MERLINFor a little rest and relaxation, I wrote a tiny JavaScript puzzle implementation, Magic Square Puzzle, that emulates the Merlin's Magic Square puzzle from the old 1978 electronic game.

I remember getting one for Christmas as a kid, probably in 1978 or 1979. I had wanted a Merlin so desperately, but doubted my parents would get one for me. Oh, what joy and excitement filled my head when on Christmas morning, there, beneath the tree, I saw it, in all its dazzling, smooth, shiny red plastic glory.

The magic square game (one of six) was one of my favorite, if not my favorite. Fortunately a quick web search turned up some information about the rules of the original electronic game. With a little HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I could once again play the game that had delighted me in my childhood.

Try it out (use the link at the top of this article) with a web browser that supports JavaScript. It's pretty easy to figure out, quite simplistic. In theory, a perfect player should never have to click a single button more than once to solve it. At best, a single click might solve the puzzle, and at worst one might have to click on all nine buttons a single time.

The following rant is one I posted to digg.com as a comment in response to a link where someone explained their own troubles with Buy.com. I thought I'd share my own experience with them and why I refuse to do business with them.

Here's my comment in full:

Sadly, this is par for the course for Buy.com.

Last year (2004) in September I bought...

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The crew of the ship SerenityI've borrowed the lines from Seinfeld, "Serenity now! Serenity now!" and corrupted them to express my own impatience waiting for the release of the Joss Whedon movie Serenity on DVD after it left the local theaters. This morning it was finally released.

After a midnight visit to Wal-Mart to buy the new Serenity DVD and pick up some movie munchies, my brother and I drove over to Cassidy's house to watch Serenity on his big-screen HDTV with several others. It was sweet! Great movie, good company!

Now I see that on Amazon.com's Today's Top Sellers list, Serenity is the number one top seller. Sweet! I hope it can stay up there on the list for quite some time.

The Amazon.com top sellers list demonstrates the demand for Serenity. Too bad other retailers won't benefit as much. This morning at Wal-Mart I noticed that much more shelf space was devoted to several other new DVD releases in contrast to the smaller spot Serenity occupied.

If the demand for Serenity keeps up, maybe fans can prove once-and-for-all that this movie should have had more marketing dollars behind it. I think if it had been marketed more, it would have made much more money in theatrical release, and DVD sales too would be greater than they will be. I think it's a missed opportunity.

But at least I've got my Serenity now.

There are many good things that I have to be thankful for. Today, three in particular stand out.

Back in July of this year, the last Sunday in July, a letter from the First Presidency was read in Sacrament Meeting in which President Hinckley challenged each member of the Church to read or reread the Book of Mormon before the end of the year. This challenge was reiterated in the First Presidency message in the August 2005 issue of the Ensign magazine as well. In it, President Hinckley said...

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Here it is, late Saturday night, and on KBYU television is a rebroadcast of a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert from 2002. I had to rewind and listen again to Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, a Polish carol the choir sang, arranged by the incomparable Mack Wilberg, who was...

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Surise at 7:24 AM on Friday the 9th of SeptemberOn Friday morning, the 9th of September, the color of light illuminating the blinds and curtains of my home's east-facing windows was so intriguing, that I grabbed my camera and went out on my front lawn to snap a photo or two.

The house in silhouette is one of my neighbors one street over. The mesa on the left side, angled, sloping upward toward the middle, is Shinob Kibe, a small mesa in the adjoining community of Washington, Utah.

What a beautiful place Southern Utah is!

While at the City of St. George's web site, I came across this little gem:Give it a listen. It left me grinning from ear to ear.

What a great place to live! Where besides St. George will you find a city mayor willing to share like this? (Dare I mention that I'm related to Mayor Dan? He's my dad's first cousin, so I guess that means we're first cousins, once removed.)

Thanks, Cousin Mayor! I enjoyed the song and had a good chuckle.

I must admit, I've heard Roene DiFiore's The Dixie Song before, when my mother has sung it.

From Mayor Dan's web page, the lyrics are:Roene DiFiore (if you follow the web link, look down near the lower part of the page) and her Program Bureau at Dixie College had a lasting impact on many people, as my mother has said.

[UPDATE 18 Jan. 2010: None of the links here work any more, sadly. If I ever find a copy of the audio or video, I'll try to host a copy on my server directly. Also, I fixed the spelling of Roene DiFiore's name (I'd had it wrong: "de Fiore")]

The King of Attolia
The ThiefThe Queen of AttoliaGrrr, I don't think I can wait until February of 2006 for Megan Whalen Turner's forthcoming book, The King of Attolia, the third of her Attolia/Eugenities books that include The Thief (a Newbery Honor book), and The Queen of Attolia.

My sister stopped by today and had me surf the web to check out what The King of Attolia's cover was going to look like. All that did was whet my appetite, triggering my impatient desire for the upcoming third book.

Both my sister and I love the cover art, and the matching new cover art for the earlier two books. I especially like the lighting and contrast on the upcoming book's cover.

My sister lamented, however, that the new art was only available for the first two books in the new paperback editions, not in hardcover. I sympathized, agreeing with her fully.

Some of the art on the older editions was less interesting, and in the case of The Queen of Attolia, the cover with the hand above a building, outright ugly.

In the meantime, will I do until February? Ug, I can't wait!

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Another Geek Alert

Looks like I'm geeking out these days. I just implemented my first AJAX mini web application. You can help me test it if I'm online. Just go to this page, and I may be online. Or it may not work at all.

It's a simple multi-user web chat room that uses asynchronous background requests (so it doesn't have to reload a page or use a hidden iframe like my previous web communications stuff used). I need to make it look better (it's ugly looking right now) and get it to work on more browsers.

The PHP and JavaScript source code is available here.

Whee, fun!

Update: Over the following weekend, I improved a few things, including the layout, handling window resizing, etc. It seems to work all right under Firefox and MSIE on Windows, and with Firefox and Safari on the Mac (the versions I have access to, at least), but Opera seems to have a bit of trouble still.

Super Geeky Post Alert! Don't say I didn't warn you! *grin*

In administering FreeBSD servers, in particular using FreeBSD jails to encapsulate various processes and/or services, I've often wished for a ps command to list all processes within a particular jail. Now with FreeBSD 5's useful jls command to list all jails on a host, and also jexec which allows one to attach to an existing jail and execute a command within it, it's as easy as whipping up a quick alias or shell script to get a list of processes within a particular jail.

Here's my solution, a shell script I named jps for ps within a jail. (Of course it requires that the ps command be present within the jail and fully functional.)


#!/bin/sh
JID=$1
ISNUM=`expr "${JID}" : '^[0-9]*$'`
if [ -z "${JID}" -o "x${ISNUM}" = "x0" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <jail_ID> [<args_to_ps> ...]"
exit 1
fi
shift
jexec $JID /bin/ps $@


Of course it won't work on FreeBSD 4.x hosts, but...