I write for About.com on C, C++ and C# programming and have been running a Programming Challenge.

You find lots of these challenges and contests on the web so I collected a list of ten that seem to be live and put them in a article Ten Programming Contests. One thing I’ve noticed is just how many Chinese and Eastern European developers are entering these. Maybe it’s a cultural thing or maybe this is where the future lies. If I do a Google Trends search for C++/C#, these are then top ten countries in order using google.

India, Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, Singapore, Viet Nam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech Republic, Denmark.

Of course maybe the richer countries like the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany can afford the manuals and have less need to search… but interesting.

A goatse is a rude thing indeed. I am not going to tell you what it is but if you look on Wikipedia, you’ll find out. Anyway I spotted one the other day on Leyton tube!

I was having a nosy at the Brainbench.com website today and on the learn link for Java, when you click it, this appears. Its a stack dump from a Java Exception. Brainbench of course provide testing for developers and others…!

This one is mine. I have a few domains which feed into my main account and the number of Pump and Dump scam emails promoting xxx stock – well enough is enough. So repugn will name and shame every company that is being promoted.

I’m keeping a copy of every email I receive so I can show that its not being vindictive or attacking any particular company. I’ve nothing against these companies- the scammers have bought lots of their stock and are just trying to inflate the price by inducing others to invest in them and then dump the stock after it moves a bit- scammers make money and other investors lose it.

Well, portent.org finally escaped from the Google sandbox with a reasonable PR of 4. That took 5 months. Personality-tests.eu though got hacked and taken down by the hosting company. After zapping the blog (which is where the emails originated), it’s back up with just one lost day. It was running an older version of Pivot so hopefully it was a problem in that version and not a “feature” of Pivot.

Clearly I had tempted fate by writing a review of Pivot a few days ago and for my hubris got a metaphorical slap. That also happened to me in 1995 when I was doing a bit of part time private hire driving in Blackpool for C-Cabs. After doing it for two years, I said to a driver one night “How lucky I was that no one had ever been sick in my car.”. Within a fortnight it happened four times- with four different passengers at different times. Unbelievable but true. Not an urban legend or apocryphal tale – it really happened to me. It does really make you wonder sometimes…

The leaflet pictured is from a local pharmacy and was posted through I guess most of the letterboxes in the street. I reckon its advertising their services but with all the languages on it..shouldn’t English also have been included! (Not much use to me without!).

Also, after recent arrivals in the area (we are so… cosmopolitan) I think Lithuanian, Ukranian and Polish should also be on the leaflet as well. Mind you there should be a few more Christmas trees and lights this year!

It was nuts today. A one hour commute became two and a half. After changing at Mile End from Central to District Line, that ground to a halt due to a fire on South Kensington. I was at Embankment, so changed lines and and scooted up to Picadilly Circus where the Picadily line tube went as far as Green Park and stopped due to more problems. I then changed lines and got to Bond Street and back on the Central Line as far as Notting Hill Gate where the station was closing due to problems at Earl’s Court.

A bus then took me near enough to Fulham Broadway and a one mile walk got me to work, 90 minutes later than usual to a very quiet as in no one else here office.

My day off, to work on a project when I got asked to sort out a problem. A Linux system I setup with Suse a few months back on it has crashed. By the look of it a hard disk was having difficulties- it only booted intermittently- and it was manufactured in January 2006!

I wondered if something had damaged the Linux box as it was failing to boot with a Kernel Panic error. Couldn’t find a bootable partition. I don’t blame the hard disk manufacturers as the hard disk in this was replaced a few months ago. Dodgy controller perhaps?

So I had an unbootable disk (formatted with Reiser FS) containing very important customer data (backups! Don’t ask- they do not know how lucky they were- someone there had switched off backups a few months ago!).

There are some pretty amazing open source utilities and Yareg (which is a front end to the excellent RFS Tools) let me plug the drive (which was Sata- thankfully Maplin sell a USB- SATA drive enclosure) into My XP box. I was then able to see all the folders and files and drag and drop the mysql database and website files onto my XP box. It looked like the disk, though failing had not corrupted anything.

One last trick. If you have the correct version of Mysql – you can download them from mysql.org, install, run it, set up default root admin etc then close it down. Now copy the mysql data files into the data folder and restart mysql. It’s quick and dirty but it sems to work ok. Result… I could view the data. It was from a live system and the latest update date was last night. Phew=-All data rescued!

Where I faced serious questioning. Sounds serious, but it was actually to take part in a fun quiz, as guest of my friend Kate (who owns Christchurch Tower

The Bank’s staff were raising money for two charities- the RNLI and I think Demelza house (a childrens hospice). It was very well organised- had to be with 300+ team members in 60 teams plus a hot supper and drinks. Our team probably came about middling in the ranks, thanks in part (he says modestly) to my love of pop music.

One round had photos of people and you had to name them and whether they were dead or alive. We clearly jinxed Milton Friedman who was on the photos and was supposed to be still alive. He though had different plans and kicked the bucket yesterday.

It was a great event and good fun. We’d have scored higher if I knew more flags of the world… d’oh!

On the BBC, a report why Christian Aid charity are still using Closed Source (Windows) rather than Open Source. I’ve nothing against Windows- horses for courses mind. But it’s the reason that the techy guy gave!

…But Steven Buckley, who runs Christian Aid’s common knowledge programme, prefers to buy software from the likes of Microsoft. Is this not odd for a charity?

and

He also explained that what is seen as one of the advantages of open-source – that the core code can be examined by anyone – could actually work against the charity.

“We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world – the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs,” he said.

Except guess what the Christian Aid website runs on? It runs on Linux… D’oh!