I caught a butterfly!
August 30th, 2009I was outside (*ghasp!*), and I saw this little guy fluttering around on the patio. To my surprise he let me pick him up, so I snapped a shot quickly before he flew away into the sun.
Playlist 2009-08-21
August 21st, 2009Sometimes I’ll build a random playlist of music that I feel like listening to at the moment. It’s cool go back months later and rediscover what I liked then. I’ll save these playlists in a format “YYYY-MM-DD” so that when sorted alphabetically they are listed chronologically, which makes it easy to select an “era.” But enough of that.
Today’s playlist is pretty long, so I thought I would write a little program to format a Windows Media Playlist file into an HTML ordered list. I’ll polish that and post the source and executable later (/nerd), but for now here’s today’s playlist:
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: }