November 30, 2001:   Site availability seems to have stabilized Wednesday, Thursday, and today.   Outages have been down to 10-15 minutes each day, their daily server reboot I assume.   Monday had a long  2 1/2 hour outage and Tuesday had 2 hours of downtime spread across 14 outages!  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the current stability is the norm.    I've been working on the Accelerated Reader Search page this week, fixing a couple of bugs in the Delphi "search and sort" program and adding some JavaScript code (ugh!) to "Flag" and "Unflag" all selected records for printing.   Too bad Borland can't get Delphi included in every browser.    Well, Thanksgiving's  over and deer season ends tomorrow, so maybe life will get back to normal here on the mountain.    

November 24, 2001:  Site was down for several hours today.  Some user's program (not mine!) is bringing the shared server down and they are "working on it".    I'm rapidly losing faith in Windows (or at least Windows NT) as a server, but not much choice in the short term except to be patient.     

November 23, 2001:  Find  a six  digit number that, when multiplied by some integer between 2 and 9,  produces a number that has the original digits reversed.   Reversed Numbers is a beginner's level program that has  30 lines of user written code and takes about 1/2  second to generate both valid solutions.         

November 20, 2001:  Well, guys and gals, we are now Windows hosted - for better or worse. Both delphiforfun.com and delphiforfun.org  seem to reach to this site today.   I'm a Windows bigot and have looked down on Unix guys for 20 years.  But --- the new host server has died  several times during prime time since we started testing.  This is in addition to a scheduled reboot at 3AM each day.  In the year we were Linux hosted, I recall only 2 outages.   Whether this reflects a difference in operating systems or host competency, I'm not yet sure.  I happened to be looking at site statistics a few minutes ago (10:00 am here on the East coast), when the site went down for 10-15 minutes,  affecting 7 DFF users.  I hate that  as a user and I hate it even more as a webmaster.   

November 19, 2001:   Here's a program that implements a human vs. human version of the game of Hangman.   A future version will use our dictionary to let the computer join in but this will get the basic drawing and word checking concepts out of the way.   300 lines of code make this an Intermediate level program (100 lines or so of those are just hard coded directions for drawing pieces of the image though).   Granddaughter Kaitlin, 10,  helped design the hangman - she decided that programming was harder than she thought!

November 18,2001:   Here's a link an Accelerated Reader Search  web page that calls my first Delphi CGI program - a program that runs on the host server and is called from a web page.  The program  was one of the motivations for switching to a Windows based server.   It searches a file of available  Accel. Reader  books at my granddaughter's school and builds a sorted results page.     Not really part of DelphiForFun, but it was an interesting experience.   

November 15, 2001:  I will be switching this DelphiForFun site to a Windows based host sometime in the next week (more space, same cost, and ability to run Windows web programs).    Tests are looking good, but email stuff, like Feedback and the Newsletter  can't be pre-tested.  Another item that cannot be tested in advance is the domain suffix.  You may  have noticed that we have domain names delphiforfun.com and delphiforfun.org which can be used interchangeably through some Internet magic called "domain pointing".  Currently delphiforfun.com is the real domain and delphiforfun.org points to it.   On the new host, the roles will web reversed, so if the .com suffix stops working temporarily,  try .org.   

November 11, 2001:  Here's a 10 year old TileFit program that I resurrected the other day to help design a new computer desk for my office.   And  a less-than-professional picture of the original slate-tile table project.

November 6, 2001:  The erroneous  virus warning that went out as a result of  the October  30 newsletter has been resolved.  Here's a transcript of my communications with TrendMicro, the producer of the "ScanMail" virus scanner that sent the message in the first place.  They agree that there was no virus,  the email reply produced by ScanMail was misleading and say that their latest release corrects the problem.    Another learning experience under our belts! 

November 4, 2001:  I really like problems that are simple to state but still hard enough that PhD types write papers and articles about them.   Here's the latest:  "Put some dots randomly on a piece of paper and draw the smallest circle that encloses them all".    I couldn't believe that the solution was as complicated as the algorithm given by Dr's Elzinga and Hearn.   So in this Circle Covering Points program you can see my five attempts as well as the Elzinga-Hearn solution. (Big surprise -  they were right!).