Once in a thousand years, half a dozen times!

On the Friday, the 7th of August, was one of those freaky time-and-date moments that we seem to be hitting repeatedly now that the calendar year has integers in it. At 12:34:56, 07-08-09, the numbers of the time (12 hours 34 minutes and 56 seconds) and date (7-8-9) formed the counting sequence.

Curiously, if we chose to write the time as YY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS.T (T being in tenths of a second), then we also got: 9-8-7 6-54-32.1, and that we got twice on Friday. (morning and evening).

One of the best references is here. Which is written with the view of writing dates MM-DD-YY, so the 7-8-9 was actually the 8'th of July... If you like sinister red fiery numbers then this is the place for you. And for Unix, which counts the time in seconds since 1970, the event 1234567890 passed last Feb, 2009. (It didn't take many seconds to get to 123456789 which passed a long time ago). Yeah, I'm a pedant.

Work stuff: it's time to leave the blog

So, I've decided to create a new blog: wearable intelligence which will capture all the material related to the work I do. The intention is to separate work-thoughts from home. We'll see how this goes, but I do expect that every now and then a "wireless world" post pops up here, and some reference to Miss 3 or Small Dude sneak in over there...

Cakes and fun

It's my birthday today.

Flavia bought an excellent mud cake which had (honest) a 5mm thick chocolate coating - not icing, chocolate, and not compound chocolate. Miss three has been extremely excited, telling me for the last day or so Your birthday is in the fridge! [meaning birthday cake] She whispered this to me, because it's a secret.

The cake is from a little bakery in Kippax, called Baker's Best at 8 Hardwick Cres. I don't know if they do all their own stuff, but the food there is always excellent, it's not expensive and the staff are super friendly. I've often walked past at the end of the day, and the manager will give Lilly a few free croissants - it's that sort of place.

An excellent day, and thanks to all.

Playing with the style instead of creating content...

It's always a temptation. But I like tag clouds. The tag cloud on this blog is copied from Phydeaux3's blog, and it worked perfectly first time. Kudos to phydeaux3.

Computing

ICT Careers: Willy Wonka and the Google factory

In what must be a kind of Geek version of the Willy Wonka tale (as if the chocolate factory weren’t geeky enough), Google is offering 40 students and their parents a rare look behind the scenes at the company’s Sydney Googleplex.

ITWire, Mon July 27, 2009

Years (ok, more than twenty years) ago I entered an Australian computing Olympiad. It was the pre-trial run, to see if anyone from the tiny thousand-person shire high school would actually enter the true ACS Olympiad. Amazingly enough, someone did.

Since then I think the Australian Computing Society has run regional South Pacific trials in which Australia periodically appears. Other Olympiads also exist, but in general it's been fairly low-key. There has been a recent announcement of re-invigorating the secondary schools computer science outreach

Meanwhile, the Australian Computer Society and peak research agency National ICT Australia (NICTA) have announced a National ICT Prize for high school students, where years 10 to 12 students have a chance to win prizes from a total pool of $5,000, with top prize being an ICT internship inside NICTA's research laboratories.

“Offering school students the opportunity to contribute to dynamic, world-class ICT research projects is a powerful way to engage them with tertiary-level ICT study and participation in the digital economy,” said NICTA's education director, Tim Hesketh.

which makes me wonder: why are there no substantial tertiary programming contests in Australia?

My 2nd-year computer science Algorithmics lecturer Mike Houle, introduced me to the idea of individual programming competitions for hard problem solving - travelling salesperson and the like. I've seen similar things since, either for individuals or teams: typically it's a massive class assignment, in which the competitors hand in one final solution code which is tested, and run. The competition winner is the one with the best score. In Mike's case there was some feedback along the way with a trial data set, that students posted (on his door -- no real Internet then!) their current score.

I have found a different type of programming competition, which I am particularly interested in: the Matlab one where teams not only compete on the problem as stated, and publish their scores but they also publish their code thereby giving the opposition a chance to modify and resubmit the code before the competition closes. It has the feel (to me who has never seen one) of something like real code collaboration - subversion style. It also strikes me that the winner of such a competition need not be the best programmer, but that much of the "sponsors' benefit" will be achieved in scoping out the competitors while the competition proceeds.

This sort of competitive collaboration is one of the aspects that makes the MATLAB Contest "programming as a spectator sport".

Matlab 2002

So, is it possible for Australian Universities to have a code-collaborating competition like this? There would need to be some common need, and some common benefit (both the students and the sponsors) but it strikes me that with enough impetus, there are enough Comp. Sci., Soft. Eng and Elec. Eng students around who'd jump at the opportunity to hack away.

Painting by footprints

So last weekend, instead of cleaning the house, gardening or doing anything that we ought to have done, we painted.

I begin by noting that the amazingly large paper is courtesy of work, and a never-ending-demand for posters. I also note that Mum is still staying with us, and as an ex-pre-school teacher of many years "doing something interesting with a three year old" takes on a whole new world of meaning.

Enough context. We got up, we wandered around the house finding the paints -- we used squeezie-marker pen type ones, that were supposed to be not too hard for small people to use. I believe Flavia has photographic recall of every object we've ever bought, and where it currently resides. She managed to find and unearth the paints based on no more than my statement "We got some squeezie paints for Lilly a year or so ago, you know, the ones you can hold. Do you know where they went?" With my GPS-like description of the materials in question, and less than one minute, we had the paints. And so with two A0 posters stuck together, we filled the lounge room.

In the end, it was much more fun to finger paint than it was to use the paints as markers. Yes, that's me in the trackies and ugg boots. Lilly is performing her first ice-skating based masterpiece. At this point in time we have (I think) finished breakfast. Flavia has very generously not shown any identifying features of anyone except the artist in the photo.

This weekend we might add some more paint, and put the work-in-progress up on one of our walls.

And the flame grows...
Today Mum started blogging. This takes us from Flavia, Its just a way to put pictures up to me, and now Mum, who is very excited. I am looking forward to the news, and hoping that once we all separate back to normal households in a month or so, we will keep the blogging active.

Ballet

Flavia's sister (Renata) has just sent over this link. My niece (Manuela) is taking ballet classes. She is the last to enter from the left. The view is from Manuela's first ballet presentation.

I don't care what anyone says, I think it's brilliant.