I saw this robot at Kinetica. It was not very impressive. First of all, the hardware seemed poorly designed. It was incredibly shaky. When it drew a square around an image, the result were four wobbly lines that did not even connect.
The software, of course, is the more interesting part - and a complete mystery. They had a screen showing a program doing edge detection or something similar on a face. They had a camera that was supposed to capture visitors and draw their portraits. Other than that, nothing was written anywhere about how the software works.
They had some portraits hanging on the walls that looked really nice. But all the ones the robot drew live while I was there came out as a wobbly mess. Maybe it was broken or something... this was on the last day of the exhibition, it could have worn out I guess.
It still passes through Google's servers and could very well be scanned for ad keywords, stored or processed in any other way. The privacy concern remains.
Trinity College, Dublin is switching completely to GMail mid next week. So much for European universities protecting their students from corporate interests.
My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.
I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.
Does this work in linux??
Most likely - no. Their current three button keyboard is Windows only with a Mac driver currently in development. It's all closed source as well. This is stupid of course as their innovation is in the hardware design, not the driver code, but it probably will take someone to reverse engineer the USB packets used by this thing before Linux support becomes available.
Reduce emails to plain text and attached files. No HTML. Thunderbird is able to sanitize incoming e-mails in that way and I have been using this setting for ages. It works best if combined with the "HTML!" toolbar button available via the Buttons! Add-on. All incoming e-mail appears as plain text by default. When you receive an e-mail that can only properly be viewed as HTML (airline and hotel booking confirmations are frequent offenders for me), the HTML version is just one click away.
With these settings, I must say I have been pretty much unaffected by image SPAM. I was not even aware of the amount of image SPAM out there these days. I do not use any server-side filtering, relying on Thunderbird's built in Bayesian classifier. It's been doing a great job on image SPAM so far. And when it misses a message or two, all I see is a blank e-mail or one with random text in it. The spammer's message goes unnoticed in a GIF attachment that I never get to see.
comparing Jews with pigs
Doesn't Borat compare Jews to the devil, claim they have horns and can turn into all sorts of nasty creatures? I guess that does it for Borat in Australia then.
For those who cannot (*BSD, non-i386 Linux) or do not want to run Flash, VideoDownloader is pretty much the only way to watch YouTube videos. That, and sometimes it actually is great to fetch a video from YouTube for offline viewing, even if you have Flash installed. Sure, the server that the extension uses may go down sometimes, but so what? Just wait a couple of seconds and try again.
Since this is about Visual Basic.NET, why did the Mono guys have to develop a new compiler? If.NET is oh-so cross-platform, the bytecode generated by Microsoft's VB.NET compiler should run on Mono's VM without the need for any kind of recompilation.
The only reason I can imagine for Mono having to recompile the source is that their VM is not compatible with the MS one and their compiler is spitting out bytecode that leaves out constructs not supported by the Mono VM. But then, that's clearly a bug in Mono and the whole compiler is just one big workaround...
Of course, having a compiler that will run on systems other than Windows means that development can be shifted to other OSes, but according to the summary and TFA, that is not what the hype is all about - it's about recompiling source so it will run in Mono.
I know it's tricky to figure out, but calls to free destinations really are free as they do not deduct a single cent from your balance. The topping up you have to do to keep the company in business, but that money is yours to use on other calls. Yes, this is a bit of a catch, I know. But at least in Europe, calling mobiles is not free and many people have friends/relatives in neighboring countries - so calls to non-free destinations are common and you burn through those 10 euros faster than you'd think. And the best thing is that the rates for those other destinations are the best I found so far, so I consider the money well spent.
Betamax have been offering free VoIP calls to something like 30 countries for years now and do not appear to be stopping any time soon. The also give you a free inbound POTS number (with Skype, you'd have to pay a yearly fee for SkypeIn) and since they use SIP technology, you can connect from a free software phone or even a hardware SIP device. I replaced my landline phone with a SIP phone 3 months ago and have never looked back.
There are some quirks with Betamax though:
They operate VoIP services under a dozen or so brand names and each brand has different rates. For an up-to-date comparison, see: http://backsla.sh/betamax
They keep changing rates and the list of free countries, but the core countries tend to remain the same.
To get free VoIP calls, you must top up 10 euros (+GST) every three or four months (depending on which of their brands you are using). Free calls are free calls - those 10 euros you can use for calling other, non-free, destinations. Also, credit does not expire so you can keep topping up until you finally have a use for all that credit (or the company folds;).
