Now I’m rather pleased that I can get myself around Wave, post links to my photos and generally do all the good stuff.
There are however, people of my acquaintance who are a lot more technologically ‘ept’ (it should be a word, you know — Â the opposite of inept) and have started mucking about under the bonnet of Wave.
One of these is Dave, and the other day he introduced me to a little gadget he calls 5×5. Â The object of the game is to totally fill the grid with black squares. Clicking on a square results in that square (and those around it as seen in the initial pattern below) toggling its colour. There is a solution in 14 moves.
DaveP’s 5×5
I’ll hand over to Dave to explain what it is, how it came about, Â and how it works.
5×5 is a puzzle I first saw as a DOS PC thing back in the late 1980s. I wrote my own version of it back then (just for fun) and, ever since, it’s sort of been my “try a new environment” project. I’ve written versions for DOS, Windows, OS/2, the old Palm Pilot and even for GNU emacs.
Some time back I quickly wrote a HTML/Javascript version so, given that that’s pretty much all a Wave gadget is, I reworked it as a gadget. The main difference with this version is that it’s coded with the state of the game held in the Wave. This means that a) you can always come back to it and it’ll be how you left it and b) everyone who is part of the Wave can see what’s happening and can also make moves.
All you have to do is use the “add a gadget” toolbar button (the one that looks like a green jigsaw) and just input this URL in the dialog that you get:Â http://serenity.davep.org/5×5/5×5.xml
Hmm — the fun stuff begins!
Oh, and PS … I couldn’t do the puzzle (/grin) not even using Wave’s fabulous “playback” feature!
