Saturday August 13 , 2005 
 

 Delphi For Fun Newsletter #40      

Summer is flying by and things have been busy  here. Our  big event of the summer was a grand trip to Switzerland. I worked in Germany for a few years in the 1970's while our children were young and we fell in love with Switzerland.  About 10 years ago, while looking a Swiss mountain pictures I kind of promised my oldest granddaughter that Grandpa would take her there one day.  She turned 16 this summer, so it was time.  I became tour guide for our family group  of 16 (wife, kids, spouses, and 8 grandkids).   Great weather, great scenery, and no serious problems,  all  combined to make it a trip we'll never forget. And, to   her parents consternation, Kristen discovered that 16 year olds can legally purchase beer in Switzerland!. 
 
The garden is in full tilt here.  More tomatoes and cukes than I can eat.  Rabbits ate every bean plant while we were on vacation, but were are sharing the corn about 50-50 with the raccoons.    Time to start thinking about getting in the winter's wood supply as soon as the weather cools off a little.    
 
I have previously mentioned the programming problems in Project Euler at MathsChallenge.net.  Most of the problems are above beginner level but Delphians are  doing well.  We are only 32 of the 1300  active  participants, but 11 have made it into the top 50.   I spent the last week catching up and have now solved 101 of the 102 problems.    If you are looking for some  programming  challenges, regardless of your favorite language, check it out.  
  
In spite of the trip, there has been enough hot and rainy weather weather here to provide a good excuse  for staying  indoors and working on programs.  Below are the additions for the past 4 months.  
 
Enjoy!
 
 

April 11, 2005:  I sent DFF Newsletter #39 last Friday so if you think you are subscribed and did not received one, you are one of the 71 subscribers with an inactive account, full mailbox, unknown user, or whose ISP thinks that DFF sends spam.     While watching Tiger win  the Master's Golf Tournament yesterday, I wrote a program to help me update the subscribers list.   Text File Update   is a program that processes a  file of bad email addresses against a total subscriber list and deletes the matches   (it could be any list of text items).    I included a few extra goodies like options to add unmatched transactions, delete duplicate master records ,  ignore or consider capitalization when matching, ignore leading trailing blanks, etc.   For programmers there's  version 1 of a TSyncMemo class that allows three lists (Master recs., Update recs., Action taken) to be scrolled synchronously from a single scroll bar.   

 April 12, 2005:  Completed Project Euler!  Yesterday I finished the last of the 95 programs in this challenging set of programming projects.   5 of the 18 who have completed all the problems are  Delphi programmers.  One of them, a non-native English speaker, who also recently made it, expressed the satisfaction best.  He wrote "I am happy like a child!".   After working five months on the last problem (#60), I can only echo that sentiment and say "Me too!"    

April 13, 2005:  I corrected a small problem in UBigIntsV2, our large integer arithmetic unit the other day.  (Multiplication by a negative 64 bit integers ignored the sign).  Rather than update all six  DFF programs which use this unit, it was relocated to the DFF Library file.  So these programs will now need access to the library in order to recompile successfully:  Big Integer test,    Multiple Length Long Division, Pell's Equation and Continued Fractions.   Big Floating Point Arithmetic,   Big Combos ,   T-Shirt XXL  (Armstrong numbers).   The error did not affect any of these programs, so no need to re-download executables, but if you have the source code, it would be a good idea to download the Library file to get the latest code.

April 14, 2005:  Here is the next version of Cutlist, Version 2.1.3.  Cutlist is a woodworker helper program which displays the optimal layout for a set of parts from a given set of material.  This version adds the ability to specify a  "duplicate count" to simplify entering multiple parts with the same dimension in a project.   There's one more pending request - ability to zoom the displayed results across multiple pages for better readability for large projects.    Those woodworker guys are really using this!  I'll try to get to it next week. 

April 15, 2005:   

 

 Inverted Text,     Mirror text,     Or Both?

A fellow wrote the other day asking about "mirrored" text for a teleprompter application he was working on.  I started out to modify an Inverted Text demo program over in Delphi Techniques,   but ended up with an entirely new application.  The TestMirroredText program described here uses the  Copyrect procedure to copy text from one canvas to another.  It turns out that it's smart enough to handle cases where the left and right (or top & bottom, or both sets of) coordinates are reversed.  the result is a fairly fast way to flip or mirror, or rotate an image.  Along the way, I learned a few more things about re-justifying TMemo lines and setting margins.          

April 19, 2005:  

Two friends who have an eight-quart jug of water wish to share it evenly. They also have two empty jars, one holding five quarts, the other three. How can they each measure exactly 4 quarts of water?  

