The truth of life

club.live.com is a harsh mistress.

Okay, not all that harsh but there's a truism about it that I didn't realize. Looking at the high score tables, the highest scorers all have very close scores (18000-19000 points). I discovered this around the same time that Flexicon told me that I had played all of the puzzles it had available and that I should check back later to see if they'd added more.

So that means that even if you played every game as much as possible, you ain't gonna break 20,000 points right now. So the Zune and the Xbox are currently outta reach.

All is not lost, though. I did notice that a couple of older games have different scores for "best all time scores" and "best scores this week". That means that new puzzles are indeed being added and you'll just have to play all the new puzzles week by week until you get enough for your coveted XBox.

Although you probably shouldn't go for the XBox or Zune, as they're not the best value. The best value is the Vista Ultimate at 6,000 points. New copies of Vista Ultimate are selling for $150-$200 on ebay. That means that if you just spent all your points on Vistas and ebayed 'em, you'd have enough for an XBox or Zune much faster than if you'd earned the points to get one directly.

I wish I'd thought that through when I started. I should've ordered a Vista and ebayed it, thus giving me enough for two wireless joysticks and some leftover cash.


Ahh the wonderful world of playing the metagame - the game that lives outside the game :)

It never hurts to ask

Well, I managed to get myself another 2500 club.live.com points and ordered my second wireless XBox joystick for my Windows game machine in the living room. Happy happy.



On the "it never hurts to ask" front, I noticed a while back that Microsoft bought up the company that makes iView Media Pro and is repositioning it as part of their Expression suite. I had a review copy of iView from a couple of years ago. I really like the product and I still use it today as a general purpose clipart/icon browser. It's not perfect but IMHO it beats the pants off Adobe Bridge, which IMHO is about on-par with Windows Vista Explorer as a picture browing/organizing tool.

But I did like iView, mainly because you can build browse-able databases from folders full of clipart or icons or sounds or fonts. These databases contain all of the thumbnails and filenames and info and such so searching and browsing graphics is fast even if you have lots of 'em. And iView made a major upgrade that I didn't buy before MS bought 'em out and rebranded the product. On the new site, MS is making it clear that owners of the latest iView will get a free upgrade to the newly-branded product until the end of July. Since my product was marked NFR and was a version out of date, I didn't hold out hope for a free upgrade, but I gave 'em my magical unlock code anyway.

The system came back with "You should hear from us within 24 hours", which is web-speak for "A real person is verifying these serial numbers", so I was hopeful.

Wonder of wonders I got the magical unlock code and a free upgrade to the latest version. So I'm happy. It's a minor victory but it's something.

Two things

First off, somebody managed to launch all of the rockets in Countdown Dice, a feat that I thought was nigh-impossible. To see the playback, check the top score for June 26 in the high score table.

I was thinking of making an award for launching all the rockets, but I thought there was no point. Now I see that it might be necessary.

Edit: Shelly insists that he cheated. It is theoretically possible to cheat at this game, so it's a possibility.



Second, it looks like Microsoft refilled the prizes at club.live.com a day after I settled for some second-tier stuff. Drat.

I was just playing it safe. I'd been involved in stuff like that before (specifically freebie.com), and I ended up with a ton of points but nothing to spend 'em on. Worried that I was gonna have to settle for a ton of ringtones or some crap like that, I grabbed the headphones.

But now the wireless Xbox controller is back. So I've gotta get my score back up.

The Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 aren't back, but that doesn't surprise me. They seemed a bit cheap points-wise. Assuming a point is worth one cent (which appears to be about its value in the prize-pool), Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 were selling for about 1/3 of their retail value. I was wondering if they were gonna bring 'em back at a higher price, but that'd probably bug people, so they got rid of 'em.

I already got Vista anyway, so it doesn't bother me. I do, however, need another one of those wireless controllers.

Well drat

Wouldn't you know it. I finally get enough points to get the freebie I want on club.live.com and it sells out. They're now out of wireless USB joysticks (what I wanted), Vista software, and a couple other gizmos.

I suppose I could wait to see if they get restocked, but there's also the chance that the stock could deplete even more until all that's left are ringtones and T-shirts. So I cut my losses and grabbed some free headphones. My computer headphones are getting a mite threadbare, so it's not a complete loss.



