Written by Ion Saliu on December 7, 2002 (2 WE).
• CoolRevGui.exe, version 1.2, December 17, 2002.
Cool GUI application to reverse text files, in the manner of the DOS UPDOWN.EXE.
Also, the application shuffles text files, in the manner of the DOS SHUFFLE.EXE.
The application is a nice text file viewer, too.
Created by Cristiano Lopes, systems engineer, Portugal.
• I wrote some time ago that I ran into hardship when I needed to update my lottery data files. There is no consistent Internet format in presenting the lottery results. Moreover, the order is bottom-recent, top-oldest. It's exactly the opposite of the required LotWon data format. Case was most true when Pennsylvania Lottery added yet another game. They adopted the PowerBall lotto. It is a mega-odds game (53/5/42), with several participant states. The jackpot frequently goes above $100 million, therefore no house edge. Evidently, no percentage advantage occurs when an entity would be able to play more than 120 million combinations!
So, I needed to write a little program that reverses the order in ASCII (text) files: UPDOWN.EXE. The bottom of the file becomes the top of a new file. UPDOWN.EXE can be downloaded from the “FTP Download” site. It became a 32-bit DOS software that can handle huge data files.
One day I came across an interesting post in my EZBoard forum:
"Comments on your programs" -
1) I think you should start using command line parameters on your console programs, like they are
now it's impossible to create batch/script files to automate certain tasks. On example the util-6 program if it could be called like this:
util-6 /F /N:49 /D:150 /I:myd6 /O1:FREQ6 /O2:PAIRS6
It would be very easy to create a batch file that would this program and after call another processing
program to handle its output.
2) I don't know how you handle those filters of yours, and how you pass the combinations through it (and I don't want to know) what I do know is that things are a bit slow! I've seen some other programs work and on my laptop they just zap through all the filters and past drawings generating possible combinations in a few minutes if not seconds. Don't take me wrong but have you thought about profiling your applications in order to find possible bottlenecks and then optimize those routines...
I receive emails with a similar content. They always raise red flags with me. Probably no more than 1 in 100 people who write to me are computer programmers driven by malicious intentions. But I do know that software developers want to get their hands on my algorithms and source code. Even what I considered friendly persons had no purpose but gain access to the inner workings of my software. The time to freeware the source code has not yet come…
Command line parameters make users' lives easier, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, it gives the opportunity to few suckers to illegally use my software in conjunction with their own programs. My software would run invisibly and its hard work in the background be ripped off by other programs. Not acceptable, even if that would be a '1 in 1,000,000 cases' event! Someone who wrote a good piece for me knows better what I mean…
So, that's how I treated the programming post in my EZBoard forum.
The author, however, proved to have good intentions. Cristiano Lopes is a systems engineer who works in a maritime lab in Portugal. He sent me a few GUI programs that better my UPDOWN.EXE. Incidentally, UPDOWN is a quite frequent keyword search that leads to my website. I have no clue to what other connotations the keyword might have. At the time I wrote the program, the keyword had no rated connotations. Things always change. Heraclitus put it best:
Change is the only constant in the Universe.
Cristiano Lopes wrote this C++ application using Microsoft Visual Studio:
CoolRevGui.exe
He decided to offer it as freeware. It can be downloaded from the FTP download site. The program is accompanied by a short info file: Readme_CRG.txt. Download it with the application.
The program is very easy to use. It offers the advantage of a GUI application over a text program such as UPDOWN.EXE. The user can select much more easily the file to reverse, using the common Windows interface. Then, easy again, the user can save the file to a different name, or the same name. The cool thing about this application is its file viewing capability. It is a superior file viewer compared to the default Notepad. CoolRevGui.exe is only 50 KB in size!
I think Cristiano Lopes can improve further this application. The file viewer can be fine-tuned. The application can also add shuffling to reversing.
•• The truth is that the lottery commissions are becoming increasingly hostile to computers. They treat the computers as enemies. They have become aware that lottery software does shift the balance. The players who use software can gain a tremendous advantage. I non-modestly believe that only LotWon is considered lottery software at this time. That's the pure truth. One reason why the lottery commissions change so often the game formats, especially in the United States. The lotteries make it also very hard to download lottery results over the Internet. Some commissions add dots and all kind of weird delimiting codes to their draws. The UK national lottery site is the champion of making it hard. Their draw history is an example of hardship. The past draws are offered via Java scripting. The downloading is an exercise in digital sadism. Don't try it at home with WinWord or another word processor!
I've heard of other strange stories. There is a good piece of writing e-published in Spanish. I'll try my best to get it right in English.
Franco Elcaporal has become a hero in Latin America. He resembles some of Garcia Marquez' notorious characters. He is known as Amante Traficante de Numeros. The governments decided to ban the use of software in playing the lotteries. Every computer is digitally fingerprinted. The laws may be by-passed only by generating software combinations in one country and playing them in another country. The real danger is in crossing the state lines with lottery numbers. The customs bureaus apply steep penalties. That's when Franco Elcaporal steps in. He travels with his beautiful lover Vijana Magnolia do Avejado. Franco writes the combinations in places on her body where nobody can see them but a lover. Vijana Magnolia do Avejado is so beautiful that her smile and legs have passed in seconds every customs gate in the world. Their baggage contains no numbers!
The incredulous story unraveled in the mountains of Bolivia. The beautiful company of Franco Elcaporal could not go unnoticed. It had never happened in the entire world. Franco and Vijana become the object of voyeurism in any hotel they sleep in. Mainly Amerindians populate the village of Goldorado. The income provided by the old gold mine is gone. It ended decades ago. Reasonable income has been provided by DEA (United States Drug Enforcement Agency). DEA monitors the rugged valleys of cocaine trafficking. Then, out of nowhere, tourism! The local hotel is booked months in advance by rich travelers from USA and Western Europe. El negocio—THE business, as they say—is voyeurism. The tourists wait patiently for Franco Elcaporal and Vijana Magnolia do Avejado to come over with their bootlegged numbers. Legged, obviously, is not the accurate description. Franco writes the combinations on Vijana's most intimate locations of her body. The surge in tourism started after a local shaman participated in voyeurism. The peephole transfigured him as the scene of an earthquake. “La Formula Fundamental de la Vida!” “The Fundamental Formula of Life!” he was shouting. He gave to the Bolivian army colonel and the American DEA-agent-in-charge the numbers he said he read on Vijana's left breast. The colonel read the 6 numbers in apocalyptic fashion: a reference to the 666-beast number. Joffrey Joppooroo, the skeptical DEA agent, consciously filed a report and sent it back to the headquarters. The report, which was meant to be top secret, ended up in several supermarket tabloids. The conclusion of the report made headlines and generated huge tourist traffic to Goldorado. “The numbers do not seem to represent any codification. They may well be just six lotto numbers. I would have loved, however, to take a look at the book myself."
Ion Saliu
Socrates Home 
Search 
Random Generator, Odds Calculator 
New Writings, Pages 
Sitemap, Content