Here's our version of the classic "Water Jug Problem" which will let you try your hand at solving this problem, and many others.  If you have trouble finding the 7 required moves, a button click will show you how! 

April 22, 2005:  Version 2 of the Mirrored Text Test program was posted today.  It adds another piece of the solution for a real teleprompter application: synchronized speed-controlled auto-scrolling of the input and mirrored text.     .

April 24, 2005:  A big "thank you" to all those who use the Amazon link at the bottom left of our home  page to place your orders.  Today I received a $16.16 Amazon Gift Certificate for your purchases so far this  year.  That covers my expenses for a month!    On average I seem to get about  2.5% of what you spend, so cumulatively, you have spent a hunk of change!  Thanks again.   

April 29, 2005: I created a Simple Backtracking Demo on the Beginners page this morning in response to an inquiry from a student.  There are already several examples on the website, but I enjoy doing one from scratch because the probability of success is high - it's kind of a test to see if Alzheimer's has kicked yet.  So far, so good.  

May 4, 2005: Here  is my version of Buffon's Needles, is a classic problem which describes a way  to estimate Pi by dropping needles on a grid of parallel lines and counting what fraction cross a line.    

May 6, 2005: 

Medium difficulty level: 
I found 10 , program found 40 more!

Akerue is a word search game originally posted several years ago.  Find as many words as you can from the letter grid and the program will show you those that you missed.  Finding more than half is a challenging task.  Here's the first update which includes improved word selection and better level of play (limiting the program to smaller dictionaries for easier levels).  Why Akerue?  Try reading it backwards.   


   

May 10, 2005: 

I ran across this problem in my early Father's Day gift this year: "The maximum number of individual regions formed by three lines dividing a circle is seven.  The circle contains an ant colony and  each region uniquely contains between one and seven ants.  Can you place seven groups of ants in the seven regions so that for each of the lines, the total number of ants on either side are all the same?  How many solutions can you find?".  This is from Ivan Moscovich's latest puzzle book Leonardo's Mirror & Other Puzzles -  geometrical puzzles with lots of  color and good  graphics.   I was going to write a program to solve the "ant" puzzle, when  I realized that our Brute Force program could handle it.  So "Ant-ics.prb" problem  is now included with the downloads.  I also added the ability to include images with puzzle descriptions to help clarify the equations used.  

 

May 22, 2005:  Here's a program to Convert Decimals to Fractions requested by a viewer a couple of weeks ago.  At the time I gave him a few hints but I assume that the homework assignment is past due by now so I can safely post my solution to the problem.  

May 25, 2005:  A couple of minor bugs fixed today - The UBigIntsV2 Big Integers unit in DFFLibV02 library file had an error in the modulo routine for 64 bit integers.    I also made the second operand independent of the first operand in Add operations so that  X.Add(X) now works. 

In our Reaction Times application, the Density Plot program required that Delphi 5 be installed in order for the executable to run.  That is no longer the case.   

May 28, 2005:  It didn't take long to for the new Convert Decimals to Fractions program to earn its first update.  Regular reviewer/contributor Don Rowlett pointed out that I had once again ignored the fact that Europeans use comma (,) instead of dot  (.) as a decimal separator.  I told him that's the real reason the USA wants to take over the world.  Not for freedom, democracy, or even oil.  We really just want everyone else to use our decimal point and date formats!  But I did fix the program for now to use Windows "decimal separator" character so it should work where ever.   Don also knew of a trick for converting repeating decimals to fractional representation, so the user can now specify whether the input decimal terminates or represents one cycle of a repeating decimal.  

May 29. 2005:  Another viewer, from Sweden this time, pointed out that there was a date format problem in  our Astronomy Demo program.  Sure enough, in computing Lunar eclipse dates, I tried to get the January 1st date for the current year  to internal date format by converting '1/1/2005'.  That works fine if your system expects dd/mm/yyyy or even mm/dd/yyyy date formats.  Sweden's date format is yyyy-mm-dd  which made the StringToDate function complain that 2005 wasn't a valid day of month.  It's fixed now so Sweden can start having Lunar eclipses  again!  

June 6, 2005:  Some one posed the Four Dice Puzzle to me the other day.  The problem is to find a set of 4 special six-sided dice which may have more than 6 dots on a side and may repeat the number of dots on a side.  The set, if labeled A  B  C  D,  has the property that when rolled  in pairs, on average, A beats B, B beats C, C beats D and D beats A!   Makes a good non-fair game if you let your opponent choose his die first.   You can always select one to beat him.    This version lets you set a number of parameters to look for other solution sets and to print the solutions as a deck of playing cards.   

