Level scores on Angry Birds

Game Centre doesn't give scores or ranking per level. This makes it difficult to target levels that are potentially going to yield more points. Below are my scores. I'm particularly interested in any scores you have that beat mine.

Angry Birds…

1. Poached Eggs.

1 - 1 34240

1 - 2 61200

1 - 3 42820

1 - 4 31120

1 - 5 64930

1 - 6 36570

1 - 7 45610

1 - 8 56410

1 - 9 55440

1 - 10 68560

1 - 11 59960

1 - 12 53560

1 - 13 53010

1 - 14 78180

1 - 15 52590

1 - 16 65760 [66300]

1 - 17 56620

1 - 18 50400 [56080]

1 - 19 39130

1 - 20 60590

1 - 21 83440

2 - 1 68350

2 - 2 73710

2 - 3 117740

2 - 4 56480

2 - 5 92550

2 - 6 74130

2 - 7 55300

2 - 8 55390

2 - 9 29420

2 - 10 43840

2 - 11 95430

2 - 12 63920

2 - 13 89760

2 - 14 52310 [56050]

2 - 15 67510

2 - 16 68490 [73150]

2 - 17 43690

2 - 18 64450 [70730]

2 - 19 54780

2 - 20 56490

2 - 21 82640

3 - 1 64560 [65420]

3 - 2 54920

3 - 3 76550

3 - 4 39650

3 - 5 105590

3 - 6 63030

3 - 7 56620

3 - 8 82290

3 - 9 66740

3 - 10 55090

3 - 11 50940 [56550]

3 - 12 50010

3 - 13 48680

3 - 14 52100 [55260]

3 - 15 63530

3 - 16 75460 [76490]

3 - 17 74160

3 - 18 91200

3 - 19 68260 [69500]

3 - 20 121630

3 - 21 130400

2. Mighty Hoax

4 - 1 67130

4 - 2 58250

4 - 3 62540

4 - 4 63880

4 - 5 93380

4 - 6 60040

4 - 7 71120

4 - 8 52880

4 - 9 42370 [46920]

4 - 10 46990 [54510]

4 - 11 95890

4 - 12 99200

4 - 13 77360

4 - 14 87000

4 - 15 88260

4 - 16 83180

4 - 17 30460

4 - 18 89400

4 - 19 52110

4 - 20 108660

4 - 21 90800 [94100]

5 - 1 58810

5 - 2 52900

5 - 3 89430

5 - 4 72990

5 - 5 84560

5 - 6 93830

5 - 7 87250

5 - 8 83650

5 - 9 72830 [79120]

5 - 10 52340

5 - 11 69260

5 - 12 73520

5 - 13 62190

5 - 14 58400

5 - 15 60790 [ 64950]

5 - 16 116840 [117770]

5 - 17 103620

5 - 18 112190 [116910]

5 - 19 115250

5 - 20 103620 [104780]

5 - 21 175600

3. Danger Above

6 - 1 69180

6 - 2 87140

6 - 3 76220

6 - 4 93430

6 - 5 70170

6 - 6 79000

6 - 7 125970 [124830]

6 - 8 101150

6 - 9 109640 (Don't think this will yield much more)

6 - 10 103590 [103820]

6 - 11 105670

6 - 12 111720

6 - 13 88930 [93520]

6 - 14 95850

6 - 15 139720

7 - 1 131030

7 - 2 143230

7 - 3 68410

7 - 4 86680 [86740]

7 - 5 83190 84840

7 - 6 80140

7 - 7 103750 [104070]

7 - 8 90290 [96080]

7 - 9 136720

7 - 10 107110 [115680]

7 - 11 113320

7 - 12 90110 [91290]

7 - 13 67270

7 - 14 65460 [69750]

7 - 15 158350 158650

8 - 1 107430

8 - 2 71330 [73020]

8 - 3 128600 [135380]

8 - 4 117670

8 - 5 97400

8 - 6 115610

8 - 7 167140

8 - 8 113640 [125310]

