What’s New at OakRoadSystems.com

This page helps you survey the significant changes to the Oak Road Systems Web site. While any change to a page automatically changes its revision date in the site map, this What’s New page is prepared manually and does not list minor changes.

August 2012

• In Loan or Investment Formulas, there’s a workbook to amortize loans in more complicated ways than the formulas can handle. I’ve generalized that workbook, adding payments every two weeks or twice a month, calculation of true daily interest, and payments that change every year.
• Several new tips were added to Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
• In Importing (“Ripping”) CDs to iTunes, a new section explains the audio duration problem and how to avoid it.
• In Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music, a new section lists some iTunes Alternatives.

July 2012

• “Taming iTunes for Classical Music” has been thoroughly revised and updated, and is now called Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music. The older version is still available as Taming iTunes 7 for Classical Music.
• There’s a new document: Some Playlists for iTunes and iPod.

June 2012

• There’s a new document: Importing (“Ripping”) CDs to iTunes.
• Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks has been updated for iTunes 10.

February 2012

What with surgery in the summer and a long aftermath of recovery, I wasn’t able to do any significant updates. But now I’m starting to catch up with the backlog:

• In Loan or Investment Formulas, added a link and a worksheet for more complicated scenarios.
• In It’s the Law Too — the Laws of Logarithms, added a couple more applications.
• In Play Nice on Usenet, added a second reason to avoid writing in all caps, and a warning against Windows Live Mail.

June 2011

• new document: Confidence Intervals for Goodness of Fit

May 2011

• added more tips to Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks

April 2011

• added Trim Bloated Context Menus and Startup File for the Command Prompt to Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks

January 2011

• new document: Curb Unneeded Services in Windows 7
• additional tips in Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks

December 2010

• more tips in Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks
• new links, and correction or removal of dead links, in Math Sites and Software
• finally! tables of contents no longer have <table> tags, or <br> and &nbsp; for layout, but are now all lists with CSS styling

November 2010

• new document: Windows 7 Tips and Tweaks.
  This will be updated as I continue working with Windows 7.

October 2010

• Clear out all the link-rot in How to Find FAQ Lists and Play Nice on Usenet.

February 2010

• remove Web Resources for Web Authors, which was horribly out of date
• remove the WHISTLE shareware program, which used the PC speaker to play a tune with no need for a sound card: newer hardware and OSes prevent it from working

December 2009

• realign the former programs MATH200D and MATH200I (Descriptive Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 and Inferential Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84) into MATH200A and MATH200B (MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 and MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84)

October 2009

• rewrite Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks, most notably to use free software to merge the individual files into a single audiobook file

September 2009

• new document: Factoring the Sum of Squares

July 2009

• replaced the separate print and screen style sheets (31 K in aggregate) with a unified style sheet (13 K). You may not notice the performance improvement, but it will cut the site’s bandwidth significantly.

May 2009

• added easy derivations of functions of 3 or 4 times an angle to Trig wthout Tears

March 2009

• improve the TI-83/84 program MATH200D, (now incorporated in MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 and MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84) and add an example for probabilities
• in the TI-83/84 program MATH200I (now part of MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84), before doing inference on correlation check that r ≠ ±1

February 2009

• new document: One-Way ANOVA
• rewrote Drawing Inverse Functions on the TI-83/84, added instructions for finding values of inverse functions, and renamed it as Inverse Functions on TI-83/84

December 2008

• consolidated separate TI-83/84 programs for several descriptive statistics procedures into a single MATH200D program, along with new programs for plotting time series, making box-whisker plots, and plotting the histogram of a binomial probability distribution
• removed Skewness and Kurtosis on the TI-83/84; the calculator part went into Descriptive Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 (now incorporated in MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84) and the statistics part, rewritten and expanded, became new document Measures of Shape: Skewness and Kurtosis
• rewrote the rules of thumb for rounding means and standard deviations
• added ERR:VERSION to TI-83/84 Troubleshooting

November 2008

• consolidated separate TI-83/84 programs for several inferential statistics procedures into a single MATH200I program, along with a new program for computing sample size