I'm reading and quite enjoying a couple of books by Stanislaw Lem. Apparently he's one of the most popular SF authors ever, although he's almost unheard-of in the US. His eye for clever plotlines really is the best I've seen. Most short-story collections I've read are hit-n-miss, but he's thus-far batting 1000.

I'm rather surprised that he's the author of the glacial (at least the Russian version) "Solaris". It's surprising because the stuff I've read of his skews much closer to Douglas Adams than Arthur Clarke.

I'm also reading "Day of the Triffids". I always heard that the book was much better than the movie, so I gave it a shot. It's definitely one of those books that grabs you from chapter one and doesn't let go. Good fun so far.

I find that when I'm in review-writing mode, I do a lot of recreational reading, and the lighter the better. I think I just need to cleanse my palette.

Wow, that was a surprise

If you recall, I recommended Microsoft's http://club.live.com to play some games and win some prizes in the name of MSN search pimpage.

Well, the following night (Wednesday) I managed to rack up 2500 points playing the Flexicon game, so I ordered my prize, a wireless XBox controller (the PC version, which comes with a USB receiver dongle and driver disc). The terms clearly stated that I should wait 6-8 weeks for my prize to arrive.

Surprise of surprises, my controller arrived YESTERDAY MORNING. It works great and is perfect for playing games on the computer hooked up to the downstairs TV.

I've had good luck with Microsoft's shipping in the past. When I order something from 'em with a product rebate, I typically get the rebate in two weeks (compared to the typical 2-3 month cycle).



Note that if you play Flexicon once and it takes you forever and you think there's no way you could beat it enough times to win a prize, note the following:

1. The puzzles get easier as the words repeat. It looks like they have 2-3 clues per word that they cycle through. You'll eventually get the hang of it. I can typically beat a puzzle in 5 minutes.

2. Have a tab opened to http://www.oneacross.com/, which is a crossword helper that lets you enter partial words and get some help.



They've added some new games to the site now, like a couple more word games and a trivia game. Thus-far I haven't found one that can net you points for your time investment as well as Flexicon, but if you find a good one, lemme know.

More Misc

A couple of bits.

First off, I have to retire a trophy. It's always been a troublesome one, and I just realized the reason that it's troublesome. It's the award for making a "perfect score" in ConFusebox.

Problem is, I cannot reliably predict what a perfect score will be. The way I generate a puzzle is thusly. . .

1. Generate a solved puzzle.
2. Randomly rotate the pieces to scramble the puzzle.

During step two I keep a count of how many rotations I make, and I make allowances for some things (like rotating a straight piece twice puts it right back where it was, rotating a plus-shaped piece has no effect, etc.), and I come up with what should be the minimum number of rotations necessary to get it back to the solved state.

Problem is, the solved state from step one isn't necessarily the only solution. As some folks have noticed, you can play the same puzzle more than once and can sometimes come up with different solutions. And some of these solutions might require fewer moves than are required than the original one I calculate in step one.

So it is indeed possible to get *better* than a perfect score, but that's because the solved state isn't necessarily the best solution. The only solution would be to do an exhaustive brute-force attempt at creating all possible solutions to a puzzle, then calculating the shortest solution from the possible ones.

And if you think showing a Zwinky-ad is annoying, just wait until I lock your browser up for a half-hour calculating all possible solutions :)

So I'm going to retire that award.

Sorry about that. I'll try to add some new ones in its place.



I finally gave up and shut off Aero on my Vista machine. It's pretty but it's a hog and some software (specifically Fireworks CS3 and Illustrator CS3) still have some serious problems with it.

Not that that matters to you in the slightest.



My favorite new cheap beer is Budweiser Select. It's inexpensive (same price as normal bud around here) and it tastes good, a bit like Shiner Bock. I've heard that the new Michelob Ultra Amber is also quite good, but I haven't tried it yet.

Being on Weight Watchers, it's two WW points per can. Becks Lite is even better at one WW point per can, but Becks Lite tastes a bit like liquid skunk filtered through an old sock.

