Computers
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This section of the web site used to be under the Hobbies section, but in March 2006 I decided that the subject of computers and software is so important to me that it was promoted from being a hobby to a top-level subject of the site.

A bit of history: I caught the computer bug at high school in 1974 writing Minitran (Mini-FORTRAN) programs on punch cards. From 1975-1983 I wrote, Algol, Honeywell EasyCoder assembler, COBOL and S/360 assembler. From 1983-1989 I was a systems programmer and assembler specialist on Fujitsu mainframes. From 1989-1993 I was contract systems programmer on Fujitsu and IBM mainframes. From 1993 to the present I have been writing software for Windows, Unix and OS/2 using COBOL, REXX, C, Borland and Microsoft C++, Mathematica, Java and Visual Basic. Since 2002 I have specialised in .NET development using whatever language is needed.

I used to have a section on my net.au site with curious anecdotes and pictures from my computing history, but that site is temporarily offline and I plan to move the history section over here when I get time. In the meantime, the Gallery section of this site contains many photos of the Computer Room and Screen Images spanning 15 years.

Development

Development Blog

My Development Blog page used to contain a list of "Stuff-Ups and Disasters" at Nancy Street, but I've converted it into a contents list with sub-pages related to general networking and development topics. There are some very technical discussions of deep matters which might be of interest to other software developers and systems administrators.

Free projects that might have practical uses and educational value

	Win32FileFinder	A utility class that finds files using the non-blocking FindFirstFile and related Win32 API calls. The class hides the complexity of the underlying API calls, handles and return codes. Callers simply listen to the FileFound event which returns managed FileInfo and DirectoryInfo objects. Callers can incrementally consume the find results and cancel the search.
	IconAssoc	A Forms application that manages the association between file extensions and the default icons associated with them. In pre-Vista versions of Windows you can use to the Explorer Tools > Folder Options > File Types dialog tab to manage associations and icons, but it mysteriously vanished in Vista. The application contains some interesting Registry and Shell API calls that might of interest to upcoming developers.
	SqlFinder	A utility library that uses UDP broadcasts to asynchronously find all SQL Server databases within the network horizon. Included are various interesting test projects and the underlying library that sends and receives UDP packets.
	randplot	A Forms application that plots random numbers generated by a variety of standard and famous algorithms. You can plug-in your own random generator variables to see how they perform. See also: Hobbies - Random Numbers. See also the similar stringhash project which plots the distribution of String GetHashCode results.
	csutylib	A library that has slowly collected all of the utility code I have needed over the years. The library is therefore a bit jumbled, but it may contain some code tricks that will be useful to developers of all levels of expertise.
	Boxes	A piece of simple animated computer art created with Silverlight 3 . A grid of coloured boxes are rotationally disturbed by mouse motion. This application has been very popular on the official Silverlight Gallery web site.
	hypno	A hypnotic Silverlight demonstration app that uses the CompositionTarget.Rendering event to animate some coloured circles around a Canvas playing field.
	ResourceLib	An experimental library that uses Interop to read and parse the resources in a Win32 PE image. A Forms application is included that uses the library to create a resource browser and a bulk Icon extractor utility.
	ngrep	A .NET command line utility that searches text files for strings using regular expressions. Many optional switches can control behaviour. Microsoft provide the findstr utility, but this simple home-grown command still seems to be more powerful and I use it a lot.

Larger applications and libraries

	Infrastructure	An essay about how I created a library of commonly needed "services" that can be used from .NET Forms applications and ASP.NET applications.
	Topaz	Topaz is an application for browsing and manipulating the Nancy Street Library Database. When it reaches a suitable quality level I will publish an installer so anyone can evaluate it. It uses a SQL Compact database to keep the install footprint small.
	NTag	NTag is a general-purpose library for manipulating the "tags" in audio files. NTag uses a plug-in architecture to support arbitrary tag file formats. The only working plug-in at the moment is one for ID3 tagged mp3 files which implements a significant subset of the ID3 V1, V2.2, V2.3 and V2.4 specification. A plug-in reader of wma files is provided, but it doesn't update wma files yet.
	Onyx	A Windows .NET Forms application which allows efficient viewing and bulk editing of tagged audio files. Version 5 is now available for testing and works very well with ID3 tags usually found in mp3 files. Onyx internally calls the NTag library to perform the tag manipulation.

