Messages

7701

Developer's Corner / Re: Seeking Programming Language To Learn

« on: January 23, 2009, 12:24 AM »

Have fun with it.  I have some utilities that I've been working on over years but one of my favorite programs is a little gizmo that I coded in AutoIt3 in a very short time.  It's just a little dialog box with 2 radio buttons for selecting the optical drive, and buttons to open and close the tray.  Really simple, but I like using it.

7702

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: reopen recently opened explorer windows, history, MRU

« on: January 22, 2009, 08:04 PM »

I have a freeware that fits the category. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles desired but it's a simple 10 Folder MRU list.  The download also comes with a sort of Dialog launcher for launching multiple programs, but you can choose to only install the XMon explorer monitor.  Here's the link:

http://www.favessoft.com/xmon.zip

(The previous design tended to flush out the MRU queue with similar entries as you clicked down into the folder chain.  I modified it to use a weighting scheme to remedy the effect.  Now folders are only reported if they are active for some time.)

7703

Developer's Corner / Re: Seeking Programming Language To Learn

« on: January 22, 2009, 07:42 PM »

@raybeere if you really want to create a large project like a Writer's Workshop you might want to check out programming tools that make it easy to use 3rd party components.  Writing just a plain text editor is very involved.  But if you start with an open source editor component you may find you just need to add the tweaks you want.

I've messed around with a lot of different interpreters and compilers.  One that has served me well for general purpose GUI type programming on Windows is Delphi 5 Professional.  For making Windows Shell extensions, like if you right click on something in Explorer and launch it from that menu, those type of programs, it's tough to beat Visual C++ 6.  For small utilities on Windows AutoIt3 and AutoHotKey are good.

The natural language feel of Pascal is a good point.  If you read books on algorithms it seems like the ones with examples in Pascal are easiest to grasp.

If you look around you can find free basic, assembler, pascal and scripting languages for Windows.  For maximum portability and getting close to the metal it's hard to beat the old standard C.  But I think it's best to grasp programming conceptually first.  That's why I think it wiser to start with something like Pascal rather than something like Perl.

Once you mess around with a few programming languages you see they are all either interpreters or compilers under the covers and do similar things.  Object Oriented and other abstractions have power but I think it's a good idea to do at least one language that's close to the machine.  The code actually has to run on something and you won't appreciate the limitations if everything is a virtual machine.  I started with GWBasic with the line numbers and the whole bit.  But it was easy to learn.  After that it was Turbo Pascal, assember and C.

You may want to check out the library for "Algorithms" by Robert Sedgewick. I'd recommend the one with Pascal implementations.

Also "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" by Niklaus Wirth
who invented Pascal.  It was written before Object Oriented Programming, but back then the rage was "Structured Programming" which is like the precursor to OOP.  Still a very valuable book.

I didn't take Computer Science classes so I used the "Spider Web" approach.  If I read an article that was very good and the author mentioned a programming text, I'd check it out.  That's how I heard of authors that are standard in computer science classes like Knuth and Sedgewick.

Follow what you enjoy.  I never used Perl or Smalltalk much because the syntax put me off, but I'm glad I read books about them and messed around with them a little because it increased my understanding of programming languages that I like to use.

7704

Developer's Corner / Re: How to Share Your Programs with the World (PAD Files, installers, etc.)

« on: January 22, 2009, 02:49 PM »

I'm hip to PadGen and have my own site.  After looking around here I see a place for quick hacks, which I love(my first AutoHotKey script is for Vista and just waits for Control-Enter hotkey to open Explorer selections in another window like XP.) I'm curious how I could contribute some little hacks of my own.  I toyed with my own licensing code when I first opened my page but after awhile it was just a pain so I enabled all my software for free download.  So I guess anything that's already out of the bag doesn't fit the license key paradigm? Or where do I find out more details?

I'm a newbie and took a quick look around but maybe I missed something right in front of me.  Happens a lot.

7705

ProcessTamer / Re: also check out process lasso (new free lite version)

« on: January 22, 2009, 02:20 PM »

Hi.  Newbie here.  I also just found AutoHotKey and mess around with coding a few utilities.  What I noticed right away when I got my Vista PC was(and it's still true in W7 beta) that defrag is in the task scheduler to run at idle.  What I also found out was, it didn't care if a 3rd party defragger was already running. It just kicked right in because CPU % usage was low and I wasn't typing at the keyboard.

So I'm looking for a programmable launch utility(or clues how to code it myself) that would not kick off the target program unless disk access was below some adjustable parameter for some set amount of time.  I'm not looking for a way to tame the disk usage once the app starts since I know that's not a good place to try to mess around.  I just don't want a defragger or some disk intensive app to launch while I'm defragging or doing a video conversion or muxing etc..

I'd appreciate any pointers.