Messages

2976

Living Room / Re: Programming in general...

« on: August 15, 2005, 03:14 PM »

And speaking of deeper waters, I've noticed a difference in the syntax between AutoIt and AutoHotkey;
AutoIt seems to follow a more Basic-like structure. One statement after the other.
AutoHotkey code looks (if you squint a bit) more structured like the higher-level languages. Squiggly brackets (what are those called, anyways?) at start and end of loops and subroutines, etc. Learning to script like that might prepare one for coding similarly.

2977

Living Room / Re: emulating xdrives skip download plugin

« on: August 15, 2005, 02:30 PM »

might even be a solution to this old coding snack request:
https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=198.0

2978

Living Room / Re: Fan Created 45 minute star wars movie, free download

« on: August 15, 2005, 02:14 PM »

Hooee! so that's what Mr. Zap has been up to lately... I used to use his 'Stomper' tool to make some nifty noises for use in my (thankfully) brief fascination with techno music. Check out his main page for more movies & interesting stuff.

2979

Living Room / Re: Deluxe/Pro versions: Good or Bad?

« on: August 15, 2005, 01:16 PM »

Hey...

I'll buy a BIC pen and write on scratch paper first.

was that a jab?
https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=661.0

2980

Living Room / Re: Scripting utility suggestions?

« on: August 12, 2005, 07:25 PM »

Brainf***k looked pretty funny until I saw this on thefreecountry.com's page of weird compilers.

However, before you write it off as a totally useless endeavour, you should be aware that the DeCSS algorithm (which decrypts the system used to protect DVDs) has been ported to this language.

2981

Living Room / Re: All you'll ever need is found in QBASIC

« on: August 12, 2005, 07:17 PM »

Just for the infos, QBasic.com has a broken link to Microsoft's repository of DOS utilities INCLUDING QBasic. The real link is ->HERE<-

2982

Living Room / Re: Getting Started with C#

« on: August 12, 2005, 07:12 PM »

Look out C#, here comes D!
(from the folks at www.digitalmars.com who bring you dmcpp, a free C/C++ Compiler)

2983

Living Room / Re: Programming in general...

« on: August 12, 2005, 07:04 PM »

Boy, you ask a question, you get answers... Sweet! Thanks for resurrecting the programming posts, those will help. As I said in my original post, these questions were less for myself and more to encourage those who, because of Coding Snacks, are realizing that a Useful App doesn't necessarily take months of development, a Ph.D. in Super-Genius Code Munching, hundreds of dollars worth of Microsoft [insert programming language here] Studio software, etc.
What's needed is a good place (websites, books, etc.) to start learning the basic concepts that all software is based on, like variables, statements, for/next and if/then loops, etc. Then, where to go from there. I learned at the beige keys and spiral-bound Manuals of Apple IIe's and TRS-80's (Yeah, I had to chase the trilobites off every morning before class, too ) I'm still learning today even in the depths of an AutoIt help screen and I don't think that's a bad place to start.
So, to the new folks wanting to 'get their feet wet' I say come on in, the water's fine. It isn't as hard as it looks really, and the more you learn the less math it gets and the more art. Go ahead and download Autohotkey or AutoIt and write a few scripts, there's some great stuff to be learned there. When you're ready for more, go to thefreecountry's page of free compilers and programming tools. There's a real can of worms waiting there, and it's all free. Once you move on to something C-flavored, I'm sure Mouser will be here with some tips and pointers as well.
The only (relatively) hard part IMHO is the funhouse maze that is the Windows API. I converted the old 95/NT WinAPI help file to RTF and it strung up to 5000+ pages before I decided I couldn't just print out a hard copy. (Script languages protect you from such horrors so don't freak out just yet...)

On a (not-so-)different note; Mouser, the more I learn about Assembly the less afraid I am. The community for those assemblers still in development are very active, the assemblers are getting more powerful and there are IDE's and libraries and even OOP and 64-bit support. There is also a High Level Assembler project that looks to be VERY nice in terms of ease of learning, power and speed. I just downloaded RadASM, Fasm and HLA. We'll see how much Assembly I can learn on my lunch hour at work!

2984

Living Room / Re: Deluxe/Pro versions: Good or Bad?

