They're Running Out!

From Princeton:

Dear Mr. Gallotta:

Thank you for applying to our Graduate School for the 2008-2009 academic year. While I assure you that the materials you submitted were carefully reviewed by the faculty in the Department of Computer Science and by the Graduate School, I regret to inform you that the department did not recommend your admission for the coming year.

The number of places available at Princeton for entering graduate students is extremely limited and we cannot offer admission to all who are well-qualified. Indeed, many departments consistently have applicants who would be admitted without hesitation if the resources were available. Our decisions take into account not only the applicants’ merits, but also the suitability of the department’s programs to the candidates’ expressed interests. Our goal is to achieve a sound match between the strengths of our programs and the interests of the relatively small number of outstanding students that can be accommodated.

We chose to advise you of our decision via email on the assumption that a timely response would outweigh the informality of this means of communication. I would be happy to provide a formal letter upon request.

I wish you success in your plans for graduate study and thank you for considering Princeton University.

Sincerely,

William B. Russel

Dean of the Graduate School

So, only two places left: UIUC an Waterloo. And UIUC is the one I really wanted!

It Won't Be The Bay Area For Me

This just in from UC Berkeley:

I regret to inform you that you have not been accepted for graduate study in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkeley campus has a strict enrollment ceiling and thus each department is limited in the number of new students it may admit each year. Our department has the difficult task of selecting students with the strongest overall records from a large pool of well-qualified applicants. Unfortunately, this means we are not able to offer admission to many applicants who are capable of excellent academic work.

I am sorry that we do not have a place for you and hope that you will be able to make other arrangements to achieve your academic goals.

Sincerely,

Joe Hellerstein, Vice Chair
EECS Graduate Matters

I'm not sure how wide-spread this his, but a friend tells me he hasn't heard of any South African being accepted by more than two US universities. I can only hope this is the reason I am getting all these negative responses back.

SACO Training Camp One Online

Making the SACO final round and the online training camp available to the general public has proven rather successful, so we're planning on continuing to do so indefinitely. We've been getting lots of participation from TopCoder members, however, we'd really like stronger participation from South Africans. So if you're a South African reading this and are interested or know someone that might be interested please read further.

The first training camp of the year is being held in two weeks time over the weekend of 23-24 February. We'll be holding it online during at the same times as the on-site contest:

• Saturday 23 February at 08:30 to 13:30 SAST
• Sunday 24 February at 09:00 to 14:00 SAST

To participate, all you have to do is register over here:

https://olympiad.cs.uct.ac.za:8082/contests/camp1-2008/

If you have already registered for a previous contest, then you don't need to re-register as your account will carry over to the new contest. The coaches will be on IRC, in #saco on the FreeNode network during the contest for any potential issues that may arise. To see what type of problems to expect, have a quick look through the problem archive.

One Down, Four To Go

Just a couple of hours ago, the following hit my inbox:

February 11, 2007

Dear Marco Franco Antonio Gallotta,

Thank you for applying to the Computer Science Ph.D. Program at Stanford University. The Ph.D. Admissions Committee has reviewed your application and we are sorry to inform you that the committee did not recommend you for admission. The number of applicants far exceeds the number of those we can admit, which makes the admissions process a difficult and painstaking one. As a result, many strong candidates must be turned down.

We wish you every success in satisfying your educational and career goals.

Sincerely yours,

Graduate Admissions
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

I'm not sure what my response is to it yet, but it's sinking in fast. This is a big step I'm taking, one which will decide my future for at least the next five years. And now that that the first response has come in, I'm starting to feel very nervous as the rest are likely to start coming through rather soon now. Nervous as hell! I just want it to be over, either way!

Overbooking...The Joy!

Flying is fun. I love it. Well ok, not the flying part, but the travelling bit. But airlines have their way of miraculously screwing up your entire trip...just like that! And the scary thing is, they get can away with it. Maybe I've had bad luck, but I don't think so. I've heard too many bad experiences from others, but this one I just had went a little far.

Two weeks ago I went to Las Vegas. It was a wonderful, amazing experience and I'll post more about this and my trip down to Southern California when I return to South Africa in two weeks. Unfortunately though, we missed out on so much in Vegas. United Airlines are the ones to blame for this, not us.

We were supposed to fly out on Friday evening. I had booked tickets about two weeks in advance, however, I was not able to select seats at the time, which I assumed at the time was due to the flight being rather full. I was travelling with my aunt who was visiting from London and my two roommates from South Africa, Migael and Nick. Migael and Nick booked separately as they were taking a different return flight, but otherwise we were all on the same flight to Las Vegas.

When we checked-in they told us we had to get seats at the gate. This has happened to me enough times already so I hadn't started worrying at all. We get to the gate and they tell us to wait until we're called up. Now that's when a little worry started creeping in. Some time later I overheard them say there were 16 passengers without seats and only 7 available. Soon after they started boarding the plane and still they had not started calling us up. Then only did they make the announcement that they were overbooked and they were asking passengers t step down and get re-routed through Los Angeles arriving in Vegas early the following morning, with the only compensation being out up in a hotel in LA and getting either a free round-trip within the US or $400 United vouchers.

I think I remember about 4 or 5 people taking the offer to step down. We thought about it for a brief moment, but it really wasn't worth losing one of only two nights in Vegas. Most people were busy boarding so they either didn't hear the announcement or didn't have enough time to think about it. I've seen this happen plenty times in Europe, especially at Heathrow, but they know well in advance that they might have an overbooking situation on their hands and they have signs up when you first arrive at the gate so many more people actually take note of it and they have plenty time to consider the option. This was the part about this experience that frustrated me the most -- the complete lack of organisation and prior planning. Non-existent!

