It's been a busy couple of days. In a moment of weakness I'd agreed some time ago to be the local contact for the Scottish regional heat of the British Computer Society Programming Competition. Over the past five years, Edinburgh University hosted the event but this year Strathclyde University was the venue and department hosted the event and prepared the computer facilities for the teams and judges. So, yesterday, I ended up lugging PCs around labs so that each team would have the same specification of machine in separate rooms. I also had to install Visual C/C++ (spit!) on these machines as that was one of the two allowable environments for the competition. The other was Java 1.3.1 which, fortunately, is already installed on all of our machines.

This morning I had to get up early and drive through to Glasgow so that I was there in plenty of time to set up and welcome the contestants and judges. Naturally, the weather had turned wintry and quite heavy snow had fallen yesterday and overnight. Made the journey quite demanding in terms of concentration required.

To cut a long story short, I actually made good time and arrived an hour before registration began. Martine McFarlane was the other local organiser and she had arrived about 20 minutes later replete with sandwich lunches and 'ginger'.

The judges, Donald Bell, Matthew Leah, and Tony Printzis were next to arrive followed closely by the contestants. As befits convention, the team names were chosen carefully ;-):

• Apply Computing
• Byte IT
• Chewin' the Inode
• Heh
• Unexpected Exception

Tony is a veteran of the programming competition having won through to the finals in each of the last five years as a contestant and, in fact, his team - Glasgow Univerity's "Midnight Hackers" - won the competition last year. Like a poacher turned gamekeeper, Tony was 'promoted' to judge this year!

I'll link to the actual results page of all regional heats in due course, but in the Scottish heat the new Glasgow University team "Chewin' the Inode" (2 final year students plus 3 postgrad research students) narrowly beat the Cisco UK "Byte IT" team (4 professional software engineers). "Unexpected Exception" - five second-year Strathclyde students - at least scored a moral defeat as they managed to submit attempts for several of the problems and as a result could be counted as the third place contestants. I hope the Strathclyde students are up for it next year as they'll have learnt a lot from the experience today.

Good luck to the "Chewin' the Inode" team for the finals on March 23.

On a final note: I was absolutely amazed that none of the 21 contestants drank coffee!

BBC SPORT | Winter Olympics 2002 | Alpine Skiing | Baxter: Blown out of proportion

Britain's best skier for two decades, Alain Baxter, got caught up in the middle of a political row when he turned up at the Winter Olympics with a new hairstyle.

The slalom specialist, who was 11th in the world last season, had his hair dyed blue with the cross of St Andrew on it to show the world he was Scottish.

But he was immediately told he would not be able to compete with the new hairstyle because it could be deemed a political statement, which is against International Olympic Committee rules.

I seem to recall a number of other 'patriotic' hairdos over the course of the winter olympics. Why would they pick on Baxter?

I'm recovering from writer's cramp! As the academic selector for Undergraduate Admissions I've personally signed 554 letters of invitation to applicants that have been made unconditional or conditional offers to study one of our undergraduate degrees.

I'm covering VM in my Computer Architecture lectures at the moment so I must recommend the following sample chapter to my students - System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition: Chapter 4: Memory:

In this chapter, I'll describe how memory is physically implemented, the mechanics of how the system manages memory, and how paging and swapping function at a system level. I'll give you some tools you can use to analyze your memory use, and explain how to work with swap space. Finally, I'll cover mechanisms to address some common memory performance problems.

Study: Ability to invent inspires engineers - Tech News - CNET.com

A new survey aims to dispel stereotypes about engineers and others who work in technological or scientific fields, emphasizing that most decided to enter their professions "to invent, design and discover."

The survey from a scientific-software company explains that most engineers are highly creative, entrepreneurial types with a desire to change the world--or at least some small corner of it.

The Mulle kybernetiK XMLRPC Framework

A framework implementing XML-RPC in Objective-C.

Cool! It's been a loooong time since I used Objective-C. It's great to see a resurgence in its popularity due to Mac OS X and Cocoa.

I'm watching the winter olympics women's curling final. It's the 10th and final end with the scores tied at 3-3. The GB team have the last stone. In 15 minutes or so we'll know if the Scots ladies win gold. It's a tense match.

Advanced CSS Layouts: Step by Step - WebReference.com