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Building in public 👉 github repo / changelog

God’s Little Toys

God’s Little Toys
William Gibson essay about the tools – “Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating”.

Sudoku Primer

Sudoku
People seem to be searching for information related to the puzzle game called Sodoku, so here we go. The game (officially known as Sudoku) was first popularised by Japan in 1986, but in the past few months it’s been appearing in many newspapers around the globe. The Sodoku surge is primarily the responsibility of Wayne Gould, who wrote a computer program that allows for the easy creation of puzzle boards.

The puzzle itself is relatively simple; the common format consists of a 9×9 grid, that’s further sub-divided into nine 3×3 grids. The object is to fill each column, row and 3×3 grid with the numbers one through nine (other characters or symbols can be used) without any repeats. The game’s difficulty lies in the initial board configuration — both the quantity and frequency of the given numbers. True Sodoku puzzles have only one unique solution per puzzle.

Further Links & Reading:

That’s about it for now. The next thing up will be cryptic crosswords — I’ve been figuring out how to do them over the last week or two. Alanah, Will and I managed to finish off the Globe’s Canada Day cryptic puzzle (it was a little on the intense side of things).

Updates:

Cottage-time

I’m heading up to Will’s cottage for a couple days, I’ll probably be back Tuesday night, so there likely won’t be any updates around here for a few days. Hopefully you can find something else to occupy your time. If you can’t, spend some time on the July Contest. There should be pictures when I get back, the camera still kind of works, it just doesn’t have the lcd anymore.

July Contest: Define Unfusly

This is the story of my new favourite word: unfusly. I’m not sure what it means yet — but you can help me decide.

So how did this word come to be and why don’t I know what it means? The answer is simple: Google. Not that anything Google does is simple, but the origins lie deep in the heart of the Google-plex. Gmail was kind enough to demand that I answer a captcha and produced the word unfusly. It seemed real enough to me — I was under the impression that captchas produced garbage text. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to save the image.

Now I like unfusly, but it needs to mean something. I have some shiny PayPal dollars (Dreamhost gave them to me for telling people about their super hosting abilities) that I’m willing to part with for some solid work. Here are the basic categories and prize-disribution as it stands now:

  • Best Definition of Unfusly – $5
    The one I like the best
  • Best Display of Unfusly – $5
    The best display of unfusly in the real-world
  • Most Professional – $5
    Make me think it belongs in a dictionary

Anything you submit needs to be your own, and if you’re using images they should be hosted on your own webspace or a photo-sharing site like flickr. The judging will be done by me, likely after the contest closes. Which we’ll say is one week from today (July 7th). I’m not likely to change the contest, but like anything in life, it could be subject to radical change with little or no warning. Go nuts.