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.  

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.

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.