I ran across this site and since I’ve found some stuff there that I find that I like I thought I’d post up a short blurb about it here.

This music is all free because it’s uploaded by the artists under a Creative Commons license. The site is Jamendo. Of course, because it’s freely licensed you won’t find any mainstream artists (at least not that I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been on the site.)

Still, I’ve found some nice things to listen to.

You have to understand that I’ve been programming a long time (the first program I wrote I had to flip the toggle switches on the front panel to toggle in the 0’s and 1’s), but just about everything I’ve done has been command line based. Mostly utility programs, programs that operate behind the scenes, programs that are used by other developers or systems people - in short, nothing graphical in nature. This is a whole new issue for me.

So, of course,  the first thing you do is hit Google, or the C#/GTK# pages looking for a tutorial on how to do this. I found a problem here - there are a lot of tutorials, but they’re relatively static. That is, they show how to put a button and a text display on a page, press the button and update the text display. Those tutorials work, but they don’t expand well.

I’m working on programs that put up a display, take some input, and then go off and do some work. This work is supposed to give feedback to the user so they know what’s happening. The tutorials I found don’t do that.

Thus was born this tutorial in which I use Glade# to develop the interface and then use GTK# to run a simple little program that picks a number between 1 and 10,000 and then tries to determine what that number is. While it’s guessing, it’s updating the GUI to show the current guessed number and how many guesses it’s taken so far.

I don’t claim that this is extensible to the most complex program, it’s worked for this tutorial and now I’m off to implement this method in a larger program to see how well it works there.

I’ve included links to a MonoDevelop and a VS2005 solution. Please download and give them a try. Feedback is most welcome.

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

MonoDevelop Solution for the tutorial

VS2005 Solution for the tutorial

“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.

There are certainly a lot of options out there for doing this sort of thing, but I can be sort of an odd person - if I’m using a language, I want to use the language;  not write in a language I’m comfortable in and just use the syntax of the new language.

That may be a difficult concept to visualize if you’re not a programmer. Hopefully someone can comment and give an example in the non-programming world, but I can give a programming example. I once worked with a programmer that had done most of his work in COBOL and he was very good at it. Times change, and he needed to be programming in C. C is not like COBOL at all. It is, after all, meant to do different things.This person wrote C programs and they compiled and they worked

However, one look at his source and you could tell that his mind was still writing COBOL. He wasn’t taking advantage of many of the features that C has and the program was structured as if it were in COBOL. He got the job done, but it could have been done better.

So, to get back on track, I was looking for an assembly that could do command line processing that externally looked like all the other command line processing I was familiar with, but internally it was written as a C# program.

I searched Google and found a lot of candidates, but one named Command Line Parser Library seemed to fit the bill very well. I downloaded and compiled it, sorted out the documentation, and started using it.

Well, I’m an iterative developer and as I expanded the utility program I was writing I found that this particular assembly was not capable of doing one thing I needed it to do. No worries, there are a lot of choices out there so I went back to Google and did some more looking. I found that the assembly I was already using really was easy to use and was so close to being what I needed that I contacted the author and talked to him about it.

He asked me to make an entry on the web site and he’d try to sort out how to accomplish what I needed. He already had a similar feature, used for trailing arguments, but I needed to be able to do things just a bit different. If he didn’t have the time and/or inclination to add this feature then I was prepared to delve in to the code to add it myself.

However, just today he released a new version with my feature added. Very cool.

He apologized for it taking so long, but since I knew he was working on it, the time it took hadn’t bothered me. Not having this feature hadn’t been holding me up because I  had a lot of other development to work on. Now I can go back and update the code and take advantage of this newly added feature.

Why am I blogging about this? Just because I think it’s important to acknowledge that a substantial amount of good work is going on in the small development shops. If he’s like me (and it sounds like he is) the definition of “development shop” is him sitting in front of his computer in the basement or spare room whenever you have the time to work on writing code for fun. He’s not getting paid for this, he’s scratching an itch and that’s something I can identify with.

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.

In a recent email to a Linux mailing list about backups and backup strategies, we find the following:

> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 08:36 -0700, XXXXX XXXXX wrote:
> > Fifth, restore capabilities are only a website away, and can easily be
> > performed by the end user (assuming they have enough rites to do so).
This is a case where the word “rites” obviously should have been “rights”. However, the wrong word really changes the meaning. My response to the author (which I made a private reply and not a reply back to the mailing list) was:

> Sorry, but I was very amused by your typo: “rites” should have been
> “rights”, but the mental image of users making the proper sacrifices and
> chanting to get their files restored made me laugh.

When you take into account the common view that users don’t know how all that networking stuff really works and it’s all magic, only understood by the Administrator and his minions, that’s what really makes this funny.

In a follow on email the author noted that spell checkers don’t help when you spell the wrong word correctly.

It just reinforces what I’ve known for a long time - spellchecking is not the same as proofreading.

I spent a lot of Saturday and Sunday trying to sort out how to do the configuration in an easier manner than the original writer and was having a lot of difficulties sorting it out. I finally found something called Nini that is working just fine.

So, I still have to tie changes in the UI back to the configuration file and then forklift the code from the original project into this one. I started a new project because a) I wanted a slightly different name, and b) it was easy to keep the original, working code separate from my changes.

I ran across a couple of open source Windows installers so, hopefully, by the end of the week I’ll have this ready to distribute.

