In the distant past, I’d been a very occasional crossword solver. I only ever did the weekday Boston Globe puzzles (which are syndicated from the Universal Crossword), and not with any regularity. Like most solvers, I was pretty bad at them for a while, what with not knowing common crosswordese and tons of bygone pop culture, but I slowly improved over time.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been solving puzzles more regularly and getting better. I now regularly solve the Universal Crossword and the New York Times crossword. The Universal I can almost always completely solve (sometimes I need to Google one or two things if there happens to be two obscure answers crossing each other that I don’t know). I’ve gotten my times down to about 4-6 minutes or so on average, and my best time is 3:19.

The NYT, on the other hand, is still a huge learning experience for me. Those puzzles increase in difficulty through the week, with Monday’s puzzle being the easiest and Saturday’s being the hardest. Sunday is special, in that it’s usually on about the level of a Thursday puzzle, but much larger—21×21 instead of 15×15.

Monday puzzles solve like Universal puzzles for me; Tuesday puzzles nearly so, but they’re slower and take more thinking. A Wednesday puzzle I can finish about 2/3 of the time and get about 80% of the puzzle the other 1/3 of the time. Thursday and Sunday puzzles I can fill in about half of on average before resorting to Google and Wikipedia. Friday and Saturday puzzles are absolute nightmares—I can rarely get more than a small handful of clues without turning to the Internet, and even then, the difficult cluing makes them quite the challenge. But armed with my arsenal of Google, Wikipedia, grep, One Across, OneLook, and more, even the mighty Saturday puzzles fall within an hour or so.

I’ve also been participating in Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest for the past couple of months, ever since I found out about it from reading Rex Parker’s blog (who does an awesome writeup of every day’s NYT puzzle). Matt’s puzzles are a lot like the puzzles from the MIT Mystery Hunt. Each week’s crossword contains in it some hidden word or phrase that is the answer to the puzzle. The extraction mechanisms are different in every puzzle, so figuring them out is a real challenge. If you’re not familiar with Mystery Hunt-style puzzles, go check out Matt’s blog for examples of how previous puzzles have worked. I highly recommend solving his puzzles if you’re at all into crosswords or the Mystery Hunt (and doubly so if you’re into both).

The Saturday of the weekend after the Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament is DASH3 (Different Area—Same Hunt), a Mystery Hunt-like competition that takes place in parallel in multiple cities across the country. Another highly recommended event for avid puzzlers. I’ll be competing in the Boston edition.

There’s not really a punchline to this post, it’s more just my musings on puzzles. Did I mention I like puzzles?

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    printf("%.256s\n", (char *)0xFFFF1600);
    return 0;
}

The output:

Your karma check for today:
There once was was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind,
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
   (C) Apple Computer, Inc.

Note that this only works in OS X 10.4, not in 10.5. I don’t know if it runs on older versions of OS X. I wonder if this message is also on iPods and iPhones.

adam-rosenfields-computer ~$ curl -I slashdot.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:16:23 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001224
X-Bender: Boy, were we suckers!
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

-I is the option for doing a HEAD request instead of a normal GET. So, a quick and dirty script to generate a random Futurama quote is:

curl -I slashdot.org 2>/dev/null | grep '^X-' | grep -v '^X-Powered-By'

This works since all of the quotes are under a header name beginning with X-, e.g. X-Bender, X-Fry, or X-Leela. I’m not sure how many total quotes there are in the database, but you could probably get a good estimate by sampling a large number of times and counting how many unique quotes and how many duplicates you get, and then extrapolating.

The 46V4100 includes the following GPL’ed software: Linux Kernel (no version number mentioned), busybox, and pump (no idea what this is). Under the LGPL, it contains glibc. Other software listed includes Independent JPEG Group Software, Software Developed by the OpenSSL Project for Use in the SSL-Toolkit (SSLeay License), Freetype2, Expat, cURL, and Popt.

The sad thing is, DRM hinders the legitimate users without stopping the pirates at all. In the case of Spore, the DRM was cracked and the game was torrented a day before it released. Countless people have complained over the overly Draconian policies, such as you’re only allowed to install the game a total of 3 times anywhere (even if you uninstall it), and you have to have the CD-ROM in the drive to play.

The fan backlash to this has been incredible. So incredible, in fact, that over 2000 people have given Spore a review of 1 star out of 5 on Amazon. As of this writing, 2005 out of 2202 reviews are 1 star.

