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#1: Mark Conger (aruba) on Oct 7, 2006

It's an interesting style. Since it took a while to fill in, though, I wish there had been more of a payoff at the end.

Yes - it's interestingly different, but solving it gets seriously repetitive for a long time. Might have been better done on a smaller grid.

I'm curious as to why this one is marked 'has multiple solutions'? Is this another one that had the modified after publishing issue? Very tedious and predictable puzzle - I didn't take the time to solve it logically, but I don't see anything I could change to give it multiple solutions.

I don't know how it got the multiple solution rating. It definitely has a unique solution.

Can't have been the same bug. Must be a different one.

I've come across a couple puzzles like this that don't show any question marks in the listings, but have the multiple solutions message when I load the puzzle.

This puzzle locks up ie6 on 3 different computers win98 & win2k! Any ideas?

What usually causes lockups is the error checker, the thing that lights up the red error balls. It mostly happens on big puzzles with long clues when you are working on the far right or bottom edge of the puzzle. It isn't really locked up, but in these circumstances the error check takes so ridiculously long that it might as well be.

Turning off error checking will solve the problem, but you have to turn it off before it locks. Once it's locked up there isn't much you can do but wait for it to finish, which may take a while. There are some browsers that will notice that things are stuck and pop up a box saying the Javascript appears to be stuck, would you like to stop it? But on most browsers the only way to break out of a lockup is to reload the page, which would mean losing your work to date (unless you do what I do on big puzzles, which is save frequently).

I don't really have a way to fix this. The fact that I can't interrupt a running command is one of the bigger deficiencies in Javascript. The most I could do would be to manually flag puzzles where this problem may exist and have error checking default off for those puzzles.

Jan, thanks for the tip. I had the same problem on another big puzzle and was beginning to wonder. I did find on one computer that if I opened another instance of ie6 and clicked on it when the puzzle "locked up", then click back on the puzzle it would resume. This only worked on one computer but not on the others. Could be related to which java is being used? Thanks for your help!

I have no idea why that would work.

By the way, Java and Javascript are completely different. The stupid naming is the fault of Netscape who wanted to feed off the buzz around Sun's Java language by naming their own product similarly. Then the standards committee decided it needed a better name and came up with "ECMAScript", a name so incredibly hideous that everyone preferred the confusion of "Javascript".

Anyway Javascript is built into your browser. The Javascript commands get loaded in along with the page, and can dynamically rearrange just about anything on the page. The biggest problem with it is that it tends to work a little differently on every browser. Lesser problems are that it isn't really a very well designed programming language, isn't multi-threaded, doesn't handle interupts well, and lots of other limitations mainly geeks care about, but it means that if I ask it to go check a line for errors, then the whole browser is frozen until it is done. Under rare circumstances that takes a long time and there isn't much I can do about it.

Java, on the other hand, isn't part of your browser. It's a separate program, the most common versions being from Sun or Microsoft. Sun invented it with the idea that it would be a way to write programs that would run equally well on any computer or with any web browser - be it IE on Windows, or Konqueror on Linux or Safari on a Mac. Microsoft, of course, violated various standards in their implementation so that nothing so awful would ever happen, so it's not quite the magic bullet it was meant to be (there are other reasons for that too).

With Java, the description for the web page typically says "set aside a rectangle on the screen of such and such size, and run this Java program in it". The browser searches your computer for Java, feeds it the program, and hooks it up to the right hunk of screen space, and lets it run with no further interference. So the Java program gets embedded in the web page much as an image would be, but it's not really part of the web page. Most of the paint-by-number web sites I've seen use Java applets, and you do in fact have to worry about having the correct Java installed on your computer. This one doesn't use Java though so you don't have to worry about that.

This is one of the moments when I half wish I had gone the Java route. I think this bug would have been fixable in Java because I think it does let me set up real timeouts.

Well, that was a long response that nobody really asked for, wasn't it?

Apparently not, Jan. :-)

Very interesting design, nevertheless. I'm not a fan of them, as you all know, but this was "interestingly different," as Jan perfectly put it.

My firefox doesn't seem to like this puzzle. It got frozen two times while solving it.

Wow, first puzzle I've actually had to disable error checking for.

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I'm amazed this puzzle still has a quality rating of 2.

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