I made a version of Squares called "Micro Squares", which can be included on any web page.  So here it is...
     Unfortunately, it only works on browsers that are not IE (Firefox and Opera). I also made a little script to generate a snowfall behind the logo of my front page. Again, it only works on browsers other then IE. It's pretty slow, however. The snowflakes are DIV tags being moved around, and despite there only being a couple of them, the snowfall makes my browser use about 25% of the of CPU power.

    I finished an overhaul on the A.I. unit of my Javascript game "Squares".  The original A.I. system simply calculated it's move by making a determination as to which cell would result in the highest gain.  This often resulted in moves that opened up the computer to major vulnerabilities, and the system was pretty easy to beat.  The new system calculates it's move by determining the gain to be made by each move, and the losses that can occur because of that move.  The gain less the loss equals the weight of the move, and the move with the highest weight is taken.  This results in the computer playing more defensively.  I've observed several times at the start of the game the computer retreating to avoid the loss of a first attack.  Overall, the new system is a large improvement.  The computer is actually challenging to play against.  It's not up to par with the microscope puzzle in the game the 7th Guest, but it will make you work a little.  
    In the new design for the A.I. system, I made it easy to capture the state of the board and experiment with a local copy.  This system will allow the A.I. to think ahead more then one move.  So far, I haven't thought through how such a system would weight out it's options.  None the less, the hooks are there when I come up with something.
    What I would like to do is implement some learning A.I., but I don't actually know anything about learning algorithms (aside from the fact they exist).  This game is simple enough, it would be a good place for learning A.I.  It may not be piratical in Javascript though.  As it stands, the current A.I. system is pretty slow-- noticeably so.  I'm under the impression it's the fact the system is Javascript that is causing the slow down-- the work load is still pretty light considering the CPU power of my computer.  Despite the improvement to the A.I. system, my version of squares is still no match for the 7th Guest's microscope game.
    On top of the new A.I., I added some animation to the game play.  It's not really needed, but it does help to illustrate what effects the moves have.

    Happy winter!  Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the beginning of winter—my favorite season of the year.
    Pictured is a loaf of French Bread I made this evening.  Behind it is my new mixer with it's dough hook.  That makes putting together a loaf of bread really easy.  It can kneed a ball of dough in 2 minutes, where I usually took 10.  While it's doing it, I can watch the consistency of the dough and decide if it needs more water or flower.  Gives you a lot of control over the end result.  To go with my bread, I made a pan of lasagna... and life was good :)

    Took my last two finials today.  The Anthropology finial was as tough as I expected, but I think I probably passed it.  I'm counting on my paper to pull my weight in that class, since I feel pretty good about how I did on that.  The history test I feel pretty good about.  It's all essay, and the instructor offers several question we can write on.  I like this approach, because I can pick an area I feel I have a good deal to write about and then write every last drop of information I can recall.  The topics I thought were pretty good too.  I picked writing about how war plays an important part in bringing about revolutions and some of the common themes about the revolutions we studied.  Perhaps I enjoyed it a bit, because I got to throw in my rather extreme politic overtones, and that's always fun :)
    In all, I'm glad to be done with the exams.  The semester has been a lot of work, but my grades will show me weather or not I'm cutout to be a full-time student.  So lot rests on the results.

    Two exams tomorrow: anthropology and history.  I spent the entire morning working with my study group for anthropology.  The instructor was the class is excellent and joined us for part of our study group.  After the anthro study group was done, I returned home and did some work for history.  The last part of the class was suppose to be on the Iranian revolution of 1979, but the instructor got off on tangents for most of the lectures we had on it.  I don't feel bad about that, since he brought up some points.  It does, however, mean I don't know much about the subject matter.  Lucky for me, I'm a documentary and lecture dork, and I had downloaded a lecture on the history of the middle east.  I re-listened to the section on the Iranian revolution, and hit Wikipedia and several other websites to learn as much as I could.   I've been doing this for the last week actually, but drilling more on the details today.

   Today was the pre-calculus finial exam, and I was ready for it.  I was surprised on how vicious the professor had made the test, asking the hardest version of every method we covered.  I felt pretty confedent when working the problem, and I think I should do alright—but I'm by no means fast.  The alloted time was 2 hours, and it took me three.  I don't feel bad about that though because I can still work through the problem.
   Pictured is Shannon at Denny's

    So no one showed to my study group.  After waiting around two hours, I joined Caleb, Adric, Roni and Sam for lunch.
    I've noticed some spammers on Crystal's site trying to spam the guestbook... still.  Someone or something has figured out there is a captcha and is now requesting the cap. image.  However, they are clearly unable to crack the captcha.  I'm wondering if someone has taken the time to review the page, or if spam software has grown to the intelligence of automatically being able to determine what image the captcha resides.  Tazz's site started getting hit by a spammer using the comments form.  However, I had already implemented the captcha in this script, and it just needed to be enabled.  So only a couple of spam messages were received before I prevented that from happening again.
    Captchas get a lot of bad rep on the net, but I've had nothing but very positive experiences myself.  I read a blog a few days ago talking about how captchas were ineffective, citing this site with the stat that 92% of captchas can be defeated.  Looking at the site, it's quickly obvious the site hasn't been updated in several years—the newest "news" article is from 2002.  Not listed are any of the more recent captcha systems.   Modern visual captchas are designed to defeat OCR software by creating problems OCR can't solve.  Currently, the only way to defeat these systems is by convincing someone to type in the captcha word—an attack known as the "free porn" attack.  The only decent alternative to captchas is filtering by either using some kind of IP blacklist or content analyse.  Blacklists require a continuous  updating source, and even then, you could always be one of the first.  And content analyse is something many spammer take into consideration when sending messages, often testing against systems designed to weed out their messages.  So, while some might find it annoying, I'm sticking with captchas—at least until something better and just as reliable comes along.
    Pictured is Roni.