Posts by wally_lawless

Yeah, the nameing for these things is a real pain. They're all the same deal. My main recommdation: don't get any of the fat ones (fat as in thicker/wider than the USB connection itself). Reason being, most USB ports on PCs and laptops are recessed at least a little bit, if your USB drive is much thicker than the port then the connector might not fit all the way into the port and you'll have to carry around as USB extension to get the damned thing to work, a pain in the ass, trust me!

I've had great luck with Sandisk and Kingston and they're priced very well. Most of them now offer some sort of encryption system, be careful with these if any of your potential target PCs isn't yours (ie work) as the software usually has to be installed on each PC you use the key on which you might not have access to do on somebody else's PC.

Just some ideas.

Hey Dortz,

Not sure where you're buying your USB drives, but you're getting ripped off! I'm in Canada and if I go into a Best Buy for $40 I can get a 512mb USB key, 1 gig for $69.99. As usual, I would recomment getting as much as you can reasonably afford, I highly doubt that once you've got truly portable storage at your fingertips that you'll only use it strictly for your manuscript.

Just my thoughts....

Hey,

Sorry for the delay, haven't been around much for the last week. I like the idea you came up with. Cross-platform development is a good challenge, lots of possibilities to think of.

As for your options for development platforms, regardless of what you decide to use, you're going to want to make sure it can be built into a standard executable program for your target operating systems. Requiring that your users go out and download wxWidgets in order to run your program will automatically reduce the number of users that use your application.

Good luck with the app, let me know if there's anything I can help with

Ok.... I know you're new to this so I wont go to hard on ya....

There's a couple of problems going on here, for your error though, your code is trying to apply an else to a while loop which just isn't possible.

Formatting your code will help a lot, take a look:

while( i < lineCount) {
	current = 1;
	while (nList[i-1] = nList[i]&& i < lineCount) {
		current++;
		i++;
                // you had a semicolon(;) ending the following line, big oops
		if (current > highest){
			highest = current;
			arrayposition = i;
			multiMode = false;
		} else if(current == highest) {
		        multiMode = true;
		}
		i = i + 1;
	}

	if (multiMode == true){
        	return -1;
        }
	else {
                return arrayposition;
        }
}

That semicolon on the end of your if line basically ended the IF before it had done anything, therefore the code on the lines after it was being executed no matter what the conditions were. When it got to the else the compiler was litterally confused because it couldn't find the IF you were talking about. I didn't change the code much else besides that, just added some braces for clarity.

I've wondered about this for quite a while now and thought I would post a question. How do you Software Engineers/Developers keep track of the knowledge you have gained from working on software projects? I suppose I'm relatively new to development (< 5 years) but have completed a number of projects in the last months I'm finding myself forgetting how I did things in a previous project when I see a similar problem present itself.

I would like to know how some of you more experienced developers keep track of your old solutions. I was thinking about setting up a Wiki, but that would be a lot of manual maintenance. That is of course unless any of you know of a Wiki tool that can self-generate pages from source code?

Hey, there's another project idea...

Thanks for the feedback

Read This and post what you've got so far. Sounds like a homework assignment to me, isn't the whole idea of going to school so that you can LEARN something? Nothing is easy the first time you do it.

Ok, that information is good. What are you familiar with software wise? For a project of this level you might want to stick with something you're at least familiar with so that your time is spent building the solution, not learning the tools to build the solution at the same time. Do you have any examples of projects that you're classmates are attempting? Not to copy, but that would at least help narrow down the acceptable scope for your project.

Curious, does your solution have to have the entire alphabet in a single pic.bmp file? If not it's actually a pretty easy solution. You could use an associative array (follow this example) where the key is the alpabet letter and the value is the path to the image for that letter. You could then go through your supplied text and pass each character into the get() method for the array and the returned image path onto your GUI (not sure what you're using for output so I wont assume).

Let me know if that helps out at all.

What are the criteria for the project? Are you working on this on your own or in a group? Do you need to have a company sponsor the project? Let me know the details and I might be able to help you with some ideas.

I'd definitely start doing some searching on using the recovery console. Otherwise I'd be looking at installing XP overtop of itself without a format, backing up your data then doing a clean re-install. It could potentially be a hardware problem, bad memory etc. If a re-install works then you've effectively ruled that out.

