Finally, it is Pie Day 2007, 3-14, where all mathematicians gather to celebrate their love of pies! Whether it be cherry pie, apple pie, cow pie, or (my personal favorite) pecan pie! By the way, although pecan pie may be good, many recipes call for the use of Corn Syrup, which is clearly not healthy for you. Although it is good on occasion, we at TICALCS prefer pralines as the source of our wonderful pecan goodness.

Okay, I will drop the ruse. It is not pie day (yet), but it sure is Pi Day! Pi is the crowd favorite of all of the mathematical numbers, second only to another transcendental number, e. Unfortunately, E and Pi have nothing in common, other than that they can both be derived by means of infinite series. However, if you though that, you were wrong, as Euler's identity states that E^(pi*i)+1=0. Pi Day is the celebration of this wonderful number and of Euler's identity as well.

In any case, we would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Pi Day.

If the excitement Pi Day were not enough for you, I would like to show you all an official website related to the to-be-released N-Spire CAS graphing calculator. Whatever the sales turnout of this "N-Case", there is no doubt that it will be quite a break from TI's traditional calculator model. This is the perfect website to look at on Pi Day, of all days.

Gaze upon one million glorious digits of Pi! (Look for a thread on deriving Pi in the General Board sometime soon...)

TICALCS.net is now announcing the Holiday Programming Contest.

The purpose of this contest is to provide an interesting thing to do during the holiday season. As you will see, it is not meant as a lengthy contest.

The contest will be open to all calculator platforms, as well as in all calculator programming languages. All programs/projects must be unannounced in order to qualify. Once again, it should be quick and brief. The following are the rules:

* The contest will begin right now.
* The contest will end on 12:00 AM, January 15, 2006, Greenwich Standard Time (GST).
* The contest will be open to all people, regardless of their forum membership.
* We will begin taking submissions on 12:00 AM, January 1, GST. More details about the submission process will be posted later.
* The focus of this competition will be casual programs and casual gaming.
* The judging of this competition will have two phases. In the first phase, a public vote, open to guests and members alike for one week (7 days) will narrow the competition down to three candidates. Then, the TICALCS staff members will review the programs. The final winner will be selected by a combination of the public vote and the reviews.
* All who have announced their programs before the start of the competition will be disqualified.
* TICALCS staff members will have the right to disqualify any programs that appear to be in violation of decency, copyright, or other rules if there exits a 2/3 majority among the staff. Remember, the programs in this competition must be of such a decency that they would be allowed to enter the ticalc.org archives.

The prize for this contest will be recognition and a special commemorative graphic/image.

Please note that if you will submit your program to this competition, it would be a good idea to email me at the following email address: admin@ticalcs.net so that we can have an idea of the number of entries expected. Mention the words "Holiday Contest" in the subject.

Remember, anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit, because anyone can win.

We recently underwent a massive update of our underlying forum software. This update added several new features, including multiquoting and a "quick edit" function.

We were down for approximately 16 hours due to this upgrade.

Michael will no longer be a moderator at TICALCS2. This is due to his lengthy absense as well as his decision to withdraw from the TI community. It saddens me greatly to see such a leader leave the community, but this was his own decision and it has to be honored and respected. This is a snippet from an email that he sent me recently:

"Calculators have ceased to become an interest in my life at the moment. The benefits were just too little and too precarious, and I took less interest everytime I started programming. This spread to the forums, of course."

Michael's last visit to this forum was in the month of August and he has posted in the forum 443 times.

My apologies for this (relatively) short News post, but nothing more can be said.

Earlier today, the calculator website ticalc.org premiered its new advertisement program. It seems as though ticalc.org is testing Google advertisements in one of their sidebars.

I am seeing two separate boxes of advertisements on the front page, but no other advertisements. I would say that they are not obtrusive, but that ticalc.org has broken its 10-year tradition (promise?) of being ad-free.

The real question to me is: will the money from these advertisements be used purely to support ticalc.org, or will the staff members there benefit as well?

That is all.

The calculator website Calc.org has been hijacked. It is now a mirror for Super Soaker Central for some reason. Sorry if this news article is a bit unrealated; I wanted to end the news drought.

Via Ticalc.org.

The montly statictics were in. I can only say that we have good news and bad news.

The bad news? My unique-visitors estimate was off by a lot.

The good news? We got 13483 unique visitors, beating our own record of 12749. My estimate was off by ~4000+.

All of you may have noticed that we have new members posting in the forums, asking for help with their calculators, etc.

To any anonymous viewers out there: I can offer you this piece of advice: sign up. Post. Only when you post, will you see how good TICALCS2 really is. Post about anything. We will be glad to explain things to you, and to help you with any problems that you may have.

With that note, I would like to welcome the autumn season of TICALCS2. Happy programming! (Happy gaming to gamers...)

But unfortunately, this may not be good news. According to a German member of these forums, and in this post, it has been revealed that this new calculator may not be what it is expected to be.

So far, the new calculator is quite buggy, and the programming features have not been implemented yet. One of the beta testers actually hurt his hand while testing the project, because reportedly the handling is so bad. The battery life stands at 3-4 hours, now...

The entire report can be found here.

The tip-off post can be found here.

Credit to Gottvonallem for this exclusive info.

Remember, you found it here first!

I am working on a revamped downloads center. It shall be called the "File Archive". Expect to see it around the end of August, although it may have some bugs.

For more information, see this thread on the MyBB Community forums.

Also, be sure to post feature requests, etc.

I was browsing the Top-Level domains of the visitors to ticalcs.net within the past year and I noticed many curious things.

(Note: Of course, an overwhelming majority had top-level domains of .net, .com, .ord, .edu, etc. I am pointing out the country specific unique visits.)

14 came from Taiwan...

11 visitors came from a .gov domain. That means that they work for the United States government...

Somehow, I can't quite imagine a government employee visiting ticalcs.net on his lunch break...

11 came from the Czech Republic...

7 visitors came from Luxembourg...

5 came from Guatemala...

5 came from Zambia...

4 came from Croatia...

3 came from... the United States military!

3 came from Ukraine...

3 came from South Africa...

2 came from the United Arab Emirates...

2 came from Benin...

2 came from Brunei Darussalam (Brunei)...

2 came from Egypt...

2 came from Latvia...

2 came from Malta...

2 came from Vietnam...

1 came from Estonia...

1 came from the Faroe Islands...

1 came from Lithuania...

And last but not least, Monaco had one visitor to TICALCS!

I think that it is wonderful that TICALCS has such diverse visitors.

While we are on the topic of statistics, let us track the total unique visits to the websites hosted on ticalcs.net (this includes bfr.ticalcs.net, ticalcs.net, forum.ticalcs.net, downloads.ticalcs.net, wiki.ticalcs.net, and also recently waterbottle.vworldv.com).

January 2006 - 2537
Ferbruary 2006 - 4339
March 2006 - 9903
April 2006 - 12749
May 2006 - 12329
June 2006 - 9753
July 2006 - 8467
August (so far) 2006 - 1325
August (estimated via simple mathematics) - 6846
August (estimated) - 9000

Note that visits to TICALCS2 began increasing at the time of its launch and then began decreasing in May, first quickly, then sharply due to the summertime.

I predict around 11000 in September. Afterwards, it should rise.

This is very good news. Let us hope that TICALCS2 will continue growing!

Total Page Views from January 1, 2006 to August 6, 2006 - an astounding 285,013!

Lol, if only I could have $0.01 per page view, then I would have $2,850.13 - much more than enough for a deluxe dedicated server.

I hope that everyone has enhoyed these curious tidbits. Until next time!