Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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DLCinferno: Feb 22, 2003; Happy

hey wiz posted:

I didn't see the part where he mentioned C#. I need to stop assuming code that looks like Java is actually Java .

Does Java have Bananas? No. :crossarms:

C# is bananas.

# ? Jul 17, 2008 05:21

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# ? May 14, 2024 21:50

Waltzing Along: Jun 14, 2008; There's only one
Human race
Many faces
Everybody belongs here

fletcher posted:

You should do more to convince them that it will be worth it, because it will be, without a doubt. The amount of money you will spend on extra time trying to do simple things with the wiki will far outweigh the couple thousand dollars you spend on a nice inventory application. Not to mention skimping on a critical and inexpensive piece of a potentially multi-million dollar project (not sure of the size of your company) is just stupid.

What if you want to figure out how many Dell D620 laptops were purchased before a certain date? Good luck doing that with a wiki.

If the requirements aren't too much more than what you posted earlier you could write this webapp yourself with a minimal amount of time, or pay to have somebody write it for relatively cheap.

They have been trying for years to get an inventory system implemented but upper management has not shelled out the money for it. It is definitely not going to happen now. In any case, I have a meeting in a few hours to discuss it.

Again, does anyone know of a simple gui that can be used to edit wiki content? There has to be something out there, doesn't there?

# ? Jul 18, 2008 18:48

ColdSnickersBar: Apr 7, 2005

Div posted:

Apologies if this has been answered, but I'm writing documentation for some internal libraries that I wrote at work and I'm looking for a tool to quickly and easily make nice diagrams to avoid the whole thing being TEXT TEXT TEXT. I need flowcharts, UML diagrams, that kind of thing.

Diagrams like the ones this guy uses to describe software/hardware processes:
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/

I'd rather not pay but if it's a good solution then I don't mind.

I like UMLet. It's very easy to use, the diagrams are made of XML, it has a very quick to learn markup for customizing the diagram elements, and you can export the diagrams to image files. It's free.

# ? Jul 18, 2008 19:15

POKEMAN SAM: Jul 8, 2004

Waltzing Along posted:

They have been trying for years to get an inventory system implemented but upper management has not shelled out the money for it. It is definitely not going to happen now. In any case, I have a meeting in a few hours to discuss it.

Again, does anyone know of a simple gui that can be used to edit wiki content? There has to be something out there, doesn't there?

For in-browser editing pages I use monobook on our internal MediaWiki, which does highlighty stuff and overall makes it more like Word.

# ? Jul 18, 2008 23:50

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Waltzing Along posted:

They have been trying for years to get an inventory system implemented but upper management has not shelled out the money for it. It is definitely not going to happen now. In any case, I have a meeting in a few hours to discuss it.

Again, does anyone know of a simple gui that can be used to edit wiki content? There has to be something out there, doesn't there?

The idea of a wiki is that the gui is a web interface. Fogbugz comes with a wiki with a wysiwyg editor. It's awful.

Also, the wiki idea for inventory is really awful. I've worked in a company, that was terrible for many reasons, one of them being their use of a wiki for inventory. I'm shedding tears of pure pain at the thought of it.

# ? Jul 18, 2008 23:52

rugbert: Mar 26, 2003; yea, fuck you

I need something for webpages that lets you drag and drop supplied images onto an image with a predefined perimeter. Specifically, I wanna make something like
this

but not nearly as complex. So what language would I have ot teach myself to do that, or does anyone know of some free code I can grab?

# ? Jul 19, 2008 15:20

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

rugbert posted:

I need something for webpages that lets you drag and drop supplied images onto an image with a predefined perimeter. Specifically, I wanna make something like
this

but not nearly as complex. So what language would I have to teach myself to do that, or does anyone know of some free code I can grab?

I'd go with the same thing that page uses, Actionscript. You should be able to find plenty of drag & drop tutorials. You can use FlashDevelop and the Free Flex 3 SDK to do this for free without having to buy Adobe Flash CS3. You could also probably do it in javascript, but it will be painful.

