Dan Tull has created a wonderful Sudoku tool that makes Hard Sudoku puzzles less tedious, and Tough Sudoku puzzles possible!

You need to provide your own puzzle values, which is just takes a few double clicks and then you are off.  It basically does the grunt work of eliminating the obvious impossible values for you.

It could take hours of tedious re-evaluation to solve a tough puzzle manually and tough puzzles seem to require some guess and check as well.  With the tool, the re-evaluation is mostly free and guess is check is made much easier with the "Copy Puzzle" feature.

The tool is a Javascript application supported on IE, Firefox, and Safari.  The Copy Puzzle feature doesn't currently work in IE however.

Excellent work all around Dan, Thanks!  I'm still addicted, but at least I waste less time per day doing the harder puzzles.  :)

My step-father-in-law introduced me to Sudoku logic puzzles last weekend and I've been compulsively obsessed ever since.   Here's the URL:

http://www.sudoku.com.au/

There are 3 new puzzles every day, one easy, one medium, and one hard.  The easy ones I can do in less than 5 minutes.  The hard ones I try to finish in less than 20 minutes, but I've spent over an hour on them before.

These puzzles have everything about logic puzzles that I loved as a kid without most of the bad parts.  There is no math to do, yet it's number oriented.  Most of the work is "process of elimination" oriented.  It's very visually stimulating.

The biggest downside I've noticed so far is the first ~10 minutes of grunt work that goes into a hard puzzle.  Being a programmer, I'd love to just code up an algorithm to do a first pass analysis for me which would save a ton of time, and eliminate the normal human mistakes.  I'm not sure how that would affect the "fun factor" though.

I saw the announcement on The Inquirer.  I was a huge fan of the first version (I liked it much more than Diablo II, which was an excellent game in its own right), so I assume I'll buy this one even if I don't have much time to play it.

Microsoft is listing the release date for the game as August 16th.  W00t!

The PDF containing the AMD-Intel Complaint

I have been an AMD shareholder for the past ~6 years (shortly after AMD successfully launched the first Athlon processor).  I read a decent majority of the complaint linked above.  It makes me want to cry.

AMD has apparently been working very hard to be successful and Intel has apparently been working very hard to stealthily kill AMD's chances to increase market share in the face of AMD's technical superiority across many mass market product lines.  It's amazing how much of the plot AMD has reverse engineered.  I'm sure it has taken years for AMD to gather all the information it has about Intel's intentionally stealthy plots.  Hopefully, legal discovery will allow AMD to much more quickly build a lengthy fact filled case against Intel.  If I was an Intel shareholder (i.e. naturally biased against AMD) and the judge for this case, I would be pretty persuaded to AMD's cause just by reading the complaint which is very damning of Intel.

I want to cry because over the last 5 years instead of seeing my AMD stock increase in value, I was (on paper) down ~90% at one point in time.  If it turns out that was because of Intel doing very illegal things, I will be very angry.  I did sell some of my AMD stock during the last 5 years and that sale was at a price that was (theoretically) lower than it would have been had Intel been (allegedly) competing in a legal and legitimate way.  I don't think there is any way for me to be compensated for that loss though (the Enron shareholders obviously had it MUCH worse; I am starting to feel their pain).

I guess now is a good time for me to put my money behind my beliefs.  I'd love to short Intel to zero.  :)

AMD sues Intel, the monopolist

Wow.  I would guess that AMD has been preparing this lawsuit for years.  There have been rumors of this kind of behavior by Intel for a long time.  As an AMD shareholder, I can't help but be thrilled.  If AMD wins no money from the lawsuit, that is fine with me.  If it causes massive increases in their market share because customers aren't afraid to buy from them anymore, that would be fabulous.  If the status quo remains after the lawsuit ends, oh well, the lawyers drained some of AMD's profits away.  There seems to be little downside risk and tremendous upside potential.  Go AMD!

ATI turns in a loss, Challenging quarter, CEO says

I find this shocking.  Not that I pay a ton of attention to ATI, its stock price, or it's financials, but...  I used to own NVDA stock.  I do follow developments in graphics cards with some interest.  NVDA and ATI have been fairly even in the head to head battle for the last year or so.  Before that, ATI was clearly ahead.  How badly do you have to mismanage your finances that a little improvement by the competition can cause you a loss for the quarter?  Hmm, I might need to try to understand better what is going on here so I'm not so shocked in the future.

High Dynamic Range Lighting

This looks like a huge visual improvement that even I can notice (most graphics goodness is lost on me).  It's good to see that the graphics card companies (NVidia and ATI) will have plenty to keep them busy in the coming years while we are waiting for the next id graphics engine to stress all those new features.

I went to a No Limit Hold'Em poker event last night in Cambridge.  I busted out within an hour and choose not to rebuy.  Such is life.

While at the event last night, I found out about this site where you can find out about poker events in the Twin Cities, which is very helpful:

http://www.twincitiespoker.com/

I'm more of a once every two months kind of a poker player myself, but I did feel a little rusty last night and that tends to motivate me to play more.  Hopefully I can resist that urge.

Mark Cuban riffs on copyright protection

I think Mark has the right approach here.  Copyright protection is:

a) anti-consumer
b) technically not workable
c) sold by companies whose main product is fear

There are only losers in this game.

My attitude toward copyright protection is the only thing that works: "help honest people stay honest".  If you ship a digital product without copyright protection, a consumer may accidentally do something illegal with it (like borrow it to a neighbor who then copies it and resells it illegally for profit).  If I ship a product, I'm okay with the simplest possible copyright protection that keeps honest people honest.  I don't worry about the people who are dishonest, because then I would have to engage in a never-ending arms race that only ends up hurting my customers by making the product harder to use.

It's not clear to me why this attitude toward copyright protection is not more widespread (i.e. stop wasting time trying to prevent dishonest people from being dishonest).

For more proof (and there is tons of proof available, I just happened to notice this one instance at the time I wrote this post) that this game is nothing but an arms race that even the biggest companies can never win, see:

Sony PSP cracked

Rick Segal: Sometimes it's hard to be an American [via Robert Scoble]

Wow, powerful stuff.  Ever since the start of the Iraq war, I have been somewhat embarrassed to be an American.  I'll feel slightly better after Bush's second term as president is over.  Clinton was an embarrassment as well, but mostly to himself.  Bush's government has made America many new enemies.