What's New - July, 2012[Home]
July 6, 2012: Back to work after a break for the holiday. Blue Moons, a program which calculates occurrences of full moons which are called "blue" even though they are not. There is speculation that the Middle English word for "blue" which also meant "betrayer", used that meaning because the occurrence of 13 lunar months in some years messed up their use for agricultural and religious purposes. In any event, the phrase "Once in a blue moon" in English indicates an event or condition that rarely occurs. There are two common definitions and the program provides results for both. July 15, 2012: A viewer recently suggested that I build a CD each quarter with all downloadable program files and offer it on a subscription basis as a way for users to always have the latest versions of everything. I'm considering the idea, but it raised the question of the size of those files to be included and the idea to write a file scanner program. I soon realized that we already have a program to copy files matching a file mask in a selected folder which almost does the job. Copy Folder Test Version 3.1 adds the option to report counts and sizes of selected files without copying. It also fixes a couple of other problems including "Web Site" directories being excluded in Delphi's class which lists directories and misreporting sizes for files larger than 4GB. July 28, 2012: My one-week project in "syllabizing" (aka "syllabication", aka syllabification) turned into a two week project and could easily have been a month. The definitions and rules are man-made, not "nature-made" which always leads to complexity. The program posted today, Syllables Version 3 syllabizes words from DFF's largest dictionary (Full,dic, 63,000 words) by matching them against a large publicly available syllabized word file 180,000 words. Actually only 40,000 words were matched from that source, another 20,000 were generated one of two ways:
When neither of those matches resolve how to syllabize, the final method is to manually create a syllabized entry in an update file, currently with about 600 entries. The update file is automatically added to the syllable data base each time it changes. Working with syllables resulted in changes to three other word related areas of DFF:
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