Hey! Roomie isn’t dead either!
February 11th, 2010After completely rewriting FRI from scratch (and renaming it Arcadia), I have decided to rewrite my other big project, Roomie. This absolutely needed to be done. Roomie had some good functionality, but I had hit the limit for its extensibility. Roomie’s engine was a monolithic blob of ugly code, with very little room to make it into a full scripting language with features like custom functions and if statements. My redesign of Roomie, which I call RoomieRemake for now, is completely expandable, is properly multithreaded, and has all of the potential to be a robust, featurefull scripting language. Just like Arcadia, I am proud to declare that RoomieRemake shares absolutely no code with its predecessor. Not even a single copy/pasted line of code! More on that in a bit, but first an end scenario: 
Roomie Mobile Update
January 28th, 2010Remember Roomie? Today I updated Roomie Mobile. This version includes a second dimming option and more touch-friendly buttons. Check it out in the video below.
FRI is dead, but its spirit lives on
October 11th, 2009It’s been almost a year since I’ve updated FRI, my ROM library program. FRI is now officially dead, but not completely gone. Since I started working on FRI I have gained a lot more programming experience. I started writing the thing when I was still a C# novice. Between then and now I have written an elaborate intranet site in ASP.NET, debugged and written C++ applications, and have learned the true value of a regular expression. I look at FRI’s code now and am a little grossed out. I decided that if I was going to make any more improvements to FRI, I’d have to start over and rearchitect the whole thing. The name of this new project: Arcadia.
With Arcadia I have committed to research everything that I suspect will make for a better design. Because of this, Archaida’s backend is shaping up to be elegant and efficient. I researched how to do inheritance in C#, and have used that to save myself from writing a lot of code. This has drastically decreased development and testing time. I learned how to use basic regular expressions over the summer, and have used them in some areas (more on that later). For the frontend I decided to switch from WinForms to WPF. All I can say is that databinding is epic, and I still have a lot more to learn about it.
Here’s a shot of Arcadia in its current form:
Roomie is getting more powerful!
August 3rd, 2009I’ve been making more improvements to Roomie (which I still haven’t released). Now a RoomieScript can send a RoomieScript to another computer. This makes collaborated scripts much easier. The script below gets two of my computers, the Home Server and Desktop Computer, to wake me up in the morning. The Home Server handles the Z-Wave stuff—turning the lights on and off—and the Desktop Computer handles the music.
C++ How-To: Print a Buffer
August 1st, 2009I was recently writing a command line application in C++ that parses raw binary. I thought it would be really nice to be able to print different parts of memory to the screen as the program runs. I’ve included well-commented code and a usage example.
1: //needed for printf()
2: #include <stdio.h>
3:
4: //needed for strlen()
5: #include <string.h>
6:
7: // prints the contents of memory in hex and ascii.
8: // starts at the location of the pointer "start"
9: // prints "length" bytes of memory.
10: void Print_Memory(const unsigned char * start, unsigned int length)
11: {
12: //create row, col, and i. Set i to 0
13: int row, col, i = 0;
14:
15: //iterate through the rows, which will be 16 bytes of memory wide
16: for(row = 0; (i + 1) < length; row++)
17: {
18: //print hex representation
19: for(col = 0; col<16; col++)
20: {
21: //calculate the current index
22: i = row*16+col;
23:
24: //divides a row of 16 into two columns of 8
25: if(col==8)
26: printf(" ");
27:
28: //print the hex value if the current index is in range.
29: if(i<length)
30: printf("%02X", start[i]);
31: //print a blank if the current index is past the end
32: else
33: printf(" ");
34:
35: //print a space to keep the values separate
36: printf(" ");
37: }
38:
39: //create a vertial seperator between hex and ascii representations
40: printf(" ");
41:
42: //print ascii representation
43: for(col = 0; col<16; col++)
44: {
45: //calculate the current index
46: i = row*16+col;
47:
48: //divides a row of 16 into two coumns of 8
49: if(col==8)
50: printf(" ");
51:
52: //print the value if it is in range
53: if(i<length)
54: {
55: //print the ascii value if applicable
56: if(start[i]>0x20 && start[i]<0x7F) //A-Z
57: printf("%c", start[i]);
58: //print a period if the value is not printable
59: else
60: printf(".");
61: }
62: //nothing else to print, so break out of this for loop
63: else
64: break;
65: }
66:
67: //create a new row
68: printf("\n");
69: }
70: }
71:
72: // Prints the contents of memory in hex and ascii.
73: // Prints the memory between and including the
74: // two "end1" and "end2" pointers.
75: void Print_Memory(const unsigned char * end1, const unsigned char * end2)
76: {
77: if(end2 >= end1)
78: Print_Memory(end1, end2 - end1 + 1);
79: else
80: Print_Memory(end2, end1 - end2 + 1);
81: }
82:
83: int main(int argc, char **args)
84: {
85: const char start [] = "hi there! You're looking at me in memory!";
86: const char * end = start + (int)strlen(start);
87:
88: Print_Memory((unsigned char *)start, (unsigned char *)end);
89:
90: return 0;
91: }