News and updates to Gavin Brock’s code
As you may know, Google Streetview went live today in selected Japanese cities.
To celebrate this I bring you the “Random drives in Tokyo StreetView” page. (Intended as another page for WebSaver).
On your drives, if you get to Tsunashima, you may see this odd looking person:
Further back story on this page.
Solving Sudoku with software has been rather fashionable at the office this week. So here is page that does it in JavaScript entirely on the client:
Gavin’s JavaScript Sudoku Solver
As could be expected, this is not the fastest solver in the world, but it will get there using brute force. You have an option to watch the internal decision tree or not.
Inspiration for the code comes from a beautiful perl three line sudoku solver by Eccles & Toad. The extremely hard test case from the list of incredibly hard puzzles strings at Sudoku Players’ Forums on sudoku.com.
Here’s a summary of the usage yesterday: (Interesting to note that the counter resets at 23:00 GMT)
Oh-oh!
Tiles Used: 34642 of 30000
I guess my OS Overlay is getting more well known! This is the first time I have run out of my allocated tiles.
I’m going to monitor this for a while to see how chronic the issue is, and if necessary, ration tiles by source IP address, or even beg the OS for a bigger quota!
As part of the Street View saver page, I thought it would be fun to see how far you have “driven“. So I set about finding an odometer. This proved harder than I expected since most of what was out there were static, image based web-counters.
So I set about some CSS hacking and came up with this:
This is entirely CSS and Javascipt based and fairly browser neutral (only fairly common one missing is IE 6 – bleagh).
Full details, including API, here.
Zip download here.
Update: 2009/04/07
Two odometers should work too:
<script src=”odometer.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[
var n = 9999999998;
var m = 10;
var myOdometer1, myOdometer2;
function run () {
var div1 = document.getElementById("odometerDiv1");
var div2 = document.getElementById("odometerDiv2");
myOdometer1 = new Odometer(div1, {value: n, digits: 10, tenths: true});
myOdometer2 = new Odometer(div1, {value: m, digits: 10, tenths: true});
update1();
update2();
}
function update1 () {
n=n+0.0025
myOdometer1.set(n);
setTimeout("update1()", 50);
}
function update2 () {
m=m-0.001
myOdometer2.set(m);
setTimeout("update2()", 100);
}
//]]>
</script>
<body onload=”run()” >
<div id=”odometerDiv1″ style=”width:100%;”></div>
<hr>
<div id=”odometerDiv2″ style=”width:100%;”></div>
Another Google Maps API based screen saver for WebSaver. Based on the recently released Street View API, this walks around a few US cities (NY, LA, SF and Boston to be exact). The movement is random, but a history is kept to avoid too much repeating.
View it at: http://brock-family.org/streetview.html
The Street View API is still pretty new, and it does seem to leak memory (under Safari 3), so this may slow down your system.
Now, this will be more fun when they get some cities I know on it.
I have uploaded a YouTube page for WebSaver.
The base URL is, http://brock-family.org/youtube.html however you can control it by passing arguments at the end of the url:
mute=1 – Turns off the sound (usually a good idea)
rows=n – Sets the number of rows of videos to view. n can be any number that your system can handle
cols=n – Sets the number of columns of video. Again – limit is up to your system
For example – my favourite is 3×2 videos with mute:
http://brock-family.org/youtube?mute=1&rows=2&cols=3
One other feature – if you only have 1 video (rows=cols=1) then the page will use a cookie to remember your last position in the last video.
Websaver 2.1 is now available. Full details here.
Main addition is SMS support. If you have a laptop with the Sudden Motion Sensor, the screen saver can now send these events to the web-page as cursor input.
This is primarily for the google-maps saver page: http://brock-family.org/map.html
Ok, my Jaiku page is not working out. It’s great for a feed about what I’m doing, feeling and thinking, but the wrong place for descriptions of code I have released, or updated – or the odd piece of tech news that I have found important.
My aim is to provide a low bandwidth feed about things I have written, improved so you can subsribe to the RSS and forget about it.