8 - 9 143550 [143560]

8 - 10 124500

8 - 11 108260 [110810]

8 - 12 106900 115020

8 - 13 152690 [153610]

8 - 14 90410

8 - 15 150290 [152750]

4.The Big Setup

9 - 1 24150

9 - 2 38830

9 - 3 44660

9 - 4 55890 [58440]

9 - 5 40090

9 - 6 53330

9 - 7 82830

9 - 8 58320 [61950]

9 - 9 47240

9 - 10 80970

9 - 11 57610 [58380]

9 - 12 66980 [71530]

9 - 13 78050 [83880]

9 - 14 71150 [73650]

9 - 15 86210 [88980]

10 - 1 71370

10 - 2 96290 [96960]

10 - 3 77060 [80880]

10 - 4 101850

10 - 5 93870

10 - 6 112100

10 - 7 89290 [97300]

10 - 8 75770

10 - 9 67620

10 - 10 73530

10 - 11 135470

10 - 12 85460

10 - 13 80270 [82020]

10 - 14 107700

10 - 15 105880 [109140]

11 - 1 117850 [121610]

11 - 2 112110 [115190]

11 - 3 131750 [153290]

11 - 4 89130 [95150]

11 - 5 125980 [137640]

11 - 6 100680 [104850]

11 - 7 124440

11 - 8 126010 [130760]

11 - 9 106430 [108810]

11 - 10 77020 [82090]

11 - 11 92120 [95520]

11 - 12 84390 [87010]

11 - 13 100000 [113450]

11 - 14 91400 [95860]

11 - 15 95690 [101340]

5.Ham 'Em High

12 - 1 76200

12 - 2 83020 [83740]

12 - 3 60280

12 - 4 83780 [88590]

12 - 5 79980

12 - 6 62150 [62170]

12 - 7 70140 [71240]

12 - 8 60260

12 - 9 101640

12 - 10 85520 [96250]

12 - 11 75650 [79370]

12 - 12 78350 [80880]

