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1126

General Software Discussion / Re: File Names : what should be avoided

« Last post by Eóin on June 09, 2007, 07:20 PM »

Het Armando, this link is worth glancing through. It is referring to working with highly portable paths so is actually quite a limited subset of what, say, Windows supports. Then it is probably not a bad idea to develop good portable habits should you switch OS at some later stage. I know I haven't been following these guidelines, but think I will try and start from here on . I'll repeat the recommendations below but the link also gives the rational behind them.

• Limit file and directory names to the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, period, hyphen, and underscore.
• Do not use a period or hyphen as the first character of a name. Do not use period as the last character of a name.
• Do not use periods in directory names.
• Do not use more that one period in a file name, and limit the portion after the period to three characters.
• Do not assume names are case sensitive. For example, do not expected a directory to be able to hold separate elements named "Foo" and "foo".
• Do not assume names are case insensitive.  For example, do not expect a file created with the name of "Foo" to be opened successfully with the name of "foo".
• Don't use hyphens in names.
• Limit the length of the string returned by path::string() to 255 characters.  Note that ISO 9660 has an explicit directory tree depth limit of 8, although this depth limit is removed by the Juliet extensions.
• Limit the length of any one name in a path.  Pick the specific limit according to the operating systems and or file systems you wish portability to:
  
  • Not a concern::  POSIX, Windows, MAC OS X.
  • 31 characters: Classic Mac OS
  • 8 characters + period + 3 characters: ISO 9660 level 1
  • 32 characters: ISO 9660 level 2 and 3
  • 128 characters (64 if Unicode): ISO 9660 with Juliet extensions

1127

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Ghostbar - aka FadingTaskbar Redux

« Last post by Eóin on June 09, 2007, 05:38 PM »

Ah, ok I need to test it more , thanks. I'm pretty sure the guy behind Taskfade wouldn't mind, considering he says the following in the readme-

Taskfade is open source, and is under no particular license. I ask only
that if you do anything interesting with it or make changes which you
think might be useful, you contact me and give me credit if you release
your changes.

I'll send him an email to let him know if I do 'borrow' that neat feature.

[Edit for a P.S.]

Anyone try it on Vista?

-Nighted (June 09, 2007, 04:04 PM)

Off hand I'm pretty sure it won't work on Vista just because of the way the start button in Vista is a separate window entirely and not a true child of the rest of the taskbar. That said it would be easy to make this work, as it would be also for Skrommel's FadingTaskbar. It's just one of those things where a small change messes up apps until the developer gets the chance to test it themselves.

1128

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Ghostbar - aka FadingTaskbar Redux

« Last post by Eóin on June 09, 2007, 01:23 PM »

I was going to ask that question too lanux. I really like the way Taskfade readjusts the desktop window so that maximized windows take up the full screen. I might incorporate that lil' feature myself.

Nighted that's a pity it didn't work. If you'd like to run it with the '--debug' parameter then instead of selecting start on the first tab go to the debug tab and click 'Install' followed by 'Enable' then if you quote back the list of nonsensical numbers which appear in the list to me I could probably narrow down the issue. Then click 'Disable' and 'Uninstall' before quiting to make sure it unloads the DLL again.

Only do it if you're really pushed, Taskfade pretty much does the same job anyway .

1129

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Ghostbar - aka FadingTaskbar Redux

« Last post by Eóin on June 08, 2007, 04:33 PM »

I found myself in a mood to do something different recently so I decided to try and rewrite Skrommel's excellent FadingTaskbar. I call it Ghostbar.

While similar in functionality to FadingTaskbar it is quite different in implementation. I won't go into details here, full source code is included for anyone so inclined, but the two key differences are (1) It supports Vista and (2) instead of remaining in the background it installs a DLL (in a benign non-malicious way) that performs all the work so that the main program can happily quit.

The app is less user-friendly than FadingTaskbar but it was just meant to be a small project whose scope didn't extend beyond plain functionality See the readme.txt for details or ask me here. Enjoy.

1130

Living Room / Re: Humorous, perhaps informative, article on forum trolls

« Last post by Eóin on June 07, 2007, 06:09 AM »

I hope this comic isn't inappropriate, I think sums up frustration towards trolls quite well.

1131

Living Room / Re: The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

« Last post by Eóin on June 05, 2007, 08:03 AM »

Of course C is still hugely popular over in the opensource *nix world. But I definitely think the article is right that if all you've got is C on your resume you ain't going to be very employable.

1132

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Eóin on June 04, 2007, 05:10 PM »

Looks like you're forced to create image files with ImgBurn (which makes sense).

-Hirudin (June 04, 2007, 12:15 PM)

I had thought the same thing too for a while, but in fact when in the build mode you can set a writeable cd or dvd as a target device allowing you to skip the intermediate iso stage if you wish.

1133

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Eóin on June 04, 2007, 05:26 AM »

Ah, I hadn't been following that other thread so didn't realise this was a spin-off

AutoGK is also quite good, for a ripper I'd recommend Imgburn.

1134

General Software Discussion / DirectX 10 on platforms other than Vista

« Last post by Eóin on June 03, 2007, 08:50 PM »

Read about this in a magazine Linux Format, it currently only aims for XP support but is talking about Linux and OS X versions. See the site for Falling Leaf System a company set by the developer.

[attach 1][/attach]

Also the wine project are working on their own port, and it has be accepted as a Google Summer of Code project.

Google accepted ten Wine proposals in 2007:

• "Improve sound in wine" by Maarten Lankhorst, mentored by Marcus Meissner
• "Improve Wine's rich edit implementation" by Matthew Finnicum, mentored by Ulrich Czekalla
• "Improve Wine's rich edit implementation" by Matthew Finnicum, mentored by Ulrich Czekalla
• "The DIB Engine" by Jessie Laine Allen, mentored by Huw D M Davies
• "Implementing mscoree.dll and Mono-WINE bridge" by Bryan DeGrendel, mentored by James Hawkins
• "Tablet PC support in Wine" by Carl John Klehm, mentored by Daniel Richard Kegel
• "Beginning of Direct3D10 implementation" by András Kovács, mentored by Stefan Dösinger
• "Improve WIne's built-in text editors" by Alexander Nicolaysen Sørnes, mentored by Eric Pouech
• "Windows Printing subsystem bridge (i.e. use WIN32 drivers to print from wine)" by Marcel Partap, mentored by Detlef Riekenberg
• "CHM compiler" by Miikka Viljanen, mentored by Jacek Caban
• "Improve Wine portability, make Solaris x86/amd64 a first-class supported platform" by Albert Lee, mentored by Juan Lang

-http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode

1135

Living Room / Re: Strange Maps

« Last post by Eóin on June 03, 2007, 05:55 PM »

I've always been a fan of maps, I think I just really like the completely new perspective they can give you on a place you previously thought you knew intimately.

That false map of the true north is particularly nice.

1136

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking to do high quality video conversion "the easy way"

« Last post by Eóin on June 03, 2007, 03:21 PM »

SUPER is a program I only became aware of from people talking about it here. I've found it to be excellent, it does almost everything you could need and I think it should meet your requirements.

P.S. the website is horrible to navigate, but don't let that put you off.

1137

Living Room / Re: Pubbox.net is down, it's owner is deceased.

« Last post by Eóin on June 02, 2007, 09:22 AM »

It is something which has crossed my mind too. The least everyone should probably try and do is leave instructions for close friends or family on how to officially announce what has happened to you among the various online communities you were a part of. At least that way people out there will know the correct story, sad though it be.

1138

Living Room / Pubbox.net is down, it's owner is deceased.

« Last post by Eóin on June 02, 2007, 07:45 AM »

Very sad news if it's true, it appears the owner, Armin Arh, is dead. A link is given to an obituaries listing in the thread mentioned at the end of this post. Here is a Altavista Babelfish translation of that link.

http://www.emaildisc...?p=413849#post413849

1139

Living Room / Re: Flash Game of the Week: FlashTrek Broken Mirror

« Last post by Eóin on May 27, 2007, 07:00 AM »

Impressive how complex the flash games are becoming nowadays.

Here's a more simplistic new game that is great fun:
Cat with Bow Golf   http://ishi.blog2.fc...g-entry-211.html?new

-Nod5 (May 27, 2007, 05:26 AM)

Wow that game is quirky and fun, got -33.

1140

Developer's Corner / Re: How to bundle a game's source file and its interpreter into a single EXE

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 03:33 PM »

Ah ok, well you're right then when you say it sounds challenging, but you needn't lose heart either. Off hand I wouldn't have a solution for you, as I mentioned I don't use C# and/or .NET myself properly. But I do know it is possible.

I would suggest working away at steps (1) and (2) because they are the real challenge. You'll need your interpreter to not be fussy about where it gets the binary source data from. So it should be able to read it from a file, and also quite happily accept being given a raw pointer to the data already in memory. With prototypes of the interpreter existing as a single exe as well as a prototype binary source file which is self-contained also as one file then the final step of putting them together shouldn't prove too difficult.

Someone here may be ale to help you with step (3). I'm intrigued enough by it myself that I might hack away if I've the time (which honestly isn't too likely ). But if not here I can pretty much guarantee you'll get an answer at say programmingforums.org or codeproject.com. The key though will be going to those people with basic working prototypes of part (1) and (2) so that they can narrow in on the best solution for your problem.

