Ta-Da List Posted @ 15:39 on 2nd July, 2008
For a long time I've been looking for a simple To-Do list thing for my desktop. I've used Task Paper, and wasn't too impressed. What I really wanted was Ta-Da list for the desktop, so I thought I would make a dashboard widget for it. Especially since this would involve making an API for it, which would have been very fun! However,
these guys have done a much better job than I could have done. My prayers have been answered! Even if I've lost yet another project idea...
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I've just spent some time re-doing the Blaccu Weather Report. It now uses the Google Weather API (details of which can be found
here), which, although is much neater than the Yahoo! one, doesn't have a defined set of return states, which made generating the Oli phrases a tad more difficult. I've gone by the icon it returns, and unfortunately cannot find a directory listing for the icons directory, so will have to hope I've got them all! I'll be keeping an eye out for other icons that I've missed, but hopefully there won't be many. As well as that, it now attempts to guess your location using the
NetGeo Database, which is very cool, but could do with turning the result of the queries into a nice XML or JSON format. Apparently there's a Pear package that does this querying for you (quite why, since it's just an HTTP GET request and then some minor parsing, I don't know), which I suppose might be a nice thing to look into if you're planning on using this for anything more substantial.
And now, to plan the Facebook app!
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Websites, Blaccu Weather Report.
A year ago (almost to the day, I think) I built the
Blaccu Weather Report for a laugh. I looked at its analytics today, and although it's not getting much traffic, it turns out that it's number 1 on Google for "oli williams family guy", and is on the first page when you search for "oli williams" by itself. I think this is pretty cool! As a result I hope to dedicate a bit of time to the site, make it a bit better. Probably make a Facebook app - everything has a Facebook app these days.
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I was killing some time playing
Scrabulous, and I started thinking about strategies. I don't really regard Scrabble as being a particularly strategy based game, but there is a certain element of it to the game - and that strategy can help you win. So this lead me to think:
Is the best strategy to adopt in Scrabble a purely greedy one?
i.e., if at each turn, you play the word which will gain you the most points, do you have more chance of winning than if you were to adopt a different strategy. For example: if I have a Q in my tile set, and the highest score I can make this turn is by playing that with an I (a legal two letter word) - is it better for me to play this and grab some points now rather than hold back the Q and hope that I get some nice letters in the next few moves to make an even higher score?
Intuitively, I would hope there is a nicer solution than a purely greedy approach - but of course one would be difficult to find. As well as this, such a strategy might involve "counting tiles" in order to calculate probabilities.
Were the Greedy solution to be adopted, I think one would have to create a compound value for each playable word - which takes into account certain things. For example, does the word leave the Triple Word Score open to your opponent? Can your opponent append something to your word and gain more points from it (by, for example, extending the word to pass over a Double or Triple score)?
I think this is quite an interesting problem - and one which I shall be thinking about each time I can't think of a good word to put down in Scrabulous. But I thought I might open it up to the internet in the hope that someone else, more intelligent than I, would find it interesting and propose a solution. Enjoy!
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Third Year Project.
I just came across the most ridiculous big ever. I had a page which had a number of similar blocks: each had an image floated left and some text next to it. One of the blocks of text had some italic text in it, specified by an <em> tag. For some reason, the whole block of these was rendered below the floated image, as if that block of test had been given clear: left; or clear: both;. The solution wasn't easy to find, but was easy to implement:
em{ zoom: 1; overflow: auto; display: inline; }
What really gets me is that somewhere, someone programmed IE to do this. Either they're part of some humongous joke which the web development community just doesn't get, or they're just a bit stupid.
Having said that, it's obvious that someone is lacking quite a bit of sense when they appoint
this man CEO.
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