What's New -  March, 2013

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March 1, 2013:  On January 4th I posted a program investigating two erroneous claims made about interesting features of the year 2013.   A viewer recently pointed out a problem with my proof that 2013 was not,  as claimed, the smallest number which required 6 terms to be expressed as the sum or difference of prime numbers squared.  I forgot to select only prime numbers, but the claim is still untrue in the corrected version.  432 + 132 - 32 + 22 does the job with 4 terms.  In fact, I believe that the 15 is the smallest number requiring 6 prime squared terms if individual term values are limited to the target number value.  If you need help finding expression for 15, search button for Case 2B in Interesting 2013, Version 2 can help.

March 3, 2013:  It didn't take long to come up with Interesting 2013 Version  2.1 which takes advantage of the "prime numbers only" search to  make searches 100 times faster than the previous version.  Also my new candidate for the smallest number requiring six terms is 11.    If we allow term sizes to be up to two times larger than the target number then the smallest number requiring six terms  2 (= 32 + 32 -22-22-22-22).

March 14, 2013: A new Utility program,  Bulk Find & Replace, was posted today.   

Like most of the programs in the Utilities section of DFF, it was motivated by a specific problem that I had.  While at it though, I made the  program generalized with these options and  features

  • Change files matching a specific mask.
  • Match a given string and change it to a new given string.
  • Match text case or not
  • Change a single folder or a folder and all of its sub-folders.
  • Simulate the "Change" runs, displaying changes to be made without updating.
  • Change the first or all occurrences in a file.
  • Change the first or all occurrences in each line.
  • Save options when program closes and reload load at next startup.  A Test.txt file is included in the downloads for initial testing.

Let me know if you find it useful (or especially if you find bugs!) .

March 28, 2013:  We're embarking on a grand experiment today - converting DFF Delphi programs to Lazarus/FPC.  Lazarus is a frontend IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for FPC (Free Pascal Compiler).  It knows about Delphi and, in it's current form, does a pretty fair job of converting  Delphi source.  For someone wanting to use DFF programs on a non-Windows platform or who wants to modify DFF code but does not have access to Delphi, it's a no-cost approach worth a shot. Lazarus Revisited introduces the process I used to convert most of the widely used DFF Library unit and a dozen or so programs using them.