What's New -  October, 2014

October 1, 2014:  A small update the other day created CutList Version 4.01 to help resolve a printing problem when saved manual solutions are reloaded without first loading the case definition file.   The requirement still exists, but I hope it is now better diagnosed for the user. 

October 5, 2014:  DFF Newsletter #74 was sent last night to 853 subscribers.  The newsletter is issued quarterly summarizing website postings for the previous quarter and is mainly intended for those who like the website but don't visit regularly.  It is motivated by my personal experience of losing track of many interesting  websites that I like but don't need to visit daily or weekly.    There were only 7 invalid email addresses this time so the list has pretty much settled down to our group of "permanent" subscribers. 

Brute  Force Version 3.2.1 was posted today to fix a small problem when the  image from the previous problem still displays after a new problem is started or an existing problem without an associated image is opened.

October 11, 2014:  Here is a program posted in our Delphi Techniques section which tests list creation and retrieval speed for standard TStringList  and for  the DFF integer list equivalent, TIntList.  Times and rates can be compared under multiple Delphi versions using the same source code.  My conclusion from testing with Speed Tests for Lists is that integer lists are much preferred if possible when performance is important.      

October 19, 2014: 

KenKen is a Sudoku like game with a little math involved, cages instead of 3x3 blocks, and allowing numbers to be repeated within cages so long as no number appears more than once in a column or row. 

While solving a new puzzle the other day, I found a couple of irritating program "features" when the user has filled all cells but errors exist.  First, automatic checking to produce error messages for every change until the errors were corrected was awkward and just a bad idea.  Second, when I tried to fool the program by entering spaces in all of the error locations, I found that space character was not honored as a valid key,   Both of those mistakes are corrected today with the posting of KenKen Version 2,1.