What's New - October 2011
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October 14, 2011: We're back home from a short hiatus visiting a grandson at college, Williamsburg Colonial village, Jamestown, Yorktown, and the Virginia Sate Fair. A Yorktown, I picked up "The Campaign That Won America, The Story of Yorktown" by Burke Davis and I've found it fascinating reading even though there is not an equation or puzzle in it. The main takeaway for me: the French played a crucial role in winning our independence from evil old Britain. I may have to reconsider my opinion of things François.
I
posted another update today to a program included in our
Wordstuff program, Unscramble this
time. I added an option to handle cases where, rather than being
scrambled, words are "interlaced". Letters for 2 or 3 words appear in the
correct order but interspersed with letters of the other words. A
new checkbox on the Unscramble form indicates that the letters represent
interlaced words. The sample set of 17 letters included on the form
represents 3 synonymous words in a puzzle from a recent Mensa Puzzle Calendar
page. I did not successfully identify the words using human brainpower,
but the program finds them in several ways in a minute or two.
October 21, 2011: Scrambled Letter Blocks was posted today in our Delphi Techniques section. The puzzle is from the October 17 page of my 2011 Mensa 365 Brain Puzzlers Calendar
"Form six 9-letter words by combining two 3-letter blocks below with each ending already placed in the grid. All blocks will be used. If you do it correctly, one of the vertical columns will spell a bonus word. Use these groups to complete the words in the grid: AFT, ARC, BET, DEM, ERG, HEN, KEB, ROT, SCO, SNA, UND, YST"
October 30, 2011: A batch (command line)
version of our Clear Blank
Lines utility program was posted today to help a user who needs to run the
program repetitively. The program removes lines from user selected text
files which are entirely blank. Batch files can be a pain in the "you-know-what" to
set up but are an convenient way to repetitively run a program without user
interaction. Parameters in this version allow masked
searches for files to be processed including ability to search subdirectories,
and to make backups of files which are changed. The download includes
sample test files and a batch file to process them.