1. I found that while splitting tasks up with student developers at work, that we were often stepping on each others toes. We needed a quick and easy way to indicate what we were working on so no one else would be trying to do the same thing.
2. We needed a centralized place to manage tasks and track things to work on for specific projects.
3. I wanted to learn CakePHP.

ToDo teams is essentially a productivity free-for-all. There’s no assigning tasks to people or forcing people to work on certain things. There’s simply a list of things that have to get done, and everyone is given the ability to work towards that goal.

…at least that’s how it is now. In the future it could change.

When something on a project changes, other users viewing that project will quickly receive notifications about projects changes through AJAX alerts. This helps to keep everyone up-to-date on the latest project information, and helps keep stale information or concurrency issues from happening.

ToDo Teams Screenshot

ToDo Teams uses OpenID (currently through Google or Yahoo) so that there’s no extra usernames or passwords to remember. You can be logged in and working in seconds, and there’s no extra headaches keeping team members from joining your project.

ToDo Teams aims to be as simple as possible with the focus on getting stuff done, not fooling around with complicated project management software. If you think ToDo Teams may be a good fit for you and your team, check it out now.

Go to ToDo Teams

In my opinion, the Zen Garden is the easiest and most consistent way to get money if you have a decent sized garden. Purchasing Stinky the Snail makes collecting the coins and diamonds easier, but there is one critical problem: he’s narcoleptic. He’ll often take a snooze after just a couple minutes of collecting coins, meaning that you have to sit there and wake him up.

“Not fair!” I say. What if I wanted to take a nap? Can’t we take shifts? Apparently not, according to PopCap. So, I decided I needed something that would wake Stinky up, and along the way a few other features snuck in. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Zen Garden Farmer.

Garden Farmer works for you by taking control of the mouse and doing some of the more tedious tasks of taking care of your Zen Garden. Hopefully this video will help explain things.

So, feel like trying it out for yourself? Go ahead and grab it then! Interested in the source code? It’s shared on GitHub! http://github.com/jocull/ZenGardenFarmer

Download Garden Farmer now

and/or…

Join the discussion on the Steam forums

Update: I got bored and decided to add in a Whack-a-Zombie mode. It works for Beghouled Twist too as long as you have matches available. If you run out of matches you can just take over for a second to hit the “shuffle” button, then put it back on cruise control. Video here:

Tweets (updates) are limited to 140 characters. In the space we have most of the important information. The format is concise, but useful:

[Show Name] s[Season #]e[Episode #] is starting on [Show's Network] in [minutes 'til air time] min! ([Time show starts] EST) Summary: [TinyURL to Episode Summary]

The tweet is measured before and after adding the summary. If the tweet is too long, the word “Summary: ” will be cut. If the entire link won’t fit it isn’t included at all, because having half of a URL doesn’t make much sense.

Interested in following? Check it out now: http://twitter.com/tv2night

This game reflects Company of Heroes pretty closely. Much of the game is based on taking cover, positioning, suppressing, and flanking the enemy. Especially suppression is a huge issue to deal with. Suppressed squads move slowly, take more damage, and are basically just dead. The only way to get out of these suppression effects is to get out of fire, die, or run like hell. The game has a “Flee” ability on most units that make them run away to the nearest reinforcement point. It breaks suppression effects and gives a little defensive bonus, I think. Your units are likely to live while fleeing, but they can get blocked off or pulled back by certain abilities.

Unfortunately, right now a big part of the game is also running the hell away from anything that could possibly kill your units. Because the requisition is so broken, any loss of units means minutes waiting to rebuild. In this game every second counts, and a minute feels like an eternity. I never see my requisition-per-minute counter passing 350, and it usually sits at about 200. One squad of Tactical Space marines costs 500. Are you seeing the issue here? If your marines die, you’re probably going to have to wait two and a half minutes for the requisition to accumulate. It’s rare that you’ll have any left over or stockpiled, because really you should be spending it all on more units, upgrades, an enhancements.

That little math problem aside, all of the Space Marines units are just plain too expensive. I often find myself stuck with two scout marine squads wondering how on earth I’m going to afford any other units, let alone upgrade my base or buy higher tier units. All of the other races have much cheaper base units. Granted, they are weaker, but at least you can afford them. Basic infantry (ranged and melee) squads in the other races run at about 270 requisition

The Eldar even get a 4-man suppression turret for 270 requisition. Based on this, I hereby declare the Eldar over-powered. No infantry squad can afford to be suppressed, and if you can cover lots of angles with the suppression effects, the other team is pretty much screwed. Punching through a line of fire is nearly impossible. You’ll either have to jump over the suppressing squad, tunnel under them, flank them, or somehow just avoid the fire. It almost never works, and you’re pretty much dead.

