What's New -  May, 2006

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May 25, 2006:  One more version of Cutlist, Version 3.2.2 will do it for this month.   The program has real users designing real projects, and finding real "bugs".   Today's version adds the ability to print the "leftover parts" list and a a new option to select what parts of the project to print.   I also corrected a problem when part name items exceeded half of the available page width.   List was printed in two overlapping columns, making it hard to read.   These cases now print in a single column.     

Here's 1 word of 121 found by Akerue.  How many could you find?

May 24, 2006:  Here's Akerue Version 4 , a word search game where you try to find more words in a square letter grid than the program finds.  (Actually, the program finds them all, but he only takes credit for the ones you don't find.)   This version adds keyboard input and a game time limit,  features that a small but dedicated group of Akerue players have been requesting for some time.   I also added a couple of my own including the ability to define additions and deletions for predefined wordlists.   
 

May 19, 2006:  A bug-fix version of CutList (Version3.2.1) was posted last week to fix  printing & display problems when parts diagrams exceeded  one page.   Cutlist is a program to find efficient ways to layout  required parts for a woodworking project using a list of available supply pieces.

May 14, 2006:  Well, the "stupid" logic problem has become "could have be more clearly written"  after it succumbed to much study.    Traveling Men describes the problem and has download links for the program I wrote to speed experimentation with facts and rules extracted from the problem text. 

May 11, 2006:  I spent most of this week working on a stupid logic problem a user sent me.  "Stupid" because I haven't solved it yet.  In fact, it seems one particular clue makes it unsolvable.  I'm researching the source of the problem, but either way, I'll probably post a page about it one of these days.   It's called "Traveling Men" and involves 6 men with 6 first and last names, 6 occupations and each having uniquely traveled by 2 of 5 modes of transportation.  If you have any information about it, please send feedback.

I did post a couple of small changes to other programs.  The dictionary maintenance program, DicMaint, part of our Wordstuff series, was corrected to properly flag capitalized words if the dictionary file was saved as a plain text file.  A new, faster, routine to extract words from input text was also implemented.

Another viewer pointed out that our Set Partition program in Math Topics, did not return results for the single element case.  The set {a} has only a single partition (of course}, but the class that returns partition information should handle it.  It now does.    

May 8, 2006:  For  programmers, a new TCountDown timer class I wrote for the usual reasons - I wanted one with one second resolution  for a timed puzzle project and could not find a good, free, Delphi version online.  Countdown Timer Demo includes the new control and a program illustrating  usage for both analog and digital versions.

  May 4, 2006: Frustrated viewer Delores just wrote asking if it were possible to solve the Seven Coins puzzle.   The answer is, probably not,  if you just had the abbreviated (and confusing) description provided on the web page and did not download the program.  The instructions from the program have been transferred to the web page which may help her sleep tonight. 

"Place a coin on any unoccupied star point connected to another unoccupied star point and move it to the other end. Can you do this 6 more times so that 7 of the star points are occupied?"