Server outage on April 16th

My server that handles armoredpenguin.com failed early in the morning on the 16th.
I was able to get a replacement motherboard and processor in, but it took a bit of time.
Hopefully everything will be stable now….

Dave Regan

New mode for wordsearch puzzles

A teacher recently requested a mode to create wordsearch puzzles where the words went forward, down, and diagonal, but not in any of the reverse directions. I have made the configuration so that this is now possible.

Secret Codes

I’ve added a new puzzle, one that generates Secret Codes. See:

http://www.armoredpenguin.com/cipher/

The idea is that you type in a series of words or phrases, and the letters are substituted for other letters based upon a key. You can have a very simple (almost trivial) code known as a Caesar Cipher, or you can make it harder by randomly shuffling the alphabet. It can be even harder by having a longer key length.

Microsoft docx files

I’ve gone through and added code so that you can now load Microsoft Word files with a *.docx file type.
This should make it a little less error prone to load files.

Status of new server

The new server has been in place for about a week, and seems to be holding up well.

The new server has several times the CPU power of the old server, plus much more RAM.
I expect this has helped with performance.

If you see any lingering problems, please send in a bug report.

Changes are coming

It’s clear that I’m not a blogger.
The blog URL was broken, and I didn’t know it.

I am in the process of bringing up a replacement web server. This new machine will have 8 CPU cores with 32GB of RAM. This compares with 4 CPU cores (running slower) and 4GB of RAM. I expect the new machine to be several times faster than the old machine.

Quiz Mode

I have added a way, for registered users, to create a quiz to crossword puzzles.

In this mode, the puzzle doesn’t have an on-line answer key. When a student solves the puzzle on-line, the answers the student supplied are sent via email to the person who constructed the puzzle.

Login and other new features

There are a number of new features that are coming in the next couple of days.

The first, relatively simple, is that new puzzles have a button to allow people to see other publicly listed puzzles by the same author.

The bigger change is an entire added login system.

Graphical buttons

I have been asked, at times, for a somewhat prettier presentation.

I created some logos for the crossword and word scramble puzzles a few weeks ago.

Today I added graphical buttons along the left and for the “Make Puzzle” button at the bottom.

Let me know what you think of the changes.

Answer keys for crossword puzzles

Many of the crossword puzzles had lost their answer keys over time.

I went through and regenerated answer keys. Hopefully this will make doing those puzzles more satisfying.