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As if Flash games weren’t enough, Holger has released a new web-browser game written in SVG: Sokoban. This puzzle game is fun and challenging, but at 60 levels, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to sit through them all. It’s a shame that the game doesn’t save a cookie and remember which level you’ve made it to (hint hint, Holger).

To play the above, your browser needs to support SVG (a relatively new web-based graphics standard). Until Mozilla Firefox 1.1 is released, I recommend you download the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin. For Internet Explorer, click here. For Mozilla Firefox, follow the instructions at the bottom of this page.

After I wrote this entry, I knew I had forgotten one “gotcha” from my little Remote Scripting experience. I remembered it today. It involves PHP and the annoying aspect of having to declare within a function when you want to use a global variable:

The above will not produce “5″. Without explicitly telling PHP that gSomeVariable is a global variable, it will assume it is a local variable and currently undefined.

Do you know how many time this has tripped me up? The correct PHP code is:

For all the times I made this mistake: AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!

Why are newspapers still around? Who buys newspapers these days? It certainly isn’t teenagers looking for a used car. As a family we certainly don’t buy newspapers, though we’ll occasionally check one out if we find one sitting (discarded and lonely and only slightly stained) in a coffee shop. Click To Read More...

This is just a quick entry for me to jot down some caveats that I encountered while making a simple instant messaging application for the browser using Asynchronous JavaScript, XML and PHP. Click To Read More...

In the midst of Adobe purchasing Macromedia, thereby putting in question the Final Fate of Flash and the success of SVG, I decided to check out the W3C SVG site. No reaction yet there (and I guess there wouldn’t be, they are a standards body, not a bunch of gossip columnists/business theorists). However, I did notice that they put up a new Working Draft document for SVG 1.2 about a week ago. Click To Read More...

In designing a little on-line chat program accessible through a web browser, I came across what was one of the most frustrating problems in my software development career. Click To Read More...

When Cartoon Network first came onto the scene it was owned by the Turner Network and had access to the entire Turner library of animation. This included a large chunk of Warner Brothers cartoons (Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies up to 1948) and (I believe) the entire Hanna-Barbera library (Scooby-Doo, Flintstones, etc). Naturally Cartoon Network became to be known as just a network that reran old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Frustrated with this image, Mike Lazzo (a producer at CN) asked Turner if they could create their own shows. Click To Read More...