There is a limit on the amount of free calls - 300 minutes in a floating 7 day window, though they do not seem to be very exact about this. Sometimes, they screw up and charge for a supposedly free call (at a still impressive 1 cent a minute). But far more often than that, I end up calling for way over 300 minutes per week and still get charged nothing.
They also offer a call-back service where you type in your phone number and the one you want to call. Both phones then ring and a connection is established between them. If both phones would have normally been free to call, this type of call is free as well. There is only a 5 cent or so set-up charge. A minor annoyance is that this gets charged even if the line on the other side is busy or nobody picks up.
This service is actually really handy at work, where SIP may not work due to firewall restrictions. You can still call out by having your office phone be called back.
Finally, all calls get disconnected after one hour. My guess would be this is because with each free call you make, they are actually losing some money and they do not want to keep paying when people forget to properly hang up their phones...
All in all, I am topping up 10 euros (+GST) every few months, am calling family all over the world for free and get much better rates for mobiles and exotic destinations than I have ever seen from any other provider. I wouldn't know why I would ever consider SkypeIn + SkypeOut.
I recently graduated from the University of Dortmund in Germany. I must say that compared to a lot of what I read on slashdot, it's been a great experience and quite well designed. Besides the obvious data structures, theory and programming courses, we also had several projects. During 2nd or 3rd year, we did a one-semester thing in groups of about 8 students. We were provided with specifications and had to develop two applications, one a game and the other a more serious app. The whole cycle was required, starting with annoying UML diagrams and finishing with a presentation of the applications at work. We worked around most of the requirements, such as coding first and then using a program to generate the UML diagram from the source for us - but that was only because the lecturer totally failed to explain the benefits of UML to us. To be honest, while I see the reason to specify interfaces and APIs, I still think UML sucks.
The second project was much better. A whole year, 12 to 15 students, just one application and a very light load with other classes so that we could easily spend 20 hours or more a week on it. This time, we had to start completely from scratch, with just a vague idea of the direction we would be going. Again, there were specifications to be written, UML diagrams to be drawn and reports to be produced. Of course, there was lots of coding, but also all the pain of integrating different modules, testing and bug fixing. In the end, this second project was a great experience. Because we were running things as we see fit, we much better learned that yes, specs are useful and yes, CVS (or any other VCS) is necessary and that no, you cannot depend on anybody else to do your work (or their own, really). I know for a fact that some groups ended up working well into the following summer as they did not get their product done on time. Only this kind of approach will teach you hard reality IMHO. If you know that you will be done by the end of the year no matter what, you do not put as much effort into organizing things properly.
And finally, everybody has to go through writing a thesis, of course, which in most cases is a 9 to 12 month development and documentation project. While it's not cooperative, you get to practice the whole software life-cycle one more time. All in all, I think my university prepared me well for whatever may be next.
Granted, I am not encrypting the *whole* thing, but/home should take care of most of the sensitive data. I am using GBDE on FreeBSD which is strong enough for the weakest point to be the password. Yes, if I do lose the password, the data is unrecoverable. However, a simple way around this problem is to regularly back up the entire partition. The backup should be unencrypted, of course, so that if I lose my password, I can still get back my data. With GBDE, this is easily done. The encrypted data on my machine resides in/dev/da0s1g and after I have typed in the password, the decrypted content appears under/dev/da0s1g.bde - all I need to do is dump that partition.
Certainly, encrypting all other partitions would increase security, but I am feeling pretty safe as it is. Also, FreeBSD is probably obscure enough for most laptop thieves by itself:). One last thing to note is that because the file system on *NIX is well structured, there actually should not be any sensitive data anywhere in/usr anyway - just application binaries and source.
I will... when I submit it this Friday:). I am fixing up some last typos and getting it into shape right now. I'll put it on http://www.fabianowski.eu/, which is an empty website for now.
GPU shader processors certainly are Turing complete and there are plenty of people (ab-)using them for general purpose calculations. See for example http://www.gpgpu.org/. For some types of calculations, GPUs are much faster than CPUs due to their massively parallel processing. In fact, I have written my thesis on that very topic, comparing CPU and GPU based implementations of some algorithms.
Reserve price auctions are a good tool for sellers to find out what the market is actually willing to pay for a given item, while not risking having to sell below the seller's preceived value of the item.
If the seller wants to find out whether their perceived value of the item is too high or not, they should simply make the auction start at that very value. If it's too high, the article will not sell. If it sells, it's not under value as the auction started at the perceived value. Simple and fair. A starting price below what the seller is willing to sell for makes no sense - if you don't want to sell below $100, then don't offer your item below $100.
