What's New -  May, 2017

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May 14, 2017:  Here's a  puzzle that required a 25 line program to solve (at least for me). If you want to try it on you own, here it is:

We have two normal 12 hour clocks that start running at 12:00.   One loses two minutes every hour and the other gains two minutes every hour. How many hours will elapse  before both clocks again show the same time?

Program FastSlowClocks simulates the two clocks by incrementing the times by 62 minutes (Clock 1) or 58 minutes (Clock 2) for each real hour interval. Starting at time 12:00  (00:00 really), clock times are displayed for every "real" hour until they again match.  The link above points to a Beginners page with 2 dozen simple programs described for beginning Delphi programmers, so scroll to the bottom of the page to see the entry for this one.  Viewing  the program results showed that I should have been able to reason my way to the solution, (but I didn't L).  If you just want to download the executable file to check your answer, clicking this link is a simpler way. 

May 23 2017:   I recently needed to extract information about a particular location collected over time and buried in many large files.  This was a one-time study, not worth writing a separate program.   In order to assemble the needed data  from several files, I modified our Text Search program to append selected records into an single text file  Text Search 2.2 posted today, now allows appending as  an alternative to overwriting an existing file with the same name.