Two years ago I participated in a programming competition in University Tenaga Nasional called UNITEN MULTIPROG 2007. MULTIPROG is short for multimedia and programming, as it was a competition for multimedia and programming students.

Recently I received an email from a UNITEN professor asking me if I could spread the news about their upcoming competition, the UNITEN MultipProg '10 Competition to be held on Saturday 6th February 2010:

MultiProg ‘10 which is organized by College of IT, Universiti Tenaga Nasional is a Multimedia & Programming Competition. This event is open to all Institution of Higher Learning (IHL) and schools in Malaysia. The objectives of the competition are:

• To serve as a national platform for undergraduates and secondary school students to demonstrate and observe the creativity and innovativeness in multimedia techniques and programming skills.
• To encourage creative thinking, foster spirit of teamwork and generate inspired graduates.

This competition is divided into 3 categories :

• Programming Category (Open to all IHL undergraduate students)
• Montage Design Category (Open to all IHL undergraduate students)
• Poster Design Category (Form 4 & Form 5 students)

Prizes

Prizes for each of the categories:

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More photos available.

Lots of familiar faces from the local PHP scene.

Alwin Chan, and Raj Kissu and myself teamed up as team "Paamayim Nekudotayim", which I had no idea how to spell (and pronounce) throughout the competition.

Though the event had some hiccups, I believe it ran quite well. Having been to other programming competitions, I believe this one had to be one of the most accommodating. Food and drinks were readily available throughout the competition, though they might not be suitable for you vegesaurs out there. The selection of food, went from proper meals to snacks, and the drinks were nicely chilled in a fridge, which was nicely positioned near us.

Support the organizers! I believe they did a great job!

Congrats goes out to Alwin Chan and Raj Kissu as well.

Team Paamayim Nekudotayim FTW!

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This competition conflicted with the eGenting Programming Competition, so I had to make a decision. Have a chance at possibly winning first prize again at eGenting, or risk the safety net and go into uncharted territories (at least for me) that is Singapore, and push myself to the max.

Even though it's so very near this was my first time I visited Singapore, and I am quite impressed with it. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the field, hell I think it actually does, at least the trees. But once again, this is just from a tourist perspective.

My team members for the competition were once again Kamal, and Kegan from the previous Rails Rumble competition. Together we formed Team RSB, the Ruby Super Brothers (*cough cough*)

Arriving in Singapore, Kamal and myself checked into Carlton Hotel, and lured by the prospects of free Internet, I plugged my beloved IBM laptop into the wall socket, powered it on, and left it alone, while I got comfortable in the hotel room. A few moments later, I returned to my laptop to find the screen completely blanked out. After several minutes of restarting, trying to resuscitate it, I came to the conclusion that it was dead.

My laptop died on arrival to Singapore. How great.

In fact when Kamal put his MacBook charger into the wall socket, it started omitting strange noises, and we deduced that the wall socket must have been faulty.

Later we went to Sim Lim, the Lowyat of Singapore (or so I've been told) looking on trying to isolate the problem, and have it fixed within the day. But that didn't go so well. The repair shop said the mobo was fried and there was not much else I can do about it.

After arriving back from Sim Lim, we talked to the hotel trying to get them to claim responsibility over a faulty wall socket, but that didn't work at all.

Luckily by the end of the day, I was able to borrow a laptop from Kamal's relative and setup a development environment on top of Windows Vista. That was also a first experience for me, using Windows Vista. I didn't have the liberty to install Ubuntu, as I didn't want to mess with the partitions, so I ran the server version in VMware Player. It was more trouble than it looks, perhaps when I release a verbose version of this trip, then you'll see.

Now I had to win first place. To repair my current laptop, and or buy a new one.

The code::XtremeApps:: competition lasted for 24 hour, and was held by the renowned (at least the University, don't know about the school) Singapore Management University School of Information Systems. The campus is really nice, with a very modern architecture.

There was a large number of participants, with over 80 participating teams consisting of 1-3 people each. Surprisingly there were quite a number of girls, and some nice/cute ones to boot. I also noticed that at least half of the participants were carrying MacBooks around, and some were wearing either WWDC shirts or Digg.

The theme for the competition was:

Hospitality and/or tourism services in a participative society.

"Participative society", well that must have flagged something! Social Networking!

Our Team came up with EventPedia.sg, an event aggregation with all the social networking features (save for folksonomy) site for Singapore. During the first round of judging I was quite thrilled that we were able to build a complete site in 24 hours. Minus the tests for it!

Bummed out after staying up for more than 32 hours, we decided to call it quits, and returned to our hotel room for some nice shut eye. But before we could even rest, or at least I couldn't (Kamal and Kegan were already in dreamland), we received a call saying we've made it to the second round of judging the next day. Now I could sleep easily.

I was told that the second round of judging consisted of only 5 teams, so we only had to beat 2 other teams to get third, and another 2 to get first. Victory was so near.

But shortly after arriving, we found out it was 11 teams. Damn. After the judging was completed, we had some time to kill before leaving Singapore, and went to Vivocity.

After arriving home at 11pm, I checked my email. An email from the organizers. We had won co-third place. That is there were 2 teams who had won third place. I quickly went to sleep after that, from a completely exhausting trip.

I am completely disappointed in myself.

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Kamal, Kegan, and Sean and myself were camping out in RSB in Cyberjaya for most of the time. Found lunch and dinner there, though there really wasn't much to eat over there.

Our application idea was to build a contacts aggregator from the various services out there. Be it Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, or your very own blog feed. We dubbed it Reduxbook.

At the start, Kamal handled the server and setting up the continuous deployment via Capistrano. Sean covered the HTML markup and design. Kegan looked at integrating the services. As for myself I hacked away at application's source code.

The first few hours went okay, but as the 24 hour mark came by, we knew we were in a pinch. The last 24 hours was a real adrenaline rush, and it went by really really fast. But we were able to pull it through with an all nighter.

Don't forget to vote for Reduxbook !

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Best part is, I'll get to be using my language of choice, Ruby.

Rails Rumble

Taking place on the weekend of September 8th to 9th, (locally it stretches from 8th to 10th noon), Rails Rumble is about building a Ruby on Rails web application over a weekend. Besides just building you will also have to administer and setup the application on a provided VPS, which you can use till October (sweet). The prizes just recently got announced, and look mighty good.

I'll be participating in this with Kamal and Kegan, whom I've met at the Malaysia Ruby Brigade.

This will provide a good practice for another upcoming competition.

Award on Rails 2007

Award on Rails is a Japanese competition open to international participants, where one builds a Ruby on Rails application. Top prize is 1,000,000 YEN, which translates to 29,964.74 MYR. Talk about alot of money.

The English on the site is broken though.

Deadline for submission is September 25th.

eGenting Programming Competition

Luckily for me, even though as last year's eGenting Programming Competion winner, I can still participate in this, and hopefully bag myself another first place. Well hopefully. The prizes are the same as last year for Students, MYR 6000 and a Job Offer.

Except...I probably won't be attending this one...

code::Xtreme::Apps::

It probably has the most awful name I have ever seen, but this is the one I am truly looking forward for. code::Xterme::Apps is another competition, where I can use Ruby on Rails or the Google APIs and make a web application. The competition is being held in Singapore, so I'll be having a nice trip down there.

Sadly the date clashes with the eGenting Programming Competition, and falls on the 22nd to 23rd of September.

My team members will be the same one from Rails Rumble.

Afteword

Are there any more that I should know off?

Best of luck to all competitors!

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