I remember that some German online auction site used exactly that system - ricardo.de, offerto.de, atrade.de, don't quite remember...
There are two problems with this, I think. One, as a buyer, I want to have a feeling of getting a bargain by jumping in at the last minute and snatching a really cool item at the lowest possible price. eBay in many countries has reserve prices - they are an unfair and IMHO dumb idea that lets sellers start everything at 1 euro (or $1) while not actually selling below the secret reserve sum. It doesn't work in Germany. eBay Germany tried bringing over some ideas from its other local sites and they were met with outrage (for example, at one time, it was impossible to sort auctions by time remaining, in an attempt to discourage people from looking for auctions ending soon and sniping; people hated it and the restriction got reversed).
The second problem is a legal one. I remember eBay getting accused of running auctions without a license, which is not allowed in Germany. They got out of this by arguing that their webiste was not running traditional auctions where bidding stops when no higher offer has been made for some period of time but instead always ends after a predefined interval. This apparently makes a lot of difference in legal terms and allowed eBay to carry on. Now, if they extended the bidding time by 10 minutes after each new bid, they would actually be doing just what a real auctioneer does - and probably get in trouble again, or even shut down.
So, I believe such a change would be hard to do, at least in Germany. And I think that's a good thing. At least for me...
Google also have registered googlesex.com. Maybe the dating service will receive a geek-friendly cybersex upgrade one day where you don't need to leave your chair to check-out your date?
There are separate teams working on KDE and GNOME integration. It just so happens that the interview was conducted with a GNOME on FreeBSD developer, so the focus was on GNOME. Be assured that FreeBSD's KDE integration is very good and will be even further improved on in the future. DesktopBSD, for example, features KDE as the default desktop.
Also, KDE is officially a cross-platform environment, with KDE4 being developed not only on Linux and FreeBSD but also on MS Windows. I don't know what the officiall position is for GNOME, but from what I hear they are a pretty Linux-centric project.
It's interesting to see that the best of the South Pacific universities came 80th in the World Finals.
Actually, Adelaide came 37th.
We (the University of Otago) came 27th back in 2004 when I participated. Whatever others say about the contest, I loved it and certainly enjoyed the trip to Prague.
In 2004, my team won the eliminations in New Zealand and we went on to the ICPC World Finals in Prague. Up to the finals, we were expected to write clever programs using efficient algorithms that ran blazingly fast. Then, at the finals, it was all about hacking up crude semi-brute-force approaches that didn't work efficiently at all but got the job done. We were by far not the only team to do badly because at the finals because it took us hours to figure out that the clever algorithms we were coming up with were not necessary here at all.
So, my advice is, try to find out as soon as possible (preferably before the competition, at the very beginning otherwise) whether they want smart algorithms or just something that works. It can save you a lot of time during the contest.
Online contests are a good practice. For example, the Saratov State University (http://acm.sgu.ru/) has harsh time and memory limits while other contest sites give you heaps of resources to use.
Live online contests are also great fun and practice. I remember winning a T-Shirt and some money at Bitwise a couple of years ago solving some neat problems in the process.
Finally, practice makes perfect. Get old problems and practice, practice, practice,...
As you pointed out yourself, the link you gave currently doesn't load. But whatever issue it is you're having with FreeBSD on the desktop, I certainly don't have that problem. I am posting this on my FreeBSD laptop, through my FreeBSD router with another FreeBSD desktop box next to me. It's all working just fine here. On the desktop as well as on the router.
When I got my TI-89 in 2000, the shop I bought it from offered an overclocked version for a small surcharge. At first, I went with this offer. What I got was a brand new calculator in original packaging that had been opened to install a tiny switch which would enable or disable a capacitor inside the calculator. It did work flawlessly, but I returned it because while opening the calculator, they had slightly scratched the case and who would want to pay big bucks for a brand new calculator with a scratch?
Also, a few years before that, I overclocked my TI-86 in the same way. I removed a SMD capacitor and that made the calculator run at roughly twice the speed. This also meant it drained the batteries at twice the speed. My original intention had been to add a switch, but unfortunately that tiny SMD part just disappeared some day and now I am left with a TI-86 that is useless for the one thing I love to use it for - playing tetris;).
Slashdot Mirror
I saw this robot at Kinetica. It was not very impressive. First of all, the hardware seemed poorly designed. It was incredibly shaky. When it drew a square around an image, the result were four wobbly lines that did not even connect.
