ArmoredPenguin

Changes and possibilities for the armoredpenguin.com site
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  • Interview

    Posted on August 17th, 2013 admin No comments

    The people at Ultimate Spelling Blog had an interview with me:
    http://www.ultimatespelling.com/dave-regans-word-games-help-spellers-at-www-armoredpenguin-com

    If you’re interested in the background of this site, you might take a look at this interview.

    Dave Regan

  • Crossword puzzle change

    Posted on August 6th, 2013 admin No comments

    I just made a minor change to the way that crossword puzzle PDF files are generated.

    There is a new option to put the clues on a separate page from the puzzle. This defaults to the way it’s been for years, but the option allows PDF files to be on two pages. This should help with larger puzzles.

  • Server Replacement

    Posted on August 6th, 2013 admin No comments

    The server that I had for making puzzles died on me.
    I’ve replaced it with a new(ish) server which is designed to be a rackmount server.
    Hopefully this works out better.

    I’ll be adding a couple of RAID disks as soon as they get in to help with data reliability.

  • Server outage on April 16th

    Posted on April 16th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on March 28th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on February 27th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on February 11th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on February 9th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on January 26th, 2013 admin No comments

    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

    Posted on August 13th, 2009 admin No comments

    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.