Thursday June 14, 2001
I decided I'd better send a newsletter today. The grandkids are coming in this afternoon, so there won't be much programming time for the next week or so.
Here are the "What's New" excerpts since last time:
June 3, 2001: I finally got eclipse prediction working in the TAstronomy component, but it was probably more effort than it was worth. Only stubbornness kept me at it, long past the fun stage. I'll come back and clean it up and post it in a week or so. (Unless I recover enough to tackle the planets.)
But here's a river crossing puzzle than was fun. This is the fox-duck-corn variation of the 1200-year-old wolf-goose-cabbage original. A graphics interface allows the user or the program to solve the puzzle. A simple puzzle, but I like it.
June 12, 2001: I wrote this Canvas drawing demo the other day to
help someone who was having trouble saving and restoring canvas drawings. It's posted in the Delphi Techniques section. It also illustrates the starting point to get the little images posted occasionally with these program descriptions.
June 14, 2001: As you might guess, I couldn't resist adding planet position prediction to the forthcoming TAstronomy component, so now everything is there and working. Well, Pluto isn't there because it's position isn't predictable over the long term using simple curve fitting. No big loss - it's the smallest planet, smaller than our moon, about 100 times dimmer than the next dimmest planet, Neptune and it's about 4 billion miles away. But I do need a program that does more than just display where the rest are at any point in time.
I found a neat, free, Delphi OpenGL 3D graphics component this week. (Computer Geometry, CGLib, from Delphi3D). I came across this while working on the idea for a 3D planetary model to go with TAstronomy. So here's a prototype Planet Viewer based on OpenGL/CGLib. It's adapted from a demo program also found at the Delphi3D site. Most of it I don't really understand yet, but it does look cool.
Gary
http://www.delphiforfun.org
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"Five years from now, my computer will at least be, maybe, one-tenth as smart as my secretary" Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, June 7,2001
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