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WHAT'S NEWMarch 18, 2010: I use our "Monitor Off" program each evening to blank the monitor on my old laptop dedicated to capturing and reporting outputs from our weather station. Monitor Off Version 2 fixes a problem a user had with the alternative code for blanking the monitor, The "Power-Off" option, should now work when the "Standby" option does not. I have tested it under Windows 7 on my Dell Studio 17, my first laptop to require its use. The program uses the Pause key to blank the monitor, regardless of the active window. In the process of testing, I also found that the Studio 17 uses the Fn + F12 keys to emulate the missing Pause key. I have no experience with other company's laptops, but I suspect that they all use a similar technique to replace the seldom used Pause key with a virtual alternative. Dell doesn't seem to document the "feature", but my Key Codes program will help find the hidden key in short order.
March 11, 2010: A small bug was reported and fixed in the Computational Geometry test program, Geometry4 today. The "Draw line from point perpendicular to line" demo page (PerpSheet) did not allow the initial line to be drawn due to a rookie coding error. In the "mouse move" procedure, the statement: if (activepage=PerpSheet) or (activepage=AngleSheet) and (dragval=1) then begin needed an extra set of parentheses (colored red here) to look like this: if ((activepage=PerpSheet) or (activepage=AngleSheet)) and (dragval=1) then begin. This is the coding equivalent of writing the algebra expression A + B * C when you meant (A + B) * C. Results in both cases were wrong! March 4, 2010: A Text Spinner program suggested by a viewer was added to our Delphi Techniques section. today. A "text spinner" randomly changes the content of a text based on some criteria, in this case a supplied set of alternative phrases embedded within the input text. Not very practical, but an interesting intermediate level programming exercise anyway. February 23, 2010: I recently needed to send the log file from a newsletter mailing to help diagnose a minor problem. However the log file contained the email addresses of each recipient and sending them in unsecured plain text did not seem like a good idea. This program, Obfuscate Text, added to our Utility section, confuses email address one of two ways; replacing the name portion with a random word or replacing the entire email address with an "address removed" phrase. In both cases, email addresses are identified by the embedded @ symbol. As an exercise that might be useful some day, I added an option to obfuscate the word following a given word. For example, changing the word following the word "Password:". February 17, 2010:
February 10. 2010:
Our Wind
Triangle program provides mathematical and visual views of a problem every
pilot, or at least every amateur pilot must wrestle with; how to get where you
want to go when the wind wants to take you off course. The answer is
to head the airplane into the wind just enough to offset the distance that the
wind moves you. Version 2 lets users change colors from my default
choices in order to address a problem recently reported by a pilot who happens
to be color blind. February 4, 2010:
Word squares are square letter arrays with rows containing words
which match words formed by the corresponding columns. Here is a
Word Square Search program which
searches a 62,000 word dictionary to create word squares based on an initial
word provided by the user. At left is one of 149 solutions found for
the word "WORD". February 1, 2010: A couple of times each year I get a request for help from a student requesting help in some project using my Reaction Times programs. This year it was a graduate student in at a Medical School in Ecuador whose thesis topic is to test the effect of sleep deprivation on interns as result of the long hours they put in. Her problem turned out to be decimal separator confusion because the PC she was using happened to have the Window's Locale set for a European country. Changing back to Ecuador set it from comma back to dot and allowed her to analyze her data. While investigating, I discovered and fixed a problem with the ResponseStats statistical analysis program that kept a newly loaded response statistics file from being made available. Reaction Times programs including ResponseStats Version 3.1 was uploaded today to fix the problem. January 17, 2010: Consider the sequence formed if, starting with any positive integer, we form a sequence where for the sequence ending with N, then next entry is N/2 if N is even and 3N+1 if N is odd. Starting with 3 for example, the sequence is [3, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1]. The unproven conjecture (the "Collatz" conjecture) is that any such sequence will eventually degenerate to 1. Here's a beginner's level program, ThreeNPlus1, that evaluates all sequences within a given range and reports the longest sequence found. January 12, 2010: DFF Newsletter #55 was sent yesterday using the latest version of MailList King, a mailing list management program from Xequte Software. The program is written in Delphi and contains all the features needed to simplify newsletter sending such as automatic subscribing/unsubscribing, limiting the sending rate to comply with host server limits, processing undeliverable email responses to clean the list, etc. The $99 personal edition does everything I need and is recommended if you ever have the need.
A university student recently took on a Java version of the
MasterMind game as a school project. He wrote asking about my "Smarter
than you" intelligence level which can be applied when the program is doing the
guessing about the secret pattern. The program has a Verbose mode which
was supposed to help debugging and explaining the search steps, but the messages
were being cleared after each computer guess. MasterMind
Version 2.1 corrects this and hopefully will help him and others understand
the mini-max guessing procedure used at the smartest level. January 9, 2010:
"Instant Insanity" is a variation of an older cube arrangement puzzle and one of a large family of similar puzzles. In this one, we have four cubes with one of four colors on each face of each cube. The objective is to stack the cubes so each column of faces has all four colors. A viewer recently asked for help in developing a Delphi solver
version.
Most of the online literature describes a graph search algorithm which can be
applied to find solutions
with pencil and paper. With a faster but dumber computer, it's easiest
just to check all 41,472 possible arrangements looking for
solutions. Instant Insanity
Version 1.0 posted today does just that with a few sample or user defined
cube sets.
While playing the "Wii Play" version of the Four-In-A-Row game
with a grandson over
the holidays, I used my Delphi version of the game to advise me on moves
to make. I was embarrassed to find that the program's random
moves "enhancement" frequently allowed Chris to win by placing 4 adjacent token in his first
4 moves - the initial random moves feature assumed that there would be no winner that soon.
Four In A Row Version 2.2 posted today
fixes the problem by limiting initial random moves to 2 or 3 turns. January 2, 2010: Happy New Year! We'll kick off the new year with a program that I wrote a year or so ago but never got around to posting. Accordion Solitaire is a simple solitaire card game that is difficult to win; perhaps one win in 100 games. This version allows user and program play and implements a "sweeper" strategy of play which can increase the odds of winning to perhaps 10%
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