Today, I woke up to find that my FeedBurner feed for Inspirated has stopped updating because the source feed is timing out. After digging around a little, the source of the problem turned out to be long posts containing (hundreds of lines of) code.

At this point, I could change settings in WordPress to display “summarized” texts instead of full ones in my feeds. The downside of which was the fact that it would require readers to click through their feed aggregators even for posts that weren’t long enough to cause server delays. The better solution was to use the wp-cache plugin so that WordPress wouldn’t have to “process” the feeds at each request. The plugin itseld works like a charm, but getting things working again with FeedBurner was a bit of PITA. Here’s the order of steps that worked:

• Disable the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin in WordPress administration panel.
• Access the original feed to make wp-cache do its magic.
• Resync the feed in FeedsBurner administration panel.
• Enable the FeedSmith plugin again.

It took me almost a couple of hours to sort out the whole picture, and ironically, one of the songs in my playlist at the time had lyrics that I’ve quoted in the post-title.

“Adversity causes some men software to break; others to break records.” — William Arthur Ward

It’s official. Firefox 3 has created a world record for being the most downloaded software in a 24-hour time-period (approximately 8 million times actually, and that too with a server outage). I did download the source-code on the release day but I didn’t compile it until only yesterday. The compilation went smoothly, mainly because I had already solved out incompatibility issues while messing with the betas.

The grandmother’s theorem just got another postulate to build open .

PC/UVa IDs: 110107/10196, Popularity: B, Success rate: average, Level: 1

I had two approaches in mind for checking the check before solving this problem:

• return a flag value from the move-generation functions as soon as opponent’s king is encountered in a reachable square.
• Generate all reachable squares for a side first, and then check whether opponent’s king is positioned on one.

I opted for the latter because even though it was more performance-intensive, it made my move-generation functions more generic and appropriate for extensibility.
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PC/UVa IDs: 110106/10033, Popularity: B, Success rate: low, Level: 2

Nothing extraordinarily interesting here — typical straight-outta-the-book exercise.
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PC/UVa IDs: 110105/10267, Popularity: B, Success rate: low, Level: 1

Few notes:

• In the problem input, pixels are specified as [column# row#], whereas two-dimensional vectors (or arrays) are referenced using [row# column#] format.
• The program would be doomed to infinite recursion if the condition on line #51 is omitted.

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PC/UVa IDs: 110104/706, Popularity: A, Success rate: average, Level: 1

Two-dimensional vectors again, with an array of function pointers to construct the digits’ appearance.
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PC/UVa IDs: 110103/10137, Popularity: B, Success rate: average, Level: 1

I have more wrong submissions for this problem than any other one until now. The reason? I was oblivious to the fact that the default rules for type-conversion between double and long in C++ include floor()ing positive values and ceil()ing negative ones.
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PC/UVa IDs: 110102/10189, Popularity: A, Success rate: high, Level: 1

Hello two-dimensional vectors.
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PC/UVa IDs: 110101/100, Popularity: A, Success rate: low, Level: 1

The Collatz problem. More of an introductory “hello world” for the algorithmic programming than a “challenge”. But still:
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There are few better ways of spending your vacations than trying to solve a series of programming problems, especially when you’re trying to learn something new related to those problems.

And this is where Programming Challenges pops in the picture. It is a combination of book containing about one hundred selected problems from various international competitions of the past. There are two online judges for checking solutions, the book’s own website and another site called UVa Online Judge. I will be constantly keep posting code on my blog as I keep solving problems according to the book’s chronological order.

P.S. Since I wanted to practice STL, please bare with its bloated usage that you’re bound to find in my solutions.