Gath Adams

Kym & I are going away for the weekend for a much needed break. Where? you ask - look no further than here for great Daylesford Accommodation.

See you next week!

So what is going on?

It has always been a big concern to me that sudoku.com.au remains as warm and welcoming to visitors as possible. I have always thought that I have been very lucky to attract the sort of visitors so that the site gives out this feeling.

As with any large site, though, it has also attracted its share of spammers and people that are more interested in insulting others than anything else. I have put in place posting guidelines and various technical filters, but these are all avoidable if you are determined. Getting past the filters is made a lot easier by not having to log in before you post a comment or start a chat session - which is why I have introduced the free membership. The Free Membership (FM) is a new addition to the site and has coincided with the ‘Last Post’ competition. I have been asked if FMs are going to last beyond this competition, and the answer is yes.

By restricting access to the chatroom so that only members can enter, it is now much easier to ban people that just want to annoy (or worse) other people. Posting comments may be eventually restricted in a similar fashion, but hopefully not just yet.

A few supporting members have voiced their concerns that I am now giving away for free some of the things that they paid their membership fees for (Avatars, Smilies, Personal pages). While Free Members still have Ads and don’t get the sudoku solving tools, I can understand some SMs feeling this way. I am grateful that they have paid their membership fees & it certainly isn’t my intention to seem disrespectful. Almost all the new recent additions to the site have been for SMs and I am sure there will be plenty of new SM-only additions coming along shortly. If an SM feels that the free membership has everything they want from the site, then I would hope that when the membership expires that they remain on as a free member. Finally, if an SM has just recently joined or renewed their membership and would rather be a free member then just contact me and I will be happy to issue a refund.

Whew - thats everything! I have plenty of new stuff in the pipeline, so hopefully the site will get better (and better!). As always, if you have any suggestions just let me know. I have been super busy lately, so if you have sent an email and haven’t got a response please send it again.

Thanks to all the visitors to sudoku.com.au; Supporting Members, Free Members, and even the people that don’t want to know about this and just want sudoku

Cheers,
Gath

Friday already, and what have I achieved?

Sudoku.com.au Fixed up a few bugs and added the membership expiry date for members. All the interesting stuff was to do with managing ‘people issues’. Big changes to the site coming up next week, though.

I Want That Flight! lots of updates within the code to make it faster and more reliable. Still plenty of room for improvement.

Hidden Bars of Melbourne - The photos are up, so check out what we got up to last night! This was one of the biggest nights out in a while - we didn’t call it quits till 2:30am, thats how dedicated we are :).

I was surprised to see that Mitch Harper closed down his blog after only a month. Within that time he made it into the Top 10 Australian blogs, as well as spending a bunch of cash. His blog posts were all very long, detailed and of a high quality, and I wondered how he had the time for it and running his company. Well, I guess now we know.

There is a Havana themed party at Manchuria this weekend, so I’ll definitely be going to that. I’ll be the one with the big cigar!

A few sites have gotten some attention today:

Sudoku.com.au
You can now have your own Sudoku on your site, and blend it in with the colour scheme of your site.

Hidden Bars of Melbourne
Last nights photos are up, so you can see what we got up to.

FreeCrosswordPuzzles.com.au
American style crosswords are almost ready. Definitely next week!

Now I’m off to a bunch of Comedy - Justin Kennedy tonight and Dave Hughes, Danny Bhoy and Adam Hills next week. The comedy festival rocks!

From the labs to the arenas to the battlefields, here are the Top Ten Real Life Fighting Robots.

10. Sewer Snake

Sewer Snake became the richest battlebot of all time when it won the $10,000 Combots 2005 Championship. Later the same year, Sewer Snake also won the RFL (Robot Fighting League) Nationals. In 2006 it went up a weight class to Super Heavyweight (340 lbs) and still managed second. Sewer Snake’s main weapon is an ‘Invertible Lifting Wedge’ (Flipper) which it uses to throw its opponents into the air and sometimes out of the arena. Robot fighting events go in and outta style each year, though maybe its on the way up - ComBots came in at #8 in ‘The Best 10 North American Geek Fests’ but was well behind the ‘World Championship Punkin Chunkin’ (pumpkin throwing) at #2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duHe8g6Hdn8

9. VIPeR

Straight outta Israel comes the 9 inch tall VIPeR. Though it looks more dinky than dangerous, apparently it can be fitted with an UZI machine pistol or plant grenades. It can also do the standard bomb-sniffing and surviellence through its onboard camera.
http://israelitybites.blogspot.com/2007/03/viper-and-heron-israels-latest-war.html

8. Gladiator

Developed by Carnegie Mellon University for the Marine Corps, the Gladiator is currently in prototype stage. It is highly configurable, the weapons payload can be changed (or completely removed) depending on the mission and the locomotion can alternate between tracks or 6 wheels. It is designed to take a lickin and keep on tickin; the specifications state it can withstand small arms fire at point blank range and still be operable.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/gladiator.htm

