Operation Noble Email

Yesterday I went and worked on computers that are destined to be used by family members of those who are on active duty.

I found that what they were spending the most time doing was repetitive, and that could easily be automate with AutoIt3. Today I've been programming with AutoIt3. Trying to get it so that you just put in a CD, and the installation happens automatically. One of the biggest obstacles was getting it so that if the installation program requires a reboot, that the installation can continue once the computer is rebooted.

I did this by having an ini file placed inside of c:\windows which keeps track of what has been done so far. One of the major benefits of this paradigm is that I can have the disk automatically ejected. I also have it so that if someone puts the disk back in, it doesn't try and reinstall any thing, it just ejects the disk.

Operation Noble Email

Games powered from the TV

Today I modified my sisters TV so that she could plug her video games into the TV without needing to keep putting in new batteries.

It consists of a cheap power supply from Radio Shack, and a size M coaxial panel mount connecter, on the Tv side. On the game side there is a cord that is the same length as the RCA connecter cable. On the Tv end of the cable is a size M connecter that goes into the connecter on the Tv. The other end of the cable goes into the game, near where the RCA cable goes into the game.

One of my future projects will have to be modifing it so that it will turn off when the tv is off. I think this will be an easy thing to do, there is an LED that is on only when the tv is on. I have a solid state relay that uses 1.2 volts for the control voltage, which happens to be in the range of voltages for LEDs.

What I don't like about C\C++

I think that most programming errors stem from the computer language that is used. I mean one of the commonest errors is buffer overrun, which is easy to accidently create with C\C++, but can be done in other languages when you use pointers. Also this has caused something I don't like about Operating Systems, that when you give a system subroutine a string there must be a terminating null. When more modern languages store the length of the string with the pointer, which means you can call a function with a section of a string without creating a new string.

Another thing I don't like about the C\C++ language(s) is the necessary usage of macros to work around an inefective language.

The thing that I really don't like about C\C++ is that it is basically the only choice for low level operations.

D + Perl6 = DP6

I am thinking about designing a computer language that has many of the core design decisions of D and Perl6. To come up with a language that would be more statically typed than Perl6, but be able to do some of the dynamically typed tricks of Perl6.

The reason I have thought about this is I have been programming in Perl5 for a while now, and I like the freedom it gives me as a programmer, but nobody would likely use it to create a kernel. I als have been programming in D, which would be great to create a kernel, but I wouldn't want to it to be the language I program on a daily basis.