ACM-ICPC Asia Kanpur 2006 Regionals

I went to IIT Kanpur for the ACM-ICPC Asia-Kanpur 2006 Regionals along with my teammates Varun Gupta and Vipul Goel. The regional was preceded by an online prelim contest where we were asked to solve four problems in three hours. The Top 50 teams were invited to IIT Kanpur to play the regionals. We were given six problems to solve in four hours.There were a total of 49 teams out of which only 25 were able to solve atleast one problem. We managed to solve only one problem (E).

Overall, it was a nice experience meeting such a lot of like-minded people interested in solving problems. I met TopCoder members codager, pranip, vinaysingh, Digibomb and abhicool personally. The winning team was from NIT Trichy with IIT Madras coming in second.

Back to Vista

I am writing this post on my newly installed 64-bit Windows Vista RC1. Another round of partitioning and some experimentation completely erased my Ubuntu (Edgy) Linux and has left me just with this particular OS. Surprisingly, I am comfortable with this. Maybe I'll use windows for some time now.

The only trouble is that Vista has not detected any of my sound cards (yeah, I've two of 'em). But I believe I should be able to fix that soon; after all Microsoft products don't usually give problems like this, and if they do, they are easy to fix.

This 64-bit edition is actually 32-bit compatible and I haven't had any compatibility problems so far. Interestingly I am getting a strange warning while opening the Yahoo! home page:

I know this is not very readable, the error message says "This website wants to run the following add-on: 'TODO: ' from 'TODO: (unverified publisher)'. If you trust this website and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here..."

Windows Vista definetely has a lot of eye candy with it's translucent windows, fabulous backgrounds and colors. The designers at Microsoft are awesome. The user experience on the desktop with Microsoft's products is something which is hard to emulate in the immeadiate future on the Linux desktop. Meanwhile on Linux, an entirely new breed of UI technologies are coming up. XGL is striving to put advanced effects on the Linux desktop using the advanced OpenGL platform. You can click and drag your desktop and switch to another workspace while doing a cube rotation effect. Now that's what I call the WOW factor!

Googlemail alias for Gmail

Found something new about GMail today. It seems that everybody who has a gmail account also gets an alias account with the googlemail domain automatically.

For example my email address is shalinmangar [at] gmail [dot] com
So I also have an alias shalinmangar [at] googlemail [dot] com

Try it out!

What's keeping me busy

I've been out of the blogging circuit for a while. So just an update on what's been keeping me busy.

I've been working on a host of things for Onyomo, many of which you'll be able to see soon on the website. I also attended the Microsoft's X-BOX India launch party on Saturday night. It was very cool, with performances by DJ Aqeel and Euphoria (Euphoria rocks!). Akshay Kumar was there to launch it. We were also shown the X-BOX TV Advertisement. They said that you people are the first ones to see this as it has not been aired on TV yet. It was awesome, O Brother! (catch it on your favorite TV channel soon enough).

Speaking of TV channels, I see a lot of publicity for SkyTV DTH Service here in Delhi. It seems to be catching up quite fast. While I am on these topics, it would be worthwhile to mention that Reliance has launched a Radio channel called BigFM on a frequency 92.7 with plans to make it pan-India soon. After all nothing about Reliance can be small, remember :)

I have also been trying my hand on Software Design competitions at TopCoder. I placed second in a .NET Javascript Drag and Drop component design but unfortunately scored 74.15 points. I needed at least 75 to claim the prize money ($600 for 2nd place). My Hard luck.

Anyways, I'll try to be regular now. Keep checking.

And GMail continues to amaze me

Modern Day Alchemist - Use Gmail to generate unlimited e-mail addresses

Yeah, go check this out!