I'm slightly wary about mentioning this because I thought the poor OP got a hard doing but at the same time more knowledge is rarely a bad thing. You might like to read this thread where someone with similar (I use that word VERY lightly, in truth the OP was being wildly naive and unrealistic whereas I do not think you are being so) goals was frustrated by not getting an answer for the equivalent of your step (3) when he didn't have a prototype therefore making it very difficult for people to help. Don't dwell on the negative bits of the thread but take heart that there are very knowledgible and helpful people out there if you can just meet them halfway

On a final note, I suspect that if you write the interpreter in a native language like C++ it might make the step (3) much easier. But if doing so would make step (2) much more difficult for you then don't switch, stick with what you know.

1141

Developer's Corner / Re: How to bundle a game's source file and its interpreter into a single EXE

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 12:43 PM »

Hi kyrathaba, do you want to give others the tools to do step (3) themselves? If not then for yourself you won't need to write a program to do that bit. You'll already have the necessary tools as part of your build system.

1142

Developer's Corner / Re: Generalizing Overloading for C++ 2000

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 12:36 PM »

Yeah it starts off very convincingly. I'd been told it was an April Fools before reading it, I wonder how long I would have been fooled for otherwise

P.S. my smilie at the end holds the url to Bjarne's webpage which acknowledges the joke.

1143

Developer's Corner / Re: How to bundle a game's source file and its interpreter into a single EXE

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 08:15 AM »

Unfortunately I don't have any real .NET programming experience myself. But as I understand it resource file do still exist so linking the binary source file into the exe should still be viable, though you'll need to look into the C# or .NET equivalent APIs for manipulating resources.

mouser, I get the impression that kyrathaba wants a transparent solution which the end-user will not be aware of. Many tools out for bundling files will probably need to unbundle the files onto the harddisk before they can be used.

1144

Developer's Corner / Generalizing Overloading for C++ 2000

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 07:44 AM »

The recent thread about Ruby and some aspects of it's coding style reminded me of this fascinating paper from Bjarne Stroustrup on generalizing the operator overloading functionally currently offered by C++.

http://www.research....~bs/whitespace98.pdf



http://www.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf

1145

Developer's Corner / Re: Why Ruby is so great and why I'll pass and wait for the next big thing..

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 07:25 AM »

Well I have to agree also that 20.minutes.ago is utterly ridiculous

1146

Developer's Corner / Re: How to bundle a game's source file and its interpreter into a single EXE

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 07:19 AM »

Embedding raw data into an exe isn't too difficult. Using a resource script and compiler which packages the data into an object file ready for linking into an exe is probably the easiest way to go.

Basically you would write the interpreter and get the compiler to link the different resources for the different games into final exes. Inside the interpreter would use the FindResource and co. family of API calls to access the binary source file.

So in reality the exe IS the interpreter, but since for end-users the behaviour of the exe is completely different depending on the packaged binary source file that it appears that the exe is in fact the game.

What language are you writing the interpreter in? That could have a big bearing on the options available to you.

1147

Developer's Corner / Re: Why Ruby is so great and why I'll pass and wait for the next big thing..

« Last post by Eóin on May 24, 2007, 04:08 AM »

Hey mouser, I'm not too sure I'd agree with you on the first point. Given the two bits of quoted code I would say the second one is indeed better. That's not to suggest I disagree with you regarding code comments, but I believe that's a separate issue and an improvement which could be applied to either quoted bits of code.

Although I also think the first example is purposely contrived to be bad code i.e. the multiple exit points in this case are not at all necessary.

On the topic of domain-specific additions, well I can definitely agree that in many cases people can go overboard here. But I think the Boost libraries rarely if ever do so. In example code where 'using namepsace' directives are used too liberally it can be confusing, but in larger projects those directive are usually frowned upon anyway.

I'm eager to be shown otherwise though, would you have a sample or two?

1148

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to get one good copy from three corupted ones?

« Last post by Eóin on May 10, 2007, 03:20 PM »

Ok, this is one of those things which s so bad it's funny, there was obviously something interfering with this download because it's nearly completely corrupted

[attach#]

1149

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to get one good copy from three corupted ones?

« Last post by Eóin on May 10, 2007, 09:54 AM »

Hi justice, thanks when I get back to the other copies I'll I'll check with the par2 files. I'd been using Damn Hash Calculator for the hashes, it's old but I had it lying around and it worked for me in the past, it's hash values matched with DPASHA.

Is FlashGet adware free these days? I used to use it back two or three years ago, stuck to an early version with the bundled adware removed. Only moved on from it when I started using the DownThemAll extension to FireFox which seemed to do just as good a job.

1150

General Software Discussion / Re: Utility to get one good copy from three corupted ones?

« Last post by Eóin on May 10, 2007, 09:01 AM »

Hi justice, with ZIDRAV as I understand it I'd need to create a hashfile with my corrupted version and send that to you from which you could create a patch file. Unfortunately I can't do that today because I'm away from the computer with the previous downloads. And the 4th copy I was going to download again today in college I can't seem to get at all. I'm definitely thinking usenet over the weekend is the best option.

The funny thing is I don't even need the file, I have use for it of course, but it's not crucial to anything either. I think at this stage I just don't want it to beat me