While going over my site’s stats I noticed that several people reach my site searching for walkthrough for Eyezmaze’s mini-game Neighbours (actually most of them come looking for “Neighbors walkthrough” probably because Neighbours makes no sense and it’s quite easy to accidentally ignore the ‘u’). And since I believe that people should get what they came looking for, I decided to write a short walkthrough for those of you that are unsure on how to solve it. Before anything else you should know that I will not give to the correct order in which you need to place the hairy guys to win. The correct order changes every time you play the game, so I can’t tell you what the right order will be, however I can tell you how to figure it out yourself.

First, I’ll start with the basics. The objective of the game is to place the 9 different “hairy guys” so that they all “like” the hairy guys around them (hairy guys only care about who’s above them, below them, or at either side; they don’t care about who’s sitting diagonally from them). If you place two hairy guys who don’t like each other together, they will shake their arms in complaint.

The first thing you should note is that there are three different types of places where a hairy guy can be placed. Hairy guys placed in each one of these types need to like a different number of hairy guys. The hair guy in the center needs to like 4 other hairy guys. Hairy guys in the sides need to like 3 other hairy guys. And finally, hairy guys in the corners only need to like 2 other hairy guys. Now that you know this you only need to find out how many other hairy guys each hairy guy likes and you’ll know where you should place him.

The best strategy is probably to try to figure out which hairy guy goes in the center first. To do this, just place one of the hairy guys in the center and then try placing one by one each of the other hairy guys next to him. When you’re done you’ll know if that hairy guy goes in the center, side, or corner. Chances are the first hairy guy you pick won’t be the center hairy guy. So you just need to keep trying. If the first hairy guy you picked is a corner hairy guy then you know that the two other hairy guys he likes are both side hairy guys; then, any candidate to be the center hairy guy must also like those two hairy guys. If the first hairy guy you picked is a side hairy guy, then you know that one of the three hairy guys he likes must be the center hairy guy, and you only need to figure out which one it is.

Once you know who the center hairy guy is, you’re almost done. The four hairy guys he likes are the four side hairy guys so the only thing you need to know is the order in which you need to place them. You also know that the remaining hairy guys should all be placed in a corner. Try placing one of the corner hairy guys in one of the corners and see if he likes his neighbors. If he likes one of them, but not the other, then just change the one he doesn’t like for one of the other two side hairy guys. If he doesn’t like any of them, then that hairy guy goes in the opposite corner. After that you just need to place the rest of the corner hairy guys where they don’t complain (depending on your situation you may also need to switch some of the side hairy guys), but by now your possibilities are quite limited, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find the right order. Good Luck!

• Jetspeed is another fun game where you control a small ship that has to avoid traffic and destroy some trucks.
• Ford Billboards is a pictures of some new Ford billboards. It’s a great idea and produces some very nice results.
• Kid-Sized Tetris – I should get some of those…
• Citizendium is another project created by Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) which aims to have “gentle expert oversight”. I registered and was browsing some of the Math articles, and while it seems like a great idea it’s just too new and lacks a lot of information. I think everyone should read “What mathematics is not” in their article on Mathematics, especially where it says: “Mathematics is not accountancy”. Never ask a Mathematician how much is 34*56, they probably don’t know, and I doubt they care.
• Neighbours is a mini game from eyezmaze, it’s very short and not too hard, but I’m a big fan of eyezmaze’s games, so it had to post about it.

• Red is another very simple but very fun game. The music is kinda nice too.
• Speed Cluster is a very simply yet very fun game. The link goes to the jayisgames review where you can find instructions on how to play (since the game itself is in japanese). Have fun!
• jmtb02 Studios – The other day while I was playing WarioWare: Smooth Moves, I remembered Four Second Frenzy, and today I decided to go see if there was a new version, and I found Four Second Firestorm, along with some other great games in this site.
• Super Mario Brothers Theme Song – Homemade Versions is a collection of YouTube videos of people playing the Super Mario Bros theme in several different instruments. I had already seen a few of them, but there were also some very cool version I hadn’t heard before.
• Is 17 the “most random” number? is a blog post that talks about how when you ask a group of people to pick a number between 1 and 20, the most common answer is 17. I even tried this with a few people and several of them answered 17! The article compares this with a random number generator he ran in his computer, which to me doesn’t make much sense, but if you ignore the “Computer” part in the charts then it’s all very interesting information.