When I finally got that straight in my head, I decided to integrate the two programs in to one. I think the original thought was that the actual resizer was meant to be a command line sort of thing and there wasn’t a need for a user interface. Since it always opened up some sort of a dialog to tell you what it had done or to ask a question or two, I decided that making it a graphical program from the start would be OK.

So, I fired up the interface editor and came up with this:

The one thing that’s not correct yet is the Max Size element. Obviously we don’t want fractional sizes. I think that’s a setting in the widget, but I’m not quite there yet. That is the next step, tieing the new interface to the existing code.

One thing that might not be evident from that screenshot is that the bottom element is a status bar, in which the user will see the images fly by as the resizer works.

Thoughts? Does it look OK?  GUI design is definitely not my strong point, so I won’t be offended by people that want to make it more usable.

Stay tuned.

I’ve recently gotten involved with a group called <a href=”http://eons.com” target=”_blank”>Eons</a>, a website that’s targeted toward the over 50 folks. I’m involved in the Better Photography group, and the subject came up about someone’s image being “borrowed” by a different person without permission.

So, I went off the to web to look for some sort of utility that would be able to resize and watermark images. I found a resizer program (named, appropriately enough, Resizer) and an article on creating both image and text watermarks. The Resizer program was up for adoption as the person who wrote it was no longer interested in maintaining it. He had written it for a specific purpose and the program was no longer needed.

I contacted him about adopting it and after the appropriate conversations, he passed it on to me. I added three features to it (reduced DPI, image watermarking, text watermarking) and it’s now working. I don’t have it available for download quite yet as it’s currently set up as two separate programs - one to edit the config, one to resize images. In the process of fixing the config I came to the conclusion that I needed to integrate the two programs as I don’t want to plot pixels to place items on the dialog by using pixel counts.

One other thing that prevents me from putting up at the moment is that it’s a .NET program (and yes, it runs on both Windows and Linux) but I don’t have a good install for it yet. I have a link or two to investigate for an install program, but I’ve not quite gotten that far.

All that being said, if you have .NET installed on your Windows or Linux box and don’t mind a little hand-editing of the config file, then drop me a line and I’ll zip up the two programs for you to try out.

Maybe I should talk a little bit more about what I plan on doing for the book.

I’m writing a book about platform independent programming using C# and OpenGL. I’ll be developing a program throughout the entire book. Each chapter will add a little more to the game and illustrate some point in game programming.

One of the chapters will be about sound and to that end I decided to use a computer voice. As documented elsewhere on my site, I’m a listener of ALICE 105.9 (KALC) here in Denver. I’ve interacted with the show on several occasions and I decided to ask Jennifer Wilde, one of the Morning Show DJs, what it would take to get her to do some voice work for me. She graciously volunteered (as long as I didn’t ask for too much :) and I got the first cut of them today. I asked her to voice about 8 phrases and she did them in a couple of different voices for me.

I can’t tell you how excited I was to get them. I know, it’s a bit (or a lot) geeky, but actually having something in hand that was done for me for the book makes it a little more real in some way.

Evidently Jennifer was cutting the phrases for me this morning after the show and I’m guessing that one of the other folks on the Morning Show asked her what she was up to.  Thus I’m going to be on the show tomorrow, once removed. That is, I’ll not actually be on the show but they’re going to do a bit about Jennifer’s next career move - being a computer voice in a game :)

Oh, if you want to listen (and I heartily endorse them) you can tune to 105.9 on your FM dial if you’re here in the Denver area or you can listen to them online at http://alice1059.com. Then choose Listen Live to catch the number 1 morning show in the Denver area with BJ, Howie, and Jennifer. They’re assisted by Producer Mikey who does a great job of answering the phones even though he doesn’t like counting to 105 :)  To be fair, he does do a bit more. I have enough trouble keeping this blog up to date and he does a blog for the show with all the features and a lot of what they talk about on the show along with MP3 clips of the more amusing stuff.

Right now he has the confidence in me that I don’t (yet.)  I’m just having a hard time getting started. The first chapter is all about getting set up. Since the book is about coding you have to have some tools installed to get working.

Since I’ve already been annoyed at books and articles that say “Here’s what I’m using, if you don’t use this you’re on your own”and I’m writing a platform independent How-To, I feel as if I at least need to show how to set up the environment for the two primary platforms: Windows and Linux.

The problem is this: I’m not the expert on Windows and I have to find a Windows box that doesn’t already have some sort of Visual Studio installed on it already. I should have the virgin Windows box resolved as my work desktop is dual boot system and it’s only been booted into Windows once. It just means that I have to pay very close attention to the steps involved in downloading and installing the free version of VS.

Also, in the book, do I use screen shots? After all, it’s a web page, so it’s subject to change at any time and having pictures of something that doesn’t exist isn’t very helpful. But without pictures, what do I call those areas on the screen?  Since the free versions of VS are targeted to a specific language, the page they show has separate visual areas for each of the choices (VC#, VB, VC++, etc) and you pick your “natural language” (English, Chinese, etc) and then it starts the download.

I just don’t have the terminology to describe what to do on that page.

My mentor says that I should be targeting the book to beginning to intermediate programmers. I don’t have an issue with that, but it’s been a long time since I was a beginner so how detailed do I make the installation instructions? How much do I presume they do (or should) know, and at what point is what they need to do outside the scope of the book?

I really think this will all get easier (hey, you in the back,  stop laughing) as I go on and I start to get a feel for how it all goes together.

Stay tuned, hilarity is sure to ensue.