Mahli’s Musing

Just when I was about to leave the office, I checked the score table and started to perform the routine I had been doing for the past 3 weeks: updating the final table (even more work this time since I had to compare previous result with today’s result), it struck me. There’s no point on updating the table. The scores have become meaningless.

Today has been a productive day for my PhD, probably the most productive day ever since I’ve moved to Kaiserslautern. I didn’t turn on my Yahoo! Messenger, and suddenly I didn’t have any messages to reply. I didn’t have any obsession to see the their progress, checking out their programs one by one. Nope. I channelled all the energy into reading papers. It felt good. It felt even better when I met my professor discussing progress and stuff. Probably this is indeed the best way.

Anyway, out of respect to the problem setters for tomorrow and the assistants who had to deal with the mockery (of course, why bother to stop when the assistants had warned you), I’ll try my best preparing the problems, making sure testcases are proper, problems have no typos and easy to understand, and so on. I will finish compiling the short spoilers to the problems. But this time, I won’t wake up until 5am just to ensure every questions will be answered. There’s no point.

To whoever gets into the top 4, I wish you the very best in IOI 2009. To whoever gets to coach them next, I hope you have better luck then I did. If no one steps up, well, tough luck, guys.

This wound probably takes a few days, at least, if not weeks, to heal.

Ah yes, finally, a weekend where I can go visit the city. Never went out during the weekends ever since I got here. You probably can guess why.

Yes, problems for training are taken from other contests.
Yes, looking for solutions/other OJs during training is discouraged.
Yes, number of submissions is limited for obvious purposes.
Yes, using past solutions is discouraged.

At first I thought there were only some isolated incidents, but apparently it’s more rampant than that. Why should I even bother putting so much effort into this in the first place? Hello guys, I’ve spent 20+ days sleeping < 5 hours, thinking which problems to give, trying my best (on my own, voluntary, nonpaid) to set up problems/testcases/checkers so no mistakes are in there (although obviously there were mistakes), thinking how to provide what’s necessary for you (not what you want to know), etc. Even more than before, given my constraints, since I saw very good potential in this year’s trainees. I also prepared some statistical trivias of the training progress to be given just before the last exam. I feel really violated…

Time for me to focus only on doing my PhD.

P.S. No apology nor further contact is needed. Everybody has his/her own choices.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/international/2430256/Using-your-noodle

Finally, I drove a car with my mom sitting next to me. Of course it wasn’t a smooth trip. Everything was wrong, except me :P:P naaaaah, I was pretty nervous and forgot many basic things. But I managed to get to the bank, which was the main purpose anyway, and get back home without crashing. So that’s a positive point

Not to self: try to drive more smoothly and be more confident.

Last Saturday (9 May 2009) 12 Indonesian secondary school students participated in Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad 2009, hosted by India. Students were asked to solve 3 algorithmic problems in 5 hours. 16 countries and over 300 students participated, but each country can only have their top 6 students ranked in the official list.

Unlike other olympiads, students don’t come to the hosting country and compete onsite. Instead, there are multiple sites in each country with direct supervision from leaders of each country. In Indonesia, the students were gathered at University of Indonesia, Salemba campus and supervised by Suryana Setiawan and yours truly (at a short notice due to some late financial arrangement with the Secondary Education Directorate of the Department of National Education).

This year, Indonesian students did 1 medal count better than last year, accumulating 4 bronze medals. This leaves the coaches with lots of homework on how to improve this achievement in 3 months before the 21st IOI is held in August. Hopefully many of these 12 students will follow the training enthusiastically after a slow start in the last 2 weeks.