« on: August 12, 2005, 10:53 AM »

One thing that sets Lite-version-ware apart from 30-day-trial-ware: The lite-version style apps at least let you have  some sense of 'ownership'. I downloaded it, installed it, used it and all the features given me are enough to get the given task done, I can save a product of my work and it will always be so until a better product comes down the pipe. With 30-day stuff, man that 29th day is a bummer. Did I figure out all I needed to? Am I going to REALLY need this on the 31st day or am I going to find a better, cheaper app 3 days after I break down and pay the tab? With Lite-version ware at least you ALWAYS have the choice. Some great examples of this: Xplorer2 (a great dual-pane file manager) which maintains 'Lite' and 'Pro' versions, although Nikos has snuck in some Pro version advertising in the new X2Lite; and Tuareg (a music app from before ReBirth ruled the world) which, with version 2, is both products in one. You are offered a choice at startup to continue with the Lite version, 'Try' the Pro version (IIRC that meant you had 10 minutes of full Pro functionality) or purchase a register key before continuing. After that, for your entire session, you are never nagged with popups or greyed out teasers in the pull-down menus, etc. Lite was Lite and you wouldn't know otherwise. There are others I could mention, but these are the best examples I could come up with. From a Developers standpoint, think of it like this: you either have 30 days to impress your customer or the entire life of their use of your product. To sum it up, there's almost no comparison. Lite versions 0wn$0rz!!

2985

Living Room / Programming in general...

« on: August 11, 2005, 04:13 PM »

So, I was just wondering...
I assume most of the folks haunting this board are either curious about what 'programmers' do, have done a little here and there and some are real 'Coders'. So, on the topic of programming in general, where's the best starting-place for beginners? What's free and what costs a lot and what's the heck difference anyway? How does scripting differ from interpreted? What's high level vs. low? What are some folks' experience with say, Delphi vs. Java? And fer Peet's sake, what in a pig's eye is .NET?? We've all seen by now what can be done with a fairly full-featured scripting language, but whats below the surface that might make C++ or some other more in-depth tool any more rewarding? And why the snobbery? Is Assembly really all that hard?
I'm not really asking these for my own curiosity, just that the thread on scripting utilities started by zridling took on a tangent that just left me wondering at the fact that we have a bunch of capable coders hanging around with a bunch of curious potential acolytes waiting for the invitation through the blue scr... erm, door. Is there a website or forum on another board where these and related questions are answered and discussed, or can something be set up here at DonationCoder? (I have no idea how much forum bandwidth costs, and no use being redundant...) Just wondering...

2986

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« on: August 02, 2005, 12:47 PM »

Installation of Xplorer2 includes a little text editor called Editor2 which is very fast, lightweight (~100k) and does everything a minimal notepad replacement does plus:
-switch between fixed and proportional fonts, with definable colors too.
-find & replace binaries (tabs & linefeeds...)
-toggle Upper/Lowercase
-20 autotext entries (kinda like copy&paste but from a list of 20; nice)
-dual bookmarks (whoa! two docs to work on, one bookmark to bind them...)
-external view (nice one; save as html and it opens up what you just wrote in a browser... sweet)
-save as OEM, UTF-8, Unicode or Unix LF
-document stats reporting (line count, etc.)
-'Goto line...' function
-more options in registry such as changing time/date string format and url handling.
-unlimited file size

...and really that's about it, but there's a lot of power there. If you download the Lite version and are wanting a pure Unicode version then grab the Pro version, download and install to a different location, harvest editor2 files from there to your Lite install location, and uninstall X2Pro. (this will, however, remove your X2 quicklaunch button)

2987

General Software Discussion / Re: Re-Enable Right-Click When Web Pages Disable It

« on: August 02, 2005, 10:43 AM »

I think there is a firefox extension to automatically do that... Lemme google, hold on a sec...

http://pchere.blogsp...-click-blocking.html
http://roachfiend.co...category/extensions/
I've heard the extension is a bit buggy, (caveat h@x0r) but both methods are semi-permanent. zridling's method is great for as-you-go unblocking. Thx for the tip!

