Lifestyle, hobbies, work, rage…
Programming
Everything that belongs to programming… snippets, experiences, rage, you know.. the usual.
Optimization
Jan 6th
I needed to optimize a function for my neural network. How hard could it be? It’s only one function, and it’s <5 lines at that…
After spawning a huge thread, I’m left to wonder: why didn’t I continue learning ML after my functional languages class? Blargh!
Benchmarks after the break… More >
Windows XP Registry Hacks
Sep 25th
I finally graduate in about 2 months. However, much to my dismay, I have to finish my social volunteer work. No, I didn’t do anything weird – it’s just a graduation requisite. I’ve been working at my university’s computer division, so I’ve had to format anywhere between 4 and 15 laptops every day. Yes. Every. Single. Day.
Unfortunately, most of the laptops are Dell C610s – in other words, 1GHz, 256MB RAM and they’re running Windows XP. You can probably tell that it’s very fun to optimize each system. (I’m proud of myself, they run pretty nicely for the low specs they’re sporting…)
With this in mind, I decided to code a .NET 3.5 application (free, of course) that does the job for me and also manages to be fully extensible through the use of a text-based hack database.
If you’re interested in downloading it, give it a go here. Read more if you’re interested in some of the example hacks, as well as the database specification.
iBrainer
Sep 1st
Shameless plug:
iBrainer is now ready for public use. Feel free to give it a try, either on download.com or iBrainer.net
In a nutshell: fix your MP3 collection in a snap. No more Unknown Artist or fixing tags yourself.
I might be biased, but I use it all the time — and I’m loving it!
Unicode to DOS Filenames
Jan 26th
DOS is a pain. .NET doesn’t get along too well with DOS either, since everything .NET is Unicode – just like everything, actually.
How to change from Unicode (aka, Kanji characters) to DOS Filenames:
[DllImport("kernel32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)]
static extern uint GetShortPathName([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] string lpszLongPath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] StringBuilder lpszShortPath, uint cchBuffer);
public static string ToDOSPathName(String longName) {
StringBuilder shortNameBuffer = new StringBuilder(256);
uint bufferSize = (uint)shortNameBuffer.Capacity;
uint result = GetShortPathName(longName, shortNameBuffer, bufferSize);
return shortNameBuffer.ToString();
}
