Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a little bit of decision maths. A secret in Boggle is to remember word patterns, so when you see a group of letters on the board, you know there are several ways of rearranging those letters to get a killer score. Alastair, over on the Bogglers, has been listing anagrams of 4 letter words for precisely this purpose. He asked me to find all the 4-letter anagrams in the SOWPODS dictionary. I created a program that cannot only find the 4-letter anagrams, but the 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 letter anagrams too (not that there are any 1 letter anagrams to find)

Initially, the program was rather inefficient, and I was only able to find up to 5 letters in a reasonable amount of time. I have now vastly increased the program’s efficiency, and a complete list of every anagram in the dictionary is available.

Just so Google finds it easier to find this, I’ll just clarify that these lists contain all the anagrams which are acceptable in the SOWPODS dictionary

• All the 2 letter anagrams
• All the 3 letter anagrams
• All the 4 letter anagrams
• All the 5 letter anagrams
• All the 6 letter anagrams
• All the 7 letter anagrams
• All the 8 letter anagrams
• All the 9 letter anagrams
• All the 10 letter anagrams
• All the 11 letter anagrams
• All the 12 letter anagrams
• All the 13 letter anagrams
• All the 14 letter anagrams
• All the 15 letter anagrams

Borrowing or Buccaneering?

Those Horizontal Drop Shadows

My latest project had no conscious inspiration and I didn’t borrow anything. Except for those shadows of course… That’s a very commonly used design technique though.

As you can see, I’ve made this site look better. To add to the happiness, check out this IE screenshot:

It looks quite obviously glitchy. This is, of course, exactly the kind of way I want it to look. I don’t want to completely exclude Internet Explorer users, just make them feel like they’re not quite at home, if you get me. It looks fine in Opera and Firefox, and I ssume everything else too. If you are using a worthy browser, and you encounter problems, tell me.

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser. I recommend and use Mozilla Firefox, but Apple Safari (Macintosh only) and Opera 8 are both worth considering as well.

-Paul Thurrott
I know that blockquote element looks terrible, that’s on the list of things that still need to be changed, including:

1. Comments need to be less default
2. Header likewise
3. Archives need to be tweaked so they look more distinctive
4. I need some previous post buttons at the bottom

Claire said I needed to die because I hadn’t deleted the green section of my site. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible. It’s gone now, and the next best thing is linking to her dA page and highlighting one of her pictures:

Her whole deviantART page.

As you can see, I’ve included a post summary at the top of this post. This is as a lesson to Ally, in order to show him just how easily it can be done.
This idea was originally suggested for Alastair’s blog by Matthew Brennan, and is a very good idea. However, Ally, taking his traditional stance of onedownmanship (like how he refuses to use firefox)*, hasn’t implemented it.
Well, bye for now. I know htat was a really short post, but tonight’s studying might have similar properties if I don’t leave.

I hope you enjoy this site as much as I enjoyed making it.

I’ve included a picture below as a taste of what’s to come: