midtoad's blog

Google Code Jam 2006 used for political purposes

Google is holding an event called Google Code Jam 2006. It's an opportunity for programmers from around the world to show off their skills. Well, from almost all the world. While Google says that people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary, the fine print in their contest rules says that Cash and prizes, including t-shirts, will not be provided to residents of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

This exclusion sounds mean and petty on the part of Google. However, as Google is a U.S.-registered company, it's subject to U.S. laws, so don't blame Google. The U.S. government has enacted a number of laws to punish the governments of countries whose policies it does not agree with, and Google is only complying with those laws. What this contest shows however, is that such laws only serve to punish individual citizens in those countries, and ultimately hurt the U.S. since its laws are used by those same governments as examples of why they need to be supported against the actions of The Great Satan.

The U.S. government would be far more effective, IMHO, if they turned 180 degrees and took every opportunity to help individual citizens in foreign countries.

Working with mySQL

It must be an axiom in computing that everything you try will take twice as long as expected and be three times as difficult as you thought, while being four times as frustrating as you can tolerate and requiring you to peruse five times as much information as you thought reasonable. This was my recent experience with mySql.

More server hiccups

Same issue as my last post, so this time it took less time to track it down...

I entered in my mail server details, replacing 'None' with the relevant info. Since the line wrapped again, with a hard CR being installed by my editor, I moved the comments from the end of each line to their own line. My server then wouldn't start.

After a short hunt, I discovered that each mail variable entered needed a comma at the end of each line, otherwise the server wouldn't start.

Hiccups on start-up of this Frog blog

Not quite a bug report, but a definite gotcha for me...

I installed a new FrogComplete 1.7 package and the server started up right out of the box, with no edits anywhere. Great! That's a fundamentally important behaviour if you want to capture new users. One small hitch, when I added 'frog' to the URL, I got a 404. (i.e. http://domain.name:9080/frog). It was thanks to earlier discussion on this list that I remembered that the trailing slash is needed, and then I got in. But that would have tripped a new user, I think.