by Nick

You control a waitress, the only one working at the Yum Burger, and you have to:

- greet clients;
- let them seat on an empty booth;
- take the order;
- go to the cooks’ platter and serve the order;
- at last clean the tables and collect the tips they leave.

Use the left click to perform all actions.

Don’t let the clients wait for too long or their smile will turn into a red face: to be sincere, I never had the opportunity to see the smiley face get orange and then red because the game is very easy; I just saw the red face a while ago while taking a screenshot from the game, taking my time to resize and save with GIMP2 while the game was running in the background.

Unfortunately the score is mostly affected by pure random, because if two or three tables in a row are asking for the same kind of food (let’s say the fries) you have to wait until the cook produce a new item of that kind. So skill is absolutely not the main requirement.

Tips and tricks:
When game gets faster you better find clients a seat following a sequential order not a random one, let’s say: 1st client on the upper left, 2nd on the upper right, 3rd on the middle left, middle right bottom left, bottom right and so on. This way you can immediately tell which client to serve next or is waiting for too long.
Other tip, keep an eye on the timer! When less than 30 seconds left keep well in mind that collecting the last tips is the main goal, simply ignore newcomers.

My best score: 1830

Uhoh… in one of my early posts I think I wrote something like “I hacked heavily Gengo” but I obviously meant that I modified the Gengo Plugin to fulfill my multilanguage needs.

Yes, but someone else did actually the same to the Gengo site itself… and “heavily” too!
A couple of weeks ago I visited Stoatware (jamietalbot.com) to look for a plugin update but the homepage was errored even if the forums kept working.

Now, the whole site is completely craked / hacked! Homepage, plugin page and forums.
Apparently the visit results in a blank page… but if you view the page source you can easily notice a huge amount of spam links, cloaked by an invisible (display:none) html tag.

In his other multilanguage site wp-multilingual.net it’s all calm (too much?) and there is apparently no reaction, no news.

I (we?) hope the site can regain its “freedom” soon.

A Gothic style game, very well drawn as you can see, specially compared to all those over-coloured stick-style flash games. Despite the white background the atmosphere is dark indeed:

A Murder of Scarecrows

by The Skeleton Shop

Basically you have to drag and throw seeds, appearing on the tree, in order to hit and awaken the three scarecrows, this when they are molested by the crow. If they keep staying on them the energy of each scarecrow decreases: you can tell how much energy each have by the length of their roots. Once exausted a scarecrow dies but can be “resurrected” by hitting a bell that can appear some time later.

Tips:
do not end up with all three scarecrows’ energy too low at the same time, it’s a good way to reach a game over. If things go bad you should rather let one of them die, taking care of just the two it’s easier; then ring the bell to resurrect the “sacrificed” one.

It vaguely recalled me the Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas style.

You can add darker atmosphere by turning the music on (a popup opens).

We explored the world from a satellite view.
We enjoyed the building elevations from cardinal directions with maps.live.com in axonometric projection of the Bird’s Eye feature.

But now enjoy this:

Click on the new “Street View” button. You can see the States with a few camera icons on cities. Click one camera and then “Zoom In”. Drag the orange man icon on a blue bordered street and… you’re on the streets!
Look around in 360°, drive along or navigate on to another street once you reach the center of an intersection, zoom around!

And the amazing zoom is the problem: it seems it could violate someone’s privacy. Here’s an example with a man entering an Adult Bookshop.
Specially in San Francisco: at the moment the preview features 5 cities only, San Francisco -as far as I can appreciate- has the most detailed imagery, even the double compared to other four cities’ zoom.

A crowd of bloggers started to post the most curious views a few hours after the feature went live, so if you have any, feel free to share.

At last, the announcement I was waiting for: the latest release of the wp multilanguage plugin Gengo 0.9 compatible with recent wp release. I was running WP 2.1 Ella, I thought: Ok, let’s just upgrade Gengo… eh no no. Other good news was that Spam Karma 2 released a Gengo compliant version, so let’s download SK2 as well… but(!) I soon discovered that «Gengo only works for WordPress 2.1.2 or greater» so let’s upgrade the whole bunch!

And here I am, writing this new post also to test the working features of Gengo (you can read here my post about Gengo 0.8 not fully WP 2.1 compliant) after the whole upgrade is successfully -hope so- done.

