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I noticed that this post has been sitting as a draft since 2011. At this point I have no idea if it’s useful or what I was even doing, but I might as well make it public in case someone can find it helpful! So I’ve been trying to get one of those PDF print drivers working in WINE without success. I then came upon a process that might work. When printing you need to select the checkbox “Print to file” that creates a .prn file. Just Linux things... I was using a program that only has printing facilities, but I want to export around 100 pages of text and images. Once you have the .prn (postscript) file, you can do any number of things to it. In my case I want the postscript file to be converted to HTML. I am also considering PDF format because that has more conversion options to eventually get me to HTML or plain text. sudo apt-get install cups-pdf Or it looks like that package might have changed to this… sudo apt-get install printer-driver-cups-pdf Where PDFs would be generated in /home/...

I have a large project in classic ASP, VBScript, and Javascript. It’s a hassle dealing with it because developer tools don’t support it that well or at all. I recently poked around the open source editor Notepad++ and got it adjusted to work decently well with the project. Check out Notepad++ on the official website here . In the past I had used Eclipse with an old VBScript ASP syntax highlighter. It wasn’t perfect, but worked alright overall. The main issue is that the highlighting stopped working every so often, and not to mention Eclipse is bulky and a pain to use for various reasons. Here is a screenshot of Notepad++ adjusted to work with the project: Here are my main adjustments: “View” >> “Folder as Workspace” “View” >> “Document Map” “View” >> “Function List” “Settings” >> “Preferences…” >> “Editing” >> “Display line number” The function list feature won’t work without modification. My project is broken into a large number of “.asp” files and ...

In this example I wrote a program to pull historic stock data from the ticker “DIS” over the past 10 days from the current date (it will be less than 10 results because weekends don’t have data). I used the .NET Framework WebClient object to request and return the data as a string that I parse into a generic Dictionary. It pulls the data from Google’s finance website as well as Yahoo’s finance site. Of course, check out their terms of use before doing anything with the code. Here is the code that I wrote on my GitHub. I created a class to handle communication with Google’s and Yahoo’s CSV export links. It handles constructing proper links as well as requesting the data and parsing it into a Dictionary that is structured by date. From that point, you could build an application around the use of that data, but for this example we just translate it back into strings for display in text boxes. public class WebClientForStockFinanceHistory { WebClient webConnector; // See Google...

In this article I go over the Android SDK CountDownTimer class. It’s easy to use and gives you the ability to count for projects like a workout timer. In this case we are extending that class so that we can access the methods we need to make it work. Here is the code on GitHub. Here is our SimpleCountDownTimer: public class SimpleCountdownTimer extends CountDownTimer { public static int oneSecond = 1000; TextView textViewTimeLeftDisplay; public SimpleCountdownTimer(long millisInFuture, long countDownInterval, TextView textViewTimeLeftDisplay) { super(millisInFuture, countDownInterval); this.textViewTimeLeftDisplay = textViewTimeLeftDisplay; } @Override public void onFinish() { textViewTimeLeftDisplay.setText("Finished"); } @Override public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished) { textViewTimeLeftDisplay.setText(String.valueOf(millisUntilFinished / oneSecond)); } } The extended timer class takes in the...

In this article I go over an asynchronous communication prototype I had made in straight Javascript that you use to POST to a server script and pass along the response to a Javascript function specified by the initial call to the prototype. The main benefit here is that you don’t need a full page refresh, which is great for implementing web interfaces that have an application feel to them. It doesn’t use any bulky libraries and should work on all browsers. An ideal use case for this would be websites hosted in an internal network that you wanted to act like an application. Though, with extensive modification you could add security features or just run it through https with proper verification code in the PHP script. The example code is located on GitHub. In my example I have four files: example.html = the html page that gives the user two buttons that fire off asynchronous calls to a server side script. AsyncManager.js = The prototype (aka. class) that handles communication and respons...

When developing applications or simple games for Android where you are drawing or writing to a view, an issue arises upon startup of the view. In my case I had a game where I wanted to calculate screen tile size before the game view starts, but with most tutorials I had seen everything happened after the view was fully running. That turned into a chicken and the egg scenario. I needed some key information before I could start the game view, but the default techniques didn’t allow for that. Here is the code on GitHub for this article. I was able to get around the issue with a few techniques. Have my main Activity linked with an xml layout file that has two empty nested linear layouts that fill the screen. Make a custom view that houses the main draw code. For this example, all I do is fill the screen with black and display the available screen size. Attach a ViewTreeObserver.OnGlobalLayoutListener in the Activity that will be the boot code upon getting the screen’s view size. I’m not sh...

