Older blog entries for derupe (starting at number 24)

19 Nov 2004 (updated 19 Nov 2004 at 16:57 UTC) »
pipeman asked: What does the numbers next to the names in the Advogato recentlog mean?

Could it be what others have rated your dairy?

Everyone's home page has a question similar to this -

How interesting is pipeman's diary, on a 1 to 10 scale?

It could be the average of all the ratings - hence the fraction against some dairy entries ...

Released version 2.2b of Kaprekar Series Generator.

This is more of a code refactoring release. The code was changed to be more modular. The serialization, SVG generation and statistics code had crept into the Kaprekar Engine. I extracted those into separate classes - this also fixed some cut-and-paste code.

The only bug-fix in this code is for the progress bar in the GUI - the progress bar would not show the progress while searching for Kaprekar Series with more than 19 digits. This is fixed now. Well I had written the code, but for some reason I didn't invoke it. Ok, I thought it was an expensive call so didn't invoke it. Now I'm keeping track of the heartbeat and invoking it initially every 50 heartbeats and then every 500 heartbeats. It didn't seem to have too much of an overhead.

This change was in preparation of moving Kaprekar Series Generator to Java 1.5 to use the new language features.

Found this article on Functional programming in the Java language at IBM DeveloperWorks. A good read ... now need to explore about the Apache Commons Functor.

This is fun - never knew that something like Elephant Polo existed! ;-)

8 Jul 2004 (updated 8 Jul 2004 at 20:43 UTC) »

So, Advogato is back up finally!!! I had nearly given up checking on it!

My last post was on May 27th and a lot has happened since then. I've talked about it in my blog on blogspot and the project blogs for kaprekar and matra. Also started a photo blog and a blog for my genealogy interests.

Well I got Gmail and am comfortably using it. Got a set of invites and distributed it too. Meanwhile my email accounts at yahoo and hotmail stand neglected (though they have increased the capacity). Gave a lot of feedback to Gmail - looks like they have been overwhelmed by the suggestions. :)

Matra

Added a lot of dtdtrees on the Matra site -

1. Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language dtdtree.

2. WAP Wireless Markup Language dtdtree.

3. Speech Synthesis Markup Language dtdtree.

4. RSS 0.91 dtdtree

5. XHTML strict dtdtree.

6. GEDCOM.

7. GedML.

Kaprekar

Two releases were made for the Kaprekar application -

Released version 2.0b. The main changes in this release includes addition of a Gui interface to the application and processing of hexadecimal numbers. Other changes include a few minor bug-fixes and changes to the algorithm.

Released Version 2.1b. The main changes include removing dependency on the Ganita package (Huge and Number classes). So now the Demonstrate process uses BigInteger - and consequently can handle numbers with any number of digits! Changed the algorithm a little bit to improve the performance while seaching for Kaprekar Series.

Lots of changes to the Kaprekar project web site. The site now uses valid XHTML and CSS. Added an introduction to the UML SVG documents.

Kaprekar Site: Making it XHTML Valid.

Here are my observations while making the site xhtml valid.

1. The biggest culprit was the <p> tag. Out of years of habit, I hadn't closed any of them. Removing this problem reduced the number of validation errors to the minimum.

2. Another one was the use of the < sign in the proofs without escaping it to <

3. XHTML does not have a "target" attribute. I have used the target attribute in the navbar - this invalidates all my pages. I could not find a non-javascript alrenative for this one, so just had to delete that attribute.

4. The second problem - only on one page (release: changes) - is the use of the font tag. This one was somehow missed when I changed my site to use css. This was an easy fix for me, but many sites who use font tags will have a tough time on this one.

5. The last problem was the missing alt attribute in the img tag - again only in one page (playing with numbers). The alt tag seems to be mandatory!

Other changes to the site

Made some changes across both the Kaprekar and Matra sites.

Changed the background color of the site to floral white to make it more pleasant to the eyes. And changed the links style so that they are underlined - so that its apparent that they are links.

Added Google search and ads on the site.

Added a separate CSS for the print media. Now the navbar and ads won't print - when you fire a printout - so only the content will be printed.

A few more updates on the Kaprekar site:

Added the proof on the divisibility of Kaprekar Series numbers in any radix r.

Added the Kaprekar Series for 11-digit to 20-digit numbers to the site.

Added the Kaprekar Series for 2-digit to 10-digit hexadecimal numbers to the site.

I modified the Matra project site along the lines of the Kaprekar project site ... and it was a breeze! The whole change was done in an hour or two!

So the Matra site no longer has any frames and still retains a navbar - a dotted one that doesn't have the no-scroll problem. The site uses CSS. An the pages are php based.

I reused the tempate and CSS from the Kaprekar site with a few minor modifications.

I tested the Kaprekar site on Win ME (Firefox 0.8, IE 6.0), Win XP Pro (Firefox 0.8, IE 6.0) and Red Hat Linix (Mozilla 0.7 and Konqueror 2.1.1). The site behaved normal ... hopefully should be the same using other browsers. If you encounter a problem, lemme know. It didn't seem to work too well on Amaya ... will check on that.

I fixed the link problem (in the Kaprekar site). Now the W3C link checker reports no problem! Also validated my CSS stylesheets against the W3C CSS Validation Service.

Also, added the change history to the site.

Have a long way to go for xhtml compatibility.

Checked the Kaprekar site using W3C Link Checker. Found a couple of unnecessary redirects (it was pointing to the older cvs site) and found one 404! Will fix them soon ...

Done! I have finished all the site-redesign changes to the Kaprekar Series Generator project site!

Completed the menu changes yesterday - so now its got a dotted-box left navigation bar. The frames were removed a while back along with the use of CSS. The only thing pending is making it XHTML valid and, of course, adding more content.

Right now, you find a blurb on the Kaprekar Series - something I had written a few years back (plan to rewrite that). You'll find the Kaprekar Series numbers for 2-digit to 10-digit numbers; the patterns in the series for 2-digit to 51-digit numbers (I'll need to update this, since then I've reached upto 57-digit numbers). And the class diagrams (svg format) for the classes. And finally the whats new section and links to the various sourceforge links for the project.

Next, I'll put the release notes online, write a new introduction, update the series-patterns page ... and validate the html.

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