# ? Jul 19, 2008 19:20

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

rugbert posted:

I need something for webpages that lets you drag and drop supplied images onto an image with a predefined perimeter. Specifically, I wanna make something like
this

but not nearly as complex. So what language would I have ot teach myself to do that, or does anyone know of some free code I can grab?

Something like http://www.walterzorn.com/dragdrop/dragdrop_e.htm maybe?

# ? Jul 20, 2008 06:49

zootm: Aug 8, 2006; We used to be better friends.

fletcher posted:

You could also probably do it in javascript, but it will be painful.

To be fair, with jQuery it is one function call.

# ? Jul 20, 2008 13:36

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? Jul 20, 2008 21:39

Filburt Shellbach: Nov 6, 2007; Apni tackat say tujay aaj mitta juu gaa!

(We have a Perl thread, you know

)

One part that's definitely wrong is:

code:

foreach $key (keys %ThreeHash){
    print "$key appeared $hash{$_} times.\n";

You're iterating over the keys, storing each one in $key, but then you index into the hash using $_. Change that to $key.

If that doesn't fix your bug, please post more code.

# ? Jul 20, 2008 21:43

Hughmoris: Apr 21, 2007; Let's go to the abyss!

How would I go about putting a custom mobile phone application onto my Sprint Mogul, which runs Windows Mobile?

I was thinking about designing something extremely simple, such as a tip calculator, and putting it on my phone. I realize this program would be completely pointless, but I figure it would be a neat little application to have. I am new to programming and the tech world in general, so if someone could point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 00:14

maskenfreiheit: Dec 30, 2004

maskenfreiheit fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Apr 28, 2019

# ? Jul 21, 2008 01:24

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

There's no ASM thread, so I'm posting this here since I'm not sure if it deserves a thread. I'm trying to write a dinky console in x86 ASM. Yes, it needs to be in ASM, it's for running on ancient 16-bit PCs that may or may not have a working operating system, so it needs to be bootable from a floppy. I've got that part down, but I've run into another problem.

I'm trying to just have pushing and popping the stack as a macro, but on my debugger setup, it just loops back to the start and runs the CLEAR_SCREEN procedure instead of anything useful. Here's the relevant code:

code:

; macros and stuff
save_stack MACRO
    push AX
    push BX
    push CX
    push DX
    ret
ENDM

load_stack MACRO
    pop AX
    pop BX
    pop CX
    pop DX
    ret
ENDM

CALL CLEAR_SCREEN ; <-- this works fine

JMP console
;LEA SI,ready
;CALL print_string

console:
CALL write_status

write_status PROC ;write status bar
;    PUSH AX the working code
;    PUSH BX
;    PUSH CX
;    PUSH DX 
    save_stack ; this is where it shits itself
    mov dh, 0
    mov dl, 0
    mov bh, 0
    mov ah, 2
    int 10h
    lea SI,status
    call print_string
    load_stack ; never gets here, who knows if this works
    RET
write_status ENDP

According to my debugger, once it hits the RET in the save_stack macro, it jumps right back to the beginning of CLEAR_SCREEN instead of the middle of WRITE_STATUS. Can you not RET into a PROC from a MACRO, then? Am I doing this wrong? If I just drop in PUSH AX, etc, it runs fine, but that's ugly and I want to do it right. The compiler is FASM, by the way.

Luigi Thirty fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jul 21, 2008

# ? Jul 21, 2008 05:49

Remesi: Jan 1, 2008; If the moon hit your eye like a big pizza pie you would die.

Luigi Thirty posted:

Can you not RET into a PROC from a MACRO, then? Am I doing this wrong? If I just drop in PUSH AX, etc, it runs fine, but that's ugly and I want to do it right. The compiler is FASM, by the way.

