What's New -  July, 2009

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July 29, 2009:  FrontPage, Microsoft's previous tool for website creation, and the one I use, is at the end of its life cycle.   I have delayed converting to another program partly because I don't have much interest in being a web site developer, and partly because Microsoft (nor anyone else that I know of) provides a conversion tool.  The general conversion rule is: you can save the text, but discard everything else and start over rebuilding your site.  Not something I look forward to.  

One of the symptoms of "end-of-life" is broken/disabled features as host sites lose knowledge about FrontPage and interest in maintaining it.  Currently it's the "hit counter" feature at the bottom of this page that stopped working sometime after March 31.    It may be fixable, but in the meantime I wanted to recover the usage count data for the 2nd  quarter.  Today's program, Offline Hit Counter, solves that problem by analyzing website log files.  I've filed it in the Utilities Section of DFF because, you never know, the same or similar problem may arise in the future.   (By the way, there were 11,905 visits to this page in the April-June time period.)

July 22, 2009: 

Ready, set, go!  Today's Drag Strip Tree simulation program posted our Delphi Techniques section illustrates the use of timers to control sequential events. 
 

July 17, 2009:  It's been a month since the last program posting for a number of reasons, mostly related to having other things that were more fun to do.  I have spent spare hours for the last week or two working on Dice Probabilities Version 3.   This update was prompted by a viewer who is hooked on a dice game known as "Farkle" and is working on analyzing the probabilities for outcomes when 6 dice are thrown.   I had worked on them earlier but had set the problem aside.  I believe I have cracked it now,  for outcomes up to 6 dice at least.