Windows makes me flip… again
So here’s me, in my office, deciding to actually step up to the greatest challenge of my day: print stuff. My office connection is a simple network connection, no domain as far as I can tell and at some far end of the network there’s a printer.
Long story short, I tried everything for connecting to that printer. Tried adding a network printer by its address, hostname and a lot of silly attempts that probably made no sense. Tried installing it’s drivers from the CD. I tried everything I could think of for more than 30 minutes. Nothing worked. So then, I googled my problem and after a few minutes this is what I found:
http://uis.georgetown.edu/software/documentation/winxp/winxp.network.printer.html
You will probably be as amazed as I was to read how – in order to connect to a NETWORK PRINTER – you need to use the option “Local printer attached to this computer” not “A network printer..” as, well, you would think. I know, mind-blowing isn’t it? I thought it was a joke, even Windows can’t be that wrong!! But no…
It actually worked. So here’s to MS for creating an OS that makes every simple task an adventure. Great job guys!
Projects
After being extremely lazy about this, I finally started writing some stuff for my “Projects” page. I will use that for permanent links and descriptions of some of the more important stuff, but I will continue to regularly post here under the “Stuff I do” category.
If you find all this confusing, do let me know, I’ll think about simplifying it.
Also, I added an awesome tag cloud at the bottom of the page. Cool isn’t it? I’m thinking of updating the layout of my blog to make it more efficient, but I don’t think I’ll have time for that too soon though.
Fitness category
After a long debate I have decided to include a “fitness” category on my blog. I found this word to best encompass everything that I intend to put there: post related to general health, nutrition and training.
I hesitated to do so before because I didn’t want to become one of the way-too-many “Internet experts” (i.e. people that pretend to be expert in fields they do not actually have a good grip on by propagating information through the mostly unchecked Internet medium). My decision to actually start writing in this category came together with the concept of focusing more on my beliefs and personal experience, rather than general advice. It’s also a big part of my life, so it should be here. More on this soon…
Takoma Park election
Takoma Park, MD just had their municipal election last week using the Scantegrity verifiable voting system. It is the first time that such a system is actually used in a government election. The election has gone well so it’s definitely a great start for verifiable voting systems out there. My contribution to this election was minor, but I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate everyone on the team and hope that the adoption of such voting systems will continue, also motivating us to make them better and better.
PS: Here‘s a good article about this.
Update: Also on Slashdot.
ACM ICPC “revolutions”
About a year ago I mentioned I was retiring from programming contests as a participant and starting coaching instead.
Well, I am sitting in the coaches’ room right now, in the middle of the regional ACM contest, watching the progress (by that I mean hitting refresh every 15 seconds) and I should say this is as stressful as it gets. I never really experienced stress when I was participating in these competitions (hard to believe, I know, but I really never did), but now when I am outside the loop, just looking in at what people that I’ve trained are doing, it’s a lot different. Well, the contest is still rolling, so good luck to all!
