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#1: Marie-Louise Ambrey (marz) on Jun 13, 2007

Sylvain, I have tried numerous times to do this puzzle but my computer freezes up and I have to restart it again. I dont know why, maybe the puzzle is too big, I havn't had this problem before and it upsets me because I love your puzzles and I want to do this one. Oh, I liked your cheeky coment about my puzzles, its especially funny after you just posted this one. Have you tried to solve it from scratch? I would like to know if its my computer that cant handle it or something else, thanx :)

I got an old Pentium II with no real power so for big puzzle ( like yours...) I usually print them first. I think the biggest one I did on screen was around 45X50 and my computer froze a couple of time during de process. But one think I konw that can help you is to turn off the auto error indicator at the buttom of the puzzle.

Yay, your suggestion works, thanx. Now here's hoping I dont make any mistakes. My computer is a pentium 4, I bought it last September, it can handle wide puzzles, maybe not long ones, weird.

Cool hope you like this one. Have you try my CBT collection? They are smal but some of them are quite challenging

Not yet, Ive only been on this site for a couple of weeks and I am working backwards, starting from the latest puzzles and whose puzzles I like the best. So it wont be too long before I get to the CBT collection :)

It is probably the error checking that causes your lockups. There are two tactics you can use to get around this. You can uncheck the "Enable Error Checking" box, but then you don't get those very helpful red dots that tell you when you've filled in enough squares or made a mistake (especially on these large puzzles where the clues are not always visable).

The other approach is to use the 0-1-2-3-4-5 number keys. When you hold the mouse over a square and type one of these numbers, it fills in the selected color (0=blank, 1=dot, 2=black, 3=red, 4=green, and 5=blue). You can also drag the mouse while holding one of these number keys to paint an area. This avoids the lockup problem because you don't cycle through the "incorrect" colors for a square while trying to get to the color you want.

The lockup seems to happen more often when errors are made in the lower portion of large puzzles. If I wait long enough, my computer usually recovers, but there have been a few occasions where I've let it sit for 10 or 15 minutes and it never came back. This usually happens when I am filling in multiple squares with the wrong color, so the error checker is going through multiple checks in a row.

Thanks Robert, I have tried unchecking the error checking box and it worked for a while ok, but then after going back to a the saved game the computer froze before the whole puzzle came up on screen, so I had to delete it. I will definately try out the other approach, I can try it out on another of Sylvains puzzles I'm having trouble with at the moment, so thanx :)

Oh good, it works! Thankyou so much Robert, now I can try this puzzle again and be safe in knowledge that I will be able to take on any big one that comes my way again. :)

Glad I could help you. Jan has added a few keyboard shortcuts to help us out. Another useful one that you may or may not know about are the 'h' and 'v' keys. These fill a row (h) or column (v) that the cursor is pointing at with the color of the nearest block in that row/column. This only works if the blocks to both sides are the same color (or either direction is an edge of the puzzle). This is difficult to explain - try using it to learn how it works. It's great for long rows/columns of the same color, or ones that need to be filled with dots.

Wow! Well, I finally finished this one, with a bit help, thanks Robert. Excellent puzzle Sylvain, nice and hard, with a fantastic end result, thanx :)

Robert is correct about the hanging problem. It occurs when (1) the puzzle is large, (2) a clue is long and complex, and (3) you make an incorrect mark near the right or bottom edge of the puzzle. Basically, under those circumstances, the Javascript regular expression matching function gets really, really slow sometimes, like it can take hours even on fast computers. I haven't figured out anything I can do about this. If Javascript was a grown-up programming language, I could set a timeout and just declare the line wrong if it takes more than a second or so to find a match, but Javascript doesn't really do time-outs well enough for this to work so no such luck. I really don't have a way to fix this bug.

Robert also correctly described the second and third best workarounds, turning of error checking entirely, or using the keys to make fewer errors. I do both of these.

The best workaround, however, is to use Firefox 2.0. When Firefox 2.0 hits this bug, the browser notices after a minute or so, and pops up an alert box asking if you want to abort the script. You can abort it, and continue solving the puzzle. After such an abort, the bad row/column will not have got the red ball that it almost certainly deserves, but otherwise you'll be fine. This way the hangs only last a minute or so. Still annoying, so you'll still want to do things to avoid them, but not fatal.

I've seen this feature in a few other browsers too. Konqueror was one I think, and Opera, but Opera has other issues with this site.

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Hmmm.. I didn't know about the 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 shortcuts. Jan, are all these shortcuts written down in the FAQ? (I know, lazy me, I should just go look.)

"Is that in the FAQ?" should be in the FAQ.

Yeah, I went and looked after I asked. Teach me not to look at the FAQ more frequently. Baaad Deana. :)

Nice puzzle. Who can resist the Simpsons?

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