October 2008

• added more tips to Windows XP Tips and Tweaks
• added another cause of INVALID DIM to TI-83/84 Troubleshooting
• updated Graphing Piecewise Functions on TI-83/84 to show handling of compound conditions
• updated Sample Statistics on TI-83/84 to show how to identify outliers
• changed CSS style sheets for easier reading on screen (40 em maximum width, which works in modern browsers and MS-IE7)

September 2008

• added Inferences about One-Pop. Standard Deviation on the TI-83/84 with a TI-83 program; they have since been folded into MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84
• rewrote the program in Frequency Histograms and Polygons the Easy Way on the TI-83/84 (which has since been folded into MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84) to handle lists of numbers as well as pre-grouped distributions, and removed “Histograms of Numeric Data on the TI-83/84” and “Frequency Polygons on the TI-83/84” since it’s easier to use Frequency Histograms and Polygons
• overhauled the step-by-step procedure and added numerical solutions to Solving Polynomial Equations
• made three corrections in the FAQ of the Rings

July 2008

• corrected statements about the “Part of a compilation” tag in Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music
• added instructions for making file extensions visible in Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks

June 2008

• added Frequency Histograms and Polygons the Easy Way on the TI-83/84, which has since been folded into MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84

May 2008

• added Inferences about Linear Regression on the TI-83/84 and Inferences about Linear Correlation on the TI-83/84/89 with TI-83 programs for downloading (now incorporated in MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84)

April 2008

• removed SWREG from shareware payment options and therefore from the Privacy Policy of Oak Road Systems; added Paypal to the privacy policy

February 2008

• added “Shorten the ‘Open With’ List” to Windows XP Tips and Tweaks

January 2008

• added Skewness and Kurtosis on the TI-83/84 and a TI-83/84 program (but see Dec 2008 for later history
• added “Frequency Polygons on the TI-83/84” and a TI-83/84 program that makes frequency polygons and histograms
• consolidated the page on making a histogram for a list of numbers and the page on making a histogram for a grouped frequency distribution into a single page “Histograms of Numeric Data on the TI-83/84”
• updated the tip on sorting files numerically in Windows XP Tips and Tweaks

December 2007

• in Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music, added the Year tag and rewrote the Album tag section

November 2007

• added Inferences about Linear Regression and an Excel workbook

September 2007

• added Sample Statistics on TI-83/84 (called at the time Descriptive Statistics on the TI-83/84)
• added Histogram of a Binomial PD on the TI-83/84 and Plotting Time Series on the TI-83/84, which have since been folded MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 and MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84 respectively
• added Fix Time Sync to Windows XP Tips and Tweaks
• added Approximate Solution by Formula (for interest rate) to Loan or Investment Formulas

August 2007

This month we added a number of new math pages:

• “Histograms for Grouped Frequency Distributions on the TI-83/84” (which was merged into “Histograms of Numeric Data on the TI-83/84” in January 2008)
• "Correlation and Regression on the TI-89" (later merged into Scatter Plot, Correlation, and Regression on TI-83/84/89/92)
• Binomial Probability Distribution on TI-89
• Inferential Statistics Cases
• How Big a Sample Do I Need?
• Triage: Which Inferential Stats Case Should I Use?
• Inferences about One Population Standard Deviation
• Computing Critical χ² on the TI-83/84/89 (now part of MATH200B Program — Extra Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84)
• Case Study: Gardasil Vaccine (added in April 2007)

and updated the titles of several more to match changed content.

July 2007

• update Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks for differences in menuing between iTunes 6 and iTunes 7; add a script for removing obsolete stubs

June 2007

• add Binomial Probability Distribution on TI-83/84 (now incorporated in MATH200A Program — Statistics Utilities for TI-83/84)

May 2007

• add “Don’t Shout” to Play Nice on Usenet

March 2007

• update Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music for browsing and scrolling methods
• add Add Items to “Send to” and Clear the Print Queue to the Windows XP tips

February 2007

• Donations are now tracked by which page’s “donate” link you clicked.

