All right, looks like I’m kicking off this blog with a complaint. \u00a0This does not bode well for the future. \u00a0Hey, I just kicked off the blog with a complaint and a self-deprecating remark! \u00a0We’re two for two.<\/p>\n
Anyway: the puzzle-minded among you know that Google Nexus has a Twitter feed<\/a> on which they post an occasional contest. \u00a0If you are the first to answer the contest correctly, you win a new Google Nexus S phone. \u00a0Not bad, right? \u00a0Well, recently, they ran a very frustrating puzzle. \u00a0The idea was, Twitter users would suggest ten-character strings, and they would tweet back whether your string fit a particular pattern they had in mind. If you picked up on the pattern early, you could tell them what it was and win the prize.<\/p>\n The problem? \u00a0For some reason they were verifying user-submitted strings by hand<\/i>, and trying to do so every minute or so. \u00a0This probably led to some very tired and frustrated Google employees, and … it led to some mistakes. \u00a0Their intended pattern was<\/a>:\u00a0letters in ascending order, 3-5 numerals, exactly 1 vowel. \u00a0Except they allowed two<\/a> strings<\/a> that didn’t fit the pattern. \u00a0And, if you were wracking your brains trying to figure out the pattern like I was, it just led to a few hair-tearing-out* hours.<\/p>\n * For lack of a better word.<\/i><\/p>\n So I got to thinking: why didn’t they just write a script to auto-reply for them? \u00a0It should be easy to write a Python script that would search for @-mentions, check for ten-character strings, and reply to a user whether or not his string fit the pattern. \u00a0I gave myself an hour one morning and came up with this<\/a>. \u00a0It certainly does the job and can easily be set to run every minute or so to look for new replies. \u00a0It might need to be tweaked a little — you’d want to make sure there are about as many “yes” replies as “no”, and you’d probably want to limit the total number of replies to somewhat less than 20 per minute. \u00a0But the point is: Google has much better Python coders than me. \u00a0For about an hour of coding (and some beta testing to be careful) they could have avoided a lot of trouble for themselves and a lot of gut-wrenchiness* for the rest of us.<\/p>\n * See above footnote<\/i><\/p>\n Okay! \u00a0No more complaining! \u00a0Next time, we’ll talk a little bit about the technical aspects of making my puzzle for BEQ’s site<\/a> without Crossword Compiler. \u00a0If you’re interested in making JPZ puzzles, you might want to stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All right, looks like I’m kicking off this blog with a complaint. \u00a0This does not bode well for the future. \u00a0Hey, I just kicked off the blog with a complaint and a self-deprecating remark! \u00a0We’re two for two. Anyway: the … Continue reading