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Showing posts from August, 2008

Working with Regular Expressions in C#

I’ve been working on a program that needs to parse a html file for form data.  So when I was deciding what method to use, a few popped right into my mind. The first being a character by character search through the string.  Parsing through the data and flagging sections that fit the signature of what was being searched for. The second would be automating that by using the built-in string functions to split up the string and drill down until the needed data was extracted. The third, and one I chose to use, was with regular expressions.  This in my mind is the most “poetic” method of the three, which would allow me to make the a robust and reliable function. While I’ve used regular expressions a lot throughout the years. I never seem to remember enough to construct a decent statement. I had recently bought a pocket reference (link below), so I used that to get a statement constructed. It had a total of about 6 pages for C#, but I pretty much got what I needed from it. An...
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Esprit Macro With .NET

Edit: I’m having some issues with a second tutorial, so at this point I don’t think this process below is correct.  2nd Edit:  This code should work fine, the issue was when I started using COM objects from Esprit.  There are a few gotchas that need to be taken care of.  I think the primary reason I had issues was due to writing the macro in C# instead of VB (the language the Esprit tutorials have).  I may be writing about it in the future.  If you are interested right now, send a message, or post in the forums. This post will be a little more special interest them most of my posts. I recently started learning how to create macros for a program called Esprit (D.P. Technology). It’s a “CAD/CAM” program. They still use COM/VBA as their plug-in interface, so to write a plug-in in .NET there are a few things that need to be taken care of. Their tutorial that comes with the program goes over setting everything up, but It misses a few steps. Well more likely...
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Working With the XML DOM

I’ve been working with server side scripts that rely on xml files to define the structure of the site.  It seems quite fast compared to using a database and also makes direct changes to the structure easy.  My post here is about how to use the DOM in VBSCRIPT/ASP.  Some aspects of how the DOM works are a bit “wiggy” in my opinion, but I’ve figured out a lot of it so far. Here is a quick example on how to parse a file (VBSCRIPT/ASP): function parseXmlFile(filename, byRef emptyVarToFillWithXmlObj)     dim completeFilePath, functionSuccess, filePointer          completeFilePath = getFullPath() & filename          ' Convert the xml file into an xmldoc object     ' First check to see that the file exists     set filePointer = server.createObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")     if filePointer.fileExists(completeFilePath) then         ' Initialize the xml object ...
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Site Revamp Details

Here is a screen shot of the old site.  It served me well for the two years or so that I had it running on blogger.com.  The great thing about blogging is that I can save bits of important information in one place that I can later come back and utilize. The secondary benefit is that other people can also gain something from my writings as well. Now that I’ve taken the plunge to into the world of incorporation, I have had a strong desire to improve my web presence.  My first project being this website revamp. Here is a list of the steps necessary to get from blogger to a custom wordpress blog: – Install wordpress on my computer’s local server ( WAMP ).  This is quite easy if you have messed around with developing websites before.  The major steps to that are 1. create a database (wamp has phpMyAdmin preinstalled, so doing SQL stuff is easy) 2. create a new SQL user that has permissions on the new database.  Once the database is setup, extract the wordpress ...
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ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...
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Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on  Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below.  If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is:  .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem.  Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...
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Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...
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