What's New -  October, 2012

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October 5, 2012:  Home again after a 3 week trip to our 2nd favorite place on earth, (after our mountain home), Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.   We've been visiting every few years since discovering it  in 1967.  This time we added a few of the rail excursions (over-rated), Jungfraujoch "Top of Europe" rail trip to 11,000 feet (over-rated), and 3 days in Lucerne (view from Rigi Kulm is impressive).

Only 2 bug reports while we were gone and it turns out that both had already been fixed.  But I did polish up an Intersecting  Circle Centers program I had been working on before we left  in response to a user's request.  A previous version had explored the derivation of the math to determine the intersection points and the  intersection area for two circles.  This one solves the inverse problem;. given two circles and the area of their intersection, how far apart are the centers? 

October 8, 2012:   Oops!  For Delphi programmers: On August 29 I announced a fix for a rounding error in our big floating point arithmetic unit.  I had identified, fixed, and tested the changes.  However, I forgot to  upload the DFFLibV14 library unit which contained the fix!   Library unit DFFLibV14 has been really re-posted today with the revised UBigFloatV3 unit.  

October 15, 2012:   Many integer arithmetic problems and puzzles require that the individual decimal digits be separated from or combined into multi-digit numbers. Here is a Digits and Numbers program in our Delphi Techniques section which  illustrates the technique using a few problems adapted from the latest addition to my library,  Challenging Mathematical Teasers (Dover Recreational Math)  by J.A.H. Hunter. 

October 22, 2012:

A user wrote a few weeks ago asking how to rotate JPEG clock hand images to simulate an analog clock.   That triggered another learning/relearning experience figuring out how to do it.  Delphi Techniques program JPG Clock  is the result. Not that the world needs another analog clock but it did make an interesting programming project with plenty of room left for future improvement.
 

October 27, 2012:  Most of this week was in winter preparation mode; topping off the fire-wood piles, checking deer trails, harvesting apples that stubbornly hang on, setting up feeders to help our wild turkeys through the hard times ahead, etc.  It looks like we may get our first real frost with "Sandy" tomorrow, the tropical storm the that decided to head north. 

I did update to JPG Clock Version 2 which reduces processor time and improves accuracy.  I have a "atomic" watch which synchronizes itself every night with the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) radio signal.  Most Windows systems synchronize their times weekly with the NIST time-server website.  It still surprises me to see the wristwatch and computer clock second hands within a second of each other.