I realize that I can drink twice as much Becks on Weight Watchers, but I gotta draw the line. Bud Select currently casts the best balance in satisfying my love of yummy cold brewskis, my love of all things cheap, and my need to not get any fatter.

Although I went to the doc a bit back for my "last checkup before changing over to an even cheaper insurance company that doesn't even pay for freakin' checkups" checkup and they pronounced me in the pink. Although they said I need to avoid white bread-based stuff even more than I already do because my something-or-others are a mite high.

Which is weird, because I've been eating the whole-wheat bread ever since I left my parents' house, which is where no bread other than white was ever consumed.

Oh well. If that's the only medical advice I gotta follow, I could certainly have done worse.

Not that that matters to you in the slightest either.



You have now wasted three minutes of your life that you will never get back. Go in peace.

I'm still here

Sorry about the lack of updates. The following is going on.

I'm a reviewing fool. I've reviewed about five books in the past week and have just completed a product review and plan to review two more before I start writing new games.



On a personal note, I've been a reading fool through the dog days of summer, although it's been a wet dog here in Texas. I finished "Farmer in the Sky" and "The Door Into Summer" by Heinlein and "On Basilisk Station" by Weber. I'm 90% through "Gradisil" by Adam Roberts and am about 75% through "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. Good reads for the most part.



Infrant (now NetGear) is a good thing. Possibly caused by the bad weather we've been getting here one of the RAID drives up 'n died on my Terabyte NAS box. The box emailed me to tell me that it had a dead drive and that, although no data had been lost, I should replace the drive ASAP. I replaced the drive this afternoon. It's gonna take about six hours to re-balance the drives, but it looks like I won't lose any backed up data. Nice.



Speaking of rain, we've been getting it in spades. There are parts of my yard where you can't walk lest you sink down to your ankles in moist mulch. An upside is that the soft ground makes pulling weeds as easy as moving your arms so I've been spending some time every day thinning out the jurassic weeds around the Hobbit Hole. Biggest problem I have now is that I can fill three trash cans with weeds in ten minutes, so I need a better place to put 'em.

Or more trash cans.

Or a pet goat.



I'm looking at pulling the downstairs carpet and linoleum and staining and polyurethane-ing the exposed concrete. I'm currently grappling with the "do it myself" versus "hire it out" question because it's quite cheap to do but quite expensive to hire out. It looks pretty unforgiving to mistakes and I don't have many spots where I can practice.



As a way of apology for a lack of posts, I have a good freebie. It's http://club.live.com sponsored by MSN's search (i.e. Microsoft's google knockoff). As a come-on for their search engine, they created some cute Flash games that give you points if you win. And you can trade the points for prizes. My personal favorite is "Flexicon", which is a rather simple crossword puzzle game. You get 25 points for every play, and after three days of playing during nighttime TV-time, I got enough points for a wireless USB XBox controller (which looks quite nice).

It's Trophy Friday!

Awright, some of you monkeys are all about winning trophies in my daily puzzles. I have good news. There are new trophies today. 22 of 'em to be exact.

The bad news is that you don't get to keep 'em.

You see, these new trophies are MOVING TROPHIES and they move around to the current winner. For example, if you've gotten the number-one score on Meltdown the most times, you win the coveted "Golden Radioactive Thingy Award". If, however, someone clocks more number ones than you, then the trophy is re-awarded to them.

So I currently have 22 trophies. 11 of 'em are for most number-ones. The other 11 are for playing the game the most times.

Some notes about these new trophies:

1. I only added the code that counts the number of plays and number-ones about ten days ago. So if you're a longtime player of somesuch game and you're dismayed to find that some noob has the most number-ones in it, I'm sorry. Not much I can really do about it. Time to win back your crown.

2. These awards are re-calculated and re-awarded when all of the daily tables are rebuilt (around 1 AM CST), so don't play something three times then check your trophy case in the hopes that an award suddenly moved.

3. No you don't know how many times you need to play/win something to get the award. While I do keep counts, I don't display 'em anywhere. These games are intended to be CASUAL, and if you're gonna frantically play something over and over to get an award, then you're missing the whole zen of the games :)

4. Ties are broken by seniority.

5. If your blog-reading software suddenly received three or four additional entries from the daily puzzle RSS feed this morning, then your software's not properly acting on the GUID for RSS entries. While the dates did indeed change for the feed items (while I was adding and testing the new code), the GUID did not. And good blog-reader programs should know that while they have new dates they are actually the same entry. Just FYI.



