Yesterday included a Microsoft presentation on the next version of Visual Studio. I think the sample application (something about real estate) was a poor fit for the audience, but the tools themselves were impressive. The editor can do all sorts of crazy things to your source code based on the AST, but when I asked the presenter about accessing ( Read more... )

Hmm. So I solved *a* problem. The only person who did worse in my room was doeth, as predicted by the cookie. I meant to ignore the easy problem, but opened it first out of habit, and then wasted some time not figuring it out. I have no confidence that I would have gotten the hard with that extra 15 minutes, though... it was one of those ( Read more... )

The lunch was good; kind of a pan-Asian theme, with a cold shrimp salad, another salad consisting of watercress, water chestnuts, and crispy noodles, various stir-fry things, potstickers, and... pork buns! The fortune cookies were amusing... doeth got one saying "WHATEVER YOU DO, MAKE IT FUN", which does not bode well for his performance. Mine ( Read more... )

The network service in my hotel room is really weird. I can ping any host I like, but I can't initiate a TCP connection until I've signed through their little web page, and it makes me do that again once each day. This is very confusing; I wonder why ssh hangs, ping the destination host, get an echo, and assume the problem is at the far end ( Read more... )

Apparently TopCoder reserved my room for two extra nights, and they are going to deduct the cost from my winnings. I didn't exactly ask for this, but I suppose it's handy, since the hotel is actually overbooked, and I didn't arrange to stay elsewhere ( Read more... )

I'm composing this on a 737 flying from DFW to SJC. Borrowing Christina's laptop for the trip is going to do wonders for my LJ update frequency; I may have this trip written up before I finish editing my narrative for the GCJ ( Read more... )

The TopCoder Open has four sponsors this year: Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, and NVidia ( Read more... )

Come on folks... let's vote out the "Culture of Life". (Bush authorized 152 executions while Governor of Texas.) Maybe we can get some "Policy of Truth" instead, eh?

I waited in line at the main county library for almost four hours to vote today. I was really just there because Christina wanted some company, since I'm quite confident that the line will be much shorter at my precinct's polling place on Tuesday. We have only 5670 people registered in our precinct, and it's open for 12 hours; the counter on the ( Read more... )

cornrelish posted a link to OkCupid's political quiz. I feel that my results from this sort of quiz are very noisy, because the questions are not carefully worded (and perhaps I overanalyze). I'll break down a few from this one to show you my problems ( Read more... )