OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

It ain’t easy seeing green…

Here’s a little puzzle for web-developers.

Netscape defined a number of colour names that, although not standard, are accepted by a number of browsers. Their definitions of some of the colours leave me rather confused.

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Solitaire Battleships

My approach Solitaire Battleships was a precursor to my very similar approaches to Sudoku, Nonograms and Kakuro.

The result seems to be similar to finding Sudoku is NP-complete, which seems somewhat controversial amongst people who point out that they never backtrack in solving the ones that they see.

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TV Tuning

I was called back angrily to fix the TV – when Position 8 was selected, Channel 2 was shown, rather than the VCR!

Huh? I fixed that yesterday? I re-tuned it, and scratched my head, and watched it for a while. It worked fine.

This repeated several times with my family getting more and more annoyed at me.

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Wayne’s Oil Rig Story

Wayne worked on a project installing a custom computer system onto an oil-rig. When the system was ready to ship, they packed it all up into boxes, took it down to the car-park. Then they ran one last test.

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Gambling and Meta-Gaming

Many years ago – I was still a preteen – my grandparents were hosting a dinner for all of their children and their grandchildren. After dinner, we kids played some cards, while the adults talked. We were playing Pontoon – which is a gambling game – but rather than using matches for tokens, we borrowed […]

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MoBoFo

Apparently my CPU has been getting up around 75°C.

I ignored it for a while. However, last weekend I decided it was time for action.

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Name Game II

Imagine a site that provides a common first name, and you and your friends try to guess who the highest page-ranked person of that name is.

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Throttling Poor Usability

“People didn’t realise back then that there might be a better way. They just used the same systems their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents’ parents used.”

“And is that how the Usability Wars started?”

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It’s hard to wreck a nice face

Apparently, I am a dead ringer for Adrien Brody… and Clark Gable

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Security Questions

Before I can tell you your new password, I need you to garlphrumph kwellaos.

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