Due to how the Android SDK and Java are setup it isn’t really a simple task to link up an array with a spinner control. I’ll go over some basics I just learned of the process. In this example I setup a setting control that will allow the user to select from a list of values. The spinner control will be initialized by the global setting value (from a black box object in this example), and a control listener will be defined that allows the user to change the global setting. To define a list of string values that can be loaded into android controls you would do something like this. You can add an arrays.xml file to your project (in the /res/values directory): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string-array name="settinglist01"> <item>1</item> <item>2</item> <item>3</item> <item>4</item> <item>5</item> </string-a...

Here is a simple yet pretty powerful and easy to use way to do validation on HTML form text boxes and text areas and similar controls. It checks to make sure required form field have *something* in them before allowing processing to continue. It’s a good simple way to add some basic validation to prevent trusted individuals from forgetting to fill out required fields. This is generally useful for internal websites where you can assume the user isn’t trying to hack the site. First we have two global JS variables that define the default and error-ed state of text boxes in question. Below I have standard controls with black borders and error-ed controls with red borders. // Assign a default border color for all form controls var defaultControlBorderColor = '#000000'; // Use a special color to highlight trouble (such as if a control doesn't validate) var notificationControlBorderColor = '#ff0000'; Below I have the primary function that does the field validation. F...

While it seems like there are multitude of different methods to execute commands in PHP, so far the code I will go over below is my preferred method. Using the passthru() function works nicely and includes the final return code of whatever was being executed, which is generally useful to me in error checking. In processing, I also include ob_start(), ob_get_contents(), and ob_end_clean() so that I can capture the console programs output and return it the user eventually. // Execute a console command and return both the // command's success value and any output to the console it made function executeConsoleCommand($commandToExecute, &$commandConsoleOutputToAppend) { $returnValue = 0;      // Append command to output $commandConsoleOutputToAppend .= $commandToExecute . "\r\n"; // Catch console output ob_start(); // Execute the console program passthru($commandToExecute, $returnValue); // Save console output to a string variable (this s...

I’m the type of person who prefers to do things in a way that I perceive as the proper or correct way. While this tends to make things take a bit longer to accomplish, I feel the result ends up being better overall. One such thing I noticed is that file and path handling in PHP was missing a function I used quite a bit when writing C# code. In C# there is a Path.Combine() function that appends two file paths together to form one complete path without having to care what the beginning character and ending character of the two paths are. I wrote up a little function in PHP to mimic what happens. // Take a path and/or a filename and combine them into one file path function filePathCombine($path1, $path2) { $completedPath = ''; // Check if path1 ends with DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR if (substr($path1, -1) !== DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR) { $completedPath = $path1 . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR; } else { $completedPath = $path1; } // Check if path2 starts with D...

I’m writing some software that relies on a feature of GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) in a more recent version than the one Ubuntu Lucid currently has in their repository. As I write the software on my desktop, I found out pretty quickly that I was using an old version of one of the commands (more specifically ogr2ogr and the clipping functionality). Thanks to this site for the initial tip, it’s pretty easy to get the latest “unstable” release of GDAL installed without having to manually compile the program from source code yourself. If you are using Karmic or above, you can run these commands: sudo apt-get install python-software-properties sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable Or you can opt for the more involved version below: In your desktop, navigate to here: System -> Administration -> Software Sources “Other Software” tab Add these two items: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu <codename> main deb-src htt...

Java Netbeans is a pretty decent editor for PHP code. I use Linux Ubuntu now for my primary desktop computer, so it’s quite convenient and easy to get running. One issue is that in default configuration the program is a bit slow feeling. Doing a quick search I found this page: http://performance.netbeans.org/howto/jvmswitches/ Which describes a few command line parameters that might help the IDE function faster. I’m currently running the command “/usr/bin/netbeans -J-Xverify:none -J-Xmx384m -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true” Basically, it removes one unnecessary verification check, adds 256mb of RAM to the default RAM pool the program can use, and attempt to use OpenGL to render the IDE. I am currently using closed-source video card drivers, so your mileage could very with that last parameter. You can modify your default system menu link by doing this: Right-click on the “Applications” dropdown system menu. Select the “Edit Menus” list item. Cli...

