Jason's Programming

Interesting read on Error handling

2006-04-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on error handling in software.

Perl: Storing Filehandles in Variables

2006-03-27T06:53:00.000-08:00

A good article on how to store Filehandles in Variables.

Computer Problems

2006-03-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

Well it seems God really does not want me to have a working computer at home. Again, I've had problems with my machine, I just rebooted and paff! It would not boot anymore. I boot the Windows CD and it tells me it does not even know what kind of formating my Windows partition has. I try reinstalling, no go. I finally reinstalled on another disk and it worked. So I have officially lost 220 Gigs of data!

Me no happy.

Cool: Google Moon

2005-07-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

Google is at it again, they have just released Google Moon, an extension to their Google Map. With it, you can view parts of the moon, specifically where the moon landings occurred, exactly 36 years ago.

[ Source: Slashdot ]

Visual Studio 2005 preview

2005-04-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

There are a couple of articles on the new features of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE on CodeGuru. They are quite interesting and I can't wait to try it out!

Features I like:

Class Diagrams directly in Visual Studio!
XML Documentation
Editor Change Tracking

Part one and part two.

DLL Hell part 2

2005-04-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

It's interesting how life works. It's only been a couple of days that I had to load a DLL dynamically at work and now I have to do the same for a project I'm working at home. The only difference is that I need to load child dialog resources into my application.

You would think that it wouldn't be too hard, but MFC always manages to make it hard. When will I learn to not use MFC? Anyways what I needed was to call the create on a dialog passing it my parent window.

DLL

CDlg::InitDlg( CWnd* pParent )
{
VERIFY( Create( IDD, pParent ) );
}

Now you would think that by calling this function in the CDialog derived class that it would work. But somehow, that's does not work. At first it was errors because it could not the resource. This is easily repaired by doing this:

DLL

CDlg::InitDlg( CWnd* pParent )
{
AFX_MANAGE_STATE(AfxGetStaticModuleState( ));

VERIFY( Create( IDD, pParent ) );
}

But now, I was getting errors because of a map somewhere in MFC which was NULL. I checked everywhere but I did not find answers. So ended coding it like this:

App

CApp::ShowDllResource()
{
HINSTANCE hResApp = AfxGetResourceHandle();
HINSTANCE hResExt = GetModuleHandle(_T("DllName.dll"));
if(hResExt)
{ // loading resources was OK

AfxSetResourceHandle(hResExt);

m_pDlgResource->GetDlgWnd()->Create( m_pDlgResource->GetDlgID(), this);

m_pDlgResource->GetWnd()->ShowWindow(SW_SHOW);

AfxSetResourceHandle(hResApp);
}
}

By magic, this worked. It's not very elegant but this was done late at night. If I change this, I'll post another Blog about it.

This example was found on CodeProject in the threads at the end of the article.

Linking Dynamically To DLL

2005-04-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while since I've blog here.

A quick note, dynamically linking to DLLs. It's something I had to do for work and it's not something I do normally. I have to say, what an experience. It's not that bad but when you are loading the wrong dll and can't figure out why your exported functions are not found, it can get frustrating! :)

Anyways, if you need to do it or just for me so that I don't forget, here are some good ressources:

Using Dumpbin.exe to get decorated function names
From Codeproject
From Codeguru (This is what I used.)

Linux: Windows Media Support part2

2005-02-28T20:06:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a friend at work about my problem with WMV files and he said that MPlayer does play them it just doesn't have a file association by default. It does work, sometimes giving an error but still playing the file.

Linux: Windows Media Support

2005-02-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

Ya, I never thought I would say this, but man I miss having Windows Media support. It seems like all the websites I normally go to all use Windows Media for video and it's starting to piss me off. When and if I do the official switch, I'll have to install a Virtual Windows on Linux just to have access to things I can't access in Linux. : (

Linux hell

2005-02-26T22:21:00.000-08:00

For a programmer, I don't really have a powerful machine (AMD Athlon 1.3, 256 MB ram) so running windows is not always interesting and after getting infected yet again by spyware I decided to try Linux.

At first I thought, lets run it thru VMWare and see if it's cool or not, it's going to be easy... Famous last words. I started this last Sunday and pretty much every day since I've been trying all kinds of linux and none worked. I was starting to be discourage. Friday I decided to install it directly on a little 20 GB hard drive I had. I disabled my two other disk with windows so not to do too much damage. :)

I had Mandrake and Red Hat 9. Mandrake gave me some problems so it ended up being Red Hat. Now I'm no expert of linux and Red Hat did install itself easily. By yesterday morning, I had finally installed a Linux system.

I soon discovered that you still need to install a lot of things that you think would be already included like, MP3 support. Now I've never played with Linux before so installing something was kinda new. The first thing I did was get Firefox and that was pretty easy, just like installing on Windows. Next thing was get MP3 support and thats when I realized that Linux is not all nice and dandy. The first thing I got was the sources... After getting them untarred, I didn't really know what to do with them. I found out reading on the internet how to make the files. I then found out about RPM files. Ahh already it was easier to understand and install.

After getting MP3 support, the other thing was getting XVid support. So looking on the internet found out that the MPlayer was quite popular. I get the RPM and try to install, oops, it looks like I need another library. I finally end up getting like 6 other RPM files. Got that working. I later discovered APT, a program that gets all the needed files for programs and installs them. :)

After a week, I can now say, Windows has nothing to be afraid of, Linux is not ready to over the home market. My grandmother has enough problems getting around Windows, theres no way Linux is even a possibility!

I will keep my record of my Linux experiences up to date. I also hope to have some code that I did a while back up here for you all.

Welcome

2005-02-26T22:15:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my new blog about computers and programming. In this blog I will post some code and my thoughts on the programming world.