The (Not) Joys Of Marking

I had hoped to have Challenge 17 marked tonight but a plethora of stack overflows and empty output files (well full of zeros) has delayed me a little. The stack overflows were my fault- I used Visual Studio 8 and one of the linker options lets you specify the reserved amount of stack space. Anything passed by value or defined local to a recursive function makes big demands on stack space. Increasing the allowed size and rebuilding fixes that.

The other problem of zero filled output files troubles me. The one thing you can say with certainty is that no life configuration will ever end up empty. It reaches a stable configuration and never changes but empty it isn't. I'll finish marking tomorrow night for sure and try to get to the bottom of this little mystery.

It may be something I've done- today has been one of those frustrating days where nothing went right! I was working from home and tried remote desk-topping into work using dual monitors for the first time. You can do this with RDP 6.0 by typing mstsc /span from the command line. However mine would not give me a 2560 width only 1500 and trouble shooting showed my RDP version was 5.0. However I seem to be in something like dll hell, neither of the two RDP 6.0 and 6.1 downloads from Microsoft will install on my XP SP 3 Windows. Is there a RDP 6.2 out? I should have stayed in bed!

• Link to Programming Challenge Eighteen Generate 10 maps