December 30, 2001:: If you downloaded the MakeCaption
routine posted a week or so ago, you may want to do it again. I
discovered today that the width effect of italic font style in captions
was not accounted for. It is
now.
December 22,
2001: Well, we're off
to the Virginia grandkids to find Santa, then we're bringing them back to
the mountain for a few days - so I believe I'm booked for the rest of
the year. Lot's of good things waiting in the wings though.
Here's
wishing you and yours a
Happy Holiday Season!
December 21, 2001: I just posted the MakeCaption
procedure over in the Delphi Techniques section. It displays titlebar
captions in two pieces, left and right justified. Harder than
one would expect since windows makes it difficult to get at that titlebar
information.
December 20, 2001: A second school has been
added to our Reading Program search site, Saint Ann School in Bridgeport
CT. I've learned that there are a number of reading
programs available; Saint Ann School has "Reading
Counts" from Scholastic. Here's a link
to the new book search index page in case you want to check it
out.
I finally got around to tabulating the results
of the "Future Postings" voting page. I've browsed the
results periodically I during our first year online, usually just to see if
anyone had voted for something I felt like working on
anyway. I have the program written to tabulate the
results now, so I may be running it more frequently. Several of
the most requested will also require the most effort to document, a
necessary but not so fun part of the job. But I need to do it,
just to see if I can still figure how they work. :>)
December 17, 2001: We're starting a project
to revisit existing programs with the goal of adding usability
features. A number of interesting puzzles are posted as versions that
show computer solutions but do not allow user play. (That's not the
most fun part for programmers.) It recently occurred to me that many of these
would be of
interest to non-programmers, specifically teachers looking for innovative
ways to use technology in the classroom. A number are
usable in their current form - I've listed some in the Notes
for Teachers section. Here's the first re-posting of a puzzle that
previously lacked user play but now has it , the Seven
Coins Puzzle.
December
14, 2001: I ran across this problem in a Donald Knuth paper the
other day and thought it would make a logical addition to our
"T-Shirt" series. (T-shirts with "interesting"
numbers on the front and the reason that they are interesting printed on
the back. Or should it be the other way around? We'll let
the marketing guys decide.) The question for T-Shirt
#2 is "The smallest 3 digit number equal to the sum of the
cubes of its digits". As usual, a simple problem can lead
to not-so-simple investigations. But there are less than 50
lines of code in the "Brute Force" solution which will get us
started.
December 10, 2001: Today's programming
project was my second Delphi CGI program, one to automatically handle newsletter
subscribe/unsubscribe requests. It actually just takes the
information you supply on the Newsletter page and submits an email request
in a format that the list-server can understand. (The
"list-server" is the guy that reads the list of email addresses
and sends out newsletters when I send him one.)
The program even seems to be working! If you try to subscribe (or
unsubscribe) and have any problems,
let me know.
December 8: 2001: Yesterday was a lost day at
DelphiForFun. There were more "hardware" problems at the new host
site so we were down most of the day. Here's a page with
transcripts of communications with M6.net if anyone is interested in
the not-so-fun part of running a website.
December
6, 2001: This Car and Goats
program implements a probability game that has stirred a lot of controversy
over the years. You're a contestant on a game show
trying to choose which of three closed doors has the new car behind it
(goats behind the other two). After you choose, Monty Hall, the host,
opens one of the other doors revealing a goat and offers you a chance to
switch doors. Should you?
By the way, I have had a number of feedback emails from
viewers who are interested in the problems, but not the programming.
Toward the bottom of each program page you will find a "Download
executable" link that will let you retrieve and run the program
without any Delphi code or knowledge. (But "getting
there", the coding, is at least half the
fun.)
December 5, 2001: Oops! I replaced the Big
Integer Arithmetic unit today, zeros interior to quotients after divide
operations were somehow missing (123456 divided by 112 returned 112, not
1102).
December 3, 2001: I started working on the "Square Root Piles" problem this week, and realized that I didn't have the source for the
"Huge Integer" unit I had used to generate combinations. So, not liking the structure of anything I found online, and just for the fun of it, here's my version of a
Big Integer Arithmetic
unit posted over in Delphi Techniques. It's a "quick and dirty",
2 days of coding time, and pretty much simulates what you would do with pencil and paper to
add, subtract, multiply or divide numbers that are dozens, or hundreds of digits
long. Other methods available
include Assign, Modulo, Factorial, Compare, and ConvertToDecimalString. I wouldn't want to enter any speed contests with it, but it seems fast enough for now.
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