What's New -  August, 2017

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August 1, 2017:  If you're reading this, I'm happy to report that the DFF site has been successfully transferred to the new host.  Feedback and Newsletter Subscription emails are working again and FrontPage can again be used to maintain and publish site changes.  Time will tell if if there are drawbacks as yet undiscovered.  If you encounter problems, please use the feedback to let me know., 

August 19, 2017: It's been a good news-bad news month.  The transfer of DFF from host EasyCgi to Alentus went fairly smoothly with FrontPage support restored, but I'm being swamped by spam emails (~ 50 per day) since Alentus apparently does no screening at the server levelL.  Outlook junk screening here at home is by sender address or domain name of which there seems to be an infinite number.  I  may be forced to another mail server if it cannot be fixed. Also thumbs down to EasyCgi for dropping FrontPage support without prior notice and for refusing to credit me for the unused 6 months of prepaid hosting feesL.

On the fun side of the street though, I did manage to crack a fairly complicated word search puzzle solverJ.  The puzzle solution requires forming five 5-letter words by selecting one letter from each row corresponding to the letter position in the word being formed. All letters will be used exactly once.  So the 1st letters of the words will be A, B, G, T, and W.  2nd letters will be chosen from U, A, R, L ,P with each letter appearing in one word, etc.   Word Search By Column has more details and download links for the program. 
    

August 30, 2017: Just time to squeeze in one more program this month.  This one is puzzle #57 from Terry Stickles' excellent book Challenging Math Problems "How many numbers less than 1,000,000 have digits that sum to 3?  Examples: 1200, 111000, 21, and 300."  Program DigitsSumToThree started out as a Beginner's level demo of how to extract digits from a number, add them up, and count those that sum to 3.   This method works and is easy for the computer, but virtually impossible for a human to duplicate.  That led to an Intermediate level version with two additional ways to answer the question, even by us mere humans.  The link above provides more detail and the links to executable and source code for he program.