I added a puzzle to Octothorpean this weekend. It took longer to figure out where to put the puzzle than it did to write the puzzle itself. I wanted to add a puzzle close to the beginning of Octothor...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Santa Clara
Yesterday, Mystic Fish playtested Elevate Tutoring Puzzle Hunt 2. We had a lot of fun! …[pause as I try to think of something non-spoilery to say]… We had a lot of fun! ...
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This happy chart illustrates a web server not falling over as twenty-something teams pile on to play Lumber Party: That's requests-per-second. The spike shows the time around 10:30am, when everyone...
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Playtesting continues apace. A small subset of the DRT (Demonic Robot Tyrannosaurs) tore through many, many puzzles, as you might expect. Of course, it was tricky figuring out how to transform their...
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Want to Playtest the Octothorpean Game puzzlehunt 5/25, 5/26, 5/27 or 6/2?
Update: OK, that's enough responses to keep me busy for now. Thank you! (If you're from out of town, and June 2 was going to be a rare chance for you to do bay area stuff, then you should still talk...
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Playtest went well. Wow, I figured folks would conk out after an hour or two, but they just kept going and going. Not everything got tested with n00bs; some folks showed up who'd played in puzzlehunt...
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Message to Puzzlehunter Wanna-Bes
Someone smart asked for some draft email text they could to a San Francisco-area puzzlehunter wanna-be. So I wrote this: Playing in puzzlehunts is fun, but can be kinda like diving into the deep en...
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Wanted: Wanna-Be Puzzlehunters near SF
You've had this conversation. They ask you what you did last weekend. You say you puzzlehunted. They say OMG that sounds amazing, I wanna play. You encourage them to look at some MIT Mystery Hunt puz...
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Book Report: Working Effectively with Legacy Code
This book is a classic amongst computer programmers. Well, it's a four-year old classic. It captures the, uhm, zeitg^W movement towards unit testing and refactoring. It shares a problem with other...
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Link: Race for the Galaxy
When people ask me what I do at work, I clam up. Most of that stuff is confidential. Like when some of us geek gamers play-tested the geek game Race for the Galaxy some evenings, we knew it was a f...
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Book Report: Beautiful Code Chs 5-8
Correct, Beautiful, Fast (in That Order) / Elliotte Rusty Harold Emerging from the previous essay, I saw that this essay was going to be about verifying correctness of XML. My yawning muscles tensed...
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Site: Getting Started with CppUnit on Ubuntu
I wrote a little hello-world getting-started guide for programming CppUnit on Ubuntu/Debian/Linux/whatever. CppUnit comes with a couple of tutorials, but I couldn't compile the code from either. I ...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even my Head
Last weekend was a puzzle playtest party for BATH3. BATH is a sort of pot-luck puzzle hunt in which each team makes up one puzzle. Game Control strings all of the puzzles together and runs a game a...
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Link: Google Page Creator
I have been playing with Google Page Creator, a new service which hosts web pages and gives you a WYSIWYG editor for them. It's pretty neat. My favorite part: there are pretty templates available. ...
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