What's New -  July, 2005

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July 14, 2005:   I made a couple of corrections to NumEdit2 posted last week,  Numedit2 contains versions of our  Integer and Float edit  controls (TintEdit and TFloatEdit) that do not require installation.  Prototype  properties "Anchors" and "Text" were not transferred to the new controls when they were created.  Now they are. 

I also posted the first update in several years of  Tilefit, a program that takes a set of tiles and produces random rectangular designs of a specified size.   It now handles multiple colors for the same tile size. 

July 12, 2005:  Long time viewer Don Rowlett has made a hobby of finding (and suggesting fixes for) bugs in DFF programs.  Here are two more minor corrections;  in Peg Solitaire, the "number of pegs remaining" criteria defining a solution was only checked in Auto-solve mode and was ignored for manual play.  It now is checked for both modes.  And in Safecracker, the board kept getting smaller as sizes were rounded down from previous size as board sizes were changed.  New size calculation is now from original board size.    Thanks Don.  Keep up the good work! 

July 10, 2005:  The Josephus problem :  A counting elimination "game" named after the story that Jewish historian/mathematician Josephus Flavius devised a "fair" way to kill off his troops who insisted on suicide rather than surrender to the Roman enemy. 41 of them formed a circle and every third man was eliminated.  Maybe not so fair since Josephus, who was not too keen on the idea, selected a position which assured that he would be the last survivor. At that point he decided that perhaps it was best to surrender after all.  In fact, the name Flavius is an adoptive name from the Roman family that took him in!

July 8, 2005:  A small fix for the Intersecting Lines demo was posted today.  Overlapping line segments of the same line were not identified as intersecting.   Perhaps we should have a new "overlapping" category, but for now we just identify them as "intersecting". 

July 6, 2005: Back home!  It was indeed a trip to remember for a long, long  time.  2 days in Austria and and 14 days in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland with beautiful weather for all but the last two days.  Here's Grandpa (me) with his 8 wonderful grandkids at First above Grindlewald.  Being tour guide for a group of 16 (kids, spouses and grandkids) was a bit stressful at times, but  all worked out OK.   The four families averaged 400 pictures each so sorting and weeding  them out will surely  take longer than the vacation.  

There were 30 DFF feedback emails awaiting my return.  Working through those will take a little time.  I posted a small correction for the numeric edit components TIntEdit and TFloatEdit  today (decimal separator issue for European users).  I also made a version of the controls that do not need installation before use that can be downloaded from the same page.