Daniel Pedigo

As most of you can tell, I’ve been pretty fascinated with Project Euler for quite some time (I have a lot more challenges done than I’ve actually posted).  However, these last few weeks I’ve been neglecting Project Euler and keeping myself busy with a few other “challenge”-type websites that I’ve found.   If any of you are interested in having hours and hours disappear in the blink of an eye, keep reading.  Seriously, I’m not joking.

First up is an amazingly clever riddle website titled Notpron.  Think of this as a no holds barred, anything goes type of riddle.  The first few levels are quite easy, as to give you a grasp on how it works, but they become much harder as you progress. I’ve spent countless hours on Notpron over the last few weeks only to progress to level 18.  There are 140 levels available.  According to the website, only 3 people have been “certified” as having completed all of the levels.  I definitely recommend everyone gives this website a try.

My next recommendation is a website called Bright Shadows.  Bright shadows has many different categories of challenges available in hopes that there will be a category suitable to you.  As most of these challenges require programming experience, I would not recommend this website to anyone that is not at least a little bit familiar with programming concepts.  Some of the categories include: programming, Cryptography, Steganography, logic, and my favorite, cracking.  Regardless, I still give this website an A+ for finally convincing me to whip out a disassembler and “go at it”.

My last recommendation (not because the others are any better) for challenge websites is Project Euler.  This website is based around challenging mathematical/computer programming problems.  Even someone like me, who would rather be doing things that are not math related, should still find this website to be a lot of fun.

Even though I’ve recommended a few websites to check out, there are still many more out there that are a lot of fun.  A few runner-ups include:

• Electrica
• +Ma’s Reversing
• Hack This Site

If any one knows of any other websites similar to these worth mentioning, leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

I decided that instead of solving and posting a Euler Project problem tonight, I would spend some time updating a few areas of my blog that have been neglected as of late.   I have re-posted my game of Tic Tac Toe and updated the project page that links to it.  I have also begun the lengthy process of adding metadata and optimizing the web pages for search engines. I’ll hopefully have that completed by this weekend.

One other thing I’ve done tonight is recreate my PAD file for the MHTML Converter, which in turn should start driving a lot of traffic to this website again.  Believe it or not, it is quite the popular little utility.  I’m sure I’ll begin to see the website traffic increase again very shortly.

Anyone who has actually been here within the last few months will have seen this website go up and down and up and down, changing the design each time.  I seem to have a very love hate relationship when it comes to my website.  One minute I’m having fun writing a few posts here and there and the next minute I hate Wordpress and nuke my entire website (including the database), leaving just a single static web page with download links to a few programs I have created.  Well, as you can probably tell, I’m back on the Wordpress side of things… Lets hope it will last this time around.

I’m hoping to write at least a post a week this time around; it really was a waste of time when I was only posting to the website about once a month.  I’ve decided I will probably just write about whatever I feel like at the moment instead of trying to go with a single topic like I have in the past.  Weird, it’s like a blog now! Either way, I’m just hoping a broader range of topics will keep me a little more interested in writing.