Online Computer Programming Contest

DWITE Spam by Dan
Monday February 27, 2012 At 07:48PM
It has come to our attention that there has been some recent spam sent to users who choose to display their e-mail publicly in their profile. Please note that you may hide your or change your e-mail address in your UserCP settings as well as control what official DWITE e-mail you will receive. To our knowledge our site and database have not been compromised and thees e-mail address where simply taken from user's profiles who had their e-mail set as public. Public e-mails are only shown to signed in users and are encoded with javascript, however, this does not stop determined spammers from obtaining your e-mail if you choose to show it. These spam messages are not coming from the DWITE servers or our AWS based instances.

We recommend the following steps if you wish to reduce this kind of spam:

• Hide your e-mail via the UserCP settings
• Use an e-mail client with a spam filter
• If you get a spam e-mail, make sure to mark it as spam. If you use web based e-mail services such as gmail, this allows your e-mail provider to block the sender and prevent future spam.
• If your e-mail provider supports it, use "Instant disposable" e-mail addresses. For example yourgmailaddress+dwite@gmail.com.
• Filter out or block all e-mails from and to veraappxx@libero.it and veraapia2011@yahoo.in (the source of the recent spam).
• If you relay don't want to hear from us or any one talking about us filter out e-mails with the word "dwite" or "dwite.ca".

Most importantly never give out your DWITE password to any one.

On our side, we plan on implementing the following changes to make sending spam to our users even harder:

• Switching all existing accounts to have hidden e-mails (you will be able to show your e-mail publicly again if you choose to do so).
• Making e-mails hidden by default.
• Restricting logins to only north American IP addresses.
• Report the spam to multiple DNSBLs, Google, and the host responsible for the source of the spam.

Theses changes should be implemented in the coming days, and all current user accounts will be switched to having hidden e-mails in the next few hours.

Thanks,
--Dan

End of Round 5 by Dan
Wednesday February 22, 2012 At 06:17PM
Unfortunately there were some problems this round both before hand preventing the question writers from getting new questions and test cases done in time (leading to old questions being used) and during the round were questions would time out for no reason. All of our question writers are volunteers and it seems this month was the perfect storm that prevented them form completing new questions on time. We decided it would be better to run a "best of" contest then to cancel the contest last minute.

We are still in the process of remarking the submissions and the correct scores will eventually be posted at http://dwite.ca/home/contest/50 (we will make a new news post when the last scores are in). We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience these issues may have caused and we have put plans in place to help prevent these issues from happening in the future.

DWITE will return next school year with the first round in October 2012, however, we encourage students to compete in the up coming CCC and ECOO programming contests. If you have any feedback about the DWITE 2011-2012 contest please use the feedback button on the left or go directly to our uservoice page.

Round 4 Summary by Cyril Zhang
Thursday January 19, 2012 At 07:27AM
Post-mortem is an apt description for this post, just as "death" basically summarizes this contest.

In any case, congratulations to Fan Zhang and Geoffry Song (Team * Star *, Lisgar CI) on prevailing, and being the only team to solve the fourth problem! Daniel Hui (Woburn CI) took an early, commanding lead, and finished in second place. For third place, there was a tie between Hanchen Wang, Peter Chen, Scott Hall, and Austin Chiang (Team FOUR AWESOME DUDES WHO USE THAAAAA POOOOWWWWWAAAAAA OF PENCIL AND PAPER! :D, Earl Haig CI), and Sirui Shen and Kevin Rupasinghe (Team Sirui, Vincent Massey).

If you're not already shell-shocked, you might want to take a look at the solutions to today's problems (http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=30659), because I have a feeling that you'll see some of these topics in the very near future. Pay special attention to the DP on subsets to #4. You'll find that the embedding used in #5 appears in many natural Manhattan distance problems, so please take a look at that too. Contest season is fast approaching, and there is no such thing as too much computer science.

Hope you enjoyed the round. Until next time! :)

3rd Round by Dan
Wednesday December 21, 2011 At 12:22PM
Today is the third round of the 2011-2012 DWITE contest. We have added the D programming language to the judge and their are 258 teams signed up to take the contest today. Make sure to check out the the judge page to see how your language will be complied.

Good luck and have fun.

Round 2 and Judge Updates by Dan
Wednesday November 30, 2011 At 10:48AM
Today is the second round of the 2011-2012 DWITE contest which brings with it some updates to the judge:

The following languages have been updated to their newest version:

• Java
• C
• C++
• Visual C++
• Visual C#
• Visual Basic
• Perl
• Lisp
• Ruby

The following languages have been added:

• Fortran
• OpenTuring

Other changes:

• All languages previously using cygwin are now using MinGW
• Turing now has a more reliable and faster launcher
• Line break issue from last round should be fixed by switching to MinGW

Please visit http://dwite.ca/judge for full details on which version of each language is being used and how it will be run by the judge. Turing users may wish to consider using OpenTuring which maybe faster in some cases but is still experimental.

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