Assembly macros are just a form of text substitution used by the assembler, they don't actually exist in the assembled machine code. Remove the ret opcode from the macros and your problem should go away.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 07:39

slovach: Oct 6, 2005; Lennie Fuckin' Briscoe

Luigi Thirty posted:

According to my debugger, once it hits the RET in the save_stack macro, it jumps right back to the beginning of CLEAR_SCREEN instead of the middle of WRITE_STATUS. Can you not RET into a PROC from a MACRO, then? Am I doing this wrong? If I just drop in PUSH AX, etc, it runs fine, but that's ugly and I want to do it right. The compiler is FASM, by the way.

macro's are done at assembly time, it's just going to substitute it.

While you want:

code:

write_status PROC
    PUSH AX
    PUSH BX
    PUSH CX
    PUSH DX
...

you are going to get a RET after that because of your macro, and what happens then is your problem. Take the RET out of your macro and you're golden.

Also, wouldn't:

code:

xor dx, dx

be faster and smaller than:

code:

mov dh, 0
mov dl, 0

edit: oh motherfuck. I guess it would help if I bothered reading past the question to see if it was already answered. :downs:

slovach fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Jul 21, 2008

# ? Jul 21, 2008 09:31

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

slovach posted:

macro's are done at assembly time, it's just going to substitute it.

While you want:
code:
write_status PROC
    PUSH AX
    PUSH BX
    PUSH CX
    PUSH DX
... 
you are going to get a RET after that because of your macro, and what happens then is your problem. Take the RET out of your macro and you're golden.

Now I feel dumb. Thanks.

slovach posted:

Also, wouldn't:
code:
xor dx, dx
be faster and smaller than:
code:
mov dh, 0
mov dl, 0

DX stores the row/column that the cursor's going to when you fire the interrupt, so I'd rather have it spelled out at the moment.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 16:24

Marx Headroom: May 10, 2007; AT LAST! A show with nonono ~~commercials~~!; Fallen Rib

I'm having a hard time building experience with code projects, weird as that sounds for a programmer. I mean, it's a trivial task to write python/perl/java scripts that rearrange files or cull data but it's a completely different thing to build actual, functional, useful, beautiful apps. I keep looking at things like emulators, databases, reading source code, swapping code with friends, ironing out bugs in other people's personal projects, I even have a few basic project ideas, but there's a large gap between what I want to do and what I can do and it's worrying me. I'm intimidated by large scale projects, so much so that I'm hesitant to begin one for fear that it'll fail without my learning anything useful.

The other day I scanned through rentacoder to see if I could apply my skills and earn some money, and realized how ridiculously small and inadequate my actual skill set is. I'm looking at an internship, but I'm hesitant to schedule an interview as I'm nervous about my ability to perform the job well. The list goes on.

I'm a junior comp sci major, most of my time is spent reading technical specs, code tutorials, textbooks, and mailing lists to try to pick up as much as I can but I can't find a place to apply it effectively.

So how can I build a practical skill set? I'm just assuming that most of you have been through a similar phase, how did you bridge the gap between theory and practice?

# ? Jul 21, 2008 17:56

Avenging Dentist: Oct 1, 2005; oh my god is that a circular saw that does not go in my mouth aaaaagh

Mr. Jive posted:

The other day I scanned through rentacoder to see if I could apply my skills and earn some money, and realized how ridiculously small and inadequate my actual skill set is. I'm looking at an internship, but I'm hesitant to schedule an interview as I'm nervous about my ability to perform the job well. The list goes on.

Rentacoder is the shittiest poo poo that was ever shat from a butt.

Just make Tetris or something. It's better to try and fail than to sit around worrying whether you'll be able to finish a project. Honestly, I've learned the most from my aborted projects.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 18:52

csammis: Aug 26, 2003; Mental Institution

Mr. Jive posted:

So how can I build a practical skill set? I'm just assuming that most of you have been through a similar phase, how did you bridge the gap between theory and practice?

I contributed to and managed open source projects. If you use any open source projects, try to find a feature that's irritating you and might be improved, or a new one that you'd like to see, and implement it. Most (many? some? only me?) OSS project managers would be happy to help you as long as you try to figure things out on your own. If you don't know of any projects you'd like to work on, look around on Sourceforge or ask CoC for their favorites.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 19:04

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

csammis posted:

look around on Sourceforge

Kinda off topic, but why is the message board software they use on sourceforge so horrible?