Eventually they started assigning seats to those like us without seats. Migael and Nick were one of the first few to be called up and they quickly boarded the plane. However, we waited anxiously while they called up other groups. After a while it appeared as though they had stopped calling people up. They were constantly being overwhelmed by several others that were on standby for the flight after having missed an earlier one trying to find out if there was any possibility they could get on the flight. Their policy, however, was that passengers booked on the flight had precedence over those that had been booted off an earlier flight, even if it was purely the airline's fault! In the position I was in, I was obviously glad this was the case, but looking back I find it rather disturbing that those that are affected just get constantly treated so shockingly and without any consideration whatsoever. It's as if their sole priority is to reduce the number of bad experiences and not dampen the effects in any way whatsoever!

The reality started sinking in when I saw the gate close. They carried on hacking away at their computers as though there was still the slightest possibility they could make something happen, but I knew the truth. It wasn't long before the plane took-off and we were left behind. Yet still they were busy hacking away!! Finally I lost my patience and I was determined to get anything out of them. They told us we could either take the route via LA and arrive in Vegas the following morning or be put on standby for the last flight to Vegas at 22:25. Unfortunately, if we took the standby option and missed it we would also miss the LA flight and only end up arriving in Vegas Saturday evening as all the flights till then were also fully booked. And the later flight was also likely to fall under the exact same overbooking issues we had just experienced! So we were advised to take the flight to LA.

They seemed to take a ridiculously long time to book us onto this LA flight and in that time they finally realised we would be able to make this US Airlines flight to Vegas at 20:30 that evening. However, they couldn't have done a better job at screwing that one up royally. They were on the phone with someone (turned out to be the same person we were to next bump into) to try get us on that flight. They took such a long time and it appeared as though it was US Airways being a pain, but as it turned out it was actually the guy at our end... Only after booking the tickets were we told we had to run all the way to the other terminal. It ended up being about a 10 minute rush to catch the flight. But we arrived only to hear that the gate was closed. Oh dear! Apparently the US Airways staff had told United that the gate had already closed even when they were attempting to purchase the tickets! How far can these guys go?!

By this time time were four of us doing the running up and down together. There was my aunt and I, Sarah who was in the exact same situation as us and was missing a huge party that night due to this gemorse and Yousef who had missed the flight by such a small margin and was trying to follow the same flights we were being put on. When we got back to the United counter we had to start all over again as we couldn't get though security back to those who were originally dealing with us. We got this guy that I swear didn't have an ounce of personality. We would tell him to contact Michelle Hughes who was trying to help us at first, but he would give absolutely no response. But he heard us and eventually we figured he was listening. I don't even feel like getting into this guy any more as I'd just explode.

After waiting patiently yet again he finally came back to us, with the wrong flight!! Sigh...

It took him a while, but finally we got everything sorted out and we were on the flight to LA. We had lunch, waited a bit, boarded the flight and arrived in LA past midnight. You can just imagine what time we arrived at the hotel! And we were to catch a 06:30 flight to Vegas, leaving us about three hours sleep...

Never again! I will remember next time to never ever, never take United Airlines again! Unfortunately my flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt is with them when I return home and I have these $400 vouchers with them, which wonderfully last for only a year.

100 Prisoners

There are 100 prisoners each with a unique name. There are 100 boxes, each one containing a single prisoner's name such that every name is in exactly one box. Each prisoner has to select and open up to 50 boxes and if his name is not in any of these 50 boxes then all the prisoners are executed. They go through this process one at a time, each prisoner finishing before the next begins. They can communicate to come up with a strategy before beginning, however, they cannot communicate in any way after the process has begun.

What is the best strategy that results in the prisoners' greatest chance of survival? Hint: It is greater than 30%. And if that's too easy, prove that this is the optimal strategy.

Comcast Bandwidth "Abuse"

Who would have thought that leaving South Africa for the US would result in yet more bandwidth woes! Why yes, it's true...I've hit the "cap". I just got a call from Comcast this morning saying that I exceeded the limit last month and that I was being given a warning.

Let me get one thing straight first. The cable here is *far* better than the ADSL back in SA. Don't get me wrong there. However, they could be a little more upfront about their restrictions. Apparently I was in the top 0.1% of their bandwidth users last month. All I was told that if I return to this top 0.1% bracket again within the next year then my account will be suspended for a year. Wow, that's quite harsh don't you think? Especially when you consider that no-one can ever know what that limit is in terms of an actual bandwidth figure and that as much as a tried the guy refused to even give me a ball-park figure. All he said was that I had to "drastically reduce" my usage and that if he gave me a figure he would be fired.

I was rather surprised at how interrogating he was. Some of the questions I can understand, such as asking if I had a wireless network and whether or not it was secure. When he asked what I was doing that was causing such excessive usage -- man, I got a little annoyed. I told him straight that it was private. What are they going to benefit knowing what I use my line for?

The good thing is they have plenty DSL providers here. Hopefully they'll be more customer-friendly. Yes, they charge a bit more, but the other stories I've read about Comcast are a little saddening (even though they don't come close to the evilness of Telkom!) such as sending forged TCP RST packets and throttling encrypted traffic.