The software, of course, is the more interesting part - and a complete mystery. They had a screen showing a program doing edge detection or something similar on a face. They had a camera that was supposed to capture visitors and draw their portraits. Other than that, nothing was written anywhere about how the software works.
They had some portraits hanging on the walls that looked really nice. But all the ones the robot drew live while I was there came out as a wobbly mess. Maybe it was broken or something... this was on the last day of the exhibition, it could have worn out I guess.
It still passes through Google's servers and could very well be scanned for ad keywords, stored or processed in any other way. The privacy concern remains.
Trinity College, Dublin is switching completely to GMail mid next week. So much for European universities protecting their students from corporate interests.
My university is in the process of switching to GMail. The old home-grown system was abysmal at best, but I was simply forwarding all e-mails to my private address and never worried about it. With that system about to be shut down next week, I set up the GMail account I am forced to get today - and I find it really troubling that I had to do so. All I want is to forward my e-mail to my private address again. I have absolutely no interest in Google's services, in their Spam filtering or nifty webmail interface. GMail does offer forwarding. I enabled it and expect never to never in my life visit GMail's site again. But before getting this far, I had to accept Google's terms of service and privacy policy.
I am forced to use the college e-mail address for some administrative stuff. How is it reasonable that this also forces me to accept some third party's terms and rules? If I *wanted* GMail's services, then it is fair game that I would have to accept their terms. But if all I want to do is forward my e-mails and get them off the service as fast as possible, there should be a shortcut way that routes the e-mails around Google's servers, prohibiting Google from having a peek inside. College has picked a third party here and is forcing me to enter into a contract with them. This isn't right.
Believe it or not, Samsung actually make microwaves that can do this. And I have also seen the corresponding barcodes on M&S food packaging.
Most likely - no. Their current three button keyboard is Windows only with a Mac driver currently in development. It's all closed source as well. This is stupid of course as their innovation is in the hardware design, not the driver code, but it probably will take someone to reverse engineer the USB packets used by this thing before Linux support becomes available.
With these settings, I must say I have been pretty much unaffected by image SPAM. I was not even aware of the amount of image SPAM out there these days. I do not use any server-side filtering, relying on Thunderbird's built in Bayesian classifier. It's been doing a great job on image SPAM so far. And when it misses a message or two, all I see is a blank e-mail or one with random text in it. The spammer's message goes unnoticed in a GIF attachment that I never get to see.
Doesn't Borat compare Jews to the devil, claim they have horns and can turn into all sorts of nasty creatures? I guess that does it for Borat in Australia then.
For those who cannot (*BSD, non-i386 Linux) or do not want to run Flash, VideoDownloader is pretty much the only way to watch YouTube videos. That, and sometimes it actually is great to fetch a video from YouTube for offline viewing, even if you have Flash installed. Sure, the server that the extension uses may go down sometimes, but so what? Just wait a couple of seconds and try again.
Since this is about Visual Basic.NET, why did the Mono guys have to develop a new compiler? If .NET is oh-so cross-platform, the bytecode generated by Microsoft's VB.NET compiler should run on Mono's VM without the need for any kind of recompilation.
The only reason I can imagine for Mono having to recompile the source is that their VM is not compatible with the MS one and their compiler is spitting out bytecode that leaves out constructs not supported by the Mono VM. But then, that's clearly a bug in Mono and the whole compiler is just one big workaround...
Of course, having a compiler that will run on systems other than Windows means that development can be shifted to other OSes, but according to the summary and TFA, that is not what the hype is all about - it's about recompiling source so it will run in Mono.
There are some quirks with Betamax though:
- They operate VoIP services under a dozen or so brand names and each brand has different rates. For an up-to-date comparison, see: http://backsla.sh/betamax
- They keep changing rates and the list of free countries, but the core countries tend to remain the same.
- To get free VoIP calls, you must top up 10 euros (+GST) every three or four months (depending on which of their brands you are using). Free calls are free calls - those 10 euros you can use for calling other, non-free, destinations. Also, credit does not expire so you can keep topping up until you finally have a use for all that credit (or the company folds
;).
- There is a limit on the amount of free calls - 300 minutes in a floating 7 day window, though they do not seem to be very exact about this. Sometimes, they screw up and charge for a supposedly free call (at a still impressive 1 cent a minute). But far more often than that, I end up calling for way over 300 minutes per week and still get charged nothing.
