We have added a new “Round Toppers” section to boiledbeans frontpage. This section shows 5 boiledbeans users who have scored the highest points in the past 15 questions.
Take a look at the “Round Toppers” right below the “Hall of fame” section.

Originally, some users wanted us to give multiple points for “harder” questions. While some others suggested that we turn the “Hall of Fame” section to “This month’s hall of fame” or some such. But, by doing that, we will be unfair to our all time high scorers. Thus this new section has emerged :)

Actually, no. No encoding. We stop a step before that :)
If you look at the right-side bar of this page, below the “Hall Of Fame” section, you can see a new “Runlengths” section.

This new section features 5 hard-working boiledbeans users on the front page, who have the longest chain of right answers.

Let us see Shashank’s stats to understand the feature better

Shashank

3 => 4 => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8 => 9 => 10 => 11 => 12
14
22 => 23 => 24 => 25
27
30
32
34
37 => 38 => 39 => 40
43
46
Shashank’s max runlength = 10

The numbers we see here are chains of question numbers where “Shashank” has got the answer right. The longest chain of right answers has a length of 10. Notice that he has other chains which have lengths equal to 4 and 1.

So, now you know how simple it is to reach the front page of boiledbeans.. just get more right answers in a row than the user with 5th longest right answer chain! Simple :)

Also, please stick to the user names which you prefer to use.

Some of you are facing a lot of trouble with posting comments. They just don’t show up after you post them.

This is definitely a problem on the site, and we’re working to fix this ASAP! Till then, if your post doesn’t show up, please do mail us at boiledbeans[at]gmail[dot]com. We have a way of recovering them from that great /dev/null in the sky, and we will post them up here.

For all of you who’ve lost comments on the past couple of questions, we’re recovering those too. And we’ll be adding them to your scores if you got them right.

Sorry for all the trouble, but this blog, like the tech industry, seems to be governed by Murphy’s law.

Update:
We think we’ve fixed the problem. All your comments (including the older ones) should be showing up properly now. Apologies for the mess, and thanks a lot for putting up with it :-)

**Please register. It hardly takes 30s. **
Please log in each time you post an answer.
The reason: Every time you get an answer right, you will automatically get a point. On the front page of boiledbeans, you will get to see the top scorers, which we will proudly call – “The Hall of Fame”.
Take a sneak peak at the Hall of Fame here!

FAQ

1. I have already posted many answers without registering!
   A. Please register with the name which you were using to post the answers.

2. That user name is taken!
   A. No problem. Register a new user name and tell us about the points which you have not got, and we will add it.

We quiz.

Devadutta and me, we used to engage in this weird activity known as quizzing. Quizzing, if you didn’t know, basically involves a quizmaster (usually a totally pompous guy who’s convinced he’s god) asking a bunch of participants (also totally pompous guys who’re convinced they’re gods) a series of questions. Most of these questions would have absolutely no consequence, no real life value, and were a complete waste of time. But we loved it.

We did show a slight affinity to quizzes with a geeky slant. The more the questions about Google and Star Wars, the more answers we could get. But these so called tech-quizzes are few and far between. So, to attempt to make up for this lack, we have decided to put up a few “tech quiz” questions on this blog.

The rules are quite simple:

• We ask
• You answer
• We tell if you’re right or wrong

So, let’s kick start things off with this one: What is special about this image ?

**Cracked by: Hema, Jabba the Hutt, Bikiran, Abhinav, Mahesh (you won’t have it so easy the next time around, mate), piezocake (lbh frrz evtug), Bigfoot and yaksha. Sandesh **just made it in :)

** Click below for answer**:

This is, obviously, a photograph of a band called Les Horribles Cernettes (a parody band that was founded at CERN). Back in the day, Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an image to post on his newfangled “internet” concept, and used this picture of some of the early members of LHC, thus making this the first picture ever seen through a web browser on the WWW.

Hema, Jabba the hutt, Biki, Abhinav Mathur, Mahesh Herle, BiGFooT, Anuj, yaksha, Sandesh and prabhu_dc