I could be wrong, you know.
You are currently browsing articles tagged News.
Some statistics of Google Summer of Code 2008 have been released. Sri Lanka is placed 9th in the top ten countries by the number of applications and by the number of accepted students.
Seems like Sri Lanka is way into open source development and probably this trend will increase.
The Sri Lankan Olympiad in Informatics Screening test which was supposed to be held on 8th March has been postponed to 15th of March. All participants eligible for the test will be notified.
Link: http://www.ioi.lk
IE8 Beta 1 is now released and it has a couple of cool features, like Activities, AJAX Navigation, Web Slices and Favorites Bar. And it also gives more support for developers. ( 
let’s hope this time web designers won’t have to change everything to work on IE).
On the other hand Firefox 3 Beta is also available. This will also have some cool features and bug fixes. It will also give save as PDF option for web pages and an improved download manager.
However, though they say that they have many new features, both of these releases don’t seem to give many useful new features and are more focused on fixing previous bugs, such as memory leaks in Firefox.
Tags: Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, News
Google is working on a project to develop renewable energy which is cheaper than coal. They have named this project as RE<C (Renewable Energy < Coal): a cool way to name a project.
Although there are many similar projects on finding new sources of energy, Google believes that those projects don’t get enough funding and some are not commercially viable since they are too-risky for traditional investors.
Google engineers will be working on this project and they plan to hire new engineers too. Google expects to make use of their information tools to develop cheaper renewable energy. They also want to integrate this project with RechargeIT project.
They will be spending a serious amount of money on this and they want to get results soon, not in decades as they say. So let’s hope they come up with an environment friendly energy source which is cheaper and practical in the near future.
You can read more about this project on Google.org : http://google.org/rec.html
Now there’s an invisible mode in Google chat. Now in the web chat there’s an option to be invisible so that others won’t see you as online but you’ll see them (not if they are also invisible ).
I can see them
But they can’t see me 
Oops, they still have it only in the web chat (one you get through Gmail) . I wonder when they will integrate this feature and also the group chat and smiley’s (these are available in the Gtalk gadget), to Gtalk client.
Sri Lankan Informatics Olympiad 2008 preliminary selections have started. You should register at the new web site (http://www.ioi.lk), and submit the solutions to the set of problems posted – you’ll get access to the problems once you have registered. Then there will be another screening test for those who do well.
The programming language availability has been changed this year:
This year’s IOI will be held in Egypt, so if you’re interested in competing and winning medals (or winning a free trip to Egypt ), complete the registration soon.
CodeJam wasn’t held this year (only CodeJam Latin America), after having many codejams last year.
Google has announced they’re plans about Codejam, and posted some sample problems. It seems like these problems are a bit different form TopCoder as points will be received for the number of test cases solved – not 100% or 0%.
Everyscape is a virtual version of real world. You can walk through it as in a computer game. The demonstration in its homepage gives a tour of San Fransisco’s Union Square.
The 3D virtual world is created by stitching photographs and calculating camera positions. Then these data is used to create a basic 3D structure of the landscape and a 3D like view of the pictures is generated.
Have you heard of Powerset (Not in wikipedia yet ). It is a new search engine which is still under development. It is supposed to be released soon – in September!
This search engine process the search query and identify what the user is looking for (yes, you can ask direct questions 
) and matches the web pages which have what you are looking for – not just the pages that contain the words you typed-in.
This is going to be revolutionary if it works.
They have given some samples :
This is what you get with Powerset and this is what you get with Google.
Another example from Powerset.
Again Powerset vs. Google + Live + Yahoo.
Oops!!! Google’s, Live’s and Yahoo’s first search result is about Powersets blog.
This is what Financial Times and New York Times has to say about the new comer.
However, Powerset might not beat Google, because Google now has so many features and they too are working on Natural Language processing. Who knows what they might come up with (speech recognition, track the search history and be specific to each user, etc.).
Any way this is going to be a powerful tool for everybody looking for information and answers. Sign up by providing your email and you’ll get the latest information about this search engine.
Hope this will go live soon!
Tags: News
If you are a high school student and want to test your Programming Skills then goto SLOI web site.
This competition focuses on algorithmic skills and you can use either Pascal or C/C++ to solve problems. The duration of the competition is five hours and the contestants will be given three problems to solve each carrying 100 marks
In order to participate in this competition, to be held on 22nd April (postponed), you need to register in the above web site and solve some of the practice problems.
This is year’s International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) will be held in Croatia, so this is a great chance for you to show your programming skills to the world.
USACO Training Gateway You’ll find nice tutorials and problems divided based on difficulty level on this site
Recent Comments