I am 0x20 now

Since Saturday I am 0x20 years old. We had small meeting with birthday cake etc. There was no candles on it because it is hard to put so many of them on small area. One friend had idea of putting 6 candles (with only one lit) but rest of company was non-IT so would not catch (there was already problem with “0x20” text on cake)…

The most of fun was with one present which I got week before by post… It had “Open 26th July” sign on it so had to wait. Inside was puzzle made from C code — really hard to solve because source looked like one of contributions to IOCCC (and later I got information from friend that it indeed was based on one of them: gavare/2004). It took some time and 3 persons to solve puzzle.

Completed puzzle with C source
Completed puzzle with C source

Next part was entering source into C file… As I do not know any good OCR software for Debian GNU/Linux I had to type all 35 lines by my own hands. Good that with puzzles there was a sheet of paper with md5sum for each line (I had 5 typos). Resulting source compiled out-of-box with GCC 4.3.1 (but lot of warnings). Output of application does not had any sense to me anyway… But after redirecting to file and leaving for time longer then 2 minutes it finally ended work (after 12,5 minutes). Result was PPM picture with birthday wishes :)

Birthday wishes
Birthday wishes

Some presents are really great :D Thx, Ury!

life