Marc O’Morain

Winning

I was at the final of The British Computer Society Programming Compeition lasy weekend. The team was made up of students from Trinity College (the competition is open to professionals and students alike). On the team were Vlad, Robb, Robb and myself We came second. The results should be on this page soon. The results from the heats are there presently.

We won our heat in Bristol last month, with 5 correct solutions in 4 hours. There were 4 teams in Britain with 5 solutions that day,
us, Tenacious C, Hack Away and The Knights Who Say “Ni”. In the finals we managed to answer 7 questions in the s6 hour competition. The winners, The Knights Who Say “Ni”, also got 7 questions correct, but they had an overall time of 12 hours*, beating us by one hour. 5 questions was the largest amount of correct solutions ever in a heat, and 7 was the largest amount of correct solutions ever in a final, so we were very pleased with ourselves.

* If two teams have the same amount of correct solutions, the team with the quickest time wins. The total time is the sum of the time from the start of the competition to when you submit a solution. Incorrect solutions bear a 20 minute time penalty (We had about three of these).

Work

I had an interview on Monday that went quite well I felt. I am due for a second interview with the same compnay at a later date. If anyone would like to talk to me with respect to employment, please see my resume. I will be available to work from September 2005.

Programming

When my exams are over I am going to write a music player for Windows. My player will be written in Windows.forms, so that it uses the native GUI toolkit.

My Music Player Will:

• Not have skins
• Not have visualisations
• Not have an integrated web browser
• Not ask you to upgrade to the Professional Version
• Not look silly and out of place on the desktop
• Try to trick you into downloading annoying things*
• Be influenced by good media players like iTunes** and Rhythmbox

* Like Winamp 5 and RealPlayer.
** iTunes is only good on OSX, where it fits. Windows applications should not look metalic.


dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH
dbc@matrix ~/fyp/Report $ figlet SHHHH


My FYP is now online.

I had my FYP demo on Monday morning - thanks to everyone who texted be before and after, and sorry to those I didn’t reply too - I was shattered. I went home and played PS2 for two days. Now I am fixed. The demo went well as far as I can tell. It’s hard to guage the demo while you are in there. I will but my slides and program up on the web later today. I need to find a way to turn my slides into flash - I made them in PowerPoint, and as Eman and Robb will testify too, they use every animation effect possible!

Gmail has added rich text to Gmail. Bad. Bad. Bad. When I tell the younger people in college about WILL-TCDSU and the brightly coloured email crisis of 2001, they don’t understand. YOU DON’T KNOW MAN, YOU WEREN’T THERE!