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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! 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 up these files, developers c...

I don’t often rant nor say the work “sucks” very often. However as any programmer knows, some tools just frustrate you to no end. Java, the Android SDK, and the Eclipse IDE are something I need to use, but are frequently on my “sucky tools” list. I’ve used a lot of programming languages and tools in my day, and these have made the frustrating Sh** king-of-the-mountain where things like Cobol and JCL reside. Here is an email rant I made recently: Wasted the whole day trying to get the settings activity working as I initially designed it. I eventually dropped that after wasting a large amount of time “playing” around with the code, so now the unit conversions happen outside of the settings activity. In the settings activity, it is just cut-and-dry select setting and select type of units. There is no unit conversion and re-selection of a setting value in the spinner as I had attempted to do earlier. For example, 10 for the search distance will me km or miles depending on if the use...

I’ve used linux/unix quite a bit over the years. Probably my first experience with Linux was when I bought a magazine in the 90’s that had Mandrake linux on CD. Since then I’ve used distributions from Slackware to Ubuntu, but never really had a desire to do much with the OS once I had it running, so it just usually sat on my harddrive. I have recently been reminded why I was never interested in using *nix exclusively. Don’t get me wrong here, I think the concept of free open-source software operating systems is great. (Edit 09/2010: I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and have had generally a good experience with it for a few months as my primary desktop. I’m going to keep using it…) Let me go over a scenario to explain my thoughts: Goal: Setup Debian Linux so that I can test my software. I specifically want to use a VMWARE appliance so that I don’t have to mess around with my current OS. (Edit: I’ve since switched over to Sun’s VirtualBox software, which is much better than t...

I’ve been working on a personal project with a friend for quite a while now.  To make a long story short it deals with loading/editing/saving large quantities of public geographic data. Lately we have been throwing around the idea of having our database server’s OS in Linux instead of Windows 2000. Which brings me to the MONO project. I’ve started testing some code I wrote in C# (a console application that accesses the Internet) by using that MS Virtual PC program I setup in my previous posting with Xubuntu. While my current goal changed a bit, I’m glad to start getting some use out of it. Basically, all I needed to do was install the mono run-time libraries and I was good to go. Now keep in mind that some Linux distributions might only have older versions of MONO available by way of a package manager (or pre-install). In this case you should see if your .NET application requires something that the available version of MONO does not have by visiting the mon...

I’ve been interested lately in using virtualization to setup a “computer” to do local web development on. I’m looking to configure it it closely as possible to my paid hosting, so that it will be as easy as possible when I take a project and migrate it over to to the host. If you haven’t had any experience with virtualization, it’s basically a way of running an operating system inside whatever operating system you are currently using. The nice thing about it these days is that more recent processors have hardware extension to improve performance to the level where it’s quite usable. The software mimics all aspects of a basic computer with standard hardware. So you take your operating system install disk and go through the process as you normally would. I am currently using Windows Vista Ultimate x64. So looking at the easiest option, I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s free “Virtual PC 2007” program. I’ve used it...

I was at a monthly .NET usergroup meeting yesterday. Larry Clarkin ( http://larryclarkin.com/ ) was there, and he was kind enough to give out quite a few copies of Visual Studio 2008. I was one of the ones who needed a copy. Never had the justification to buy it personally. Actually I am using 2005 at work too, but anyways… He talked about Silverlight 2. It has quite a few unique features that make it interesting enough to start “playing” around with. The most interesting aspect to me is the subset of the .NET framework embedded into the Silverlight runtime, which in turn means you can write Silverlight programs in C#/VB.NET (as well as a few other languages). Another plus is that it has built-in form controls. Put those two together and it could be interesting to make some rich web applications with not much difficulty. All this time I though it was just a Flash clone. Check out silverlight.net for more of the specifics.

