What's New - August, 2006
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August 31, 2006: I posted a card shuffle test program yesterday. A viewer had pointed out an error in the Shuffle procedure used in our Cards control. If you were to shuffle a deck of cards, in 52 steps, by taking the top card from a deck and exchanging it with a random card in the deck, would it matter if you placed this new top card in another pile or moved it to the bottom of the deck? Shuffle test answers the question.
OK, the answer is yes, there is a small bias using the 2nd method (my old way). I updated the DFF library to DFFLibV07 with a corrected version of the UCardComponentV2. This new library version also includes two other changes: The dictionary component unit, UDict, used in a number of DFF word programs is now included in the library file. And the Dijkstra Shortest Path search procedure in the TGraphSearch unit can now call a "GoalFound" exit procedure when a shortest path is found.
August 29, 2006: Windows rules! The next time a friend gives you a hard time about being "stuck" in Windows, or you see one of those Apple TV adds dissing Microsoft, whip out this table:
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The 8 most popular operating systems on the web are:
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Based on a global sample taken by web analytics company OneSoft.com. of 2,000,000 customer's web page visits.
August 21, 2006: Here's one just for the programmers in the crowd. I needed to draw some information on TShape controls, but TShape does not support the OnPaint event. The Paint on Shape demo program shows how do add the capability. The image at left shows "nozzles" for a fountain simulator which needed identifying numbers painted on them.
August 13, 2005: Last year, I wrote a "Clear Blank Lines" program to fix a particular web page file that somehow had had thousands of extra short blank lines inserted. A surprising number of users apparently have had similar problems including a recent viewer with hundreds of such files to fix. Version 2, posted today, allows multiple files to be selected and processed in a single run.
August 11, 2006.Good news for Delphians and and those who might like to be. Borland has just announced Turbo Explorer versions of several of its languages including Turbo Delphi Explorer will be available free of charge in September! Professional versions will be sold, but free Explorer versions will give many more programmers and potential programmers a chance to learn what Delphi is all about. Their new website, www.TurboExplorer.com has more information. Check it out.
August 8, 2006: An enhancement suggested by a viewer was made to our two demo string grid sort programs: GridSort and Grid Quicksort. They now consider multiple column widths when determining which column header was clicked. As usual, a few other small bugs were corrected in the process.