TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPICS: SUDOKU / PBJ TIME

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, where we haven't had an incident of a swagman stealing a jumpbuck and hiding it in his tucker bag for at least three weeks.

Newsweek Sudoku

Sudoku is the abbreviation of the Japanese phrase "suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru" which, depending on translation, means either

"The digits must remain single" or "In jail we had to be in this dumb kabuki play about the Forty- seven Ronin, and I wanted to be Yoshi, but they made me Ori!"

Homer Simpson quotes aside, Sudoku is a wildly popular and challenging logic puzzle You've probably seen it in your local newspaper. In Sudoku,

you are given a 9x9 grid. Some of the grid squares already contain numbers -- you cannot change these. To work the puzzle, fill in the empty squares of the grid with the numerals 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, and 9.

The puzzle is solved when each ROW, each COLUMN, and each 3x3 square within the puzzle contain the numerals 1 through 9 with each numeral appearing once. The 3x3 squares are differentiated by shading. [Source: Newsweek Sudoku Help]

You already knew that, didn't you? Well, what you may not know is that our friends at Newsweek magazine, with the help of uclick, have a free web page that lets you play Sudoku online:

http://www.uclick.com/client/nwk/nwdoc/

Three Sudoku puzzles are available every day. (1) The normal 9x9 puzzle we all know and love; (2) A smaller 6x6 mini puzzle. This is a great place to start if you've never played Sudoku before; (3) A massive 16x16 puzzle that uses both numbers and letters. This is not for the faint of heart.

Newsweek's Sudoku puzzles also offer both a cheat and a bug. The cheat is that if you click in an empty square and then press the spacebar on your keyboard, Newsweek will automatically show you the entries which are possible for each square. This makes the puzzles MUCH easier, although the "hints" in the mega puzzles are so small they're almost illegible.

As for the bug, the first time you complete a row, column, or square, the game will display an "About the Lights" pop-up box. At the bottom of the box are the words "Don't show this message the next time I play this game" but [at least on my computer] there is no checkbox. Well, there is a check box, it's just invisible. Move your pointer to the left of the "Don't show this..." sentence and, if you're lucky, your pointer will change into a finger. Click your mouse, and then close the pop-up window. Problem solved.

If you are addicted to Sudoku, or if you have never played it and want to see what everyone is talking about, hop on over to Newsweek's free Sudoku page and watch the hours slowly disappear from your life. :)

Info for Web Designers

[Warning: This next part is kind of advanced stuff. Please accept my apologies in advance.]

If you create web pages that display active content such as embedded QuickTime movies, RealPlayer movies, Java Applets, or Flash, Shockwave, or Authorware players, check out

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/

In their February 26-ish Windows/Microsoft Update, our friends in Redmond fundamentally changed the way Internet Explorer handles embedded, active content. From here forward, "Active content that is embedded in HTML pages in certain ways will not be able to receive user input (for example, keyboard or mouse events) until the user clicks to either activate or continue loading the control." You can find a short Breeze presentation on this topic, and a possible fix [a js "design around" solution], at

http://adobe.breezecentral.com/activecontent022606/

Meme Review: Peanut Butter Jelly Time

I want to spend some time over the next couple of months re-introducing you to different internet phenomena, the stuff that was once really, really popular and then quickly fell out of favor. Think of this as an internet pop culture history tour. Today's stop is at

http://home.comcast.net/~etrata/flash/banana.swf

This is what happens when you throw together an old Buckwheat Boys song, a copy of Macromedia Flash, and way too much free time.

Have a safe and happy week, and we'll talk again soon.

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