June 12. 2017: Brute Force is my "go-to" puzzle solver for an amazing number of puzzle types (50 sample puzzles included in the downloads).  It solves by exhaustive search ("trial and error") if they can be described with a set of integer equations with a limited range of solution values.  I recently checked to see if it could solve the "Matchstick" puzzle for which I posted a user-play version a couple of years ago.  It turns that it could, even though I had to add two additional operators to describe partially burned matchsticks.  Brute Force Version 3.5 has the details and download links.

June 8, 2017: FrontPage, the website builder used here at DFF is on life-support and options for recovery seem to be limited.  Long time viewers have heard this song before; the basic problem is that there is no easy way to convert to any other product.  Best advice seems to be "save the text and convert each page manually"; a job that sounds like weeks or months  of "not-so-fun" time to get back to what I have now.     Currently, the only way to update the site use to edit a local copy and upload the revisions via the FTP transfer protocol which has introduced a whole new set of problems for a newbie like me.    

In any event, these are my problems, not yours - just be patient while I learn and search for solutions.  I do have a couple of changes to post - the first is an expansion of our Latitude-Longitude Distance unit and the test program for it,  If you're interested in that sort of thing, here's the link to the  LatLonDistanceTest page with more information.

May 23 2017:   I recently needed to extract information about a particular location collected over time and buried in many large files.  This was a one-time study, not worth writing a separate program.   In order to assemble the needed data  from several files, I modified our Text Search program to append selected records into an single text file  Text Search 2.2 posted today, now allows appending as  an alternative to overwriting an existing file with the same name. 

May 14, 2017:  Here's a  puzzle that required a 25 line program to solve (at least for me). If you want to try it on you own, here it is:

We have two normal 12 hour clocks that start running at 12:00.   One loses two minutes every hour and the other gains two minutes every hour. How many hours will elapse  before both clocks again show the same time?

Program FastSlowClocks simulates the two clocks by incrementing the times by 62 minutes (Clock 1) or 58 minutes (Clock 2) for each real hour interval. Starting at time 12:00  (00:00 really), clock times are displayed for every "real" hour until they again match.  The link above points to a Beginners page with 2 dozen simple programs described for beginning Delphi programmers, so scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entry for this one.  Viewing  the program results showed that I should have been able to reason my way to the solution, (but I didn'tL).  If you just want to download the executable file to check your answer, clicking this link is a simpler way.