I didn’t succeed in getting in the PHP Throwdown 24 hours competition. I was already registered with my one man team under the name “Shreef”. what happened in the day of the competition is that when I went to start up my computer, I found that the keyboard isn’t working. instead of going to buy a new one, I waited till my younger brother “Mazen” comes back from library so I can give him money to get me a new keyboard (yea, it’s what you do when you are too lazy). I was supposed to be starting coding on 2:00 pm [GMT+2] as I had registered in “Phase 3″ of the competition which starts at this time. my brother came home at 4:30 pm [GMT+2]. I gave him money and he came with the new keyboard at 6:30 pm [GMT+2]. Hmm, the keyboard didn’t work. my brother went to return it back and get another one which should be working (I told him that he should try it before taking it this time). he came back with another keyboard at 7:15 pm [GMT+2]. Hmm, this keyboard isn’t working too. Oh .. the mouse isn’t working too. both of them weren’t working at the same time. I didn’t believe that my sweet LG mouse isn’t working (I love how this mouse looks). Mazen told me that he tried the keyboard before taking it, so the problem is in my computer. I don’t love saying that, but it’s true, my computer got a problem with its PS/2 ports. I didn’t know what should I do to fix it. I didn’t like the idea of taking the computer to one of those computer maintenance companies. they will ask me for allot of money for just changing this small part (some of them will tell me “change your mother board”) . at this moment I got the message and I can see that I won’t be able to do any thing regarding the competition. so I went to watch T.V. . my father was setting there too. I told him about the problem. he is electricity engineer [heavy electricity], so I thought that maybe he can help. my father went to check the problem him self. he didn’t know how we can replace the bad mother board parts with new ones as this needs a specialized electronics guy. he phoned one of his work colleagues to see if they know any helpful idea. his colleague [mechanics engineer] told us about a cable called “2  in 1 UPS”. this cable can be used to make an USB port work like a normal PS one. this looked like a good idea for us. I gave my brother money again to buy a cable like that. it worked this time, but it was 9:30 pm now. so 7 and half hours went since the start of my competition phase. one of the rules of this competition is that you should commit your code minimum every 6 hours through “subversion”. I didn’t do that, so I can see that even if I did succeed in finishing coding my application in this time, my code won’t be approved.

anyway, I didn’t have enough luck to compete this time in PHP Throwdown, but maybe I will try to compete in the next times.
you can check a web page which contains all the blog posts written by the competitors in PHP Throwdown. they were blogging how they are progressing through the 24 hours .. hour by hour.

Related posts:

  1. bye bye my processor’s fan