I’ve been working on something recently where I decided to have most of the program run in a client’s browser. It’s basically a blog system that works with that asp-xml-to-access-db class. The clients browser sends/requests information in XML to the server script and everything turned out peachy. I’m overall extremely happy with it. Now that I’m done writing the script. I learned quite a bit more about Javascript that I didn’t know in the past. The initial few days of working with it were tragic. I’m not too fond of Javascript’s (pseudo) object model and lack of a standard class model. While Javascript works and provides a good deal of functionality, it feels dirty. Maybe my fellow “old school” programmers can understand. Besides the object model, the DOM in general is a pain to work with, and hard to find information about (that works in multiple browsers). Inconsistencies, things that logically should work don’t,...

As I mentioned in the previous post I had my custom CMS site reasonably functional. From that time as I worked with the director, I found out that they were using a CMS system already. No point in trying to reinvent the wheel as it’s said. It’s called Sohoadmin and it works pretty well all things considered. I would not call it that user friendly, but seeing as I am doing volunteer work I don’t want to spend 2-3 months creating my own thing that I would also then have to provide technical support to in the future. It’s been an interesting process so far getting them where they need to be. The person who they were working with before isn’t very motivated to help them and it was showing (he hosts the server too). I wanted to get Sohoadmin upgraded to the newest version, but when he tried to do that it did not work correctly resulting in me sticking some band aids on the site to get it somewhat functional again. Now we are to the point that we bought our...

Over the past week or two I’ve been researching ways to develop server-side web based applications as fast as possible (time is money, haha). I am in the initial stages of starting a little side business with a friend and one of our possible clients is looking for a large system to handle online ordering of their products. If you know anything about developing and programming a complex system, it takes a lot of planning as well as a good deal of time to actually create it. My “developer ideals” won’t allow my to create something of poor quality, so I’ve been reluctant to take on large things in the past. I’ve been pushing myself more lately to produce results the results I strive for with more speed. Well more like I’ve been trying to learn new methods and techniques where I can keep my quality level high, but just get things done faster. While I’ve programmed in PHP before, I know that I would need to create a large amount of generic functionality to handle an ordering system. T...

I started playing around with Visual Web Developer Express 2005 (VWD). I had originally planned on using VWD with MySQL. The problem is that to use the new stuff in ASP.NET 2.0 like the pre-made authentication you have to use Microsoft’s own SQL server, or try to get some convoluted method of making MySQL work as the provider. I’m sure that I could eventually get it working, but in the end it would not provide me the free easy to use fast development solution I was looking for in asp.net and MySQL. I had a plan to develop a dynamic small business website with user authentication, but I see now that it probably won’t be with VWD Express and MySQL. If I have to reinvent the wheel for everything I’d rather just use PHP and MySQL. That being said, I still plan on messing around with VWD and Microsoft’s SQL Express. I might be doing some research about Ruby On Rails to see if that would better meet my needs.

I started using VB.NET to write that JSON/FTP/site editor program. I found a free ready made library to work with the JSON data. It’s from Newtonsoft Really easy to use. They don’t have much documentation, but just looking through the library with IntelliSense in the VB IDE is more than enough to understand how to use it. With around 6 lines of code I can flip data between CLR objects and JSON. Very nice! I used VB.NET 2003 version about a year ago for the final group project in the last computer class I had. It didn’t seem as easy to use as the 2005 express version I am using now. It’s probably because that was my first foray into using .NET… anyways. A a quick term list: CLR = common language runtime JSON = JavaScript object notation IDE = integrated development environment FTP = file transfer protocol VB = Visual Basic programming language (.NET version) IntelliSense = One of the ways Microsoft makes coding easier in the IDE.

I guess you could call this part three of the “ajax, json, html, css, easy to update non-server-scripted website series!” This time I will get into my design plans for the client application. It has not been created yet, so there will be some guess work here. Writing this will also help me figure out what exactly I am trying to accomplish here. Now that the website is: A simple xhtml page that uses javascript to fetch json text files. That means all of the content is now separate from the main structure of the site. Next up is deciding on how to make the client application. I have decided to use Visual C# or VB.net 2005 Express Edition. It’s completely free, yeah I was surprised when I found that out… Anyways, A few weeks ago I created an application (which I will post about here in the future) with that development environment and enjoyed using it a lot. The program may have features like: add/update/delete the main page links add/update/delete content pages modify existing co...