Well, I've never heard of a computer store that wont let you return something if it doesn't fix your problem.... That is as long as you don't fry the new one as well....

Sounds like your mobo may have been shorted out. I'm guessing you're using front USB ports to connect your player? I've seen it happen a couple of times, especially with cheap cases where the connectors for the front USB ports aren't labeled correctly or at all and connecting a device has shorted out the board.

You mentioned that the light is on on the mobo, what colour is it? If it's red or orange that's pretty much a sure sign your board is done, if it's green there's still a chance, sometimes.

If your CPU was dead your board would still fire up when you short the pins, it would just beep a POST failure. From what you've said so far sounds like your mobo is toast, sorry to say.

Has he tried safe mode? If so, might want to take a look at the recovery console on the XP install CD, can't remember the commands though, but Google could help you with that part.

Just guessing, but are you using C/C++ for this? What kind of help do you need? What's not making sense? I don't mind helping with homework as long as it looks like you've made an attempt at it first.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Some more information on your problem as well as some code snippets would make it a lot easier to figure out what's going on. What exactly do you mean by 'visual style is lost'. Do the controls render as flat? Does your application produce an error? Also make sure you're not running windows in Classic mode, that disables styles no matter what your code says.

Please post back with some more information and I'm sure we can get this straightened out for you.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Good luck with that, if I'm not mistaken that's a DOS based app.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Ok, I know you've tried moving the graphics card, but have you tried moving the monitor to another PC? Have you done the obvious checking of the cables, both power and the pins in the d-plug? I have seen monitors go 'bad' in shorter time frames than this so it could be legitimately dead. I wouldn't recommend taking it apart, they never end up being the same anyway, if it survives the surgery.

So, try moving the monitor to another PC and using a different power source then let me know how it works out.

Wallywww.power-coder.net

I've been using MySQL with VB.net for awhile now. Basically all you need is a data provider for MySQL and you can treat it the same as you would a SQL Server database. In fact, if you design your app right it would be trivial to switch to whatever type of database you decide to use. Take a look here
for more information and to download a free data provider for use with MySQL.

Post back if you have any problems.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

What is the SQL query in the code that is on your local PC? Are you using some sort of design tool to build your app? More code from where your generating this query would be helpful.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Wow, good job on picking a first project! That actually sounds pretty cool. wxPython shouldn't make things too difficult for you either. Good luck! Would love to see a demo when it's finished.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

I would also recommend taking a look at the wxPython Wiki, this is where I learned most of what I needed to get started and the content is pretty good.

I'll be posting some examples soon once I've got my programs complete and working.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

I just checked out my system the file is installed in the following location:

C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\wx-2.6-msw-ansi\wxPython the actual file name is _wx.py which might explain why you couldn't find it.

Shouldn't make a difference for when you're writing your code though, you don't need to know where the file is, the Python interpreter takes care of that for you.

Welcome to the wonderful world of wxPython, what's your first project going to be?

Wally
www.power-coder.net

I would also recommend a solid foundation in physics if you're going to have your objects interacting with each other (which is hard to not have in OpenGL). You'll want to be fairly comfortable with pointers as well since they (through advanced data types like linked lists) are often used to manage the objects in your virtual world.

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Here's the URL to get the wxPython binaries for WinXP link current version is 2.6.1.0 and will work with Python 2.4. Just make sure that the Python 2.4 version is one that you download and you're set.

It's pretty powerful once you get used to it, have fun!

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Hey everybody, first new thread for me on this forum.

Just noticed that there's no posts here involving wxPython, I'm just curious to hear if anybody knows why that might be? Anyway, I've got some projects in the works that use it and I'll be happy to post some code once I've got them running.

Nice group of forums here, pretty active too.

Later,

Wally
www.power-coder.net

Hey, checked out your site, it's a neat idea, but I am wondering something. Why would you use a forum to do this? A Wiki would be a much more dynamic and interesting way to grow a story. It would be possible to have links from say character names to their bio and backstory, same for locations and events. You could practically build an entire universe.

Just a thought, but I like the idea.

Wally Lawless
www.power-coder.net