".in", baby -- that totally trumps my intel.com! At Harris Grill, apparently they call it Randall the Enamel Animal, the organoleptic hops transducer module -- but when you can't remember all that, you call it a hopulator :)
Tom, you realize this means your blog is world^Wpittsburgh-famous? |
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Well Rob, a Hopulator is a device (I think maybe William and I are the only ones that call it this, but also sometimes other things like "hoppifier") is a device that forces beer through fresh hops (those flowers that some beers their citrus bitter flavor) in order to give them even more citrus bitter flavor. I love that thing. I wish it was always running. East End brewery will stick some fresh hops in your growler for you sometimes if you go during grahler 'ahrs. Wait, if you are Rob Simmons in India then you know all about those particular hops and have movie evidence. |
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Oops - just realised I called myself a one person team. Just in case my "team-mate" reads my earlier comment, we were more like a "one and a bit" person team this year. As in about 1 and 1/8th.... :-) |
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Enjoyed your write-up. It also makes me feel so much better to know that team K.I.S.S. outscored the organisers from last year. Thanks for that! :-)
I get kind of nervous now when I hear about a new ICFP07 Contest write-up, because I'm still trying to solve this problem in my slow, plodding way - they did say it was a 72 day contest right?! This means I don't want to accidentally get any more clues, yet I also don't want to not read them!! So it's a case of skimming quickly the first time (with short term memory power turned as low as possible) and then going back to read it again more carefully if it seems "safe". Yours is nice and safe (from my perspective), and very interesting.
I wasted a huge amount time during the contest trying to track down a bug caused by an a very stupid mistake I made (and insufficient testing later). My one line "empty bucket" implementation ("bucket = []") was effectively a NOP - and unfortunately the "self check" page didn't really tell you anything useful in that case! In fact only the bottom half was visible and that (apart from the incorrect colours) seemed to show things were working well. It seems obvious now, but I ended up thinking the DNA to RNA tool was the real cause. Still, it turns out I fixed the bug accidentally when doing more testing (of the colour stuff!) and some associated refactoring very late in the contest but then threw in the towel without running the self-check again. I didn't find out it was fixed until the next morning when I started comparing my outputs to those from tools from another team.
I'm really looking forward to hearing if this year's organisers really expected teams to solve all those puzzles, etc., or whether those were really a red herring/honey pot/something to play with later when you realised time was running out and turned instead to patching the daylight image, or perhaps generating the whole thing from scratch. I guess solving the puzzles was feasible if your team was big enough (and smart enough) and perhaps also a little bit lucky, but as a one person team (and not particularly smart either!) it seems rather challenging! Unless of course, it really was meant to be 72 days... oops, look at the time... I better get back to working on a way to extract page 23! |
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Thanks Robert, I appreciate that! I should also mention that Spoons helped a bit with the writeup and was mostly responsible for creating the movie. But Spoons never reads blogs so he probably will never know that I neglected to mention that. |
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That was awesome! Thanks!
This is one of the best (if not the best) ICFP write ups I've read (and I've read almost all of them), if only because you explained how you ended up solving the problem in a different way to everyone else :-) |
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Ha ha, don't worry, he always does that. |
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Thanks for going to the trouble of writing this up!
Poor Jason! |
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Aw man...Harris was on of my favorite bars in Pittsburgh--great patio. I was there on Saturday night, in visiting from DC. That is really sad to hear. |
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Don't worry, since that only runs on Saturdays I'm sure it was in secure cold storage. |
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What about the hopulator! Did they save the hopulator? |
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I hope that everyone that works there will not have to be out of work to long. |
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6103. snee (dsl82-163-126-37.as15444.net) –
13 Aug 2007 14:38:02
[ Honic the Sheghog ]
honič is Czech for 'wanker' I believe |
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Maybe they will be able to salvage the urinal, which, after all, was filled with water... |
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Reporters stated that 2 Henny Pennys and one lip-shaped urinal suffered injuries.
Ellsworth is not going to be the same. I can't live w/o Henny Pennys. |
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6100. Sophia (76.24.8.10) –
13 Aug 2007 11:32:28
[ T7es 2007 ]
Rutgers rulez. |
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I leave for ONE WEEKEND and you burn down Harris grill! |
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KDKA has a story about it:
http://kdka.com/topstories/local_story_224213109.html
I am amused at how dramatic they make it -- and there are glaring errors, like, "customers were rushing out as the firemen rushed in." "It was a Saturday night and packed ..." etc. |
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i grew up on summerlea street and from my back yard and driveway is harris, we ate there all the time and my family is friends with the harris family. it was a fire i will never forget and the friendly enviornment that will be greatly missed...i have a feeling they will be back soon!! |
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an' if he had a big mug o' grog! arr.. |
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