                     APIO 2009, Medals Table
======================================================================
       Rk Ct  Id OIL CNV ATM Tot Name
======================================================================
GOLD
       1  tw  42 100 100 100 300 Szu Po Wang
       2  kr 109 100 100 100 300 Jae Sung Park
       3  cn 281 100  95 100 295 Yuchao Pan
       4  cn 282 100  70 100 270 Jingbo Shang
       5  th 167 100  60 100 260 Abhabongse Janthong
       6  cn 234 100  56 100 256 Jiejun Zhang
======================================================================
SILVER
       7  tw  43 100  53 100 253 Che Yang Wu
       8  cn 273 100  50 100 250 Luhang Lai
       9  cn 226  95  53 100 248 Yifan Pi
       10 kr 117 100  48 100 248 Dong Ho Lee
       11 cn 244 100  56  86 242 Yilun Xie
       12 th 175  80  34 100 214 Taksapaun Kittiakrastien
       13 jp  11 100 100   0 200 Makoto Soejima
       14 kr 125  45  53 100 198 Jae Eui Ma
       15 th 168  90   0 100 190 Visit Pattaranutaporn
       16 th 177  30  60 100 190 Sarun Paisarnsrisomsuk
       17 kr 131  35  48 100 183 Jun Seong Lee
       18 in  77  30 100  50 180 Keshav Dhandhania
       19 kr 104 100   0  77 177 Dong Gu Kang
======================================================================
BRONZE
       20 id 300  65 100  10 175 Irvan Jahja                   
       21 tw  47  65   0 100 165 You Cheng Syu
       22 kr 116 100   0  64 164 Hyeong Seok Yun
       23 id 291  30  60  73 163 Angelina Veni Johanna         
       24 bd 391   0  55 100 155 Mohammad Abirul Islam
       25 sg  32  85   0  60 145 Zhan Xiong Chin
       26 tw  46  35   0 100 135 Pi Hsun Shih
       27 tw  58  45  48  31 124 Yu Hsuan Lai
       28 th 173  80   0  41 121 Pattara Sukprasert
       29 in  69  20   0 100 120 B Srivatsan
       30 tw  55  20  10  87 117 You Ren Huang
       31 id 296  30   0  87 117 Ashar Fuadi                   
       32 jp  14  45   0  60 105 Motoki Takigiku
       33 th 337   0   0 100 100 sira songpolrojjanakul
       34 sg  23 100   0   0 100 Wei Zhong Lim
       35 id 302 100   0   0 100 Risan Risan                   
       36 sg  36  30  65   0  95 Jia-Han Chiam
       37 au 379  75   0  12  87 Evgeny Martynov
       38 in  68  30  44   0  74 Anish Shankar
======================================================================
Legend

Rk   : Rank
Ct   : Country Code
Id   : Contestant ID
OIL  : OIL score
CNV  : CONVENTION score
ATM  : ATM score
Tot  : Total score
Name : Contestant Name
======================================================================

since I wrote something here, or even logged in on this site. Got 420 spams waiting for me They love my blog.

So what should I put here now…

2 weeks ago I treated some of my yearmates from Fasilkom UI at Izzi Pizza. It was fun with 60% or so of those in the guest list attended. A tip for anyone eating there, don’t order their extra crust option. It’s a waste of money.

I didn’t take any pictures, as I was pretty sure some would have used the occasion to practise their photography skill (and indeed so). So picture mania, you can see some of them on facebook.

A few days ago, I got calls from an unknown number. It turned out that this number belong to some unknown lady in Tegal who has abundance of time and money. This reminds me of the story my friend, Eko, wrote on his blog, except that I stopped far much earlier than him I wonder why can’t she donate her money to some good cause and do some volunteer work instead of wasting her time calling random numbers…

Tomorrow, I’m (finally) going to take my driving license’s exam (Ujian Surat Izin Mengemudi). I’ve tried my best to avoid this as long as possible (I like non-poluting vehicle and public transport much much more, especially abroad), but the wall has now been taken down.

I found lots of links on the (dreaded?) theoretical exam, and most complained about the striking number of cases where people got marks just below (like 1 or 2 marks off) the passing grade. Of course, the police here are pretty well known as full of corruption, although lately they’ve taking steps to make their image better.

Anyway back to this exam thingy, many people complained that they found so few resource on the net… It amazed me how sooooo many posts on this matter fail to mention the primary resource for the exam: the Traffic Directorate website. If people just take some time to look at “perpustakaan -> Direktorat Lalulintas” … Ah, who am I to say such things…

Let’s try. ilham, ardiankp, felix_halim, and another test for white spaces, John Dethridge. And now with colors: ilham, ardiankp, felix_halim, bramandia, microbrain, crazyscratcher, dolphinigle.

Click here for the plugin homepage, and here for the announcement on the forum.

Organic spinach noodle. I tried as well to make one with some sweet potato mixture, but the resulting noodle was rather soft, not to mention that in the end I needed to add lots more flour than the recipe said.

有機的なほうれん草面、出来た！ ^_^

My current status:

• stay at home 14-17 Feb (exercising my patience), so mom can go to Surabaya
• go to UGM 19-22 Feb
• made a sweet potato noodle just yesterday (somewhat failed, too mushy)
• pondering whether I should go back to Germany next month (costs quite some money)
• need to take care of my eyes more carefully (i need to see more greens instead of staring at the computer screen)

So guys, take the word of wisdom from Google. Don’t surf! Heck, even this blog is harmful

This is taken at 21:35 31 January 2009, ICT.