I know I promised to post this last weekend, but I ran into some new bugs and decided to postpone its release. It’s still not perfect, there is at least one bug that I know of, but it’s not a big bug (in fact I doubt anyone will notice it), and since I’m not sure of what is the right way to fix it I decided to leave it around for this version. There’s also a lot of features I still want to add. Up to now you can generate and view fractals, but there is no way to save them or export images with the generated fractals. Ever since I started working on Chaotica I’ve had plans to add saving and exporting features, but I can’t get myself to actually do it. The problem is that opening and saving is a mess to implement since right now Chaotica is not document-based. Cocoa does a lot of stuff for you but there are still a lot of details you need to take care of, so I’m waiting until I have a lot of free time and I’m in the right mood. Anyway, without further ado, here‘s a link to the download page for Chaotica 2.0b1.

Earlier this week I posted a link to Hard ‘N Phirm’s video of “El Corazón”. In my post I mentioned that I didn’t understand why they chose to do the song in Spanish. Luckily for me, Chris Hardwick from Hard ‘N Phirm stumbled upon my post and decided to answer my question. Here’s a quote from an email he sent me:

Anyway, just wanted to post about this in case anyone else was wondering why they decided to make the song in Spanish. Thanks Chris!

This week has been a bit crazy. I’ve been trying to get some things done (like the Chaotica release I’m always talking about), but I been spending quite some time everyday answering questions regarding Postalicious and fixing bugs. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind helping people and fixing bugs, it’s just that my vacation is running out and I still have a lot of things I want to get done before it’s over.

Anyway, a few notes to all Postalicious users:

• Please update to the latest version. I’ve been fixing some pretty serious bugs this week and if you’re stuck with pretty much any version before 1.08, chances are you’re going to run into some sort of problem, most likely getting posts claiming to be your bookmarks from 1969.
• Please read the FAQ, chances are Postalicious doesn’t work like you expect it to work. I’ve received several comments from people who say that nothing happens when they click the “Update Now” button. It does work, it just won’t do what you think it does. Because of this I decided to add a FAQ which explains how Postalicious works and the reasons why I decided to make it work that way.
• Feel free to contact me if you have any problems with Postalicious, I’ll try to do everything I can think of to fix your problem. You can use the contact link at the bottom of my site or simply post a comment in this post.

Finally, this is a link to the Postalicious page where you can read the FAQ and download the newest version. Also, I would like to thank Martin from admartinator.de for letting me know about several bugs earlier version of Postalicious had.

• “El Corazón” is a song by Hard ‘N Phirm (the creators of the Pi song I blogged about some time ago). The song is kinda funny, although their Spanish is not very good and I don’t really understand why they made the song in Spanish instead of just doing it in English.
• What is Intelligence? is a short article by Isaac Asimov where he talks about intelligence and intelligence tests. I have never trusted intelligence tests simply because I haven’t even been able to find a good definition for intelligence, so to me it seems pointless to make a test to measure something when I don’t even know what it is that I’m measuring. However, it’s always nice to see that your favorite author agrees with you. 🙂
• Calling all Cars Game Design Document is a document detailing how Calling all Cars was supposed to be. I think this give a good glimpse at how game design works and it’s certainly fun seeing how the game was supposed to be and then seen some footage of the game and realizing it’s VERY different.
• Apple – Thoughts on Music is an article where Steve Jobs basically asks the music industry to take away the DRM when selling music online. We all know that DRM is stupid, but it’s great seeing that Apple is finally stepping up and putting some pressure on the music industry.
• Prison in Japan is the first part of the story of “George” who was held in a Japanese prison for criminals who have not been convicted yet. So far only two parts are available, but it’s already an interesting read.

As you may remember, I was quite disappointed at the 255 character limit for the notes in del.icio.us bookmarks. However, while I was wondering around aimlessly trying to cure my disappointment, I stumbled upon Twitter.In the process of figuring out what Twitter was all about, I saw that someone somewhere around the world was “moving [their] bookmarks from del.icio.us to Google bookmarks”. I hadn’t heard of Google bookmarks before so I decided to find out more about it. And to my surprise it was pretty much what I was looking for. I did some testing and found out that the notes in Google bookmarks can fit at least 500 (and probably many more) characters, the labels support spaces, and the bookmarklet is a lot better since it opens in a new window instead of replacing the page I want to bookmark. That was on Friday.