12 - 13 77370

12 - 14 91680

12 - 15 150510

13 - 1 79340

13 - 2 82470

13 - 3 78610

13 - 4 93700

13 - 5 100480

13 - 6 97160

13 - 7 147700

13 - 8 60280

13 - 9 78630

13 - 10 65240

13 - 11 88460

13 - 12 90670

13 - 13 54300

13 - 14 82650

13 - 15 129810

14 - 1 120950

14 - 2 110460

14 - 3 63670

14 - 4 122830

14 - 5 68450

14 - 6 104710

14 - 7 58080

14 - 8 70670

14 - 9 102260

14 - 10 108310

14 - 11 94580

14 - 12 104520

14 - 13 87240

14 - 14 81990

14 - 15 129920

f - 1 114070

f - 2 67940

f - 3 92000

Angry Birds Seasons…

Easter Eggs

1 - 1 - 79640

1 - 2 - 121940

1 - 3 - 116990

1 - 4 - 121610

1 - 5 - 127710

1 - 6 - 90400

1 - 7 - 95190

1 - 8 - 96570

1 - 9 - 98600

1 - 10 - 100280

1 - 11 - 130110

1 - 12 - 94780

1 - 13 - 92640

1 - 14 - 109350

1 - 15 - 120770

1 - 16 - 106820

1 - 17 - 106120

1 - 18 - 121000

Hogs and Kisses

1 - 1 - 56830

1 - 2 - 118640

1 - 3 - 60230

1 - 4 - 168680

1 - 5 - 102940

1 - 6 - 67270

1 - 7 - 95650

1 - 8 - 65200

1 - 9 - 56150

1 - 10 - 58370

1 - 11 - 70400

1 - 12 - 66120

1 - 13 - 102070

1 - 14 - 110130

1 - 15 - 151560

1 - 16 - 113470

1 - 17 - 94940

1 - 18 - 78850

Season's Greedings

1 - 1 71140

1 - 2 82190

1 - 3 60730

1 - 4 95700

1 - 5 116820

1 - 6 63960

1 - 7 73570

1 - 8 91330

1 - 9 102050

1 - 10 60370

1 - 11 70480

1 - 12 85280

1 - 13 122200

1 - 14 102830

1 - 15 58880

1 - 16 100060

1 - 17 64230

1 - 18 113210

1 - 19 48820

1 - 20 50430

1 - 21 73900

1 - 22 100480

1 - 23 77360

1 - 24 59000

1 - 25 158630

Trick or Treat

1 - 1 48400

1 - 2 79150

1 - 3 75410

1 - 4 66090

1 - 5 71940

1 - 6 69530

1 - 7 84250

1 - 8 110310

1 - 9 102070

1 - 10 102090

1 - 11 110600

1 - 12 75350

1 - 13 103850

1 - 14 88710

1 - 15 85010

2 - 1 101650

2 - 2 98910

2 - 3 88090

2 - 4 93520

2 - 5 105290

2 - 6 91550

2 - 7 106390

2 - 8 91600

2 - 9 54120

2 - 10 83339

2 - 11 103270

2 - 12 101820

2 - 13 75250

2 - 14 100970

2 - 15 107520

3 - 1 120980

3 - 2 92040

3 - 3 110200

3 - 4 48840

3 - 5 73630

3 - 6 112110

3 - 7 96550

3 - 8 101080

3 - 9 77040

3 - 10 118620

3 - 11 112170

3 - 12 79940

3 - 13 113850

3 - 14 102620

3 - 15 102490

Angry Birds Rio…

Smuggler's Den

1 - 1 63060

1 - 2 48100

1 - 3 59320

1 - 4 60730

1 - 5 59360

1 - 6 74100

1 - 7 59240

1 - 8 121680

1 - 9 78690

1 - 10 84150

1 - 11 89430

1 - 12 85890

1 - 13 94500

1 - 14 84690

1 - 15 71410

2 - 1 96490

2 - 2 84290

2 - 3 95900

2 - 4 72980

2 - 5 52400

2 - 6 96920

2 - 7 63500

2 - 8 117340

2 - 9 84060

2 - 10 79780

2 - 11 61700

2 - 12 65440

2 - 13 108420

2 - 14 65880

2 - 15 92460

Jungle Escape

3 - 1 84420

3 - 2 76160

3 - 3 52150

3 - 4 106150

3 - 5 90960

3 - 6 70320

3 - 7 93350

3 - 8 147110

3 - 9 105480

3 - 10 94390

3 - 11 57040

3 - 12 98950

3 - 13 105100

3 - 14 84390

3 - 15 118020

4 - 1 63850

4 - 2 98760

4 - 3 68910

4 - 4 108210

4 - 5 75870

4 - 6 79910

4 - 7 94160

4 - 8 121320

4 - 9 56630

4 - 10 78340

4 - 11 88500

4 - 12 73040

4 - 13 63220

4 - 14 97740

4 - 15 72420

Note: Updated with new high scores.

The scores in square brackets are the highest known scores from other people.

My son is appalled by this. "Oh My God!", he said, "You're an Angry Birds nerd!"

20110429: Updated with Ham 'Em High, Rio and Easter Seasons scores.

A problem with headphones.

I'm pleased to read this from Marco Arment. I've had the same problem with all in-ear-with-grommets headphones that I've tried. I'm pleased simply because I've never heard anyone else echo my complaint.

I hadn't considered that other designs that also make a seal would have the same problem. It's something I'll consider when I buy replacements.

