Scott Blomquist

If you’re a fan of “transport puzzles” like Sokoban or Atomix, or possibly even some of the robot puzzles in Sierra’s classic Dr. Brain series, you might love one of my recent online discoveries: RoboZZle. (You may be prompted to install Silverlight in order to play, but it’s safe, easy, and well worth the download.)

Solving the puzzles is sorta like programming a computer, so those of you with a mathematical or computer science bent will be more likely to enjoy it, but the programming environment is so simple (only “go forward”, “turn right 90 degrees”, “turn left 90 degrees”, and “only do this if the robot’s on a ____ colored square”).

So check it out, and let me know if you find any particular favorite puzzles. I had fun with one called “Tetris”, and I haven’t solved it yet, but I like the idea behind “Reflection”. (Both of those two are by the same author.)

I’ve mentioned before that one thing that moderates my natural inclination to go gaga over cloud-based hosting for web applications is that there is, so far, no clean way exists to switch providers. Both Google and Amazon[1] argue that there are theoretical ways to abandon them for a competitor today, but for most business decision makers theoretical doesn’t count when the alternative is tight vendor lock-in.

The cloud lock-in problem cannot be considered solved until there are multiple viable alternative cloud hosting providers that have essentially zero barrier to switching amongst the set.

To that end, Sun Microsystems announced their Open Cloud Platform today at their CommunityOne East developer event in New York. (Best technical overview: the walk-through on their wiki)

While this launch still only solves the problem in theory and not in practice, I give them reasonable odds that theirs will be the standard API that gets broadly adopted first by making a credible (if for no other reason than Tim Bray’s active involvement) and public effort to create open standards around managing machines, networks, images, deployment, storage, clustering, backups, and all other common aspects of managing a cloud hosting environment.

Come on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, you should get involved in some kind of cloud standardization effort, even if not this one!

Footnotes

[1] The only comment I can find from Microsoft regarding Azure lock-in is that they appear to have, in the time since yesterday’s Live Search cache snapshot, removed “or lock-in” from the “Low Risk… without worrying about operational constraints or lock-in” on the official Azure Services Platform page.

My Portland-area friends at Shizzow just got written up on ProgrammableWeb. They’ve just completed their big public launch, and will be lurking about at SXSW. If you’re going to be there, look up their whereabouts on their app, wander by, and say hello.

Curtis Chen of Team Snout has posted his recordings of the talks given at Game Control Summit 2009.

Pi aren’t square, they’re awesome! Better than awesome—pimp, even! You can get this yourself an instance of this t-shirt and many other hilarious shirts from T-Shirt Hell. (WARNING: If you’re easily offended, you seriously don’t even want to look—they’re as irreverent as it gets.)

There are not many of their shirts that I, personally, would be caught wearing in public. But if you’re braver than I am, I’ll (seriously) buy you a coffee if I see you in public in any of their shirts other than this one.

A colleague of mine mentioned a post by a UC Berkeley professor, Raymond Yee where he illustrates for students of his Mixing and Remixing Information course how he brainstorms and develops ideas for his mash-up projects.

It’s interesting to me that his post covers two topics that I’ve spent time talking about here: Freebase and Sunlight Labs.

Also worth mentioning is Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America mash-up competition.

Group scheduling tool Doodle.com has announced an app design competition for applications built on their API.

The winner gets a week in Zurich.

Tyler Hinman was crowned champion for the fifth straight year at the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament held this past weekend in Brooklyn, NY. He narrowly eked out a victory over fellow National Puzzlers’ League members Trip Payne and Francis Heaney in a dramatic final match.

I’m exploring tweaking the rules that I’ve established for my t-shirt series. The funny thing is that I probably don’t even have to mention this, because I think I’m the only person that would even realize that I’m breaking any rules.

When I came up with this idea, I was going to wear a different t-shirt every day for a year, and document each shirt on a site dedicated to the project. I never got around to building out the domain, and I quickly discovered that shooting and editing t-shirt pictures every day was a whole lot of work for a secondary hobby.

So in order to break the logjam, I simplified. I figured I’d debut 1 new shirt a week on Monday and retire 1 old shirt on Thursday. But I never got around to doing the retired shirts, and besides, I kinda like the shirts that I have from before I started this project. So the new rules are that I’m going to document at least one shirt each Monday, new or old, and I reserve the right to do another later in the week.

So without further ado, here’s this week’s classic shirt:

As many of you know, I’m an extreme puzzle fan. I spent this weekend up in Redmond, WA competing in the 12th quasi-annual Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. I like to wear puzzle shirts to Puzzle Hunt, so I wore this shirt.

It’s from last summer’s instance of the Game that some of us puzzle fans write for each summer’s crop of Microsoft interns. Game staff, including beta testers each get a shirt that says “Game Control” on the front. The back documents the locations and clues that we included in the event (click the image above for a bigger version).