28 March 2008

Another one for Bulgaria

A few days ago I participated in the regional level of the information technology olympiad. I participated with a web site that I and a friend of mine - Hristo Petrov - made together. You can see it right here: http://www.ko64eto.host-bg.info/ (Note: it's in Bulgarian, however, you can still see the design itself). A great web site - I'm sure you'll agree. We've worked hard to make a real best-view-in-any-resolution and not just some small rectangle, that can't fill even the half of your screen if you're monitor resolution is greater than 1024x768. The web site is light, intuitive and doesn't make you bother about anything while you are browsing it.
This article isn't realy to tell you how great my web site was, but to inform you about what happened at the IT Olympiad. Lets start with the fact that there were only 5 web sites to participate. If you ask me - they all deserved 75 out of 100 points or even more (in other words - they deserved to go to the national level) but one single web site, that not only had an awful design, but was made out of 41 PHP files and over 9000 line of code, according to the words of the girl who made it. You can see this particular site here: http://www.gsm.souvl.com/ (Note: it's also in Bulgarian. If you know Bulgarian you may find it helpful to know that the administrator's username and password and both "1", however, the booys that hacked the web sited didn't need that much information). At the end of the contest the jury had to score all of the participants. The first thing I have to complain to is that no actual score had been givven to any of the participants. We were either told "You're going to the national", or "Sorry, try next year". The second thing I complain about is that only 4 web sites had "scored" enough. The third thing is that one of them was the GSM services web site made by that moron Merlin.
After we were told who's going to the national, the jury (actually there were only half of the jury - the other half, including the chairman, had beed gone) hasted into leaving us, giving us no other information. Somehow I managed to get to them and asked them of curiosity what was my score and how come I had less than 75. They answered me that my web site had no speciffically set purpouse (the subject was leisure time, and for one thing I agree - it really isn't speciffic) and that was what cost me so many points, otherwise everything else (coding, functionallity, navigation, design and so on) was perfect. However I didn't get a speciffic answer what my score was.
When I got back home I read all over the rules again and saw that speciffically set idea is scored with only 5 points, and applicability of the web site was scored with 5 more. OK - this makes 90 points. Or does it? After all of that I've figured that the scores were measured by the equation 100 points overall minus 10 points for no speciffic subject and applicability minus corruption is less than 75. That's why I had less than 75, although Merlin had more.
The worst thing is that this is something normal in Bulgaria. And my attitude towards it is that this whole country SUCKS!

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