Link Bomb

Janelle Monae - Tightrope

Mr Deity and the Woman

Lucky Louie - Ass (Audio NSFW)

Louis CK learns about the Catholic Church (Audio NSFW)

Tim Minchin - Storm (Audio NSFW)

Tim Minchin - Pope Song (NSFW. May offend you if you're Catholic)

Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Sesame Street: Smell Like A Monster


The Western Nostril

Яolcats

http://devour.com

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players - Mountain Trip

Charlie and the Swiss Chocolate Factory

XKCD Sys Admin

Writing UTF-8 files from Python

As always, there may be better ways to do this (using XML libraries, for example), but it took far too long to figure this out, given that there's so little to do to fix the problem. I found a lot of the examples found on Google didn't answer this specifically, but just added to the confusion.

The problem:

a = 'âêîôŷ'
print a

gives this error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii', '\xc3\xa2\xc3\xaa\xc3\xae\xc3\xb4\xc5\xb7', 0, 1, 'ordinal not in range(128)'

The proper way to define a unicode string is this:

a = u'âêîôŷ'
print a

which yields:

âêîôŷ'

In my search, though, there was lots of talk of how to convert strings to UTF-8, and this is *not* what you do if you want to write to a UTF-8 file. If you convert to UTF-8 before writing, you'll probably get errors becasue it'll contain values >=127.
This is how you do it...

ascii='abcdef'
uni = u'⢸ðêƒ'
file=codecs.open('utf-8.xml', mode='w', encoding='utf-8')
file.write(ascii)
file.write(uni)
file.close()

The only difference here is that you must use 'u' when defining literals, and you need to used codecs.open, with the encoding specified, when opening the file.

If, when you read the file, it appears to have 2 strange characters rather than the one unicode character you expect, the file is probably OK, it's the viewer that isn't reading UTF-8 properly.

More fun with Python

I'd recently written a little Python app to create a load of test data. The test data is XML, and should be UTF-8. I'd not really considered this properly, and for my original purposes, it's irrelevant. For a bit of fun/experimentation/learning, I put a tk front end on it, and email ed the project team to let them know, just in case it was useful.

Coincidentally, the vendor of the external product that would be producing these XML files in the real world was going to be late by several months, meaning that the XML files would need to be hand-crafted, the test data generator turned into a deliverable, and I briefly turned from tester into nightCoder.

There were a number of feature requests. My testing colleague started testing and raising defects against my code. Testing revealed areas in which i could be improved. I added a log file, properties files, some exception handling and error reporting dialogs. I had a real developer moment when it was deployed, went wrong and said (with a tester's smile on my face), "well that doesn't happen on my machine!".

While trying to figure out that problem, using a Swiss keyboard, typing garbage into some mandatory field, committing yielded another error as a result of non ASCII characters. As the client is Swiss, and these fields will probably included non ASCII, a fix was definitely required. Had this been just a learning exercise, I may not have been too worried, As I was now delivering this software, I had no option other than to figure it out. This highlights my main problem with self-teaching: I really struggle to find projects, and often abandon them in an unfinished state because nobody is relying on the solution.

The Henry Spink Foundation

I'd never heard of The Henry Spink Foundation, but John L Dixon retweeted this from Alan Henness, and now I have:

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! NOT FELICITY KENDALL!!!! http://bit.ly/9X9rJW #dreamsshattered

I set off to find out a little more. I read a little. I came across a list of therapies*. I ticked off Homeopathy, Chiropractic, and one of my favourites, Craniosacral Osteopathy from a mental list of quackery. I haven't and don't intend to read all of it. There may be some good and useful information about some good and useful therapies in amongst the bullshit. The trouble is that I already know from just five minutes perusing, that I can't trust it.

I picked something I'd never heard of from the list that they call the 'information centre'. I chose The Tomatis Method. In the second paragraph. I read:

According to Dr Tomatis this happens when muscles are not working properly and through auditory stimulation it is possible to retrain the muscles of the inner ear so that it can function without distortion.

Hang on, I thought. Muscles of the inner ear ? My anatomical knowledge comes from what I've picked up from watching Your Life In Their Hands, going to Body Worlds, playing Bones Lite, being slightly in love with Dr Alice Roberts and doing a 60 point level 2 Technology of Music unit with the Open University.

