The Way Of Coding

Recent Articles

25 of the most recent articles…

  • Fixing code examples on this site.

    This website was started in 2010. Before that I was writing articles on a Blogspot blog that I had integrated into the website. While there are only around 85 articles currently on the site, the article data has been through a lot. Text is generally pretty easy to upkeep, but programming code appears to be…

  • ChatGPT is a new (and faster) way to do programming!

    Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview”. One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand…

  • Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

    I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL…

  • Printing to file in Linux WINE

    I noticed that this post has been sitting as a draft since 2011. At this point I have no idea if it’s useful or what I was even doing, but I might as well make it public in case someone can find it helpful! So I’ve been trying to get one of those PDF print…

  • GPL-ed my text compare software!

    Another piece of software I’m opening up by licensing it with GPLv3. This application allows you to compare text files with a focus on speed and handling larger files through temporary file buffering. Visit the GitHub page here. I also have the first release compiled with Visual Studio’s publish tool if you don’t want to…

  • GPL-ed My 2D Tile Based Map Editor

    As I’ve started to consider getting back into computer work, I’m trying to refresh my memory and grow further. Today I released, with the GPLv3 license, a 2D tile based map editor I wrote in C# WinForms. If you are into software and game development this might be of interest to you! The video doesn’t…

  • Made an app to quickly get short ebay affiliate links.

    This article will be more about concepts than code. I’m not sure how ebay, and indirectly Impact the affiliate network, feel about programmatic website interaction. I’m also writing this well after I had created a working version of the program, so I’m working off of what information I gather after the fact. At one point,…

  • Historic frequency based random lotto number generator.

    This example is a little program to generate random numbers based on historic lotto results. Each potential result pull is weighted based on past results. The full project is available on GitHub here. First, we need to store the historic data. In this case I use an instance of SortedDictionary. There is a possible range…

  • Updating the Raspberry PI GIT server.

    I took time to refresh my Raspberry PI GIT server. I am still using the v1 board, but with a few upgrades and modifications. It was more to streamline the entire package instead of performance upgrades. Changes:– I bought a half-height SD to Micro SD adapter. This makes it stick out less from the case.…

  • Adjusting Notepad++ to work with an ASP VBScript project.

    I have a large project in classic ASP, VBScript, and Javascript. It’s a hassle dealing with it because developer tools don’t support it that well or at all. I recently poked around the open source editor Notepad++ and got it adjusted to work decently well with the project. Check out Notepad++ on the official website…

  • Using Raphael the JavaScript graphics library.

    In this example, I go over a simple use of Raphael.js. It draws 4 boxes on the page and allows you to move and resize each independently. Here is the graphics library (licenses under the MIT license):https://dmitrybaranovskiy.github.io/raphael/ Here is my code on GitHub. The basic gist of it is to initialize the primary Raphael object…

  • C#: Using WebClient on CSV Formatted Stock Data

    In this example I wrote a program to pull historic stock data from the ticker “DIS” over the past 10 days from the current date (it will be less than 10 results because weekends don’t have data). I used the .NET Framework WebClient object to request and return the data as a string that I…

  • A simple classic VB code counter made in C#

    I made this simple application a while back when I needed to quote a project where I was tasked with converting a sizeable amount of classic Visual Basic code into the .NET Framework. This application I wrote allowed me to start my estimation so that I could tie a dollar amount to the work. There…

  • Android: Using the CountDownTimer class

    In this article I go over the Android SDK CountDownTimer class. It’s easy to use and gives you the ability to count for projects like a workout timer. In this case we are extending that class so that we can access the methods we need to make it work. Here is the code on GitHub.…

  • C#: Using the Background Worker to thread your application processing.

    In this article I go over using the background worker control in C# .NET Framework (Visual Studio 2015). This control allows you to easily do processing intensive tasks without locking up your interface thread. I use this a lot in winforms applications where I expect code to take any amount of time that the user…

  • Android: Working with Preferences and Settings

    In this article I go over using the built-in Android settings and preference system. I have a settings class as well as an activity that manages user input. A spinner is assigned the task of letting the user turn on or off a vibration feature. When the application is started again, the setting is accessed…

  • Javascript & HTML: Async Communication Prototype

    In this article I go over an asynchronous communication prototype I had made in straight Javascript that you use to POST to a server script and pass along the response to a Javascript function specified by the initial call to the prototype. The main benefit here is that you don’t need a full page refresh,…

  • Android: Basic game loop with scaled graphics.

    In this article I go over implementing a simple game loop with a custom view. The standard draw method is used with some timing checks so that we can get an approximately consistent refresh rate. This is a somewhat simple way to get started without having to use something OpenGL. The full source code is…

  • Android: Get the size of a custom view before display.

    When developing applications or simple games for Android where you are drawing or writing to a view, an issue arises upon startup of the view. In my case I had a game where I wanted to calculate screen tile size before the game view starts, but with most tutorials I had seen everything happened after…

  • Raspberry Pi GIT Server Notes

    Edit: I updated my RP GIT server and made more notes here. Here are my notes for setting up GIT on Raspberry Pi and using a Windows client (TortoiseGit). I’ve been using this little thing as a GIT server for around 5 months now and I love it. Here is the quick notes I took…

  • FXAA Shader Anti-aliasing in XNA 4.0 Winforms

    I had the challenge of trying to get some type of anti-aliasing in a project that uses the winforms method of XNA 4 that was being run on a laptop in REACH mode. My first step was figuring out a method to use. I found quite a few shader based methods available, but I could…

  • XNA 4.0 Red X Exceptions

    So I’m developing a windows application that uses XNA 4.0 embedded in a custom windows control. The main issue I have is when the code inside that embedded control errors out, the windows form and control result in a big red X across the control instead of stopping and going to the debugger so I…

  • Fixing WordPress Database Collation for Foreign Fonts

    I wanted to write Japanese in one of my wordpress blogs. The issue was that the encoding was in latin1. Here are the steps I used below. Keep in mind that this is a potentially dangerous modification where you could easily lose your data. Be careful and if you try this, you do it at…

  • First Android Application Released: River Water Level Stations

    Update: I gifted this code and basically the entire project with related software tools I had made to my friend who I was trying to start a business with after we decided to stop. The app is still active and available on the market under his account and not “CWSolver” anymore. A friend and I…

  • A little rant about Android SDK, Java, and Eclipse

    I don’t often rant nor say the work “sucks” very often. However as any programmer knows, some tools just frustrate you to no end. Java, the Android SDK, and the Eclipse IDE are something I need to use, but are frequently on my “sucky tools” list. I’ve used a lot of programming languages and tools…