simont | (no subject)

Today I have become older. Ho-diddly-hum.

It seems to have become a tradition in my group at ARM that on one's birthday, as well as buying doughnuts for the group, one also poses a puzzle of some sort whose solution is one's age. This seems like a fun enough tradition to propagate, so I'm going to do it here too.

At work last week I told hsenag that there was a really obvious puzzle for this age which I'd have to avoid using, and he correctly guessed my age just from that. If you can do the same, you can give yourself a particularly smug pat on the back.

For everyone else, here's a nonogram puzzle I prepared in advance. You can print it out and solve it on paper if you like: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050503-birthday-puzzle/nonogram.pdf or http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/20050503-birthday-puzzle/nonogram.png.

Alternatively, anyone who has the ‘Pattern’ program from my puzzle collection should be able to just type in 15x10:1.4/2.5/1.1.1/1.2.1/1.1.1/5.1/3.1/3/7/4.2/2.1.1/1.1.1/1.1.2/9/3.3/5.4/2.2.2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2/3.6/3.2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2/2.2.2/7.4 and solve the puzzle in comfort on-screen.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wondered if "Birthdate: 1977-05-03" might not give it away?

Happy birthday!!

Well, don't look at that then! :-)

Thank you.

Birthday icon

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Simon
Happy birthday to you

(If you were to put that long uninterrupted string of numbers behind an lj-cut please it'd be even happier :)

I've just added discretionary line breaks. Is it any better now?

I can't see any line breaks (=I.E. is crap again). Sorry!

Bah, no, because discretionary line breaks using  cause complete chaos when cutting and pasting. Reverted to using an lj-cut. Sigh. Why can't HTML be good?

That works. Thank you!
Note to self: get better browser. Just as a general note.

Does <wbr> cause the same mess?

It certainly seems not to cause cut-and-paste doom, which is nice, and it appears to do roughly the right thing in Firefox, which is also nice. IE ignores it, though, so the LJ cut has to stay.

I've never heard of <wbr> before, and I can't find it in the HTML 4 specification. Where does it come from?

No idea really, never bothered to find out. 3.2 removed in 4.0? It's what LJ inserts into long links/words to prevent width smashing attacks.

Bah. I still don't see why my defence against widening attacks isn't used everywhere. My LJ style is fundamentally immune, because posting anything wide only widens the specific box containing it. So you can make your own post or comment illegible if you're mad keen to, but the rest of the posts on my friends page, or all the other comments on a given entry, are still displayed at their intended width.

This is admittedly a consequence of the entire style being built on a complicated table, but I'm sure it ought to be possible to reproduce it using more ideologically pure CSS (though my own CSS isn't good enough to do so).

Happy Birthday!

(I have no idea how to solve a nonogram, or even what one is [apart from 'one of those']. Is it like a strippergram, but instead of stripping, the person just goes "no! no!" a lot?)

And somewhere in among those "no"s would be my age encoded in Morse, or something? What a strange idea.

(Bah, I knew I'd forget something. In the version of this I sent out at work, I mentioned that googling for "nonogram" would give generally useful information. However, it also produces a web-based solver which would of course be cheating.)

There's a more apposite adjective to describe the puzzle, but that would also give the game away?

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday chuck :)

I didn't actually guess it from what you said, I was fairly sure I knew your age already - probably from having a random memory for this kind of thing and having read your userinfo, TICBW.

I suspect I would have guessed anyway though, because to me that is the most obvious puzzle for a number in 20s.

The previous number has a pretty obvious - in fact, probably even more obvious - property as well, as someone pointed out the next day.

I think the original one is rarer, and it's certainly more interesting.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday!

Gosh, you have the same birth year as me (thanks to

velvetfox rather than any leet puzzle-solving skills of my own). I didn't realise that. Now of course, I am puzzled as to what obvious puzzle results in the relevant age.

My age today has a property which it last had when I was six, and which it won't have again until I'm nearly five hundred. Does that help? :-)

Yes, that does.

Yes. In fact, it's perfect.

Ah. Thanks.

Heh, that puzzle was fun. Thanks. And happy birthday!

Happy birthday! *hugs*

I'm not even going to attempt the puzzle. *is arts graduate*

Happy Birthday! :)

I've just spent a fun half an hour or so solving the no sevens dice puzzle. Thanks! (and happy birthday.)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/wispfox/493222.html