Quarterflash Designs

For a project I’m working on I needed an assembly that would easily parse a command line.

“A command line? What’s that?”  you might ask. I understand that most of the programs you run always start up with a GUI that you can then use to set up all your parameters. This is not always the Right Thing to do. A lot of what I program are utility programs that do things to files in a scripted (or batch) mode. GUIs, in this case, just get in the way.  Thus the command line – you tell the program what to do when you start it up and it never talks to you again.

For example:

 playMP3 --directory /myhome/music --background true

The convention is that a long name option has two preceding – (dash) characters and a short name option (a single character) has a single preceding dash character.

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Someday I’ll get good at this blogging stuff – so far I really suck at any kind of regularity.

At any rate, you just gotta check out this link – it’s very cool, but a bit creepy. It’s called Big Dog and it’s a 4 legged autonomous “vehicle”. Watching the video is just a bit weird. I have to admit that the very first bit when it’s shown walking through the woods the very first thing that came to my mind was Monty Python. It just reminded me of some of the parts when they’re carrying baggage on the Quest for the Holy Grail.

It does do some amazing things and it has better balance than I do on some days.