Do you want to execute operating system specific code (exes) in the .NET/Mono framework? I’ll go over how you can do that. Below is part of a class I had written that can determine if Linux or Windows is running. Keep in mind that for the code to properly detect Mac OS, you will need to figure out the proper platform number and modify the code respectively. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.Diagnostics; namespace namespace1 { public static class HostOS { /// <summary> /// An enumerator that holds a list of possible operating systems /// this code can execute on. /// </summary> public enum HostEnvironment { Windows, Linux } /// <summary> /// Determine the operating system this program is running on. /// </summary> /// <returns>The current operating system</returns> /// <rem...

Here is a quick tip to save some trouble. The goal here is to get clean urls like http://localhost/site/test/5 or http://localhost/site/contact without having a query string variable and also not having the filename index.php show up. My configuration: EasyPHP (apache/php/mysql combo for windows) Yii PHP framework In the Yii main.php configuration file you need: 'urlManager'=&gt;array( 'urlFormat'=&gt;'path', 'showScriptName'=&gt;false,), Inside the ‘components’ array area. In the primary directory where the index.php file is you need a .htaccess files with this in it: Options +FollowSymLinks IndexIgnore */* RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^ index.php [L] If you have problems, check your httpd.conf file for these items: <directory c:\easyphp\www> Inside that directory section, make sure the rules don’t disallow the removal of index.php or the other rewrite rule...

Manually filling rows of data in ASP.NET controls can be a bit unintuitive. I’ll go over a few things I learned recently. I’m writing up this posting off the top of my head, so I can’t say for certain the code examples are correct in syntax. Use the template field in your grid view as it’s the most flexible to deal with as apposed to using asp bind field tags or other means. <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="A Column"> <ItemTemplate> <a href="http://address"><%# Bind("dbField") %></a> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> The example above is a column template field with the Bind() function call. Bind() is a special function that can be used to link data that the template field has access to within the grid row. You can also use Eval() which just prints the data and does not hard link the control and data like Bind() does. Also take note of the # in the asp tags <%# %> this is shorthand for...

I’m in a situation now where I am required to write programming code in VB.NET. Which brings me up to a simple programming construct that I came upon by writing code like I would in C#, but getting a different expected result in VB.NET. In C#, using the && operator in conditionals is *by default* a short-circuit type conditional. That means when the first term is evaluated, the additional statements won’t be processed at all if that first statement was not true. The main benefit is something like this: Say, you want to check a listbox for specific values… if(lb1.selectedIndex > -1 && lb1.selectedValue.compare(“value text”) == true) { code to run } If the list box has no list items in there (eg. a selectedIndex of -1), the second condition will never be checked. If C# did not short circuit after the first term resulted in false, a program error would occur because the second condition would not have anything set for the selectedValue property. Oddly enough, in VB...

I have a dual screen setup with two 20″ Dell LCD screens. I recently changed my primary screen to be vertically orientated. The benefit here is that I can see a more “global” view of the source file I am currently editing. The irritating thing I stumbled upon was tabulation in Visual Studio. I changed my tabs to be 2 spaces instead of two (to make up for my primary screen having less horizontal space). The issue that I had was all old source files were stuck with 4 space tabbing. Here is what I did to fix the issue: Tools>>options (make sure “Show all settings” is checked) Navigate to Text Editor>>All Languages>>Tabs In the Tab box, change the tab size to 2 and indent size to 2 select “ Keep tabs ” (this tells visual studio to not change tabs to spaces) Okay, so now the editor now uses two tabs and I can manually fix code I made before using shift-tab . This doesn’t solve my issue of having old source files stuck with 4 spaces as one tab. What I just figured out ...

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...

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 ...

I mentioned about wanting to start a business in my previous post. Well it looks like I might have my chance. While it isn’t exactly what I was thinking of in my previous post, I foresee many opportunities to flex my programming muscle in this endeavor. Plus, I will be starting up with a good friend, so there is a good chance our motivation will actually produce some results. A piece of software I am starting to research/design/create will be an internal application we will use to automatically extract some government provided public data. The current issue is time. With the amount of data and the requirement of using their web interface, it is not worth the time needed to do it by hand. The only other option would be to buy the data from the government, but that’s just an unnecessary cost seeing as there is a free option available. So I will be writing a program in C# to automatically access a few websites and download the needed data in chunks. I have never delt with .NET’s we...