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Yes! The time has come for Rajiv Perseedoss, Yannick Catherine and Madhav Ramlugun to prove to the world how good they are. The programming contest has started at 10:00 (8:30 in Mauritius) today and will end in 30 minutes.

Then, we’ll visit Kanpur a little thanks to Prof Prabhakar and we’ll get back at 18:00 for the prize-giving ceremony.

Of course, we are confident that we will win :-)

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve uploaded some photos to my flickr account.

STOP PRESS!!! STOP PRESS!!! STOP PRESS!!!

I am happy to tell that our team, The Cool Islanders, has won a magnificent certificate of achievement with an honorable mention. Rajiv, Yannick and Madhav did not come first but achieved something great: they put Mauritius on the world map of the ACM-ICPC Programming Contest. Congratulations to all those involved including the other students, the co-organisers in Mauritius (Anwar, Pascal and Sudha), Data Communications Ltd. (Mr Ganesh Ramalingum and others) and all those in the University of Mauritius.

See you soon in Mauritius…

Today, I woke up at 8, took a quick shower and went to see our 3 young friends. They were still alive after having slept in the students’ dormitories.

At 9:30 we went to the official speeches for the launching of the ACM Programming Contest event.

After lunch, the students started their practice session at the IIT-K computer center. Quoting Mr Tiwari, the Manager:

IIT Kanpur has a 95% Unix and Linux-based computing facilities.

Of course I was thrilled… Bill Gates, hear this: “You only have 5% here…” :-)

By the way, the picture shows a 400-node Sun and HP Linux-based cluster used by researchers throughout IIT.

I can only dream of something like this in Mauritius :-)

We have finally reached the Indian Institute of Technology of Kanpur today after a 4 (or rather 5) hours train trip on the rather excellent Shatabdi Express train (the seats were very confortable and the food was nice)

Rajiv, Madhav and Yannick are going to stay in the student’s dormitories while I have a room in the Visitors Hotel (isn’t life cool?). To go there, I (for the first time in my life) travelled aboard a man-powered rickshaw (and the poor guy asked me Rs. 6…)

India is great! But I’m happy my ancestors decided to come to Mauritius 200 years ago :-)