I suddenly thought that I should start writing the circle test program using JavaScript and an HTML5 canvas. It would probably work exactly like the native Windows app but with smoother lines. I could then add some HTML button or menu to let a user pick which experiment…
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…
Continue readingI added code to save my crossword puzzle and solution to two bitmap files. It is interesting how many people write code to do things of this sort that don’t write it correctly. Puzzle Bitmap void CChildView::SaveImageToFile( const char *pFilename, bool bSolution ) { CSize GridSize = GetGridCellSize();…
Continue readingCrossword puzzles are supposed to be designed with a lot of white squares in clumps and with some sort of symmetry. There are different style traditions in the U.S., the U.K, and Japan. Sweden has a very strange looking puzzle style that is a bit different but having…
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