Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Let’s start from the begining…

It is Saturday 19 February 2005, the clock says that it is 4:03 UTC. I receive an email, informing me of a competition on Techkriti. The competition’s name - IOPC. It seemed like a good competition, and I still had 7 hours and 53 minutes to register. So I did. I had a hard time deciding the team name (even tho I was the only member). In the end I went with "Linuxy" to show my fondness for this great OS. Next day, I woke up at 17:30 UTC which was one hour before the competition started. Wonderful, I ate quite a bit of highly caloric food, and hour later I went to my computer. The competition was already in progress (yeah, I miseed the first minute and a half). So I started coding. 19 hours later, I decided it would be best if I got some rest, since a rest refreshes the mind. I took a nap for about 1.25 hours. Then I went back to coding. After the 24 hours elapsed, I learned how well I did….85th out of 789 registered teams! That’s in the top 10.773%! I finished 4 problems to the judges’ liking. But I think I got another one right, which would have placed me 79th (10.01%). Oh well. Other than that, I lost some time because the judges had a bad test file :-/, they fixed it, but I lost time checking and rechecking the code. So that’s that. I expect that I am going to fall asleep very early today (1 hour of sleep isn’t much).

To make the coding more interesting, I decided to use a Subversion to keep track of changes I made to the code for the competition. Under normal circumstances, I would have used BitKeeper, but Larry is being an ass about the license, so I’m preparing for the worst case scenario - migration from BK to SVN. I wish I didn’t have to, BK is wonderful, but I won’t be signing away a year of CMS hacking time nor my first born male child.

I also noticed that I have survived with minimal food and water for a looong time. Maybe I should write a HowTo….hmm..

Anyway, that’s that. I am looking forward to IOPC2006.