- They also offer a call-back service where you type in your phone number and the one you want to call. Both phones then ring and a connection is established between them. If both phones would have normally been free to call, this type of call is free as well. There is only a 5 cent or so set-up charge. A minor annoyance is that this gets charged even if the line on the other side is busy or nobody picks up.
- Finally, all calls get disconnected after one hour. My guess would be this is because with each free call you make, they are actually losing some money and they do not want to keep paying when people forget to properly hang up their phones...
All in all, I am topping up 10 euros (+GST) every few months, am calling family all over the world for free and get much better rates for mobiles and exotic destinations than I have ever seen from any other provider. I wouldn't know why I would ever consider SkypeIn + SkypeOut.This service is actually really handy at work, where SIP may not work due to firewall restrictions. You can still call out by having your office phone be called back.
I recently graduated from the University of Dortmund in Germany. I must say that compared to a lot of what I read on slashdot, it's been a great experience and quite well designed. Besides the obvious data structures, theory and programming courses, we also had several projects. During 2nd or 3rd year, we did a one-semester thing in groups of about 8 students. We were provided with specifications and had to develop two applications, one a game and the other a more serious app. The whole cycle was required, starting with annoying UML diagrams and finishing with a presentation of the applications at work. We worked around most of the requirements, such as coding first and then using a program to generate the UML diagram from the source for us - but that was only because the lecturer totally failed to explain the benefits of UML to us. To be honest, while I see the reason to specify interfaces and APIs, I still think UML sucks.
The second project was much better. A whole year, 12 to 15 students, just one application and a very light load with other classes so that we could easily spend 20 hours or more a week on it. This time, we had to start completely from scratch, with just a vague idea of the direction we would be going. Again, there were specifications to be written, UML diagrams to be drawn and reports to be produced. Of course, there was lots of coding, but also all the pain of integrating different modules, testing and bug fixing. In the end, this second project was a great experience. Because we were running things as we see fit, we much better learned that yes, specs are useful and yes, CVS (or any other VCS) is necessary and that no, you cannot depend on anybody else to do your work (or their own, really). I know for a fact that some groups ended up working well into the following summer as they did not get their product done on time. Only this kind of approach will teach you hard reality IMHO. If you know that you will be done by the end of the year no matter what, you do not put as much effort into organizing things properly.
And finally, everybody has to go through writing a thesis, of course, which in most cases is a 9 to 12 month development and documentation project. While it's not cooperative, you get to practice the whole software life-cycle one more time. All in all, I think my university prepared me well for whatever may be next.
Granted, I am not encrypting the *whole* thing, but /home should take care of most of the sensitive data. I am using GBDE on FreeBSD which is strong enough for the weakest point to be the password. Yes, if I do lose the password, the data is unrecoverable. However, a simple way around this problem is to regularly back up the entire partition. The backup should be unencrypted, of course, so that if I lose my password, I can still get back my data. With GBDE, this is easily done. The encrypted data on my machine resides in /dev/da0s1g and after I have typed in the password, the decrypted content appears under /dev/da0s1g.bde - all I need to do is dump that partition.
Certainly, encrypting all other partitions would increase security, but I am feeling pretty safe as it is. Also, FreeBSD is probably obscure enough for most laptop thieves by itself :). One last thing to note is that because the file system on *NIX is well structured, there actually should not be any sensitive data anywhere in /usr anyway - just application binaries and source.
Software
- Qtopia Phone Edition 4.1.4
- Linux kernel 2.4.19
Hardware- Touch-screen and keypad UI
- QVGA® LCD color screen
- Intel® XScale® 312 mHz PXA270
- 64MB RAM & 128MB Flash
- Mini-SD(TM) card slot
- Broadcom® BCM2121 GSM/GPRS baseband processor
- Bluetooth® equipped
- Mini-USB port
And as Lorn Potter points out in the QDevBlog http://blogs.qtdeveloper.net/, he's got one already, so it must be close to production.I will... when I submit it this Friday :). I am fixing up some last typos and getting it into shape right now. I'll put it on http://www.fabianowski.eu/, which is an empty website for now.
GPU shader processors certainly are Turing complete and there are plenty of people (ab-)using them for general purpose calculations. See for example http://www.gpgpu.org/. For some types of calculations, GPUs are much faster than CPUs due to their massively parallel processing. In fact, I have written my thesis on that very topic, comparing CPU and GPU based implementations of some algorithms.
Reserve price auctions are a good tool for sellers to find out what the market is actually willing to pay for a given item, while not risking having to sell below the seller's preceived value of the item.
