Messages

1

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: February 09, 2008, 07:38 PM »

Re my game I did it for my own interest and to use myself. As far as the words are concerned I copied the first 800,000 in by hand from dictionaries and other books from 1985 to 1996 since I wasn't connected to the internet until 1997 after I retired. I have probably as large a collection of dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, crossword dictionaries and English writing and grammar both printed and on CD as anyone. My count of just CDs is getting towards 100. I have picked up extra words from internet lists and other data available. Often I only get a few thousand extra words from a large list and have to sort out lots of spelling errors by checking each word. I usually send the list authors lists of spelling errors. For example I helped correct a lot of Wordnet early errors and got them to add British spellings. I have made sure my own list has all British and US spellings, all inflexions and compound words which may be one word, two words or hyphenated. When Moby's lists were released I found massive numbers of errors but little I didn't have. I have been building up lots of phrases by searching the British National Corpus using phrase word patterns. My list has words characterised as dictionary, encyclopaedic and technical, non-dictionary, US scrabble, British scrabble, common words, academic words, and so on so I can search sub-groups. I have many thousands of words I have not yet added because I have not sorted them out from the rubbish yet. I have been gathering information a very large net type thesaurus.

As far as releasing the program it is still a work in progress which I will probably never finish. Because of my illness I could never find the time or the energy that would be required to deal with the support required. I have tried interaction with people over the web on various projects but it took too much out of me. Just this little bit of interaction has been hard enough.

2

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: February 07, 2008, 05:29 PM »

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-CWuestefeld (February 06, 2008, 04:41 PM)

10 years is quite a long time to spend solving a puzzle  [/quote]

If you had been retired for 11 years due to chronic ill health you would probably be looking for ways to stop your brain from going to mush. As well as Sherlock I also play a lot of Everett Kazer's other very good logic games just to relax. I also do hard cryptic crosswords and program in mainly in Delphi. One of my programs I developed to help with cryptic crosswords (Word/Phrase search) has a database of over 1.5 million words and phrases and is light years ahead of anything similar released on the web. I would have released it years ago if I wasn't sick for at least a significant part of every day. I taught myself Visual Basic and then Delphi and a few others so I could program and keep my brain active. 40 years ago when I was doing my post doctoral research computing was done by carrying 4 or 5 boxes of punched cards to the mainframe to get the result back in a week. Computing was never mentioned let alone taught during my time at Uni.

3

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: February 07, 2008, 04:26 PM »

Just a screen shot of Sherlock to compare with Deductoid



As a minimum Deductoid uses the same layout as a copyrighted game.

4

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: February 06, 2008, 03:58 PM »

Looking at the screenshot I would appear to have been playing this game everyday for more than 10 years. Unfortunately it is called SHERLOCK see http://www.kaser.com/sherwin.html

5

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you launch stuff?

« on: September 26, 2007, 09:05 PM »

I use a series of about 6 toolbars for different major program categories on my desktop and I put the program shortcuts in the appropriate toolbar. I have about 400 desktop shortcuts which are one click away. I arrange these in subcategories within each toolbar. I put my major programs (those I always use) on my quick launch toolbar.

6

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: September 26, 2007, 08:33 PM »

I used to use the Norton Utilities file manager until they stopped upgrading it for later versions of windows. I now use PowerDesk 6. It is not as good as the Norton Utilities one. In particular I miss the one click display of all the files in a directory and all subdirectories. From time to time I look at others because of recommendations I read but none have seemed any better. PowerDesk's biggest weakness is handling lots of directories/subdirectories with more than 1000 files (sometimes over 5000 files) you get when you download websites. This is generally only a factor when you want to move them to another HDD. I haven't found any other that will do it (even disk image software has problems). I am only just in the process of changing to XP Pro (completely clean install) and this may do better. Unfortunately it is a very big job as I have well over a million files and close to 1000 applications to reinstall.