September 28: 2001: I'm still alive -
working a few hours per day on the Roller Coaster Simulator
project. I think it's going to be a good one. I keep
spending time playing with it when I should be working on
it. One of the final problems was calculating
centripetal forces for hills, dips and loops. The force for a
body turning is inversely proportional to the radius being turned
(e.g. cut the radius in half - double the force). The
problem of determining the radius lead to this Math Topics
page "Define
a circle given 3 points" which tests the functions
used in the Coaster project.
September 16: Still sorting out emotions from
Tuesday's tragedy. Mainly anger and frustration at those who would
make us less free. Have they thought this all the way through?
I think not.
I spent a few days this week working on a QuickSort
demo program that would explain itself as it sorted. As a result I
understand the QuickSort algorithm pretty well, but not because of any
program output. Too much text is as bad as none. Maybe an
animated sort would be more instructive. Anyway, back to the drawing board on that
project.
Here's a Simple Gravity
Cart program written as a test-bed for a planned roller coaster
simulation. This cart knows how to accelerate downhill
and decelerate uphill and slow down both ways due to friction.
It took a long time to teach it to stay on the track, now I have to teach
it to fall off the track if gravity dictates. Still, enough physics
and animation techniques here to make it interesting.
September 7:2001: The customized
cursors page that I promised a couple of weeks ago has been posted in
Delphi Techniques. Not a biggie, but if you're doing
customized cursors, or want to include pictures, multimedia files, or other data as part of your executable module, this page will give
you a starting point.
September 6:2001: Borland has changed the
link for downloading free D6 Personal. I just corrected the
link in the August 30 posting. I managed to download 15 of the
140 mb, then cancelled to see if it would recover gracefully. Before
I got back to it the link stopped working. They've changed the
logon procedure and the download site still seems to be overloaded.
Hope it means we're getting thousands of new Delphi
users!
September 5: 2001:
Happy 1st Anniversary!
Almost missed it but Delphi For Fun went
online one year ago yesterday. 7000 home page visitors
and 34,000 sessions, whatever those are, later, we're still going strong with a bigger backlog than
ever. For what it's worth, here are the stats from the
first year of operation. Now if only my net worth chart looked
this good ...
OK, back to trying to figure out why my new Delphi web
program works fine locally but gives me an "Internal Server
Error" when I try it here. (Update - Oops - since
DFF is hosted on a Unix system, we're out of luck re running Delphi apps
remotely, unless I find a Windows hosting service or get
Kylix).
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Red loses |
September 2, 2001: Here's another Martin Gardner
invention - the Game of Hip, first published
way back when everyone knew what the word "hipster" meant -
as in "hipsters" avoid "squares".
It's a two-player game with the objective not to
complete 4 corners of any square with your tokens. This version
supports both human and computer opponents. There's trick that makes
it easy to win (or at least not lose, a tie is possible). But it is a fun
mental geometrical exercise anyway.
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