franklin · yesterday's greater new york regional acm programming contest went off almost without a hitch. a well-intentioned sysadmin named franklin provided us with a bit of excitement, though. apparently this was franklin's first experience with an acm programming contest. i had given him the judge's test data to load onto the judging server. when franklin asked when he should copy this to the contestant machines my heart jumped a bit, and at that point i thought i made it clear that this was the official judging data and that it should not get anywhere near a contestant machine! i thought the part about guarding it with his life would have gotten the message through.

about thirty minutes into the contest the regional director appeared in the judging area with the most serious look i've ever seen on his face. "ron, i need you now, we have an emergency." at first i thought he was joking. i mean, it's a programming contest, how can you have an emergency? i followed him out to one of the contestant stations and he had the contestant pull up a directory in one of his shares. either i hadn't gotten through to franklin or he'd given up his life as i'd asked, because the folder open in front of me was displaying all the judging data for every single problem!

i later learned that franklin was apparently just trying to save the contestants from having to type in all this test data themselves. how nice for them. i don't know how many teams managed to copy the files to a local drive before we blew it away on all their shares, but i'm certain some did. i'm just thankful that when franklin asked whether or not the solution files were supposed to be copied too, i had casually told him, "no, we shouldn't need those."