What's New -  September 2010

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September 6, 2010:  "Make this sentence true by filling the blanks with number words: ___ T's, ___ N's and ____ vowels."  This is an example of a problem which today's program Self Describing Sentences, solves.  (Try "ten", "ten", and "twenty-four" as a solution to this example.)

September 11, 2010:  I've never had reason to do much with "Date" arithmetic.  Delphi's date-time structure encodes time as days and fractions of days from some long ago reference  date and there are formatting routines that display them in various readable formats.  Moving forward or backward in time by "days" units is a trivial operation, however allowing increments to be "Years" or "Months" makes the problem interesting.  Here's my Date Calculator program which emulates the one introduced with Windows 7 with a few unexplained differences.          

September 12, 2010:  "Dice Probabilities" in our Mathematics section is now about 5 years old and still gets occasional feedback.  Dice Probabilities, Version 4 posted today corrects a "problem" for anyone interested in the odds for the 5 dice version of Poker.  I had included "full house" (one pair plus 3-of-a-kind) as one of the probabilities listed but neglected to exclude those outcomes from the "one" pair and "3-of-a-kind" categories.  They are now excluded, leaving room to count the 3% of rolls that are "straights" and the 6% that have no poker value making the probabilities now sum to 100%.      

September 30, 2010:  Play MP3 Version 2 is a major rewrite of the original version posted in our Delphi Techniques section.  Like the first version, it plays an audio file  based on a user click, but the association of the click location with the file to be played is based on text enclosed in parentheses within the sentence rather than on the location of the sentence within the text.   The new technique, written at a user's request would simplify future  maintenance if the text were to be modified.    

September 21 2010:  I have been tied up with a small commercial project for the past week or two with no time for the playtime projects.  I did take a couple of hours yesterday to dress up a puzzle project written a few years ago.  Digit trees, Version 2 adds a "Hint" button to help find a solution. The task is to drag digits 1 through 9 to the target circles so that each circle contains the sum of the circles connected to it from below.  If you like bargains,  did notice that there are several copies of this puzzle's source book on sale for under $5 shipped at Giant Book of Mensa Mind Challenges! A great gift for yourself, a child, or grandchild.