What's New -  September 2015

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September 8, 2015:  No joy yet on the Double Word Squares Solver described last time.  In the meantime though, today's calendar puzzle is a logic problem about 3 girls and the ordering of number of train rides taken and countries they visited.  I worked on it for about 15 minutes before deciding to revisit my Logic Problem Solver program.  Another 15 minutes entering the problem and encoding the facts and rules produced the solution.  The problem is now included in the Logic Solver downloads as Girls_Visiting_Europe.prb.  The program by default runs in User mode, providing you with the problem and variable names and possible values predefined.   It's up to you to enter facts and rules  using program templates.  (For example: from the given statement "Betty has not taken the most train rides", we can deduce and enter the fact "Betty isn't T3" where T3 is shorthand for the person with the most train rides.)    The program's "Author" mode will give you the 3 facts and 2 order rules that I fed the program to produce the solution. 

September 13, 2015:  The anagram feature of the Word Completion section of our Wordstuff wrapper program  was preciously only available if no words were found when filling a single missing letter.  A recent puzzle required finding anagrams even when there were words found without anagramming.  Word Completion Version 2.3 adds a check box to force anagram searches in either case. 

September 20, 2015:  

We  have more trees on our property than I can ever use for firewood.  A small sawmill has long been on my wish list, but its cost makes it a toy that's hard to justify.  A horizontal band mill   (bandsaw laid on it's side and mounted on a track) is the most common type for small operators and prices start at a few thousand dollars.  For this mill type, logs lie on the bed and are rotated as required to cut boards and beams.  As a substitute for a mill, I wrote a program several years ago to display log sawing patterns for use on on my non-existent horizontal band mill.  Requests from two real saw mill owners this week led me to revisit the program. Log Saw Patterns V1.2 posted today fixes a small bug which subtracted blade thickness twice for some cuts when cutting around a fixed width cant.  I also added the ability to  save and reload setup parameters by name reference.  The guys have more good ideas for improvement which will appear in a future version.
 

September 24, 2015:  A fellow Delphi programmer recently inquired about writing code to control the master volume level on a Windows PC.  I searched online and found the key unit (MMDevAPI) connecting the Delphi code to the Windows internal volume control routine online.  Here's a Master Volume Demo which includes the MMDevAPI unit and a demonstration program  to verify that it works.