Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

It’s been a long time, I had no motives to write here! Lots of deeds, chores and episodes come and go, day after day, week after week! What the Frak? Where are we headed to? I have lots of work left on the table, I do not know when they are enough fortunate to be done! I do not know, why life is like this! I have decided to put some time for myself and not to go for all these frakking never ending works, all the time. I have started learning how to use CUDA, for programming my Geforece 8400 GPU (just for fun and not a real application, for real applications I’ll use a GTX 260 or better). It is fun, and great. I have also decided to take part in TopCoder’s CUDA Marathon Matches. I’ll write my first CUDA program in the following week! I also decided to port almost completely to Ubuntu. I should find the proper time to install it on my box.

Have you ever heard of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware? Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are high-performance many-core processors that can be used to accelerate a wide range of applications. Recently many applications have been developed using GPUs.

It’s not a long time that NVIDIA released the 1.1.1 version of a media converter, called ‘badaboom‘. It uses CUDA-enabled GPUs for video format conversion. In this approach, the required time for video conversion is reduced and in the meanwhile you can use your CPU for your everyday work. As NVIDIA stated before, about badaboom, you can experience the blazing speed of the first ever GPU accelerated video transcoder! Powered by NVIDIA CUDA Technology. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architechure) is a parallel computing architecture developed by NVIDIA, which is the computing engine in NVIDIA GPUs, and is accessible to software developers through standard programming lanuages.

If you want to download the free 30-day trial version go http://nzone.download.nvidia.com/nodlm/Badaboom_Setup_1.1.0.132_Trial.exe.

How, you think, one would compare each programming language to a religion! Here you can find one interesting page by ‘amz’ (Rodrigo Braz Monteiro) titled “If programming languages were religions…”. It _is_ nice. So, try not to carry jokes and tricks with C++ too far, or you’ll be found dead the next morning in the gutter.

Mike Vanier have done another comparison of a more or less same kind but between programming languages and cars. It is also interesting. Find it here.

I do not know if you recall the announcement in my homepage’s News section about GCJ, here I’m discussing an issue in a bit more details. The Google Code Jam, unlike previous years which were used to be held via TopCoder, has been started but this time with the contest management system they have provided themselves at Google. In their eligibility rules they have stated that residents of countries under U.S. sanction programs could not participate in the contest. As a result no Iranians could take part in the contest. It’s a shame for Google, many arguments and discussions have been made about this issue. Some could be found here and here.

Jelani Nelson a rated TopCoder member boycotted this programming challenge. You can read more about his point of view in the above links and here. It’s a nice move in my opinion, I admire him.

This year, the same as the previous four years, the coding challenge was again held in IAUM. It was great. Last year I could not go to Mashhad to be in the Contest Site, as I had to finish my MSc thesis up for the defense. After two semi-final contests between 46 contestants, who were qualified through a number of online contests, the Great Finale held on Friday August 15, 2008. This year I was in the Scientific Committee and the Judgment team. But due to the lack of enough time I was facing as ever, I could not be of much help. I just helped in the idea for some problems and was present in the contest site doing the judgment runs and stuff. But I should really thank Yaser and Hadi for their great efforts on preparing good challenging problem sets. Here is Hadi’s post in his weblog about IAUM-CCC 5, it’s nice. The technical committee, the same as last year, have done a great job on holding this contest making everything neat, from the contest site to all the lateral stuff.

For more information on the contest, problems and results refer to homepage and blog. I’m including some undersized pictures, captured by my camera, from the contest here:

More photos also are in my repository. If you want, just leave a comment or email me.