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2991
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...

2992
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)

2993
I think there is a firefox extension to automatically do that... Lemme google, hold on a sec...

http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/06/firefox-fixes-right-click-blocking.html
http://roachfiend.com/archives/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!

2994
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.

2995
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
 


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