I hope this really sends a message to EA: we don’t want Digital Restrictions Management, and we’re going to hit you in the wallet for it. A small number of people boycotting the game for DRM will hardly make a dent in EA’s bottom lime, but a loud presence on Amazon certainly will. I, for one, am not buying Spore because of its DRM.

Here are two polls about DRM:

• ZDNet
• GameFAQs

The ZDNet poll is obviously very biased, since the article in which it appears is strongly critical of DRM. On the other hand, I think the GameFAQs poll paints a very good picture of the situation: most PC gamers have been somewhat inconvenienced by DRM or outright hate it. Where do you stand?

Some other papers about other Google technologies which I also recommend reading:

• MapReduce: a framework for scaling data processing to thousands of computers, based on the functional programming primitives map and reduce.
• BigTable: a database which scales to petabytes of data. Conventional relational databases scale to reasonably large sizes, but not the enormous amount of data that Google needs to work with.

(What, you thought this post was going to be about Chrome?) ]]> http://adamrosenfield.com/blog/2008/09/07/happy-10th-birthday-google/feed/ 0 http://adamrosenfield.com/blog/2008/09/06/pizza-party/ http://adamrosenfield.com/blog/2008/09/06/pizza-party/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:43:14 +0000 adam http://adamrosenfield.com/blog/?p=13
Domino’s Pizza allows you to order pizza over the Internet. For Unix geeks like Cory Arcangel, the natural extension to that is ordering pizza from the command line. Why bother bother dealing with a web browser and all those messy flash applications when you can just type

pizza_party -pmx 2 medium regular

to get two medium regular-crust pizzas with (p)epperoni, (m)ushroom, and e(x)tra cheese? pizza_party is a Perl script which parses the various options and login info and generates a few HTTP requests to the right places, complete with a man page. I’m particularly amused by the line from the README:

if you don’t know how to install Perl modules, you’re clearly not hard enough to be ordering pizza at the command line.

I haven’t tried it out yet, mostly because I don’t have a Domino’s account and I’m not a huge fan of theirs, but I’ll give it a shot next time I’m in the mood. pizza_party requires your username and password, either on the command line or from the .pizza_partyrc file (stored in plaintext), so if you use it, don’t use a password you use for anything else. No credit card information is involved at all, you pay on delivery as usual.

Enjoy!

That’s the right way of doing a search UI. Boardwalk Properties, and its sister sites Cambridge Pads and Boston Pads (and possibly others), managed to do it completely wrong. Instead of storing what page of results you’re looking at a URL parameter, they store it on the server and associate it with your cookie.

To actually browse the pages of search results, the links at the bottom each page for the next and previous pages just link to resultsdb.php?direction=1 and resultsdb.php?direction=0 respectively. It works fine if all you’re doing is going forwards and backwards one page at a time. But these links are just plain vanilla GET links, and they affect the server state. This violates the basic principle that GETs should be idempotent.

This has a number of bad consequences. Refresh the page? Oops, you just advanced to the next page (or the previous page). Try to view the source? Depending on your browser, it might send another GET request, thus giving the source of the next page of search results, and putting you on the wrong page the next time you try to change pages. You also can’t jump to an arbitrary page, you can only move one page at a time.

And since you only have one cookie, you can’t do multiple searches in different tabs or windows at the same time. If you start a new search in a new window and try to change pages in an older search, you’ll suddenly find yourself amidst the new search instead.

I don’t know how they messed up their search so badly; since they’re already running PHP it ought to be trivial to change. Every website developer should understand the basic principle that GET requests should not modify server state.

In my earlier post on Metal Gear Solid 2, I posted a link to a YouTube video. And somehow, through the magic of blogging, Technorati managed to pick up on this and gave this blog its second in-link. I never posted a pingback or a trackback or whatever the latest craze is for interconnecting the blogosphere. Some web crawler managed to find my blog, notice the link (which was to the YouTube video, not to another blog mind you), and decide that this was a blog reaction and post about it.

After grepping through my log files, I was actually a little surprised to find so many different bots crawling my site. In no particular order, they are Googlebot, SurveyBot, BlogPulse, BlogVibeBot, Moreoverbot, and possibly others. I also noticed there were someone was browsing my site using Lynx.

Right now I’m calling this “The Spoony Blog”, named after a famously mistranslated quote from Final Fantasy IV. In the Japanese version, Tellah says something along the lines of “You son of a bitch!” to Edward, but that somehow ended up getting translated as “You spoony bard!”. The line became so famous that in the various remakes of the game, which contained much better translations, the was retained unedited.

If you have a better name for this blog, lemme’ know.

exit(0);