If the seller wants to find out whether their perceived value of the item is too high or not, they should simply make the auction start at that very value. If it's too high, the article will not sell. If it sells, it's not under value as the auction started at the perceived value. Simple and fair. A starting price below what the seller is willing to sell for makes no sense - if you don't want to sell below $100, then don't offer your item below $100.
I remember that some German online auction site used exactly that system - ricardo.de, offerto.de, atrade.de, don't quite remember...
There are two problems with this, I think. One, as a buyer, I want to have a feeling of getting a bargain by jumping in at the last minute and snatching a really cool item at the lowest possible price. eBay in many countries has reserve prices - they are an unfair and IMHO dumb idea that lets sellers start everything at 1 euro (or $1) while not actually selling below the secret reserve sum. It doesn't work in Germany. eBay Germany tried bringing over some ideas from its other local sites and they were met with outrage (for example, at one time, it was impossible to sort auctions by time remaining, in an attempt to discourage people from looking for auctions ending soon and sniping; people hated it and the restriction got reversed).
The second problem is a legal one. I remember eBay getting accused of running auctions without a license, which is not allowed in Germany. They got out of this by arguing that their webiste was not running traditional auctions where bidding stops when no higher offer has been made for some period of time but instead always ends after a predefined interval. This apparently makes a lot of difference in legal terms and allowed eBay to carry on. Now, if they extended the bidding time by 10 minutes after each new bid, they would actually be doing just what a real auctioneer does - and probably get in trouble again, or even shut down.
So, I believe such a change would be hard to do, at least in Germany. And I think that's a good thing. At least for me...
Google also have registered googlesex.com. Maybe the dating service will receive a geek-friendly cybersex upgrade one day where you don't need to leave your chair to check-out your date?
There are separate teams working on KDE and GNOME integration. It just so happens that the interview was conducted with a GNOME on FreeBSD developer, so the focus was on GNOME. Be assured that FreeBSD's KDE integration is very good and will be even further improved on in the future. DesktopBSD, for example, features KDE as the default desktop.
Also, KDE is officially a cross-platform environment, with KDE4 being developed not only on Linux and FreeBSD but also on MS Windows. I don't know what the officiall position is for GNOME, but from what I hear they are a pretty Linux-centric project.
Actually, Adelaide came 37th.
We (the University of Otago) came 27th back in 2004 when I participated. Whatever others say about the contest, I loved it and certainly enjoyed the trip to Prague.
In 2004, my team won the eliminations in New Zealand and we went on to the ICPC World Finals in Prague. Up to the finals, we were expected to write clever programs using efficient algorithms that ran blazingly fast. Then, at the finals, it was all about hacking up crude semi-brute-force approaches that didn't work efficiently at all but got the job done. We were by far not the only team to do badly because at the finals because it took us hours to figure out that the clever algorithms we were coming up with were not necessary here at all.
So, my advice is, try to find out as soon as possible (preferably before the competition, at the very beginning otherwise) whether they want smart algorithms or just something that works. It can save you a lot of time during the contest.
Online contests are a good practice. For example, the Saratov State University (http://acm.sgu.ru/) has harsh time and memory limits while other contest sites give you heaps of resources to use.
Live online contests are also great fun and practice. I remember winning a T-Shirt and some money at Bitwise a couple of years ago solving some neat problems in the process.
Finally, practice makes perfect. Get old problems and practice, practice, practice, ...
As you pointed out yourself, the link you gave currently doesn't load. But whatever issue it is you're having with FreeBSD on the desktop, I certainly don't have that problem. I am posting this on my FreeBSD laptop, through my FreeBSD router with another FreeBSD desktop box next to me. It's all working just fine here. On the desktop as well as on the router.
When I got my TI-89 in 2000, the shop I bought it from offered an overclocked version for a small surcharge. At first, I went with this offer. What I got was a brand new calculator in original packaging that had been opened to install a tiny switch which would enable or disable a capacitor inside the calculator. It did work flawlessly, but I returned it because while opening the calculator, they had slightly scratched the case and who would want to pay big bucks for a brand new calculator with a scratch?
;).
Also, a few years before that, I overclocked my TI-86 in the same way. I removed a SMD capacitor and that made the calculator run at roughly twice the speed. This also meant it drained the batteries at twice the speed. My original intention had been to add a switch, but unfortunately that tiny SMD part just disappeared some day and now I am left with a TI-86 that is useless for the one thing I love to use it for - playing tetris