Ed, kudos on the first article and hope that you write more. I like these kinds of articles that are based on real problems and constraints. They provoke thought and ideas about options, some of which mind the constraints and some that don't, but it's still thought. It reminds me of an article I read (too long ago) about the fastest way to count words. It spawned at least one follow up and a virtual contest on who could write the fastest word counting code - the winner was something like 10x faster than the original entry. I'm not planning to try to figure out a faster method than yours btw:-)

Regards,