What's New - October, 2015
October 2, 2015:
Late last year, curiosity led me to investigate how license keys
or serial numbers might be created. Activation procedures requiring
name, email address or other personal information lead me to believe that the
assigned key contains data used for verifying that the user is the owner.
A user recently uncovered a couple of bugs when a larger number of fields or
special characters are included.
License Key Demo Version
1.2 corrects these and a couple of others discovered during testing,
October 19, 2015:
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| Complete this grid with 10 different words using the given letters |
I recently discovered the was a perfectly good name already defined (Double Word Squares) for what I had been calling "Square Word Grids" to distinguish them from the symmetrical "Word Squares" puzzles. Double Word Squares Version 3 posted today has several major enhancements and has occupied my spare time for the past 8 weeks! I will admit that the "fun level" decreased during the period and I reverted to "never give mode" several times. The resulting product still needs polishing, but I believe that it mostly works. Please let me know if you find otherwise. The changed and new features include a revised search algorithm and revised user interface. It now takes less than a second to solve this Mensa Puzzle which the previous version could not solve in over 10 hours of run time!
October 29, 2015:
Last Sunday's Mensa Calendar Puzzle led me to dig out the Self Describing Sentences program written several years ago. Sure enough it can solve this one, but I can't revisit a program without finding some bug or desired enhancement. This time I added the ability to count the number of consonants in a self describing manner. Self Describing Sentences Version 2.3 was posted today.
November's big project is a program to approximate the largest
rectangle that can be drawn inside of an arbitrary polygon. A
patient user requested it a few months ago and it does sound like an interesting
challenge.