To Srikanth..

..our dear rocket scientist.
Edit: [Srikanth] Thanks a bunch, folks :)

A few months ago, I conducted a Kannada quiz for the Sacramento Kannada Sangha. Since people were fond of buzzer rounds, they requested me to have one. I hate buzzer rounds because it is very hard to arbitrate who hit the buzzer first. To solve this problem, I rigged up a micro-controller based Quiz Buzzer which talks directly to a computer via RS232 and clearly displays which team hit the buzzer first! Since we had a huge screen and a projector set up at the location, the entire audience could see the team number as soon as someone hit the buzzer.

I got some overwhelmingly good response for the buzzer and I decided to make it available for download. You can read more about it here:

KapaLa Moksha – Quiz Buzzer v0.1

This is how the hardware setup looks(ed)

and it comes with software which can display the team number which hit the buzzer first on a Windows based computer. Here is a screenshot

More info and downloads here. It is released under the GNU GPL v2.
All feedback welcome!

If you have not tried the quiz, we suggest you give it a shot before you look at the answers!

There are some unrevealed commands on the terminal which will let you cheat big time. Try and see if you can find them :)

This is one of the shortest paths to finishing the quiz with a score of 18.

Wow! That was an amazing round of live quizzing action! We had 120(and still counting) people taking part and 29 people posted their badges.

A big Thank you to everyone who participated!

We will be posting answers and some more awesome statictics from the event after a few days so that those who did not get to participate, can still give it a shot.

Results

First to finish: gorlock
Time to completion: 35 minutes

Brilliant work gorlock! You have won a Boiledbeans T-Shirt along with 20 points!

Congratulations!

Second to finish: **Dibyo
**Time to completion: 87 minutes

Awesome! Dibyo gets 15 points!

Third to finish:** anon
**Time to completion: 90 minutes (close call ;) )

We would have given you 10 points if you had used your Boiledbeans username. Please get in touch with us at [email protected].

Others who completed:

duriel
username
sidsen
bs
Neeraj
shrik
jane and Anirudh(you both have not posted your badge here. Please do it if you want points. If you have lost it, get in touch with us)

Amazing work guys! All of you get 5 points!

Others who completed with one of more skips:

Name Score
udupendra 17
priyananda 17
Goyal 16
Ananth 15
mach101 15
srikanth 15
varuns88 15
yaksha 14
abhishek 14
keerthi2kiran 14
johnywalker 13
atulmathew 13
bulldozer 12
trinity 12
vinayprasad 12
hema 12
rohan 11
veekay 7

If your score is >=15, you get 3 points, If it is >10 and <15, you will get 2 points. The rest get 1 point.

Others have more than 1 point, but have faild to complete the login step :P
They get 1 point.

Like you can see, the scoring is quite complicated, so it may take a while for the scores to come up on the board.

Do tell us what you felt about the Live Quiz!
Would you like to see more of these?

**Let us know! **Leave comments!

Thanks everyone!**
**

p.s: The quiz is still live. You can take part if you have not.

Boiledbeans Live Quiz, the epic event is here!

You can start the quiz by clicking on the terminal image below. But, do read the rules and info before you start. They will come in very handy!

Rules

• First one to answer ALL questions correctly wins. If no one finishes all questions, the one with the maximum correct answer wins.
• When you reach the end, follow what bbterm tells you to do.
• Points
  First to finish: 20 ( and a surprise )
  Second: 15
  Third: 10
  All others who get at least 2 correct: 2-5 points, depending on how many you have right

Usage Information:

The interface is modeled around a bash terminal. You type a command and hit [ENTER] for it to execute. It is that simple. So, when we say type a command, we mean, type it and hit [ENTER] ;)

• When you type commands, do not add unnecessary spaces. If a command has an argument, seperate the command and the argument by only ONE space.
• Do not use space in your username.
• Do not use special characters
• If you are stuck at some place, type hint
• If you want to skip a question, type **skip
  **And follow bbterm’s instructions. You will loose points if you skip questions and you will not be considered first if someone who finishes later than you has more correct answers! So think twice before skipping.
• If you want to end the game and leave with the points you already have, type **resign
  **and follow instructions

Browser compatibility:

• Works perfectly on: Firefox, IE7 and IE6(please stop using it, for the good of all of us :P )
• Works decently on: Chrome, Safari(including the iPhone version), Opera
• Not tested on: IE5
• Will not work on: Lynx or any browser that does not have Javascript support.

Click on the terminal image below to start the quiz!

Click here to start the Quiz!

Update: To start off, type hint

Update 2: Remember its like a bash terminal. Search for bash commands which does things mentioned in the hint. Like “find what you have in the current directory”.

duriel(5), username(5), sidsen(5), Neeraj(5), bs(5), shrik(5), udupendra(3), mach101(3), gorlock(20) and Dibyo(15)

1. I *hate *the captcha on your comments page. It is disgusting and I want it to be gone.

Can you take it off? (ok.. Please! I said please. Now take it off..!)

A. You can get rid of the captcha all by yourself.

Register and log in, you will not see the captcha. It is that simple!

We hate the dang captcha more than you do, but it works like a charm. Ever since we added it, we have not had a single spam comment. You read it right, not even one.

2. But.. I am posting since forever and I was never a registered user. What will happen to all my hard earned points?

A. If you are registering using the name which you used to post earlier, you don’t have to worry. If you are picking a new user name, let us know in the feedback section and we will move all your points to the new user name.

3. I sent in a guest question and it did not appear on the front page!

A. We screen the questions we get for a certain level of Drama, Intrigue and Geekiness. Apart from that, we don’t post the question if we have seen it on any other blog. Sometimes we get questions that have been asked on Boiledbeans itself. We obviously cannot post such questions.

4. Where is the cake?

A. The cake is a lie!

And, Oh, BTW, Send in your guest questions to [email protected]

By popular demand, Boiledbeans Live Quiz schedule has been changed. It will now be conducted on January 3rd 2009 at 9:30 PM Indian Standard time.

On 24th December this year, we will be reaching an awesome milestone. We will be posting our 500th question!
So, to celebrate, we have put together a live quiz contest and we will be conducting it on 24th December. See below

We have built a very exciting interface to conduct the quiz online and we are sure that you will love it! (Think of it as the Google Code Jam arena for quizzes ;) )

Questions will be a mix of trivia and riddles, so it will not only test your Googleing skills, but it will also test your problem solving skills.

Here are some details

1. Live Online Quiz
2. Link to the interface will appear on 24th December at 9:00 PM IST January 3rd 2009 at 9:30PM IST exactly.
   UPDATE: See this. Date and time changed to January 3th 2009.
3. Each correct answer will take you to the next level
4. The first one to finish all levels wins

A surprise awaits the first one to finish!

So, mark your calendars and keep yourself free on 24th December to take on the rest of bb users live!

P:S: We want maximum number of bb users to take part in this EPIC event ( ;) ), so please let us know if this time/date does not work for you(post a comment). We will see what we can do about it.

Boiledbeans has been featured on QuizBlogs.com, the cool meta aggregator of quiz blogs.

Thank you, Naveen & Sujith!

And finally, the t-shirts are here!

Here are a few (blurry) pics of the final shirt:

We’ll get in touch with the winners really soon to see how we can get the shirts to you folks.

We’re also trying to work out a way to put the T-shirts online in a cafepress style website of some sort so that anyone can get one (without us having to run around for printing them :-) ).