March 30, 2002: Back from travels, including
that harrowing trip up I-95 interstate
through New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. If you only care to
exceed the posted speeds by 10 mph, you had better stay in the slow
lane. No new programs this week but, since tomorrow is
Easter, I resurrected this Easter Dates
program. (The devil made me say that.) It calculates
dates of Easter for any year in the Gregorian calendar, and gives a little
history of how the dates are determined.
March 20, 2002: We'll be doing grandkid things for
the next week or so, so I may not have much time to post new
programs. Here is one that represents a rather startling new
voice recognition technology. I had originally planned to
post this in a week or 10 days, but I'll do it now while I think of
it. It's called Card
Trick to throw would-be cyber thieves off the track.
I had some feedback from Dan Thomasson this week. Dan
had stumbled on my Knight's Tour
program and happens to run a Knight's Tour site at http://www.borderschess.org/KnightTour.htm.
If you want more in-depth knowledge, check it out.
There is a new beginner's Delphi programming class
starting over at www.delphi.about.com.
It may be worth spending some time there, if you can tolerate the
irritating pop-up ads. Personally, I can stand it only for a few
minutes - about the third time I get interrupted while trying to
concentrate, I'm gone. What a shame.
On a typical day, we get 500-1000 hits on all pages,
many from search engine crawlers I'm sure. There
are usually a half-dozen or so page errors reported, sometimes obvious
typing errors, sometimes not. If you get any "Page not
found" or other errors while browsing around here that are not the
result of your typing, please use the feedback link to let me
know. I'll fix any I can track down.
March 16, 2002:
Arrange the 10 tiles shown into a 5 X 5
array of numbers in such a way that the 5-digit horizontal numbers match
the 5-digit vertical numbers. Not a trivial
task, unless you have this Mensa Tiles
program. Implementing a puzzle type from the
"Mensa Number Puzzles" book, this program allows user play as
well as solving puzzles by exhaustive search. You can
also enter and save your own versions of puzzles.
Documenting this program brought to mind an article: "Learn
to Program in 10 Years". I'll dig it out and provide the
reference one of these days, but the gist of it is that programming is not
a skill that can be mastered in 24 hours or 21 days as many book titles
would imply. On the other hand, maybe there are only a
few dozen tricks/techniques that, once learned, move you a long way down
the road. A number of them occur in this program.
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March 7, 2002: Doodler
2, a drawing program with fill, rotate-draw, and kaleidoscope draw
features is available! And you can now also save and print the
masterpieces you create. |
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March
1, 2002: I ran across this entry the other day in my
"Unanswered questions" file:
"Championship golf courses always contain 18 holes with par scores of
3, 4, and 5 with a total course par of 72. How many possible
championship course arrangements are there?"
Here's a 40 line Delphi "GolfCourses"
program that answers the question. It involves our old friends
Permutation and Combination. If you want to be a good
puzzle solver and don't know them, it may be time to get
acquainted.
Not that it matters, but I haven't been able to find
a definition of "championship golf course" to verify that the premise
of the question is true.
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