What's New -  February, 2007

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February 26, 2007: 

My whistle

and its (correct) spectrum

A significant correction was posted today to our Oscilloscope4 program (Version 4.2.2).  The spectrum analyzer function had displayed false overtones due to an error I made when adapting the original Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) code From Borland's Turbo Pascal version.

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February 18, 2007: Three programs have had minor updates in the past few days:

  • Cutlist, the woodworking project layout program, had a mysterious problem when there was insufficient material to fit all of the parts, and the user changed the cut width or smallest waster dimension to report.  The program looped but is now fixed, actually circumvented since I never did find the real cause of the problem. 

  •  Spring Mass animated demo program did not recognize the comma as a valid decimal point for our European users.  Actually, thanks to the error report and a  suggestion made by a user from the Netherlands, the program now recognizes both a period and a comma as valid decimal separators.  This allows him to use the numeric keypad to enter decimals. 

  • The TAstronomy class and the Astronomy Demo program have been modified to include  altitude info with sun/moon rise and set statistics.  This allow easy conversion from "Horizon" to other coordinate systems.      

February 14, 2007:  Happy St. Valentine's Day to all the female viewers.   For the guys, remember to get her something that tells her how you feel., even if it's only a card.     

I listen to the "Car Talk" radio program on National Public Radio each weekend when I can.   I also subscribe to their weekly Puzzler newsletter.  A recent one involved a shootout where three mutual enemies agreed on rules for a 3-way "duel".  The question was about  worst shooter's strategy to maximize his chances of survival.  Car Talk Shootout implements  a Monte Carlo simulation to answer the question including the best strategy (which happened not to be in my original version).

 

February 12, 2007:  Here is a new version of the "Spring Mass" simulation program.  Several fixes and enhancements have been applied. 

 

February 7, 2007:   New versions of our big integers and and big floating point arithmetic classes were posted today in an updated version of the library zip file, DFFLibV10.    Aside from general cleanup, the big integer unit, UBigIntsV3,  contains new "divide with remainder"  procedures illiustrating that there is more than one way to define quotient and remainder when doing integer division.  See BigIntTest page for more information.  For large floating point unit ,UBigFloatV3, more cleanup and a new definition of the Round function which uses a parameter to specify the "round to" point relative to the decimal point location.  See BigFloatTest for more info on this. 

February 1, 2007:  An update to our Astronomy Demo program last night adds "twilight" times to the sun position statistics.  The are three varieties (Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical) defined for different purposes, all relative to the angle of the sun below the horizon.