CCSC East Conference
This Friday and Saturday, I had the pleasure of taking a trip to Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania to attend the CCSC East conference and programming competition. Six programmers and one advisor attended as an official trip of the Mansfield University Computer Science Club, of which I am the current president.
The conference itself was short and honestly a little lacking in good content. We listened to a talk from a Microsoft representative on the company’s new Azure cloud hosting service. Without actually trying either of them out, I would have to say that Azure needs some work in order to match what Amazon offers with their EC2 service. Most notably, Amazon’s EC2 allows the customer more configurability in terms of how their services are set up and provisioned. Azure is an easy-to-use way to upload services. All you must do is create a .NET or FastCGI-based project, compile, and upload. It provides for easy uploading of services and short set-up time. Microsoft will take care of the rest. On the other hand, Amazon’s offering requires the customer to create an entire virtual machine, complete with the operating system and the service software installed (although this may have changed since I last evaluated their services). This allows the customer to micro-manage their partitions and get the most out of their usage. Microsoft’s offering does not allow for this, but it is possible for Microsoft to add this functionality in the future as Azure is a very new service. Azure seems to be a good service, but it could use some improvements as well. I will be trying it out in production in the next few weeks and I may have a hands-on review of the service to give.
After Microsoft’s talk on Azure, we heard a keynote from a government employee of Fairfax County in Virginia. Later on in the day, we decided to relax, purchase the game of Risk, and wage war against each other.
The next day was the programming competition, which was the best part of the weekend. The competition was set up in a manner where there were seven medium-sized logic-based problems. These problems ranged in difficulty and most of them were fairly difficult to program in a very short amount of time. If in the future I finish one of the problems that we failed to complete as a team, I will post both the problem and the solution here. The problems we were given were frustrating above all. As usual, one small error would cause the program to fail miserably. My team was frustrated that we had only one computer to use between the three of us. We placed in the 33rd percentile with two out of seven problems complete. There were roughly 8 teams that completed two problems, 3 that completed three problems, and one team that completed 4 problems. Our team was extremely frustrated because we had programmed the majority of five out of the seven programs and we had them extremely close to functioning properly. Although we were frustrated and dissatisfied with our results, I personally had an enjoyable time competing and enjoyed the problem-solving aspect.
The trip was mostly a success and was enjoyable. As most trips do, we had a number of inside jokes that we are still laughing about. In the Spring, we hope to attend PACISE, a local competition, and possibly take a trip to Redmond, Washington to explore Microsoft’s facilities as part of a game programming competition.
I have had four cups of coffee and four Mountain Dews to keep me awake today. I am very sleep deprived and I am looking forward to some rest. I will be following up about Azure and the programming problems in the future.
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