Crossword project

[Malcolm McLean]

This is my latest hobby project. A program to enable people to design crosswords.

You can see it at
http://www.malcolmmclean.site11.com/www/Crosswords/crosswords.html

It's written in C, under the Windows Win32 API. Whilst I'd be grateful for
any feedback ion the crossword-related elements of the project, I'm posting
here mainly on the programming issues. I feel I'm behind the times.

If I distribute the program as a windows binary, it's open to the threat of
viruses. Also, it's only usable on Windows. The program consists of a fairly
standard grid editor - just donkey work to knock up, routines to load and
save files, which are much more trouble than they should be since someone
specified an xml-based format for crosswords. So of course I need to
incorporate an entire XML parser into the program to read foreign files.
Then it's got a word matcher which is based on public domain spellchecker
files. Because it's written in C, this runs interactively and smoothly with
no clever programming - it just does a brute force O(N) search of the entire
database.
So maybe the interface should be web-based and the word search written in C?
But how do I go about setting up a CGI program on a free web host?

 

[JohnF]

http://www.malcolmmclean.site11.com/www/Crosswords/crosswords.html
[...]
So maybe the interface should be web-based [...]
But how do I go about setting up a CGI program on a free web host?

What's the problem, exactly? I have several public web services
written in C and set up as cgi's, with no programming or installation
problems whatsoever. The most popular by far (about half a million
requests per day) is www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html (for web service
details, see Section 5.2 Public mimeTeX web service).

Regarding games in general, did you see that Nova Science Now
tv show about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit ?
Seems like a brilliant idea -- wrap a game-like front end around
serious scientific problems, thereby "crowd sourcing" solutions.
Maybe you could think of some other general classes of problems
amenable to this kind of treatment. Offhand, I'm failing to think
of any, but if you're investing serious time developing games,
you might want to give it a try.

 

[Malcolm McLean]

What's the problem, exactly? I have several public web services
written in C and set up as cgi's, with no programming or installation
problems whatsoever.

The problem is finding a host.

 

[Gene]

If I distribute the program as a windows binary, it's open to the threat of
viruses.

You can pretty easily sign the binary with a self-generated code signing cert. This will prevent attaching a virus. If you wish to pay a bit, you can buy a cert that names you or your business at installation time.

 

[Ian Collins]

Gene wrote:

Please wrap your lines!

You can pretty easily sign the binary with a self-generated code
signing cert. This will prevent attaching a virus. If you wish to
pay a bit, you can buy a cert that names you or your business at
installation time.

Or simply provide the MD5 sum on the download page.

 

[Malcolm McLean]

You can pretty easily sign the binary with a self-generated code signing
cert. This will prevent attaching a virus. If you wish to pay a bit,
you can buy a cert that names you or your business at installation time.

How do you do that?

 

[Shao Miller]

How do you do that?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537364(v=vs.85).aspx

(But the MD5 suggestion works, too.)

- Shao Miller

 

[Phil Carmody]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537364(v=vs.85).aspx

(But the MD5 suggestion works, too.)

If someone has hacked your website so that your download is not the
right one, then probably the md5sum on it won't be the right one
either.

Phil

 

[bryonmajor]

Hello I had not seen that there were similar posts, I started a code (c++) but I have a little trouble on the recursivity of the process.

https://www.thecodingforums.com/threads/crossword.972816/