2988

General Software Discussion / Re: Inkscape

« on: August 01, 2005, 06:25 PM »

Very nice, and getting more full featured by the minute, giving The Gimp a run for it's money. However I found it to run slow; anybody else notice? I see this quite a lot with many of the apps ported from *nix to Windows especially when they rely extensively on external libraries for functionality (Inkscape needs gtk+, perl, ghostscript and some other little things that it warned me I didn't have when I first tried it.) Viable alternatives are The Gimp, Sodipodi (renders to svg and png only...) and EVE. If you already have OpenOffice, then Draw is a quite capable vector/raster image editor.

2989

Living Room / Re: Scripting utility suggestions?

« on: July 28, 2005, 05:53 PM »

Personally, I am quite respectful of the art that 'real' programmers are able to pull off, despite the "power" of the latest scripting languages. I remember when I was a wee little buck pounding out BASIC code on apple ][e's and TRS-80's and Commodore.... you get the idea... I thought I was quite the little programmer (do you remember PEEK and POKE?... READ/DATA loops?? Well DO YOU?!?) 
I ventured into machine code when I hand-coded shape tables for a couple of games I wrote for the apple ][e because the shape table editor we all *ahem* 'shared' was commercial software. (the computer lab teacher busted all of us who had a copy, and then let me use his copy anyway...)
Needless to say, I was a tad shocked to see examples of Fortran and Cobol code and what could be done. Then came the rest of High School, long hair loud guitars and the pursuit of female companionship and computers seemed another universe away, though I never quite forgot...
Anyways, here I am again because you can't get away from these blinking boxes and I need to make things happen whether at work or home. So roll your eyes if you must, but I quite enjoy the wonderful scripting languages which let me automate mundane tasks and make pretty front ends for my favorite command-line utilities...
 (Which, of course are written by 'real' programmers with their 'real' languages.)

BTW, I couldn't resist...
http://www.flatassembler.net
http://www.visualassembler.com
 

2990

Living Room / Re: Scripting utility suggestions?

« on: July 28, 2005, 03:51 PM »

I fold.
(found holding a pair of Jacks- Euphoria and L.in.oleum)

2991

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Earth - free tool/toy

« on: July 28, 2005, 02:51 PM »

Think that's cool? Check out Google Moon to see their commemoration of the moon landing anniversary. Be sure to zoom all the way in, it's amazing!

2992

Living Room / Re: Scripting utility suggestions?

« on: July 20, 2005, 06:54 PM »

I also use AutoIt quite a bit, so I may be biased. If your looking for an editor, many script editors have AutoIt syntaxes you can use, but AutoIt has a version of SciTE that build-checks your scripts and gives you hint boxes as you type, compile from the editor, etc. as well as the rest of the features you might expect (syntax coloring, etc.). Also, a character by the name of Rob van der Woude has a page full of scripting resources from good ol' batch to VBScript, Kixtart, Perl, Rexx and WSH. Other than that, I've tiddled around with Kixtart and I only have VBScript experience writing tables for Visual Pinball (0wnZ!!) so can't speak for any others.

2993

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Printing your file window

« on: July 18, 2005, 12:37 PM »

Karen's Directory Printer works pretty good, too.
PowerDesk has that function built-in. (search Google for "pd5free.exe" for the personal edition of version 5)
Also see the topic I started at Xplorer2 forums for a pretty wild discussion towards the end about doing it with batch files. Here's what eventually shook out:

I found this on a "Tips and Tricks" site which is quite simple and uses some of the techniques mentioned before. Still not as nice as Karen's, but useful and fast nonetheless. First make a batch file named "PrintDir" (or something even more ingenious) and stick it in C:\ (or somewhere appropriate):

[Select]

@echo off
dir %1 /-p /o:gn > "%temp%\Listing"
start /w notepad /p "%temp%\Listing"
del "%temp%\Listing"
exit

Then make a new reg key:

[Select]

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\Print Directory\command

with the following value:

[Select]

c:\printdir.bat %1\

Now you can right click on any directory and select the "Print Directory" command and it will print a list of all folder names inside. To print a list of files also add "/s" after the "dir" command in the batch file. In fact, look at the DIR help page for even more options.

2994

Living Room / Re: Looking for some helpers with an easy fun project for DonationCoder.com

« on: July 11, 2005, 01:27 PM »

Maybe keep us posted on what pics you already got. I'd like to send a pic of the Timex-Sinclair 1000. Possibly the cheapest functional (barely...) personal computer ever made. (I got one when I was 12 when they went on sale for 10 bucks around christmas time.)

