What's New -  May, 2013

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May 7, 2013:  Here is a program which solves a problem discussed by computer science pioneer Donald Knuth in 1977 in a magazine article "Are Toy Problems Useful?" in 1977.  He was disputing the argument made by another mathematician that the answer was "No".  I agree with Knuth, that, like story problems in math textbooks, any problem which improves problem solving skills is useful even if the answer will not directly advance one's professional career.  This problem presented by Knuth met the "useful" criteria for me.  "Given an exponent, N, find all numbers which are equal to the sum of the Nth powers of their digits."   For example for N =4: 1634 = 1⁴ + 6⁴ + 3⁴ + 4⁴ (= 1 + 1296 + 81 + 256 = 1634).  Knuth Toy Problem has the results of my investigation, three methods which, for N=10, find the unique solution in 30 minutes, or 2 hours, or 2 seconds.  A rare personal Eureka moment!  The explanation for the best result is behind a button in case any programmer wants to discover it on their own J.

 May 11, 2013:  The original version of our "Copy Folder" utility program  performed operations like copying all files in folder "ProgramA" to a new folder "ProgrtamA_Test".   A viewer pointed out it did not work  well for his intended use: i.e. copy folders "ProgramA", then "ProgramB", and then "ProgramC" into a folder named "Backups".  In other words, copy the selected folder name as well as the files in that folder.  It seemed like a reasonable request to me, so CopyFolder Version 3.2 posted today adds a checkbox: "Include selected input folder record in output" to do just that. 

May 25, 2013:  It has been a busy month with 2 grandchildren graduating from college, spring clean up of extensive winter damage and the always stressful planning for a big family vacation in June.

Which of my children was not looking forward to their 1st day of Kindergarten 43 years ago?.

 I did find time to update the 15 Graphic Effects program to Version 2 in our Delphi Techniques section.  The update improves the efficiency of the "Magnifier" effect and has better scaling for demo images loaded.  The original program was written 10 years ago by bright 16 year old Ivan Sivak.  I emailed him the other day asking for a status update but haven't heard back yet.  

Table above shows an original photo and 4 of the 15 special effects: Brightness/Contrast, Gray Scale,  Blend, and Magnifier.