What's New - August, 2007
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August 31, 2007: I've started fall woodcutting but warm afternoons still provide an excuse to spend a few hours most days to work (my wife says "play") on the computer. The past couple of weeks I've spent most of those hours on Bitmap Chunks, a investigation into efficiently scanning a bitmap file to find connected pieces of the image. I may have developed an algorithm that will do the job. Along the way I managed side trips into color lookup tables, pixel formats, palettes, RGB and HSB color coding, ClearType display technology, magnifying an image and a few other areas. Altogether, the project provided many hours of enjoyable brain exercise.
August 19, 2007: The integer 1210 has the property that it contains 1 zero, 2 ones, 1 two, and 0 threes. So each position of the number contains the number of digits with that position number if we number the positions starting from zero. Self Describing Numbers searches for such integers. (Out of 10 billion possibilities, there are only 7.)
August 10, 2007: Another small fix-up today. The Crossword Helper word completion program in Wordstuff2 word puzzle solver suite was enhanced last month to include an anagram feature. Either then or some time earlier, the ability to specify letters to be excluded from solutions stopped working. It is now working again.
August 9, 2007: It didn't take to realize that last week's posting of Fox & Hounds lacked a needed feature - a way to save and reload moves and board positions for future study or sharing. Version 2.1 posted today adds that ability.
August 8, 2007: Version 4 of our ArrangeListBox program was posted in the Delphi_Techniques section today. It adds the ability to move a selected block of item in a single drag operation.
August 3, 2007: Fox
& Hounds is a game played on a checkerboard where 4 "Hounds" (regular
checkers) try to corner the "Fox" (a king checker) before he can get past
the Hounds. No jumping or taking of pieces allowed. I'm trying
to confirm a viewer's suggestion that the Hounds have a winning strategy,
but no luck so far. This is a playable version of the game to solicit
help from viewers while I work on Delphi code to prove or disprove the
hypothesis.