Similar suppression effects for the space marines cost 340 requisition for a devestator squad that, in my opinion, isn’t even as good as the Eldar’s. Tyranids must pay 400 requisition for a warrior squad, and then upgrade them for another 50 or so to get suppression. Orcs can’t even buy a suppression squad until they hit the 2nd Tech Tier. The best they can do is buy a shoota-boyz squad, and upgrade them with bigga-gunz. In my opinion, this doesn’t count. It’s an ability with a cooldown, and often the suppression doesn’t work or wears off too quickly. The cost to get that would be about 270 requisition plus another 50 or so for bigga-gunz.

The game seems to have a few parallels to Blizzard’s Warcraft III, though they play them down so it doesn’t seem that way. First off, you select a “Commander” to lead your army. Each Commander sort of plays a different role. Offense, Defense, Support, Tunneler, Assassin, etc. The Commander (and all other squads) level up, and get stronger (yes, stronger) as they kill units. To me, this almost doesn’t make sense. If you are on the wrong end of the stick getting your ass handed to you, do you really want the other guy just gaining an even bigger upper hand? While he’s stockpiling requisition and you are getting little to none?

Also, a large part of Warcraft III was the “Upkeep”. What happened with upkeep was that when your army got large, you only got a portion of any resources you harvested. It isn’t ever mentioned in this game, but if you pay attention you will notice that you get a lot less requisition-per-minute when you have a standing army than when you have next to nothing. Compare the screenshot below with the screenshot above:

As a final thought, it also doesn’t seem to matter how hard you work to take requisition points. In the end it hardly even matters. I laid the smack down on the highest level computer player and took every point possible as quickly as I could. This actually HURT me, and I acquired less requisition than he did in the course of the game. Now how the hell did that happen?

This is warfare, not welfare!

It seems like the only strategy that matters is stealing people’s power. This keeps them from upgrading their headquarters, getting higher tier units, and getting upgrades.

Read more from the original article.

Recently, I had the need to create a character counter for some text areas on a web form. As many people have come to realize, most browsers don’t enforce a maxlength on text areas. To help handle this, I wrote a little script that finds maxlength attributes on textarea elements. Once they are found it ties the element to a function that will count the characters, and force cut offs if you require it.

Remember, you should always double check your lengths on the server side before you send the values off to wherever they may be going. People can disable Javascript on their browsers to get around the limits you set.

Check out the demo below:

Using the code is very simple. All you have to do is include the script into your document’s source, and then attach attributes to your textarea elements like this:

You’ll notice two new attributes not usually placed on textarea elements: maxlength and lengthcut. The maxlength attribute makes the code display the character counter. If you add lengthcut="true" the maxlength will be enforced and will not allow users to type past the limit. Check out the full code example below…

Adding extra elements with Javascript on the fly after the page loads? No problem! Simply call the parseCharCounts(); method after your new textarea has been appended to the document. The script to make find then new textarea elements and handle them accordingly.

Ready to use it on your own pages? Download or copy the source now for free!

• Right click and select to save, or click the link to view or copy the source
• DOWNLOAD NOW: charcount.js

The Original Arby’s Pick 5 for $5.95 Generator

It’s been sitting happily, hosted around my various sites over the past year. It was even mentioned in a Consumerist article about Arby’s recently. It doesn’t generally get too much traffic, but the usual traffic is about 7 or so people daily. Based on the keywords people use to find the site, many of them are realizing that Arby’s has clearly failed to post their 5 for $5.95 menu online. Because of this, the generator sits near the top of the results for a variety of “arby’s pick 5 menu” keyword searches. Recently it’s jumped a little and I just couldn’t figure out why… until today. I was browsing the news to see if something had been in there to make it jump, and then I checked the Arby’s website to see what was up. Much to my surprise, I discovered this fancy version of what looks a whole lot like the generator created a year ago!

Change the skin…

…add a little pizzazz…

…and we get the same result!

Looks pretty similar, right? In my opinion, the best part is that their generator displays menu items which no longer are available on the pick 5 (can’t get Mozzarella sticks in my area) and show the price as $5.95 (when it’s $6.95 most places now). Their generator also has a few of the same quirks as my own, such as giving you multiple drinks or shakes. It also has the same sort of “slot machine” feel to it. To me it looks like Arby’s found an idea they liked and just sort of took it. Seems silly to me that this didn’t occur to them earlier. What else would you possibly do with a menu combination deal besides make a random generator out of it? Especially one that is entertaining and generally makes people hungry.