ICFP programming contest

Last weekend I competed with a team of VUW students in the ICFP programming contest. This is an annual, international contest lasting 72 hours. It is run by a different university each year, so the format tends to vary from year to year. There are no restrictions on team size, programming languages or computing resources.

Our team (called ‘interfacers’, for want of a better name) consisted in the end (after several people did not end up participating for various reasons, and one person who happened to be in the lab joined us) of Andrew Childs (hereafter referred to as lorne), Timothy Goddard, Clinton Scott, Samuel Hegarty, Michael Welsh (yomcat) and me.

This year, it ran from 10:00 pm on Friday 20th July until 10:00 pm on Monday 23th July. The story behind this year’s task was that an alien (of the Funn species) named Endo had been dumped on Earth by an Interstellar Garbage Collector and then hit by a cargo container. Endo was unconscious, and could not survive on Earth in his then-current form. Therefore our help was urgently needed to provide the necessary modifications to his DNA to adapt him to Earth’s environment. Our proposed modifications were to be evaluated by his spaceship Arrow and the proposal most likely to ensure Endo’s survival would be performed by Arrow.

We were given a copy of Endo’s DNA (a 7.2 MiB string of the letters I, C, F and P), and a specification of how Funn DNA works. The DNA works by repeatedly modifying itself through a long series of matching and replacing according to certain rules (which we were given) until it is all consumed, and in the process producing RNA. We were also provided with a specification of how to transform the RNA into a 600×600 px image. We were given a source image (which is produced by running Endo’s DNA as provided), and a target image (which we were to attempt to reproduce by constructing a prefix to be prepended to Endo’s DNA):

Geekpoints Facebook application

I signed up for Facebook this week (on Monday, I think), and on Wednesday night I created a Facebook application for Geekpoints. This means that if you have a Facebook account, you can have a box displayed on your profile showing how many geekpoints you have, and the latest points awarded to you.

To add it, add the Facebook application, then login to your Geekpoints account (or create one if you have not yet), edit your profile and enter the auth token generated by Facebook. This will also add a link to your Facebook profile on your Geekpoints page.

I would be interested to hear feedback on what you think of the application, and how it could be improved.

SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa

I spent most of today (10:00 am until about 6:00 pm) at the first ever SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, the New Zealand version of SuperHappyDevHouse. This was an event where lots of smart geeks gathered to talk (on IRC and IRL), listen to ‘lightning talks’ on a range of topics, eat free food (thanks to various sponsors), and (most of all) hack on various cool projects. I believe 42 people came this time, and it is planned to be bigger next time (possibly in September).

My project for the day is what I am calling Beststory, a comparative voting based social news site (think of a cross between Reddit and Best Thing). The idea is that people will submit news stories etc. and then vote on them, but rather than just voting stories up and down (like Reddit, Digg, etc.), a comparative voting system is used where users are presented with two stories and must vote for the best one. This is intended to encourage voting (as it is necessary to vote to see the next two stories), and to remove the bias caused by different people having different standards for voting a story up or down.

You can see what I have done so far, but there is still quite a bit to be done before it is really usable. Among other things, votes do not actually have any effect yet (though they are recorded).

You can see lots of photos of geeks on laptops on Flickr. If you are interested in participating in a future SuperHappyDevHouse, you should contact the organisers.

Fourier’s Song

This is brilliant: Fourier’s Song

Integrate your function times a complex exponential
It’s really not so hard you can do it with your pencil

It can be a little hard to make out what he is singing, so I suggest reading the words as you listen to the song.

TSCF conference 2007

This week I went to the annual TSCF (Tertiary Students’ Christian Fellowship) conference, this year in Waikanae. It was a great week, with about 100 students from universities around New Zealand attending. Andrew Lim (the pastor of Christ Sanctuary in Palmerston North) spoke in the mornings about I Thessalonians, and Dave Wells (from BCNZ) in the evenings about ‘True Witness’. There were also 5 streams of 3 seminars, though I was a bit disappointed with the stream I chose.

One thing that particularly stood out was the need to live a whole life for God. It is too easy for me to think of worship as something done at church (the Christian habit of calling singing at church ‘worship’ does not help this), rather than an attitude to apply to my whole life. Work (in which I would include study) is God-given. As such, I need to remember to do it as for God, to show an example to others and bring glory to God. Colossians 3:23 says ‘whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord, and not for men’. I have read this before, but I still do not really apply it; I still tend to keep God and the rest of my life separate.