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I recently got back to improving the crossword puzzle generator. The previous algorithm would only allow for clumps of four letters by pre-searching the word list and forming four word clumps. When the placement algorithm was running, it would try to place those four word clumps onto the…
Continue readingLast night, I decided that I would port my circletest program to JavaScript. I use the circletest program to test various geometric constructions. Most of the geometry related programming that I do is accomplished using techniques that are traditionally manual operations. A lot of interesting things can be…
Continue readingTwilio requires a few things that I didn’t know about when I started this project. One is connecting to an HTTP server in a C++ program, another is SSL for HTTP in said C++ program, and the third is website authentication, again in C++. What this all boils…
Continue readingAlthough I do a bit of rock climbing now and then, this post is about cam lobes like those in car engines, not those used for rock climbing protection. Finding End Circle Location I was discussing this with my dad because he is building a model engine. He’s…
Continue readingLast night, I finished work on the SMS text message handling in the Auto Responder. Twilio makes a web service request using my web server using a PHP script that I created for this purpose. It was simple to configure my Twilio account to use my server and…
Continue readingThe changes to the Auto Responder to support SMS change a few things in my program that affect the users. One of those things is the registration process. With email, the user is expected to send the word “team” followed by their team number to register@mucow.net. The code…
Continue readingIt turns out that some mobile phone services don’t send SMS messages to email addresses quickly enough. My demo Windows Phone from T-Mobile will not sent to email addresses at all and I have no idea why. To deal with this during the puzzle race, I am going…
Continue readingThe IMAP protocol, like SMTP and POP3, is a text based protocol. This kind of protocol can be processed by hand using a telnet client or other similar interactive terminal. I just modified the Auto Responder to use IMAP instead of POP3 as its mail retrieval protocol. The…
Continue readingI got the puzzle generator working well enough to generate the puzzle I needed. I’m done with this project. It was interesting when I decided to add clumped words to the algorithm. Four words can all come together in a four-letter clump. It’s a situation that the normal…
Continue readingClump of Letters After looking at this for a while, I figured out how to write the code to handle it. I also figured out another type of clump that I could try to handle as a special case but only if I had some three-letter words. To…
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