The rest of the weekend I was fighting against Google to be able to access the RSS feed for the bookmarks using PHP. Unfortunately after trying with pretty much every version of Snoopy I could find (the newest official version, the one that comes with MagpieRSS, and this one), I was still unsuccessful. I then tried to use Google Authentication to access the feed, but apparently the bookmark service is not supported. In fact, it seems like no one really cares about the bookmark service. The closest thing I could find was the Search History RSS feed which is a bit more popular, and even has its own Mac OS X widget. I tried mimicking what the widget did to get the RSS feed, but again, I was not very successful. However I did manage to find out that I needed to generate a random string for the zx parameter in the URL, otherwise Google would redirect the request and the authentication would no longer work. However even with that knowledge I still couldn’t get any of the versions of Snoopy to open the feed. Finally, my brother decided to give the problem a try using a Java servlet instead of PHP, and after a while, with the knowledge that he needed to generate the zx parameter, he got it working. My guess is that the implementation of digest authentication in Snoopy does something that Google doesn’t like, and since I don’t really want to waste my time sniffing packages to see exactly what is going wrong and making my own digest implementation for Snoopy, I decided to use my brother’s Java servlet to get the feed. However, since this is not really a nice solution and most people don’t even have support for Java servlets in their servers I probably won’t release this plugin.

As for Postalicious, from now on I won’t be using it myself, but in case someone wants to give it a try I decided to release it. You can download it here.

PS: I know “de-introducing” is not a word, but I don’t really care 😛

Postalicious is the name of my WordPress plugin for posting del.icio.us bookmarks to your blog. After working on it the last few days, it’s finally done. In fact, the most recent links post was created by Postalicious. Mostly I’m quite happy with how it turned out and I’m just holding its release until I can do some more testing to make sure everything is working correctly. So far I’ve found a few typos in the code that caused some problems and I also stumbled upon a certain scenario I had not thought about. After today I don’t expect to have to make any more changes to the code but I’ll probably keep holding it for observation until sometime next week. On the downside I today I realized that the “notes” field in del.icio.us has a 255 character limit, so I guess I’ll have to either keep my comments on each link short or just edit the posts with more details after they have been published.

In other news the Chaotica 2.0 release I had planned is also going well; you’ll probably be able to get your hands on a new version of Chaotica this weekend. As for the chaos game article…well, I still haven’t started, but I’ll try to get to it next week. Wish me luck!

I won’t be happy until I lose my legs is an essay about a woman who has "Body Integrity Identity Disorder" which basically means that she feels "incomplete" by having her legs. Her image of herself does not include her legs, so by having them, she feels incomplete. Certainly an interesting read.

Letter-Color Synaesthesia is a site explaining what Letter-Color Synaesthesia is. I stumbled upon this by googling Cassidy Curtis from the "The Best Homework Ever?" article. I had no idea of the existence of Letter-Color Synaesthesia. Now I wonder if this has anything to do with Cassidy Curtis’s ability to draw Mathematical surfaces. It probably does.

The Best Homework Ever? is an article about a Brown Math professor who received a very interesting homework.

SF&F Pilots Picked Up By Nets is a list of science-fiction and fantasy pilots picked up by ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW. I was happy to read the headline, unfortunately once I read the list of shows the only one that I might like is Journeyman.

Tose: Gaming’s Dirty Little Secret is a 1UP.com feature that talks about Tose, a game developer that develops games for other publishers but prides itself in the fact that they remain anonymous; most of the time, their name is nowhere to be found in the final product. Most of their portfolio consists of ports and kids games but I still think it’s quite impressive that they prefer to remain anonymous.

How does your brain tell time? is an article at physorg.com that explains a theory about how the brain tells time. It’s not very in-depth, but the general idea is interesting and I’ve always been fascinated by concept of time so I enjoyed reading this.

Tetris – From Russia With Love is a video documentary of how Tetris came into existence. It’s quite interesting and a must-watch for any Tetris player.