We are back to Delhi. Now a huge task awaits us: we have a massive shopping to do…. Christina has given me a huge list of things to buy for Kyan, Anya and her ;-) And I’ll try to buy the Canon A540 digital camera I’ve been planning to buy for a long time now (yes, I know it’s not the Nikon D80 but it’s waaaaaaaayyyyyyyy cheaper)

Instead of going to Connaught Place and Palika Bazaar, we have opted for Karol Bagh Bazaar. It is supposed to be cheapest there. I’ll let you know…

By the way, we are back at the Grand Inn Hotel and it’s a very good and inexpensive hotel. Definitely recommended :-)

Tonight we are leaving for Mumbai at 20:30 (for a connecting flight) and we’ll be back in Mauritius tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning.

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 :-)