June 8, 2005:  Here are two more simple little programs that I added to the Beginners Techniques page  in Delphi Techniques.  They do not do much but may illustrate some new techniques for the beginner's repertoire.   DrawDice draws a random pair of dice with each button click.  CountWords lets you load a text file and get a count  and list of the words it contains or a summary of number of occurrences by word.  

June 9, 2004:  One more Beginner's program from a recent Mensa Puzzle-a-Day calendar.  I called it Expressions864:  Find all solutions where the sum of two numbers equals 864.  And by the way, the solution, including the "864" sum must contain all of the digits 1 through 9 exactly once.  Only about 35 lines of code to solve this one, including a test to eliminate duplicate solutions.  

I did also coded the problem in our Brute Force program and uncovered a small bug there.  In a feeble attempt to eliminate duplicate solutions, I was eliminating any that had a repeated variable value.  But, of course, reusing a single variable value does not mean that the solution is a duplicate.   I have simply removed the uniqueness test for now. 

June 13, 2005:  We're packing for a family trip to Germany and Switzerland so DFF will have a hiatus until July.   It sounds like Europe has had a cold, wet spring, so we may come back knowing more about Germanic art, culture, and history than originally planned.  But, with enough good food and beer, sunny mountaintops will just be a  bonus, not a requirement for an enjoyable trip! 

July 6, 2005: Back home!  It was indeed a trip to remember for a long, long  time.  2 days in Austria and and 14 days in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland with beautiful weather for all but the last two days.  Here's Grandpa (me) with his 8 wonderful grandkids at First above Grindlewald.  Being tour guide for a group of 16 (kids, spouses and grandkids) was a bit stressful at times, but  all worked out OK.   The four families averaged 400 pictures each so sorting and weeding  them out will surely  take longer than the vacation.  

There were 30 DFF feedback emails awaiting my return.  Working through those will take a little time.  I posted a small correction for the numeric edit components TIntEdit and TFloatEdit  today (decimal separator issue for European users).  I also made a version of the controls that do not need installation before use that can be downloaded from the same page.    

July 8, 2005:  A small fix for the Intersecting Lines demo was posted today.  Overlapping line segments of the same line were not identified as intersecting.   Perhaps we should have a new "overlapping" category, but for now we just identify them as "intersecting".  

July 10, 2005:  The Josephus problem :  A counting elimination "game" named after the story that Jewish historian/mathematician Josephus Flavius devised a "fair" way to kill off his troops who insisted on suicide rather than surrender to the Roman enemy. 41 of them formed a circle and every third man was eliminated.  Maybe not so fair since Josephus, who was not too keen on the idea, selected a position which assured that he would be the last survivor. At that point he decided that perhaps it was best to surrender after all.  In fact, the name Flavius is an adoptive name from the Roman family that took him in!

July 12, 2005:  Long time viewer Don Rowlett has made a hobby of finding (and suggesting fixes for) bugs in DFF programs.  Here are two more minor corrections;  in Peg Solitaire, the "number of pegs remaining" criteria defining a solution was only checked in Auto-solve mode and was ignored for manual play.  It now is checked for both modes.  And in Safecracker, the board kept getting smaller as sizes were rounded down from previous size as board sizes were changed.  New size calculation is now from original board size.    Thanks Don.  Keep up the good work! 

July 14, 2005:   I made a couple of corrections to NumEdit2 posted last week,  Numedit2 contains versions of our  Integer and Float edit  controls (TintEdit and TFloatEdit) that do not require installation.  Prototype  properties "Anchors" and "Text" were not transferred to the new controls when they were created.  Now they are. 

I also posted the first update in several years of  Tilefit, a program that takes a set of tiles and produces random rectangular designs of a specified size.   It now handles multiple colors for the same tile size. 

 August 5, 2005:  Here's program which solves sets of linear equations using a technique called Gaussian Elimination with Partial Pivoting.  Even the title sounds scary.  Fortunately,  this  demo program  is usable to those of us who are more results oriented and  don't worry about the messy details.  As usual, complete source code and other references are available for those  who do want to dig in.     

Oops!

August 3, 2005:  I spent the past two weeks working on our latest  program  - a Catapult Simulator.   Users define the mechanical characteristics of the catapult and the program predicts the flight time, height,  and range of the projectile.  Now I guess  I had better head down to the shop and finish that model to see if the program's output has any relationship to reality. 

  

Gary Darby
http://www.delphiforfun.org/

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