On Thu, Jan 11, 2007, Ruby Quiz wrote:
> I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I originally turned this quiz down.  I
> thought it would be too similar to the Scrabble Stems problem we did long, long
> ago.  Ben politely explained that he felt it was different enough though, and
> then sent some guy named Guido after me in a parking lot one night.  That
> convinced me to actually work the problem, and I had a change of heart.  I think
> we can tell from the popularity of the problem that Ben is smarter than I am, so
> I'm glad I did.

Coupla things:

1) Gianni, not Guido.  I can understand the confusion, though, as it was
   dark and probably hurt a bunch.

2) I didn't manage to write a solution to the quiz, despite the fact that
   I had at least a month's time more than most everyone else, so none of
   this smarter business. :)

> I wanted to play though and built a full game interface.  My interface requires
> Unix, because those are the tricks I know.  Here's the start of that code:

<snip>

> This setup code memorizes the original state of the user's terminal, modifies
> that state to raw mode so I can read individual characters as they are pressed,
> arranges to have the terminal settings restored at exit, grabs the escape
> sequence we can use to clear the terminal, and builds a puts() like method that
> works with raw mode.  This code doesn't really have much to do with Ruby.  I'm
> just shelling out to standard Unix utilities here.

<snip awesomeness>

Further proof of #2 above.

Ben