January 2007

• update Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music for gapless playback
• add a check for impossible conditions to the text of Loan or Investment Formulas and to its accompanying Excel workbook

December 2006

• several changes to Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music, particularly about shuffle

November 2006

• add notes about joining tracks and about iTunes 7 to Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music
• update Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks for Macs and for iTunes 7; add notes on chapter sorting andsuggested track names
• revise several answers in the FAQ of the Rings

October 2006

• in Solving Polynomial Equations, correct a wrong description of the lower bound on roots and add explanation and an example
• add series computation of interest rate to the Excel workbook that accompanies Loan or Investment Formulas

May 2006

• Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks is now complete, after being published in March as just an outline.
• Another ten pages for mathematics students at Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) are now incorporated in this site.
• The new page Play Nice in E-mail, adapted and expanded from my TC3 site, explains why HTML is bad in e-mail and how to set your mailer to deliver plain text.

April 2006

• Forty-two pages for mathematics students at Tompkins Cortland Community College are now incorporated in this site.
• Sort File and Folder Names Numerically (or not) to the Windows XP tips
• "Straight quotes" have all been converted to “curly quotes”, with invaluable assistance from Stephen Poley’s sed script.

March 2006

• new document: Converting CDs to iTunes Audiobooks
• Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music now covers other genres as well.
• Relationship Terms now includes an alphabetical index to all the definitions, and some further terms were added.
• The search page now uses Google instead of Atomz (which has become Websidestory).

February 2006

• new document: Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music
• It’s the Law — the Laws of Exponents now includes a number of self-test exercises.

January 2006

• Release 5.23 of CMP handles path\filenames of any length, even those longer than the documented 259-character Windows limit.
• Play Nice on Usenet now starts with some links for people who aren’t quote sure what this whole Usenet thing is.

December 2005

• We now accept Paypal for shareware registrations.
• The page of Loan or Investment Formulas was substantially revised, and now comes with a downloadable Excel workbook.

November 2005

• Released CMP 5.2. New features include showing just the lines from one file that weren’t in the other, and comparing the output of a program (redirected stdin) to a reference file.

September 2005

• Added a lot more Windows XP Tips and Tweaks, and added Why Call It Sine? to Trig without Tears.
• Added a skills resume alongside the traditional CV or chronological resume.
• Added text, explanation, and links to my picture of Watkins Glen.

May 2005

• GREP 8.0 was released. It handles all types of text files in line or paragraph mode, as well as binary files. New output formats are available at your discretion.
• Play Nice on Usenet gained a few suggestions and clarifications.
• Having found that an astonishing 40% of this site’s bandwidth was the style sheets (CSS files), I squeezed out unnecessary spaces and comments.

March 2005

• new document: Windows XP Tips and Tweaks
• Several Web pages, mostly on C and C++, haven’t been updated in some time and are out of date. Realistically, they probably won’t be updated in the foreseeable future. They’ve been replaced them with short pages that explain the situation and link to the copies archived in the Internet Wayback Machine.

December 2004

• Release 7.5 of our flagship GREP pattern-matching utility program adds paragraph-mode searches, presents binary results in a clear new tabular format, and and relieves you of the need to prespecify the lengths of text lines. A new Quick Reference Card is included, courtesy of a longtime user.   [ more... ]
• Since groups.google.com broke all existing archive links to articles when rolling out Groups Beta, we implemented a temporary fix to link back to the articles. This affects the folowing articles:
  • FAQ of the Rings
  • Loan or Investment Formulas
  • Math Sites and Software
  • Relationship Terms

November 2004

• added some resources to the Usenet section of “Web Resources for Web Authors”

October 2004

• A new release of our GREP pattern-matching software lets you display every match in text or binary files, with or without context.
• A formula for computing interest rate was added to the page of Loan or Investment Formulas, with discussion.
• I can’t graph more than one equation at a time was added to the TI-83/84 Troubleshooting page.
• A link exchange policy was added.

September 2004

• The message Dim Mismatch was added to the TI-83/84 Troubleshooting page.
• Two answers in the FAQ of the Rings were revised.