Is anybody participating?

I just downloaded question one, woah! I’ll send it home for later.

I can’t get hold of question 1 and I just downloaded question 1 and was using spotlight to find the files it wants and I can’t open any of the files. None of the files, even ones I’m not meant to be using have any file length to them!

Mark

Worked fine for me. Bunch of files, and quite a deep directory structure.

Me too, with ‘quite a deep directory structure’ being a huge understatement in my case.

Wow, that’s going to take far too much time.

“Work smarter, not harder!” [tm]. Harhar.

Yep I got a bunch of files and was definitely working smart on them but absolutely none of the files would open. Tried the PDF files in Preview, Acrobat & Acrobat Reader and all say that there was nothing to show. The files show as having no file length either. Tried downloading again and still the same thing unfortunately.

Wouldn’t have taken too long to do I don’t reckon but can’t be bothered if I can’t even download the files

Is there a prize at the end or what happens if you get the question right?

Best wishes,

Mark

Okay, never mind. Got them to open in the end using Textwrangler.

I’m guessing that the PDF files are being created dynamically and so are not being correctly created to conform with a standard PDF or something. Opening them in Textwrangler showed them fine. Have entered my answer. Only took about 2 minutes to do it thanks to Apple Spotlight!!

Best wishes,

Mark

All the files are plain text…no matter the instructions.  .pdf, .doc, .xml, .js, etc..just open them all with your fav text editor.

Though, manually opening each and doing the puzzle isn’t necessarily the “smartest” way to go.  Some coding can come in handy here.

Well I don’t know what coding you could do to handle that. All I did was used spotlight to find the necessary files, 16 in each case and then did the sums the normal way. Hope I got it right.

Best wishes,

Mark

Well, you could use a few lines of Perl or some other scripting language, together with a few regular expressions.

How long would that take though? It only took me 2 minutes anyway so with my exceptionally limited knowledge of regex would have probably taken me about 6 months!!

Mark

Just out of interest anyone done the first question - the robot?

Just wondering if the dimensions they give are x then y or y then x?

Their image that they show doesn’t really match up with the numbers I was given. They have a wide image and quite short but if the dimensions they have given me are correct then I will end up with a grid that isn’t as wide as it is long!! I know the numbers are auto generated and are random depending upon numerous factors but it would be nice to know if they are using x & y or y & x!!!

Cheers,

Mark

P.S. The path and letters one was really easy. As said before using the find on OSX and just changing the label colour on the found items was simple enough

Well 2 out of 2 so far so I’m happy!!

I’m guessing it will probably get quite a lot more difficult as the days go on though!

Also is this definitely provided by Google as I think anyone can get one of those sub-domains to host google apps on can’t they?

Cheers,

Mark

It’s legit allright: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt-update.html

Aha thanks Ingmar. Guess I will try and carry on then. Reckon they are going to get a lot lot harder though.

Best wishes,

Mark