The OU course had a bit about the ear, but I didn't recall anything about muscles of the inner ear. It seemed a bit unlikely. I can wiggle my pinnae a bit, so I know we have vestigial muscles associated with the outer ear. I know we can attenuate our hearing by manipulating the ossicles, which sounds as though muscles are involved. Muscles in the cochlear seem a bit unlikely though.

So I googled. I found this kind of thing : EAR. Intra-inner-ear-musculature was conspicuous by its absence.

Next step, look up The Tomatis Method. The Official site says something different:

…listening will be disturbed when there is a dysfunction of the two muscles located in the middle ear whose role is to enable the precise and harmonious integration of acoustic information into the inner ear, and from there to the brain…

I don't want to go into the Tomatis Method in any detail. The rest of the information given by The Henry Spink Foundation suggests that it's nonsense. The point I'm trying to make is that if someone like me, a half-arsed lay anatomist with really quite rudimentary knowledge can spot a mistake like this in about 5 minutes, proper smart qualified people should be able to rip it to shreds. More worrying though is that gullible, desperate, less inquisitive people might buy into this kind of nonsense and line the pockets of these charlatans.

[Note: if there's actual evidence of the efficacy of the Tomatis Method, that would pass the scrutiny of a proper professional, like Ben Goldacre, say, I'll happily write another post singing its praises]

[* John has since called the lista real "Woo's Woo" of AltMed treatments". Genius!]

Wireless Audio done right.

With an open mind, I introduced the Sony wireless speakers to my wife. I explained that they were a complete bargain, and that if we didn't want them, I could probably re-sell them to someone at work. She was quite keen to get some music back into the living room. Our DVD player, which was used to play CDs, has migrated to another room, and music on a MacBook's speakers is obviously compromised.

After a quick demo, while she was out of the house earlier, I started to set them up properly. As I was setting them up, I discovered that our Airport Express, which I'd bought to augment a dead spot right where my wife sits on the couch, was now very close to our AV cupboard. My son had moved it a little while back.

Rather than plug in the Sony kit, I figured I might be able to hook up the Airport Express. We've a bit of an unconventional setup. Virgin V+ and Sky boxes hooked up to an old Phillips video sender, which is routed to Aego-M 2.1 speakers (fantastic) and an NEC projector (feeling its age now), which projects straight onto the living room wall, giving us a 70" picture. If the video sender is transmitting, it kills WiFi, so it's just used to switch sources. it has 4 in and 1 out, so here were 2 spare inputs.

A quick nose through my boxes of cables and connectors yielded a SCART to Phono converter (the kind you get with a PS2 or a Wii) and a 3.5mm jack to Phono cable. Perfect. I hooked it up, fired up iTunes on my MacBook Pro, the Remote App on my iPod Touch, paired them, and had audio out of the Aegos straight away.

I did briefly have a problem with Remote losing the ability to connect to iTunes. The settings were correct. The interwebs suggested a firewall problem. My firewall settings were fine, but something was screwing up with it. I switched the firewall off, reconnected, and turned the firewall on again, and it's been fine ever since.

The Remote app is brilliant. Fantastic. It can switch between multiple libraries, and it can re-route audio to either the Mac's speakers or the Airport connected speakers (or both). It's also far faster than I'd expect. I have a fairly large library (12,000+ songs), and it takes seconds to connect, seearch etc. It's as though the library is on the iPod.

This is how it's meant to be. The Sony system goes back on Monday. Turns out an 83% discount doesn't matter if the product is fundamentally flawed. Docking an iPod touch or an iPhone takes it out of your hand, and that's just wrong.

People accuse me of fanboyism, but it's only partly true. Apple generally make stuff that's better than everyone else, but often it's just because it sucks less than everyone else rather than being phenomenally good. iTunes + Airport Express + Remote is an example of phenomenally good.
but they absolutely nailed this.

With Airplay coming to third party devices, this is only going to get better.