monday to cut the International Baccalaureate Programme, whose curriculum some school board members have alleged is liberal and anti-American.

Looking for more information I found the Pittsburgh Tribune Review’s discussion last week on the matter to be more enlightening (emphasis mine):

“We support students learning about the rest of the world. We object to the focus on global citizenship,” [Julie] Quist said. “Unfortunately, international education has come to mean global citizenship. That undermines American citizenship and that sense of sovereignty.”

Anyway, last night they did vote to give IB the axe with the motion argument that “IB programs clearly violate local control.” On the plus side, it appears enough parents in their district are up-in-arms to cause a tremendous ruckous. At least the IB program there didn’t die to thunderous applause.