A good side-effect of keeping play-counts for each user is that I can re-order the "games you haven't played today" panel after you beat a game. Right now I put 'em in alphabetical order, but with a little PHP-fiddling I can now order that list so your favorite games are at the top.

Shelly's been asking for this feature for a while. I'll add it in soon.



Until then, hope you're enjoying the games! They're not big moneymakers for me, but they are fun. I still play all of 'em almost every day.

Steal These Games!

Awright, I have a couple of old projects written under contract. I have the rights to 'em, but they really aren't compelling enough unto themselves to sell or do anything with other than give 'em away, so that's exactly what I'm gonna do. Just to test, I slapped a Mochiad into each of 'em, and I have 'em up on my site with the hopes that they'll be passed around far and wide. I've already uploaded 'em to a couple of those obnoxious "two million Flash games culled from all over the internet, some with permission but most not" pages with the hopes that they'll start appearing on sites. From what I've read on the Mochiad forums, once your game is in the wild it'll head off to dozens of places without your permission. And this is looking like the case. One is already on seven hosts after two days in the wild. We'll see if they grow or just fade away.

Here are the two games. Feel free to slap 'em on your webpage or blog.

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/baboon.php

and

http://www.thecodezone.com/games/olivewar.php

I have the little "embed" code at the bottom of each page so you can put 'em on your page easily. If you're really anal about serving every durned file yourself, you could copy the SWF file into your own server-space by right-clicking and save-as-ing here and here, but there are a couple of reasons why it's better to just keep the game remote. . .

1. If I find a bug and update the game, you'll have the updated version automatically.

2. Someone else is footing the bill for the bandwidth.

So it's your choice.

One thing I did add on the advice of Shelly is a "start muted" mode because she wanted to add my games to her blog, but she didn't like how they made her blog noisy. If you look in that little "embed" code on each page, you'll see a little "mute=off" code. If you change that to "mute=on", then the game will start up muted and your blog won't play blaring arcade-music every time someone reads it.

Also you might note from Shelly's blog is that she resized the games. Both games are in an 11/8 Width/Height ratio, so if you need to make the game small for narrow blogs (like hers), it's doable.



So if you don't mind, please embeddamitize a game or two on your page or blog and let me know how it works. I tried to keep the amount of HTML to a minimum, so it's just a single EMBED. I just tested it on the latest IE, FF, Opera, and Safari and it worked fine on all of 'em.


Unfortunately it appears that the only blog where you can't embeddamatize a game is gamedev, as they filter the HTML before putting it up. You can, however, put it on your gamedev web-space if you have that.

Anyway, give 'em a try and if you have a problem lemme know. If it works out I'll probably put up a couple more gamelets for embedding.




Oh, and I also gotta recommend Mochibot. It's a server that gathers stats on Flash games. Basically you have an account where you set up your games. Upon setting up a game you're given a little piece of Flash code that you copy into your game. When your game runs, that piece of code calls the Mochibot server and it gets logged.

That way you can watch your traffic and see who's hosting your SWF file, which is useful if you're trying to control your game's distribution or (in my case) you just wanna see if your game can propagate faster than Half Life source code :)

Ooooh excitement excitement!

I don't know what Stallman's been doing with his time lately (I'll bet it ain't taking a shower), but after an interminable 6-year delay GNU Emacs version 22.1 is released!

It's got loads of new features, like a TOOLBAR and the ability to drag and drop text!

John pauses to let you catch your breath



Okay, enough breathlessness. Best I can tell, Emacs is one of the following. . .

1. Not really a product unto itself so much as an experiment to see how many platforms something can run on, ala TANSTAAFL's JetLag game.

2. A test-suite for new C compilers.

3. A cute "look what I did" project that's written knowing that its user-base is now into single digits, kinda like those folks who write new games for the Atari 2600.



And I make these jokes without a moment's worry about offending Emacs zealots, mainly because there's no way this page will display under Lynx.