JayIsGames.com has one of the best sites for discovering and reading about casual flash games.. And they put on an amazing developer competition.  Here's the latest, with an August 1 deadline.

As usual, I'd love to see some DC'ers enter something and I'll pledge a rare and beautiful DC game designer mug to anyone who has an entry entered into the contest.

You may use any browser-based technology platform you are comfortable with (Flash, Unity, Shockwave, Javascript/HTML5, etc.)... We are calling for entries designed to incorporate this theme: SANDBOX.  1st place: $1,000, Armor Games Awards: $500 - to each of the top 3 Flash games for a non-exclusive license to appear at Armor Games.  Audience Prize: $500.  The deadline for entries is
Sunday, August 1, 2010.

http://jayisgames.co...gn_competition_8.php

Here's a physics game that should appeal to the tool-makers among you.  You control this round little ship and have to create custom tools to attach to it in order to solve puzzles.  What's special is how open-ended the tools are -- you create tools basically by drawing them out.  I'm not sure i've seen this done quite so well before. 

http://www.physicsga...Sprocket_Rocket.html

Over at dottech.org, a great indie software site, they are asking what everyone's favorite freeware is.. Stop by and let them know what your favorites are, and support your favorite authors and small software developers.

http://dottech.org/ask-dottechies/16475

The FIFA 2010 World Cup Predictor page has been online and available for use for a few months now.
The url is: https://www.donation...r.com/wcp/index.html

It's an example of Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation, and is focused on determining the best bets to make on the competition, by looking for bets where the teams have better predicted chances of winning than the current odds-makers are assessing.

The heart of the prediction system is taking simple pairwise team match-up predictions, and using these to simulate millions of tournaments and then calculating expected payoffs.

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However, for the system to be useful and informative and fun, it relies on having knowledgeable people making these large numbers of "pairwise team match-up predictions."

Rather than try to come up with a single best set of these pairwise predictions, the page let's anyone create and edit and simulate the tournament using their own set of pairwise predictions.

I'd like to have a contest to see who can come up with the best pairwise prediction estimations.  Note that this isn't the same as predicting the overall winner, and it's definitely not the same as advising who to bet on.  It's very likely in fact that the predicted winning team will NOT be one that the script advises should be bet on.

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So.. what i thought would be nice is to have a contest to see who does the best job of estimating these pair-wise match-up predictions.  These predictions basically require you to estimate the final score that is likely to result for every combination of 2 teams in the tournament play each other (yes there are a lot of potential match-ups!).

You create and edit your predictions from this page: https://www.donationcoder.com/wcp/go/
And then you can simulate the tournament and get betting advise as you go.

As far as a contest goes, what I'd like to do is offer a $250 prize to the person who comes up with the best set up match-up predictions PRIOR to the tournament start.  On the starting day of the tournament I will take a copy of all of the saved ratings files and at the end of the tournament compare who was most accurate in there pairwise matchup score predictions when the two teams met.

Additionally, anyone who wants to enter needs to reply to this thread and ask that their ratings be considered.

This is one of those things where not many people know about this software, and it's all in good fun -- so please if you know someone who is a fan of the world cup and considers themselves somewhat experienced, please pass them the link to this thread.  I'd love to get some feedback and see people try to take it seriously.  Please help spread the word!

We've talked about this before on DC -- i have no idea why it hasn't been done before (that i know of) long ago.  Actually i'm not sure why i didn't code it long ago.

But anyway, this seems like a very useful application.  With it you can have different default printers set automatically based on the application you are currently using, regardless of any support from within the program itself for choosing a printer.

From a ghacks article today.

http://www.ghacks.ne...nters-automatically/

Hi forum,

I just stumbled upon a few amazing online/text popup translator tools like Lingoes, Google Translate Client, StarDict and Dictionary.NET.

At the moment, I'm totally overwhelmed that tools like these have existed for some time without me having noticed.

I'm still far from being able to tell which of these tools might be the best (probably there are even more such tools out there..)

Thus, maybe someone else is already closer to make a conclusion, or a little shootout, between the most popular -- or the most advanced -- (popup) translator tools?

Thanks already
Cheers David.P