Portent

Though mainly used for validating input forms and doing clever tricks to make sites like Google Maps possible, JavaScript can also do games (eg the Arkanoid game covered on Portent) .

On this site there are a number of visual toys, all programmed in JavaScript, including 3d cube and a simulation of birds flocking (pictured).

Link

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I've been playing Celebdaq on and off for three or four years – I can't remember when it started. It is hosted by the BBC and is a simple game where you can buy or sell shares in celebrities. You start with £10,000 and if you ever reach a million you get a recognition of that fact and reset to £10,000.

The value of stars depends on their newspaper appearences and stories so this week for some reason Jade Goody is the highest moving star. There are several hundred stars tracked and their value moves upand down quite rapidly. Most are languishing around the £1.00 mark. Eg David Hasselhof while others Daniel Radcliffe and Alex Ferguson have stellar prices. The celebs are drawn from the worlds of pop,movies, tv, sport and fashion.

It's free to play so why not signup and have a go! There are no prizes just fun and it doesn't take up much time.

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I see a bit of a meme here- 4 letter .com websites that end in db for catalogs of things. First was the Internet Movie Database, and now here is the Internet Broadway database. If you're into musicals on Broadway then "IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today. Details include pertinent people involved as well as interesting facts and production statistics. Get a list of every production of Hamlet on Broadway or a list of your favorite actor's credits. Find out what played at a particular theatre or what shows opened in a specified Broadway season."

Did I mention cndb.com ? Well if I tell you that C is for celebrity and N is for nude/naked, that might give you a clue. View it at your own peril!

Link (to IBDB.com)

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This is very good. There are 28 puzzles ranging from very easy to hard. In each one, all you have to do is arrange the pieces so that when the ball drops, it is guided to the target.

The one shown is the first one and takes little effort to solve but they do get harder, much harder. You can reset the pieces at any time but you are always working against the clock and when it reaches zero, it’s game over.

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If you’ve ever wondered how much people get paid at small, medium or large companies then this is the site for you and it’s completely free. You can view companies (over 11,000) generally or enter your own and see a lot more.

What is quite surprising for example that at JP Morgan Chase a personal banker is paid between $30K and $48K with an average of $35K. That’s from 41 submissions. Not everyone who works in a bank gets paid well! It’s an interesting site but as it depends upon people submitting details, so you will get back more if you submit yours. Just be careful not to submit too much or you might accidentally provide enough for your employer to identify you!

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One of the Holy grails of game design is getting it right and matching the game to the player's ability. When you get a game that does this then it captivates the player and times whizzes past. But it is not a static experience. As players play, they gain knowledge and experience so the game has to adapt to present new challenges without being too hard or too easy. This is called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment.

This is what Jenova Chen, a US based games designer and theorist is into and his website has articles, three games (some with source code) . the pictured game is fLow where you move a simple organism and eat others to make yours bigger. It's more of an experiment that a full fledged game but it will hold your attention for a time.  Interesting stuff, especially if you are into what makes games interesting and fun.

Link

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Ever searched for a couple of different things to see which shows up most on the web? Eg Google v Microsoft. Digg v Reddit, etc. Fight is a simple flash app that runs both queries on google and shows a pair of stick men fighting then the result. Its a light weight amusement but quite fun.

Link

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In the UK, today is known as “The Glorious Twelth” and marks the start of the grouse hunting season. This year though it’s more likely that huntsmen will be grousing about the lack of birds due to a population crash. Parasitic worms in the gut of the grouse have reduced the number of chicks and caused the death of thousands of birds. It’s believed that the mild winter helped the gut parasite thrive.

Link Takes you to an article in the Scotsman Newspaper.

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This cracks me up. A short (two and a half minutes) animated video about the Emperors reaction when he gets phoned by Darth Vader to tell him that the Death Star was blown up. He is a bit upset…

With memorable quotes like "You've been flying around for two weeks trying to get a signal!". "What the hell is an aluminum falcon?", this is excellent.

Link

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As the site says "Charade imagines a future where our most treasured items from
the media are under threat of destruction. When forced to rely on our
own memories and bodies for storage and retrieval, how would our
relationship to these artifacts change? What new forms of ownership and
distribution might emerge?

Volunteers attempt to memorize a chosen piece of music, film, tv
programme, play or book; through a process of walking, memorizing,
remembering and reciting, they each attempt to 'become' their favourite
media asset; over a period of one month they meet at ad hoc
gatherings at locations in central London; at a large-scale public
event in Trafalgar Square all volunteers congregate to recite their
chosen piece while wandering together, en masse – a re-creation of the
final scenes of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451."

There is a very subtle irony here btw, I suspect unspotted by the site's creator. It's true that Fahrenheit 451 was a film by Truffaut but it is Ray Bradbury who wrote the book of that name that the film was based on.  

This is taking place in London now, through May and June 2007. 

Link

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This is substrate, one of a number of computer generated images produced by Jared Tarbell, a computer scientist/artist and author of many books on Flash programming.

Although very natural looking, most of the images are produced by computer equations and he provides the source code of these (in Java in Applets which you can run- you will need Java installed to run them of course). If you like the images you can buy professional prints of them from here.

Link

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I think this has been well thought out. Some levels are very easy whereas other take a bit more effort.

You get a set number of bombs on each level and have to propel the main character to the exit door. On some levels there are barrels which explode after a while or tnt which blows immediately. Add in crates and it gets interesting. As you can see I’ve reached level 19 so far. Not easy as on some levels you have only one bomb- eg level 16.

You don’t have to solve all the levels in one go. Once you’ve done a level you can restart anytime at that level. Nicely implemented with great graphics. Recommended.

Link

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Apologies to those who only have Internet Explorer. Just as a one off, this story is about a feature in FireFox and Safari browsers. They support the Canvas tag and allow graphical apps like this lunar lander demo. Clever stuff.

The developer of this is Ben Nolan, a developer from Germany who is better known (in JavaScript circles) for his method of making html and JavaScript look very tidy through his behaviours package. JavaScript is a scripting language that runs in your browser and makes possible websites like Google Maps and GMail but it makes the html look cluttered. Ben's behaviours package cleverly moves the JavaScript out of sight.

Link

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Approximately 250 yards from where I work! Location, location and er location. It starts at 11.00 am from Earl's Court and is doing the Orient express route, though not I suspect along the rail tracks.

As the site says "The 5th year anniversary Cannonball 8000 rally will Run from the UK to France, Belgium, Germany, Czech republic, Austria, Slovenia, to Croatia, stopping off at the Automotodrom at Grobnik on the Adriatic coast in Croatia, and then head to the finish line in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where drivers and cars will be welcomed to the Cannonball 8000 finish line party at the famous Regency Esplanade Hotel."

I don't expect Burt Reynolds will be entering …

Link

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I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

Link

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