What's New -  August 2011

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August 16, 2011:  Summer is flying by.  We've had great time with the family this summer at the expense of programming time.  A fair tradeoff IMO.   Spare time recently has been spent working on adding Latitude-Longitude Mercator projections to the Traveling Salesman Program with maybe another week to go to wrap it up.  

 I thand Rob for letting me know that file size reporting for our large file size listing program didn't work for files over 4 GB.  List Large Files Version 3.3 posted to day today fixes that problem, so we'll at least have one program posting this month.  If you find any other nice easy-to-fix bugs, please let me know J.  

August 24, 2011:  One of the luxuries of working for free is the ability to ignore self imposed schedules to make time for interesting side trips.  One such side trip resulted in today's utility program Make City Location Files.  While adding the ability to use latitude-longitude coordinates in our traveling Salesman Problem Solver program, I decided that manually placed dots on a map would not accurately represent coordinates so I needed to go the other way (from lat-long to pixels).  This meant finding a source to assign coordinates to cities.  Since cities often cover many square miles, assigning a single point is necessarily a rough indicator, but how to get even that?  I did not succeed in finding a ready-made solution but did find an official US government zip code file which assigns lat-long coordinates to zip codes.  Many zip codes may reference the same cities but we should be able to average these coordinates by city to get reasonable location values for each of the 50,000 or so zip code location reference names.  Interesting stuff!       

August 28, 2011:  Another side trip thanks to a viewer inquiry about alternate ways to randomly cut a stick into three pieces to form a triangle.  The original version analyzed results when 2 cuts were made independently.  This is the first update to a program posted 7 years ago; Random Triangles Version 2 explores three other ways when the second cut location is influenced by the first.