Saleh Blog

Yes, I’m trying my best to practice for that coming compitition. I’m tired of losing all compititions I have been participating. From high school’s International Olympiad in Informatics 2002-2003 to International Computer Programming Contest 2006-2007. I always get bad results on the compitition.

I got few online judges and problem sets websites I’m practicing on. One of them is UVA online judge which has thousands of problems. The other one is USACO TRAINING PROGRAM GATEWAY. I bought a programming trainning book made especially for ICPC and IOI to train my self. I also downloded the Art of Programming Contest book from UVA website.

With all those facilities available on the giant web some people would says that it is enough to get a good rank or even the first place. However, I am sure that most of the competitors, if not all, are using almost the same facilities to train. Therefore, there should be other factors helps the compititors to get better. I think one of the factors and important factor is the support of the coach and professors in the intitution. Another factor is to provide a good environment to train us for the compitition.

In the other hand, in my university, Kuwait university, there is no support AT ALL. We didn’t have any training nor much interest from the head of the college. How do they expect us to win the compitition if they don’t even give us trainning or atleast make a team early enough to have time so the team will coordinate and do some trainning in their own, IN THEIR OWN…

In 2007 ICPC for the arab region, my university’s 2 teams participation was cancelled by the college or university administration just 1 week before we travel!. I don’t know the details, but that let us down and shows us how much NOT interested the administration are for us to praticipate in the compitition. But in last 3 days, 2 girls from the other team (thanks to them) payed a visit to the university’s president and explain the situation. The university’s president then did the required paper works to make the trip possible.

Okay I didn’t know that was an april’s fool. Today while browsing keyframer’s blog I notice a post about TiSP, it totally slipped my mind that one day I saw that service announced as BETA on main page of google’s website. It is a joke which I didn’t pay attention to it. Here is the page of that joke.

Just a reminder…
Today is april’s fool day. So don’t believe anything you read about over the internet today. There are some april’s fool news which some websites will announce which is false tomorrow. Some will link you to april’s fool page. Here’s a link of april’s fool news on CNet.

I added a new plugin for the blog which makes the blog mobile friendly. You can now browse the website using your PDA.

Okay… this is something … different!

Its been almost a decade since the c++98 standard was released and more than 2 decades since the first release of C++ made by Bjarne Stroustrup. The new highly anticipated C++0x is under development. Many new features are expected to be seen. Nevertheless, the new standard will be 100% compatible with the old c++98 standard codes. Therefore, it will be the same C++ we all know for many years, but more facility will be added to improve the language. There will be improvement on core language, but mostly on the library. There will also be more support for threading and smart pointers. However, smart pointers will be supported only through the standard library (as been said so far). Even more improvement in generic programming when developing the language which can be called ‘concept’. Developers are trying their best to include garbage collector with the C++0x compiler as compulsory rather than being compiler optional like in C++98. Many informations are available in the following URLs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x
http://herbsutter.spaces.live.com/?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=blogpart&partqs=cat%3dC%252b%252b
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=cplusplus&seqNum=216&rl=1

Memory is cheap, it is not a priority for developers anymore. However, developers trys their best to avoid as much as possible to reserve extra memory for their programs, sometimes it can’t be helped when performance is needed more. When more performance needed, more memory is needed. Speed and memory are vise versa. To increase speed of a program you need extra memory from the RAM. For example, using double linked list is much faster than single linked list, but double linked list reserves extra memory for the extra link each node will have. You don’t have to go through the whole list again to search for a prevoiuse node if its a single linked list. You just use the previouse link and increase the speed of the program.

Look at the following C++ code:

For double linked list node you have to add an extra pointer for previouse node: