Codechef – India's biggest Online Programming Battle

CodeChef is India’s biggest and aggressive online programming battlefield. I came to know about CodeChef, a couple of days back only, and no doubt, i am impressed.
Designed in a very elegant manner, using jQuery to the max and with cool color blends, the site offers a nice look and feel. Definitely better than other sites in similar area.

My first Impression with CodeChef.

As i created my account, and logged into the site. There were a couple of things that attracted my attention. The thing that i really liked was live stats. The site gives you live stats of the coders trying to get into problem solving and their result. This creates an adrenaline rush, and you are tempted to do something.

Most of the top coders on this site are from premier Indian Institutes like IIT, IISc and others. You can see the real names of people instead of their hax0r names. This is somewhat non-traditional. Traditionally, programmers all over the world have been known by their IRC nicks only. So, if you see someone over coding arena with the nick ‘pranny’, you can very well assume that his IRC nick is ‘pranny’.

The site offers a wide range of programming languages, from LISP to Java. However, if you watch closely the maximum number of entries come from C++, then comes Java. As per my observation, i have not seen a single entry in Python (my favorite). So, if you are a python enthusiastic, there is lot scope for you.

The April challenge

The April challenge is about to come. For more details log onto CodeChef and see for yourself.

Practise for TopCoder and Google Code Jam

In my opinion, the best place to practise for TopCoder and Google Code Jam is to start off with CodeChef. The easy level practise problems, should be completed accurately and well within time. The medium difficulty ones are good and the difficult ones do require brain.

If you are needing any help with Codechef, you can contact their help section at http://www.codechef.com/help/

OnlineCompiler.org

OnlineCompiler.org is a completed online development environment for C/C++ in Linuc/Unix Style and built over the opensource WebDevStudio project.

You can access onlineCompiler.org here. This is a joint project by CodeControl and Ajay Jain. OnlineCompiler.org has a lot of features that will make online development quite comfortable and fun. You can save your prohects over there, take a backup and retrieve it later, or may be download it. It is specially useful in cases when you need to do something and they don’t have a compiler.

Currently onlinecompiler.org supports only Unix/Linux GCC based C/C++. We are planning to introduce Python support very soon. But no official dates. 🙂

Hope you will like it. For any queries, comments, appreciation or crtisim, just comment out here. We will be glad to hear from you.

Cuil vs Google – the battle grows stronger

Just a few hours ago, Cuil was launched, and it has already created a fuss in the market. I just saw the reports on Techcrunch about the arrival of Cuil, and i decided to have some of my own observation.

Privacy

Cuil says that “We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.”. Well, this is something i loved. I don’t want the Magic-Mirror-On-The-wall to keep remembering all of my search information. That might be useful for Engineers over the Googleplex, but from my point of view, i certainly don’t feel benefited from it.

Cookies

Every website uses cookies to store relevant information about visitors. What differentiates them, is in the way they consider which information is “relevant”. Cuil is concerned, with only the safe search and typing suggestions. While google is more interested in my time, date of use, and also stores cookies to last till the year 2032 (may be i am wrong, i don;t remember it exactly, but it is in this range only).

Search Results

While Google uses the right sidebar for ads, Cuil uses it to further refine the search, on various basis. I looked for India, and found a beautiful page. While a google search for same, is often a bit boring.

The UI of cuil is much better and easy to explore than that of Google. It offers top tabs also, alongwith a sliding sidebar.

Well, i use Google Service to post this blog, and another Google service to upload images over here, but we are talking about SEARCH here.

I think, Cuil is going to be a tough competitior of Google.

More of orkut into google search result

Google added orkut profile links to it’s search results quite a long time back. But now, it seems to go one step further, by improving it and adding the mutual friend, and possible friends if you search for an organization.

Here is a screenshot taken from my account. I just searched for my organization name, and i got new friends out here. And yes, frankly, i did not knew them 🙂

Kool enough.

However, interesting fact is that these results were shown only when i used the Google India and not when i tried these searches on Google.com. So, it can be said that these searches are terrority specific. They know that Orkut is the leading social networking website in countries like India and Brazil, and hence the results. Too accurate to miss.

The result of integration of orkut into google search is getting day by day. Hope one day, we will be able to find Kumbh ke bichde hue bhai over google 🙂

KDE 4.0

Every cloud has silver lining, but i think this one has something more than just linings, it seems to have silver spots in it. Well, i am talking about the much awaited KDE 4.0 which was released just two days back. It is a free sunday here in India, and i decided to have a peep into what it looks like.

The Installation
The installtion of KDE 4.0 on my OpenSUSE 10.3 was not a big trouble, with the One Click Install for openSUSE 10.3. However of all the packages selected, the digiKam was not installed successfully.

The actual Experience
I logged in again and switched to the KDE 4.0 session, and it was just amazing. With the new applications like Plasma, KickOff, Widgets and KRunner, it seemed to be fun and a completely new UI for me.

This is the dashboard view of Plasma. So, instead of the old, “Show Desktop”, you can just switch to dashboard by pressing CTRL+F12 and manage your desktop while letting other applications function.

The screen grid utility is among the other utilities that make the UI very calm and comfortable.

The issues
However there are several issues regarding the use of KDE 4.0. Just like every other Linux application, in its first release, it is quite buggy. It seemed like on every click that i made, the KDE 4.0 crashed. Sometimes, while switched to the dashboard view, the system seems to be not responding. You can see the videos being played in the background, but you can’t revert back to the main UI. The Compiz-Fusion that i had installed, seemed to be non functional, and many more. The support documentation is also not enough to explain these issues pretty well.

I think there is still a lot of time, when it will be issue less, and as successful as KDE 3.5.

Fight against boredom

Mozilla has launched a fight against boredom. There are some statistics that say various activities that Firefox users are more or less likely to do, and all of them support the fact that Mozilla Firefox users are less likely to get bored of life and have ample time for various other entertaining activities. The data has been collected from 18 + years internet users by Data from Nielsen Online, @Plan, Fall 2007 Release.There is a video release also, with some strong lyrics against the Internet Explorer.

The lyrics of the song can be downloaded from here

It’s meant to be viral, but I’m not sure Microsoft will take the following statistics quoted on the page in the best light:

Compared to Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are

* 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business.
* 45% more likely to have gone on vacation in San Francisco within the last 2 years.
* 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol.
* 6% less likely to have eaten any meal at Chick-fil-A within the last 7 days.
* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 day.
* 89% more likely to have purchased database software for work in the last year.
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.
* 106% more likely to enjoy boarding sports.

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