Rozworld’s WebLog

Here’s an article on the resale value of the Toyota Prius. I think here’s an opportunity to stay in new cars for awhile now. All we have to do is order a new Prius and sell our old one at or above the dealer price!

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/07/supply-and-dema.html

Northland Wildlife Studio now has a new Website! We’re currently adding more content to it, so check back periodically for updates. This will help the gift shop and taxidermy reach out to their customers.

http://northlandwildlife.com/

I thought it was about time that I revised the old home page. After about 5 years it was getting rather tiring. I’m using a new technique this time around with the .png picture format that includes background transparency. This allows images to be any shape like round buttons etc and still show the background around the edges. Now, the background image can be swapped out without modifying the other images on the page. Jean says that the home page looks more masculine with the black. I don’t know, I think it’s much more to my liking. The buttons are a lot more brighter. What does everyone think?

Google introduced a new feature to Google Earth recently called Google Sky. Google sky is built right into Google Earth and is free to download.
http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html

With many of us living in cities, we have lost that connection to the night sky. Google helps to bring that wonder back. You can zoom in on a patch of sky and reveal a myriad of stars and deep space objects. With the number of suns in the universe totaling more than number of grains of sand in all the beaches of earth, it puts your life in perspective. You can see this for yourself in google sky. The images are stitched together from telescope surveys. Check it out!

The Lapham-Marquette Parent Teacher Group website is up and running. I volunteered to help set it up and another guy designed the home page. Right now it’s functional. It’s kind of nice because now we have a list serve for emailing and a discussion board to help rally the troops in case the school board tries to close down our schools again.
LINK :
http://lapham-marquette-ptg.org/

Some of you might not know about about Bloglines.com. It’s mainly a time saving website, where you can enter the URL of your blogs, news sites, and other “feeds” you enjoy reading and then get updates from these diverse sources in a single place. No longer do you need to go to a dozen or so websites to see if there are any updates. Now you can just check your bloglines.

Blog Lines

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An interesting set of talks by various well-known people, some talks better than others, over at T.E.D - Technology Entertainment Design.

http://ted.com/tedtalks/

Yet another good (free) product from Google Inc. is Google Earth. This intuitive tool presents satellite images by mapping them on a virtual Earth. You navigate the Earth by zooming in and out and grabbing and dragging. Not all the Earth is filled in with ultra-high resolution photos but some very important parts already are. It’s surprising to see your house as plain as day. I’ve heard of various groups doing census counts of animals using google Earth and other things such as this. Google Earth can be downloaded at http://earth.google.com/ Here are some examples of the goodies you can find on Google Earth :

Six Lakes Region	Isthmus
Alaska	Trinidad Head

I wanted to try posting a YouTube video and see how it worked. So I’m going to try posting one I came across recently. This one is funny.

About a year ago I wrote a perl-cgi program that will solve Sudoku puzzles. In case you haven’t heard what a Sudoku is, I’ll explain. Sudoku are these recently popular number puzzles that have been showing up in various newspapers, handheld games, and on the internet. They challenge the player to fill in the remaining numbers of a 9 x 9 matrix, by selecting the numbers 1-9 that are unique to that row, column, and 3 x 3 group within the overall matrix. Well anyways, my program did not work for some of the harder Sudoku because at some point in these harder ones the best you can do is guess between two possible values for a single “square” and try to solve it from there. So that’s what I recently coded my script to do. First it narrows the possibilities down for each unknown value until it uncovers that certain squares can only be of a single value, and then it uses these values to find other unknown values. If after 20 iterations through the matrix and it still has not solved the Sudoku, it saves off what it has found thus far. Then it makes an educated guess on the first square it comes across with exactly two possibilities. From there it tries to solve the puzzle with this first guess. If after 40 iterations and it still can’t solve the Sudoku, the program goes back to the saved values and tries the second value in this same 2 possibility square, which of course will work, since the first value did not. This method has worked for every valid puzzle I’ve fed it so far. There are, I’m sure, more efficient ways of solving Sudoku but I thought this one was pretty neat.
Wikipedia has a good write up on some of those other methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku

I guess the whole point is to solve your Sudoku by hand, but I got tired of this and decided that I could fee up a bunch of time by just scripting this. So if you like Sudoku and can’t solve one by hand, you can come here and get the answers!

Sudoku Solver!