Dan reporting,

 

I'm sure nobody even looks here anymore, but just in case...I've got a blog set up now:  http://saiyr.blogspot.com/

 

I looked into Live Spaces, and unfortunately, I don't think I could deal with it.

 

Dan

Well it's December and I figured I should post how my life is going.

 

3rd Best Page in the Universe. It's my blog, check it out Maybe you'll like it and check back more often.

So the coding contest is over. It was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Although I have not yet finished the puzzle I was working on, I can say that I was amazed at the complexity of it.

 

So I'm hoping that those of you that read this blog are technical people because the following is going to get very technical, and may even sound like rambling at some point. For this I apologize in advance.

 

So we started on Friday around 5pm. We get the spec off the website and start implimenting the virtual machine. So Luke works on his implementation and tests it. However, by some stroke of magic his program works the first time we run it. Needless to say this was amazing. At first we weren't sure that it was working though because we were getting this random garbage being printed out to the screen. But then we got smart. We decided to capture the output to a file. So we do that. And we open it in Visual Studio, and there's this message that says "Delete everything up to colon:" We do that and are left with this 15 meg binary file. Then we got curious and opened up that new file in the virtual machine. Lo and behold, we are prompted with a UMIX prompt. (Universal Machine IX.)

 

We log into the guest account and we're greeted with a message that says that some guest has been attempting to hack the system using this qbasic script. Yes, I did say qbasic. There was a nearly fully implemented version of Qbasic running in this UMIX OS. So we take the hint (afterall, it is a puzzle contest) and begin hacking away. However, there was an error? Oh no!. So we take a look at the hack.bas file and it turns out that the file was corrupted. We copy the file out into notepad and look at it to figure out what it does. It was a brute force hacking script. However, all the numbers were Roman Numerals! So we've already hit a crazy level of rediculousness and we're only like an hour into this thing. So after we obtain some passwords we start logging into those accounts while we continue to brute force the system and get as many passwords as we can.

 

I decided to login to the account named howie. I log in, and there is this adventure game. From what I was able to gather, adventure is a text based game that lets you examine, combine, destroy, and otherwise manipulate items while you walk around a map and complete some sort of task. I'm still working on the game now because as I discovered, the items are interdependent. So you need to figure out what item needs what thing and then combine them in the right order to make something. From what I can tell now, I am just over halfway finished with it. Some of the items have rediculous interdependices. Dan developed a tool to help analyze those dependencies. I also developed a tool that would find the items in a room and develop the query to examine all the items in the room. So once I had finished that tool, I began my attempt at solving the puzzle. Right now, I've got a script that runs through about half of the board and assembles everything for me. I just need to figure out the rest of the board.

 

There were also other puzzles. Michael and Karen were working on a bruteforcer that played this game for them and created the answers that they needed. Unfortunately, Michael only got it working right as the contest ended.

 

Luke and Anson worked on a ray-tracer in this crazy ASCII programming language called 2d. In this language there were ASCII boxes that represented functions and you had to tie them together to perform tasks. I really can't explain it much better than that, but it was crazy looking when they had it finished.

 

Cyrus and Tom worked on implementing a second virtual machine that was based off of this four operations that had intended operations, and unintended operations. It was called balance. The idea was to figure out what operations needed to be done in what order to perfom certain tasks and leave everything in a good state. It was crazy to listen in on some of the stuff they were talking about. It was a lot of stuff that I am only vaguely familiar with. (bitwise operations on registers in virtual machines.)

 

There was also the company picnic on Saturday where Michael, Karen, and I went and played volleyball in a tournament with some of her friends and a random girl that we picked up when we were there. we didn't advance anywhere in the tournament, but I played much better than I knew I could. I was actually surprised, because my serve was consisent. It was good to play well, and I got a nice tan. It is amazing to see how much darker I can get when I am only in the sunlight for a few hours. It was a good weekend.

 

So yeah, now I'm testing the latest add-in and making sure that it is stable. Our goal is to have everything done and ready to ship before Friday, so this is our final push to awesomness.

 

Hope you enjoyed the read. By the way, if you don't know the song, Tuesday Afternoon by Moody Blues. I like it, and so should you.

-ed

 

 

So it is Friday, and the end of our 3 week push to get out some awesomeness. There has been all sorts of things coming out of our lab, the best part having our dif and merg come together in a couple days without too many problems. After struggling around for about a week and a half without a serious form of source control (e-mail and im before that) we finally got Team Foundation Server running and getting used to the idea of checking in and checking out code and making sure that everyone had the latest version. Once we got that working I started to merge everything together in the UI so that it was functional. However, my implimentation was a bit off so it was updated and now everything totally fits intop the look and feel of visual studio, except our use of a smiley face as an icon because we haven't picked anything new.

 

There is an interesting coding contest going on at http://icpfcontest.org that we are going to be participating in, along with some of our co-workers. I am looking forward to it because now I will be able to see how truly freakin awesome and smart the people that we work with are. You can tell when you talk to them, now we are going to get to see thim in action.

 

I still don't like my own brain because it takes forever to properly absorb the right things to do with the code. Once it all clicks I can do all sorts of things pretty quickly, but it takes forever for me to figure out what functions I need to call and that kind of thing. Thank God for some of the automatic completition things in Visual Studio. I would definitely be a lame coder without them.

 

Well, I guess in the next week, we can look forward to bug fixing and preparation of everything and making sure that everything is working well and all that stuff. Only two more weeks left before we all head back to our original places of living and continue on with our lives.

 

Oh, and it got really warm yesterday and today and it will continue with that. I wonder what that is about. Oh well, I guess the weather is still unpredictable. I bet the weather is just one of those things that the more we know the more we realize we don't.

 

Thanks for listening. That's all I've got for you.

-ed