So, a few days ago, a friend of mine complained about not being able to rename the title captions of his windows. You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Well, the main reason is for code development. At the company I used to work at, we used an IDE called IAR. While for the most part, it is decent, when a person loads more than one workspace when debugging multiple chips, the IAR windows are all named the same thing, and so it gradually becomes more frustrating as more and more IAR instances are started.
My friend wanted a quick and dirty way to rename windows. I googled for an app, but there didn’t seem to be any “free” utilities that did this. Being the ex-windows API geek I am (from messing with vb5/6 in the old-days), I decided I’d give it a with. Fortunately, I found a great codeproject project to start as a base. Turns out the project has been done quite well (at least to my liking). I believe credit should be given where it’s due, and so I will simply highlight the minor changes I made to modify the project to make it change window titles in addition to hiding/showing windows.
To make the little app more useable, I’ve added a hotkey for editing the title of the current window (Alt+F2). It should be configurable from the menu. My friend has tried it and it seems to work. For the time being, I’ll upload the binary and source. There aren’t really any real comments as it’s pretty much the code project source with about a page’s worth of code modifications and additions.
Modifications:
In summary, I simply added in the SetWindowText api function and added an extra hot-key. I also modified the interface code to allow people to rename windows; however it seemed cumbersome so I added a hot-key feature, which seems to work for most of my friend. I guess I’m getting a little lazy, especially since most of the code is not mine, so I probably won’t even bother to paste the bits of code I did write. I believe it’s pretty clear, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
Download: Windows_Hider_Renamer.zip
This is a simple application that can search the online music service Ruckus and download Ruckus tracks via a GUI interface instead of a web browser. It was created mainly for the IMPORT feature which attempts to traverse the previous Rhapsody playlists and re-download the DRM-ed files. The motivation behind this is that Berkeley decided to cancel the Rhapsody 20$ a year deal and instead use Ruckus. Ruckus seems to currently have less features and a somewhat smaller subset of selection of songs, but i’ve been able to recover a good 75% using just the import feature of my music library so I’m quite satisified. (Note I made back in 2005, but the last time I tried in 2007 it did seem to still work.)
Known problems:
- Not all songs/albums/artists are downloaded: This is because of different naming conventions between rhapsody and ruckus. I’ve tried as best I can to determine the voodoo differences. Currently Ruckus seems to like to cutoff the ends of long Album names. i. e. “Space between Us – extended” becomes “Space between Us – …”. However there does not seem to be a standard number of characters that it cuts off at, so I can not programmically fix it.
- Lack of other search features: I’m lazy. Ask me for source, I’d be glad to give it to you under certain conditions.
Download:Binary
This project/combine solves the classic IQ Testing Peg Game. Of course, what my code does, is show that your IQ doesn’t need to be that high to solve the darned puzzle. The method is simple. It uses a recursive algorithm to simply try out ALL, and i mean ALL, of the possibilities. Realizing that the dumb 15 peg puzzle is symmetrical and so forth could’ve saved a lot of possibilities with a Board comparison of some sort. But I figured that 15 pegs = 13 moves or something, with a max of 4 possible moves per empty peg. At most, even with mathematical combinations, the answer should be found quite quickly by my laptop of 1.6 Ghz Intel Mobile. So in the end, it did work out, quite quickly, probably because of the symmetry and such.
Donwload: Binary and Source
This program takes in images and outputs pdf files screen size. The idea was to use this program to annotate or comment on pages of books people have scanned in for studying purposes. This is a great way to organize and find information by scanning pages from chapters, so you don’t have to flip through a 100pg chapter to find one stinky formula or graph. It is advised one uses a desktop search utility or something to search through the text of pdf files. Personally, I have found MSN desktop search to be the best, not because I love Microsoft software, but simply because it allows you to index only one folder, and it doesn’t start indexing your whole darn hard drive right away. It also has plugins to search text in pdf files. If I have time, I’ll finish writing up my equivalent search utility which searchs html,doc,odc,and pdf files, including annotations, which isn’t that hard since ITEXT has now fixed a bug in reading annotations.
Download:Binary