Ninjas on a Penny Farthing

If you're one of the people I talk to regularily / hang around online in the same sorts of places then no doubt you've heard me talking about the ACM Collegiate Programming competition. If not, the basic gist of it is simple - Teams of 3 compete in a period of 5 hours to solve a set of programming challenges - most heavily algorithms based. You're given one computer to use between the three of you, your choice of 3-4 languages (Java, C, C++ and Delphi - I say 3-4 because Delphi / Pascal is conditional on where you take part) and you then compete. It starts out in regional contests and then proceeds to an international level with teams from each country.

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Like all good spare time projects, my most recent - Marvin - was created to scratch a particular itch. I'm usually a fairly regular visitor in a particular ruby oriented chat room. One of the things that we'd talked about adding as a group was an IRC bot - in particular, something which would let us keep logs (with a searchable web UI) as well as a few other niceties (e.g. a Twitter bot). With that in mind, I spent some time hacking on it. To be brutally honest I wasn't a bit fan of all of the

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