January 31:2001:  Everything takes longer than I think it will.  I hope it's just a symptom of being an eternal optimist.  Here are 5 little programs bundled into a group I'm calling Squares and Cubes  .  They all involve the finding integers whose squares and cubes satisfy some condition.   They are all small,  50 to 100 lines of code and mainly involve brute-force searching for solutions.   There are examples of some Delphi  topics that you might want to check out.  e.g.

• dynamic arrays  (arrays that can change size at run time) (#2)

• the Format function. (#4)

• Use of the TComboSet object (included) to generate all permutations of a set of digits. (#5)

• Passing a procedure as a parameter.(#2)

• The use of Windows accurate timing procedures QueryPerformanceFrequency and QueryPerformanceCounter to get microsecond resolution (#4).

Most or all of these problems  are from an excellent (and inexpensive)  little book: Math and Logic Puzzles for PC Enthusiasts , J. J. Clessa, Dover Books.   

January 24:2001:  Whew!  I spent the last few days battling a web page formatting problem.  FrontPage, the Microsoft program I use to build the site, does lots of automatic stuff to make the pages appear consistently.  One feature, shared borders, is great, but when Google provided some new insert code for it's search engine button, it totally confused FrontPage.   And, like many bugs, the problem went unnoticed for several days and the symptom had no apparent relationship to the change.  Anyway - Google search button is gone for a few days until I get it all straightened  out.        

WordStuff 2 is available.  I've added two new programs using the dictionary capabilities introduced in WordStuff 1.   Unscramble is an anagram solver.  The twist is that it finds two and three words phrases as well as single words.  Quite entertaining to see what phrases can be made from the names of grandkids or friends (or enemies).    Decrypt is a code solver.  It decrypts messages encoded with simple substitution encrypting,  if the words are in the dictionary that is.  It's kind of slow, but at least leaves lots of room for more exploration.    Finally, I wrote a "wrapper" program called WordStuff that handles dictionary loading and can run any of the the three existing  programs: CrosswordHelper, Unscramble, Decrypt.  

A capitalization property was added to words in the dictionary, with the result that dictionary format has changed slightly.  CrosswordHelper was also change to accept '?' and '*' characters in the word mask, allowing it's use as a rhyming word finder, etc.   As a result, if you downloaded the dictionaries, or the DicMaint or CrosswordHelper programs introduced in WordStuff 1 before Jan 24,   please download them again.   

January 14, 2001:  The logo contest is over.  The good news  - every contestant is a winner!   I'll be contacting you all in the next few days to find where to send your check or software.   The bad news is only for those you who didn't get around to submitting an entry.  Aren't you sorry now?   (My daughter Amy has a procrastination theory - if you put things off long enough, the problem goes away.   Sometimes it works,  sometimes it doesn't.)  

Entries were all excellent and I'll just rotate them around as I get the urge to make a change.   

January 12, 2001:  WordStuff 1  is available.  This initial release of a word puzzle solver series includes three dictionaries (small, medium, large),  a dictionary maintenance program, DicMaint, and a word completion program called Crossword Helper.   It's an exaggeration to call these dictionaries, - they're actually just word lists,  but that's all we need to check for valid words or to search for words that meet some criteria.  I finished these a couple of days ago, but I've been having so much fun working on a Cryptogram solver that the documentation/posting tasks got deferred.    An anagram solver called Unscramble is complete and  will be posted in the next few days.   

January 8, 2001: Here is Version 3 of the Towers of Hanoi programming series.   This one adds animated graphics.  Users can drag disks from peg to peg to solve the program, or watch the disks move as the program solves it.  If you're not familiar with the problem, you can check out  the description here.  

I'm frantically working on finalizing the dictionary handling code so that we can get some word games posted.   I have word completion and anagram programs running.   Also working on a  program that decrypts messages encrypted with simple substitution codes.   Once I get a simplified dictionary, I have a neat idea for a "cheating hangman" program.     

January 4, 2001:  I hope everyone had a holiday season as pleasant as mine.   Played in the snow with the grandkids and the dog,  helped my 9 year old granddaughter write her first Delphi program, and got all 25 balls rolled into the proper holes in the 4-level plastic cube that Santa left in my stocking.   

 I posted the Genaille's Rods program today - it prints a set of "rods" that allow multiplication by inspection.  Henri Genaille developed these rods as an improvement of a set designed by John Napier, of logarithm fame,  a couple of hundred years earlier.  I think they're kind of neat.