7. Robart III

Built by the US Navy, this research prototype is one of the most sophisticated of the robots. It features automated target acquisition; firstly it scans the area for pre-taught known objects and then zooms in to look for vulnerabilities. It also can navigate autonomously through unknown terrain while simultaneously mapping the area. Armament is an air-powered Gatling gun. Though the gun only fires tranquilizer darts “the spinning-barrel mechanism also imparts a rather sobering psychological message during system initialization”.
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/robots/land/robart/robart.html#Robart3

6. Land Walker

This one’s for the BattleTech fans. Standing at 3.4 metres (11.15 feet) tall and with 2 side-mounted guns, this robot certainly looks the goods. Before you go out and buy one (get your own custom walker for $313,000), you might want to know that the guns shoot rubber balls and the walking is more like a ’shuffle’. Still cool, but maybe a rent rather than a buy.
http://www.sakakibara-kikai.co.jp/products/other/LW.htm

5. Huitong

Huitong (’the child’) is a human-shaped robot built by the Beijing Institute of Technology. Details in english are sketchy at best, though it has “sense of sight, audio dialogue, sense of force and sense of balance”. It can also perform Taijiquan (shadowboxing) and demonstrated its swordfighting technique at an “exhibition of major achievements of the national 10th Five-Year program “. Or something.

http://www.chinanews.cn/news/2005/2005-09-19/11146.html

4. Flameosapien - Robosapien Flamethrower Hack

So the other robots here are cool n’all, but a little pricey. Well, if you are up for a little DIY then this could be for you. All it takes is a standard Robosapien, about $100 for the flamethrower parts and to be not concerned if you “blow off a hand or burn your house down”. On the same site they also have instructions on how to add a coil gun to your robosapien.

http://www.evosapien.com/robosapien-hack/marcus/html/flameosapien_v2.html

3. MQ-9 Reaper

The MQ-9 is developed by General Atomics and is the first hunter-killer unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed for long endurance high altitude surveillance. Armament is a combination of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles as well as laser guided bombs (depending on the mission). As well as the US Air Force, it has been purchased by the US Navy who have increased the fuel carried to stretch the flying time to 49 hours. It has also been used by Australia to prevent illegal fishing, presumably without the missles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-9_Predator_B

2. Intelligent Surveillance & Security Guard Robot

Catchy name. This Samsung robot is designed to protect major military bases and national borders - specifically the South-North Korea border (where it is currently in operation). It can detect and track targets from 4km during the day, and 2km at night with infra red cameras. It has a speaker to communicate with nearby personnel and can automatically ask intruders for a password once they are within 10 meters. If the password is failed then it can respond with an alarm, rubber bullets or something a bit more lethal. It isn’t clear from the articles if the response is automatic or not, but I am assuming a human controller needs to intervene before weapons are fired. Interestingly, the $200,000 units come fitted with an anti-theft alarm, possibly after Samsung read this.
http://www.samsungtechwin.com/product/features/dep/SSsystem_e/SSsystem.html

1. Talon

Foster-Miller builds the Talon Robot or Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System (SWORDS) as it is also known. According to FM, the Talon has completed evaluation by the 5th Special Forces in Iraq and will be deployed in an armed reconnaissance role in 2007. It can be equipped with either machine guns, large caliber rifles and rocket launchers. It cannot engage targets autonomously, but instead relies on an operator to direct and fire the weapons.
http://www.defensereview.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=704

Some other notable bots that didn’t quite make the top 10 were:
Life-size Boxing Robot, Transformer Robot and Huge Russian Fighting robots (looks super-cool, and equally super-fake).

Hi,

Before we get into the Meat, lets do some Greet.

My name is Gath (pronounced Garth, my parents were ‘arty’) Adams and I live in Melbourne, Australia. I create and manage websites for a living. These include:

http://sudoku.com.au - Sudoku puzzles

http://iwantthatflight.com.au - Airfare comparison to get the cheapest Australian airfares.

http://jigsawonline.net - Online jigsaws

http://kakuro.cc - Kakuro puzzles

http://freecrosswordpuzzles.com.au - Crosswords

As well as a bunch of other sites (70 or so, all up). Changing and adding to the sites, feedback from the visitors and working from home all make it a pretty sweet deal. Not terribly social, though. Which is why I also run (with my wife)…

Hidden Bars of Melbourne Tours

Every Thursday night we take a group of 10-20 people around the ‘Hidden’ bars of the Melbourne CBD. All the bars are in back alleys/rooftops/basements - really hard to find. Thursday is the new Friday for me, the tour gets me out of the house & is great fun.

You can check out some photos of the tour here.

Mostly on this blog, I’ll be going on about ways to make money on the web, as well as changes/improvements you can make to sites. But there needs to be some fun stuff too, and I’ll be reporting on some of the news in the bar scene of Melbourne.

Cheers,
Gath