My main trouble before upgrading was that I hacked heavily Gengo -as described in the post I just linked- to determine the language by subdomain and not by passing querystring parameter or rewrite-url (that awful /en/ or /it/, or whatever, trailing all links). So I had to study again the new gengo.php code, obviously changed specially where I touched it eheh. I upgraded directly my customised Gengo version (how brave) and it seems to work… let’s see…

Hello Sudoku lovers!

This post is here to receive feedback, suggestions, bugs (impossible! eheh)

Word is: multi-language.

Or better, “bilingual”. In my case, I basically had the need to write articles in two languages (italian and english). During my first search I read about plugins that support multiple language in a single post with features to switch them client-side. This is not exactly what I was looking for: different entries in different language but one related to the other as one the translation of the other. The language switch should be “global”: browsing the blog in english the user have to see only english posts; each entry should expose a link to its translation -if any- in the other language, otherwise show a “No translation” label.

All this, and even more of course, is made possible applying the “Gengo” worpress plugin.
Well, actually Gengo -as is- did’t fulfill all my requirements so I had to apply a lot of code modification to make it work as I needed.

First of all, Gengo expect to receive the current language as a parameter in the query-string (e.g. ?language=en) which, once activated the URL rewrite wordpress option (as I did), will show in the URL as a “/en/” appended in any context, for instance a full URL could be:
host/wordpress/2007/02/17/post-title/en/
This solution, to me and others -as I could read in theis forums- looks quite ugly.
Since outside the section where Wordpress is installed (/pages here in this site) the whole site language setting is determined by a subdomain (3rd level), it.heracleums.org for italian version and no subdomain (heracleums.org) for english one, I wanted Gengo to determine the current language the same way. This is the first relevant modification I had to apply.

The other aspect to be aware of using Gengo is that even its latest version does not currently support WP 2.1! Anyway, as far as I can see, this is actually creating problems when setting translation relations in the WP Write/Manage post page but fortunately you can make this association in the plugin’s “translations” page.

A related problem happens trying to get the single entry translations -the language switch- in the theme: it doesn’t work saying “No translations” even if all is properly set. The workaround requires constant mySQL queries: this led me quickly to consider using a cache management plugin (discussed later).

All the rest is working unexpectedly good, just to tell about another nice multilingual feature: the Categories, a common object through the different languages, have each their translation.

The rest of my work is all about the custom Theme development which have to show the same look of the whole site, current language awareness for various labels and captions -usually written in english directly in the HTML code of the theme-, pure CSS styling and various issues.

About new wordpress plugins I’m adding, I gave up trying to validate my Api Key for Akismet, one week of patience is enough I suppose. I see no obstacles on my hosting side that can prevent a call to the Akismet server. I can understand that a service has to be validated to avoid massive unknown request from nowhere but… I would like to speed up things, I give up.

So I added Spam Karma 2 (SK2) that seems very efficient:
well it’s too early to judge because the blog system is new, so still unknown to spam attacks… we’ll see. Anyway I had very massive ones in other sites I ran and it’s a real bother.

Ack, WordPress is great but its default-installed anti-spam Plugin, Akismet, is giving me troubles instead of helping me. The required API Key -received along with the wordpress.com account registration- is rejected by the Akismet configuration panel. It keeps saying:
«The key you entered is invalid. Please double-check it.»

The wordpress.com support kindly replied as follows:

The error message is because Akismet cannot access the Akismet server. The problem is one of three things [four actually]:
- either Akismet is being denied access to the internet if you are hosted locally behind a firewall, or
- the server you are on lacks the ‘fopen’ function which Akismet needs.
- your host might need to know that the default-installed SELinux security precautions (on Fedora4) causes this problem. With SELinux disabled, it works.
- ask your host if they mod_chroot enabled. If they do, that is what has caused Akismet not to work. They will be able to advise on what they can do for you.
Do talk to your host and see if there is anyway they can help.

I contacted my hosting support but they excluded all cases (i was sure about the first two but I ignored the rest).

Some say -at the wordpress.org support forums- that Akismet need a 24-48 patience period, let’s wait another day… then i’ll choose between Spam Karma 2 or Bad Behavior, other comment spam fighting plugins.

What about your Akismet activation? All smooth?

A tools test post