# ? Jul 21, 2008 19:18

csammis: Aug 26, 2003; Mental Institution

fletcher posted:

Kinda off topic, but why is the message board software they use on sourceforge so horrible?

Oh, who knows. I'm fairly sure it's all home-rolled and it's sucked as far back as I can remember, even after their revamp a couple years ago. My projects lasted about three weeks with Sourceforge before I got completely fed up with it and moved on to another project host.

# ? Jul 21, 2008 20:03

POKEMAN SAM: Jul 8, 2004

Luigi Thirty posted:

I'm trying to just have pushing and popping the stack as a macro, but on my debugger setup, it just loops back to the start and runs the CLEAR_SCREEN procedure instead of anything useful. Here's the relevant code:

Why are you using a macro when you can just use the pusha and popa instructions?

Edit: Also, oh god, you're popping them off in the same order you're pushing them on, which means at the end, AX = original DX, etc.

# ? Jul 22, 2008 19:32

slovach: Oct 6, 2005; Lennie Fuckin' Briscoe

Ugg boots posted:

Why are you using a macro when you can just use the pusha and popa instructions?

Edit: Also, oh god, you're popping them off in the same order you're pushing them on, which means at the end, AX = original DX, etc.

Think of the extra cycles you'd be using by using pusha/popa. :mad:

# ? Jul 22, 2008 22:35

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

Ugg boots posted:

Why are you using a macro when you can just use the pusha and popa instructions?

I knew there was an opcode for this! What use is CISC without register pushing?

# ? Jul 23, 2008 05:56

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

Ugg boots posted:

Why are you using a macro when you can just use the pusha and popa instructions?

I never said I was good at it.

Ugg boots posted:

Edit: Also, oh god, you're popping them off in the same order you're pushing them on, which means at the end, AX = original DX, etc.

I fixed that after I posted it here. The weird thing is, even when it was like that, everything still worked :psyduck:

# ? Jul 23, 2008 06:41

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Mr. Jive posted:

I mean, it's a trivial task to write python/perl/java scripts that rearrange files or cull data but it's a completely different thing to build actual, functional, useful, beautiful apps.

ITYM big. Big is an anti pattern caused by avarice.

Take pleasure in the fact that you can make useful things that make your and other peoples lives easier. If you want to make a big app, start with a bunch of small ones and glue them together.

# ? Jul 23, 2008 13:36

POKEMAN SAM: Jul 8, 2004

Luigi Thirty posted:

I never said I was good at it.

Didn't mean to come off like an rear end in a top hat, I was just seriously asking why you didn't use it (I didn't know if the architecture you were on didn't support it or something weird, or if you had some other reason to not use it.)

The reason I know those silly opcodes is because I do a lot of writing ASM to processes that I don't own, so for one, fitting one pushad into a code cave is smaller than individual pushes, but also when you have to push and pop the entire register space so often it becomes ugly to write it all out. :colbert:

# ? Jul 23, 2008 18:11

defmacro: Sep 27, 2005; cacio e ping pong

VVV good point, moved my questions to the RoR thread.

defmacro fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jul 25, 2008

# ? Jul 24, 2008 10:29

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

GT_Onizuka posted:

There doesn't seem to be a general Ruby thread, so I figured I'd ask my question here.

I'm sure the Ruby on Rails Love-in wouldn't mind discussing pure Ruby.

# ? Jul 24, 2008 19:38

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

I'd like to create a script of some sort that would basically take a folder of images, and generate a custom html page with it. It would be a pretty basic window, scroll through the images, click on it, and javascript would fill a field in another window (would be spawned from that one).
I'd like to schedule this to run on a windows server. I'm not entirely sure what language to use, or where to start. Should I use VBscript for this? I did some searching on this and everything I found was using perl.

If someone can point me in the right direction with this, I'd appreciate it.

