Category: Thoughts about Plagiarism

I have posted new releases of WCopyfind and Copyfind: Version 4.1.5. It’s just bug-fix version. The comparison counters are now 64-bit integers, so they can handle billions of comparisons without showing spurious numbers. A bug that caused WCopyfind and Copyfind to run out of input streams when handling hundreds of .docx documents has been fixed.

It has been a while since I looked after this web site properly and I hope to spend some time this spring doing exactly that. As a first step, I have moved the site to a new server and cleaned it up so that it works well on mobile devices. So far, the changes are only superficial, but I’ll try to improve the software (Copyfind and WCopyfind) in the near future.

Lou

I have posted new releases of WCopyfind: Version 4.1.4 and Copyfind: Version 4.1.4. These versions fix a bug that caused WCopyfind to hang during loading if the html file it is loading has certain errors in its structure (e.g., a comment that never ends or a &xxx; character that has no final semicolon before the end of file).

I have posted a new release of WCopyfind: Version 4.1.3. This version fixes a bug that caused WCopyfind to crash if a document file could not be opened or had other access/loading issues. WCopyfind now provides a reasonable error message instead.

Lou

It has taken forever, but I have finally released the command-line version of this software, Copyfind.4.1.2. This software is still windows-based, meaning that it will only run under windows. However, it runs in a console window and reads its commands from the console input. That means it is scriptable — you can write a script-based program to do fancy comparisons between all sorts of collections of documents. It uses the same comparison engine as WCopyfind, but it is much more flexible than WCopyfind and can be used for serious research work.

Lou

I have posted a new release of WCopyfind: Version 4.1.2.

This version fixes a long-standing bug in the hash coding algorithm that decreased its performance slightly but probably caused no observable effects. Thanks for find it, Joe!

Lou

I have posted a new release of WCopyfind: Version 4.1.1.

This version fixes a long-standing bug that caused WCopyfind 4.1.0 to crash while reading certain .DOCX and .HTML files. I finally found the bug and eliminated it.

Lou

I have posted a new release of WCopyfind: Version 4.1.0.

This new version of WCopyfind separates the windows-based user interface from the actual document loading and comparison process. The latter process is almost machine independent, although it still contains some windows-specific code.

Separating out the loading and comparison process allowed me to eliminate a number of lingering bugs that were present in the older versions of WCopyfind. It also allowed me to produce a scriptable, command-line version of the comparison program: Copyfind.4.1.0. I will post Copyfind.4.1.0 shortly.

Lou

I have posted a new release of WCopyfind, Version 3.0.2. This new version fixes several bug and omissions:

1. Smart quotes in .doc files should now be handled properly.
2. The number of matching document pairs is now listed at the end of the comparison report.
3. If no matching document pairs were found, the comparison report indicates that it found no matches.
4. Several memory allocation/deallocation problems were found and fixed.

Also, WCopyfind generates a log file in the report folder. If WCopyfind crashes during use, please send me a copy of that log file and I will try to find the bug.

Lou