2995

Image Manager Shootout / Re: Xnview vs. Irfan View

« on: July 06, 2005, 11:01 AM »

I myself have been torn between the two, here's my two cents (if I may)...
1. (re: irfanview's 'save as') choose 'save' instead. It will prompt you instead of instantly saving and it is in the present working directory.
2. xnview has 'Auto crop'
3. irfanview has more image manipulation functions and it has 'negative' (if xnview has it, i've not found it yet)
4. irfanview has more options when saving to different formats.
5. in irfanview, you can select the background color for the 'cut' function (useful when retouching a strictly b/w image)
6. xnview has grab handles for the crop function.
7. xnview is a little faster...
8. irfanview is ALL free and xnview has a 'deluxe' pay-for version with more plugins and image functions.
9. irfanview's print dialog has more options, and it lets you set print properties before printing EVERY time (in xnview, if you print something, and then go to print something else, it willl use the previous printer settings  without warning you.)

As it is, I have added two context menu entries for the most common image files...

Edit with Irfanview
Edit with XnView

 

2996

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: PowerPro

« on: June 30, 2005, 01:48 PM »

I've edited my review to include some caveats. PP is great but not perfect.


Frogblast? Anything to add?

2997

Coding Snack Guidelines / Re: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES / OWNERSHIP OF SUBMITTED PROGRAMS

« on: June 29, 2005, 04:59 PM »

What you say!!

2998

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: extra window functions

« on: June 29, 2005, 04:55 PM »

who was it that was going to write up a little something on Powerpro?

I don't recall,

our new mini-user-review section of the forum would be an ideal place for it
https://www.donation...index.php?board=42.0

but I put one up anyways.
Actualtools looks really very useful, but I couldn't find any freeware bits mentioned. 'sides, Powerpro does a lot of those things except the titlebar buttons, although it can 'paint' bar buttons on the title bar. They look a tad out-of-place but get the job done.

2999

Mini-Reviews by Members / PowerPro

« on: June 29, 2005, 04:00 PM »

Powerpro 4.3
http://powerpro.webeddie.com/
------------------
(from the website...)

PowerPro lets you take control of how you use Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP. Run commands and configure your system any way you want.

PowerPro gives you a compact and powerful launch bar, menu, and tray icon facility. But this is just the start. With a little experimenting with its configuration, you'll find that you can use PowerPro to change the way you work with your system. The source of its power is the way PowerPro integrates three capabilities:

    * Running commands: Tool bars, tray icons, hot keys, mouse actions, menus, timer, scheduler.
    * Controlling other program's windows: Close, minimize, maximize, roll-up to caption, tray minimize, position.
    * Providing utility functions: Send keystrokes to programs, run commands when windows first open, virtual desktops, clipboard extender, keyboard macros, shutdown, show all folder files in a menu, sounds, wallpaper, and screensaver activation and randomization.

That said, I must say PowerPro is the most powerful tool I have ever installed on a Windows box. I am always finding new ways to make it do something useful. Firefox changed the way I surf, Xplorer2 changed the way I file, but Powerpro changed the way I work with, play with and use Windows. Freeware.
Since this is a mini-review, 'nuff said
-Edvard

<edit>
I forgot, since this is a review, I should include some caveats (not necessarily bugs)
*transparency functions and some plugins are 2K/XP only.
*because this little program does so much, the configuration gui is quite complex.
*some apps do not behave well when using virtual desktops (although this is true for most virtual desktop progs)
*some functions have unexpected side effects, as they override windows function for the same mouse-click/hotkey. For example:
--enabling "right click drag" is nice to be able to drag a window from any part of the window, but it overrides windows' context drag.
--configuring a menu to pop up on right-clicking the desktop (one of the nice things many alternative shells do...) overrides windows context menu on icons unless the icon is left-click selected first.
*the forum is a yahoo! group (that's not necessarily bad but I would prefer not...)

3000

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: extra window functions

« on: June 29, 2005, 12:00 PM »

Nope and Nope. One monitor and I haven't changed resolutions since the boss got me a flat screen
I just found out that Powerpro's Gui control allows me to right-click drag from any piece of the window. So as long as I have one corner, I can move that bugger... (I fear I am becoming highly dependent on PowerPro, but that may be a good thing...)