# ? Jul 25, 2008 00:05

fletcher: Jun 27, 2003; ken park is my favorite movie; Cybernetic Crumb

Ashex posted:

I'd like to create a script of some sort that would basically take a folder of images, and generate a custom html page with it. It would be a pretty basic window, scroll through the images, click on it, and javascript would fill a field in another window (would be spawned from that one).
I'd like to schedule this to run on a windows server. I'm not entirely sure what language to use, or where to start. Should I use VBscript for this? I did some searching on this and everything I found was using perl.

If someone can point me in the right direction with this, I'd appreciate it.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but if you have php available, picKLE is a great minimalist image gallery.

# ? Jul 25, 2008 00:21

Ashex: Jun 25, 2007; These pipes are cleeeean!!!

fletcher posted:

Not exactly what you are looking for, but if you have php available, picKLE is a great minimalist image gallery.

I won't be able to use php, these are strictly windows web servers, so anything I use on there will be asp with vbscripting. The idea is to schedule the script to run on a server, person A will drop the images in a folder on a share on the server. When the script runs, it will generate the html file and drop it in the appropriate folder on the web server.

It's part of a form request I'm working on, should I ever get that form working, the user will specify what icon they want for a conference, and then click a link, choose the icon, and it fills in the field with the id associated with it. That's the plan.

# ? Jul 25, 2008 00:27

Mopp: Oct 29, 2004

I'm new to programming in general, and boy do I suck at it.

code:

n = 0
while n < 5:
  print "A",
  if n > 2:
    print "B",
  n += 1

I think the printout should be aaababab or something. But I've tried like twenty times, god I hate programming.

or like this thing

code:

a = 30
MITTEN = 44

if a <= MITTEN:
  print "A",
  print "B",
else:
  print "C",
print "D"

-----------------------

a = 52
b = 21
if a <= b:
  print "A",
  print "B",
else:
  print "C",

abd and c, right? fafsffffffff gently caress this what am I doing wrong

# ? Jul 28, 2008 20:09

Jam2: Jan 15, 2008; With Energy For Mayhem

How good do ones math skills need to be to excel at programming?

# ? Jul 28, 2008 20:24

Lonely Wolf: Jan 20, 2003; Will hawk false idols for heaps and heaps of dough.

The first should print out "A A A A B A B". The other two run fine (except with the spaces and all-caps, of course). You're going to need to give us more information. What is happening when you run these snippets? For all I know from what you said you haven't even installed Python.

As far as math, it never hurts but it really depends on what you want to program.

# ? Jul 28, 2008 20:28

JoeNotCharles: Mar 3, 2005; Yet beyond each tree there are only more trees.

Jam2 posted:

How good do ones math skills need to be to excel at programming?

Your logic skills have to be excellent, but higher math doesn't matter so much unless you're specifically doing math programming.

# ? Jul 28, 2008 20:49

Scaevolus: Apr 16, 2007

Jam2 posted:

How good do ones math skills need to be to excel at programming?

There's a strong correlation between being good at programming and being good at math, as they require similar types of thinking. However, you don't need to know the most obscure branches of mathematics to be a good programming. A solid grasp of Algebra is usually sufficient.

# ? Jul 28, 2008 22:28

mantaworks: May 6, 2005; by Fragmaster

Jam2 posted:

How good do ones math skills need to be to excel at programming?

Not much to very essential, depending on what kind of programs you develop.

Trust me, weak math skills aren't going to be your biggest problem.

# ? Jul 28, 2008 22:28

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# ? May 14, 2024 21:50

FunOne: Aug 20, 2000; I am a slimey vat of concentrated stupidity; Fun Shoe

A little bit of Excel help is needed here:

I have a list of files in the A column on another tab. All these are excel files.

I want to:

Make a reference that uses the file name in the cell to lookup a cell value in that excel file. I'm basically trying to consolidate about 50 files or so and only include the relevant tables and rows. Excel doesn't seem to like the obvious idea of just embedding the reference. Unless I'm doing it wrong.

EDIT
Answer my own question:

Use the 'INDIRECT' function. Must have all the files open (pain in the rear end). Got it to work though, saved me from cut and pasting from 65 files.

FunOne fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jul 28, 2008

# ? Jul 28, 2008 23:08

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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