Other old miscellaneous projects and curios

	Signwriter	A Silverlight 2 application that demonstrates how you could potentially "build a product order" interactively on a web page. This was written before many Silverlight controls were available.
	stringhash	A playaround Forms application that compares the distribution and behaviour of string hashing algorithms. See also: Hobbies - Random Numbers.
	duplib	An experimental library and driver Forms application that scans the file system for duplicate files. Not fully completed, but working tolerably well.
	Screen Saver	A Win32 C++ application screen saver that creates geometric and mathematical patterns using random numbers.
	optlib	Deprecated - See the notes on the page.
	snklib	Deprecated - See the notes on the page.
	grepf	A .NET command line utility that searches text files for strings using regular expressions and then copies or moves the files containing matches.
	nrename	A .NET command line utility for bulk file renaming. Very powerful and very dangerous in untrained hands. The command requires an understanding of regular expressions.
	nvarcmd	A .NET command line utility that issues commands with variables substituted at runtime. Very useful in batch files.
	resxtract	A .NET Command line utility to extract binary resources from xml resource (resx) files and write them out to separate files. This facility is somewhat redundant now that Visual Studio 2005 (and 2008) can can use links to binary files rather than embedding them inside XML.

Web Applications

These web applications will probably not be of interest to the general public, but they are presented here just in case they're needed for demonstrations or to show my friends.

	Photo Database	A simple web interface to the Nancy Street photo library database. You can find photos by category, subject and other search criteria.
	Music Search	This single web page "quick search" facility was created in November 2003 so visitors could quickly search the Nancy Street music database for artists, titles or keywords that interest them.
	Monitor	A replacement web monitor has arrived. The old one one used a web service and was quite outdated. The new application is a single-page ASP.NET 2.0 application, but it uses a background thread to resolve the IP addresses of visitors and present them as pop-up links.
	Topaz	UNDER CONSTRUCTION -- A web application to browse the Nancy Street database of music, video and books.

Java Applets

These Java Applets popup in secondary browser windows. Although I've been writing Java since 1996 and spent 2 years writing enterprise Java integration systems, these very old and tiny applets are the only remaining evidence of my Java skills. I think the Random Fun and Polynomials applets still look quite attractive many years after their creation.

	Random Fun	The first Java applet I wrote back in 1996, and it's still working all these years later. The Random Numbers hobby page explains the origins of this applet that plays with random numbers. The applet was eventually converted into a Windows Screen Saver. Source code: randfun.java, randcnvs.java.
	Polynomials	See the Polynomials hobby page for an explanation of the origins of this applet. You can plot polynomials up to degree five (quintic) by adjusting the coefficients of the terms. A contour plot can be generated of the abs value of the polynomial in the complex plane. Source code: poly.java.
	Alien Shootup	A crude but completely working "shoot the evil alien monster with a mouse click" game. See the Shootup page for more details. The flashing images of evil aliens are quite nice (can you recognise where they are from?). Don't shoot the good guys!

History

Due to bookshelf congestion following the Nancy Street Rennovations in late 2004, thousands of magazines and books were sitting in boxes in the carport for almost 3 years and it was decided to have a huge purge of all worthless paper. Over a period of several months, the paper is gradually disposed of via the regular Friday morning council garbage collection system. In the purge went stacks of magazines like National Geographic, Time, and Astronomy, as well as many PC magazines and duplicate Scientific American issues. I had lived with some of the Fujitsu (Facom) computer manuals for so long that I took photos of the covers for sentimental reasons. Click the thumbnails below to popup 800x533 enlargements of the covers of the manuals taken on the days they were dumped.