I also love foobar2000.

-- Marcus Kwok

In a computational physics class I took, we used True Basic[^] to implement physics algorithms. It was OK in terms of using a BASIC-based language. It looks like it has a demo version you can download, but it terminates after 15 minutes of use. If you want to go the C++ route, You Can Do It! - A beginner's introduction to Computer Programming[^] by Francis Glassborow & Roberta Allen has a pretty positive review. I've never actually looked at the book so I can't give a personal endorsement.

-- Marcus Kwok

"Inflammable means flammable? What a country!" --Dr. Nick on The Simpsons

-- Marcus Kwok

I'm in the DC/Baltimore area, and a lot of the locals pronounce it "Warshington", and it really gets on my nerves. There is no 'r' in "Washington"! They also say "warsh" instead of "wash", as in, "I am going to warsh my clothes."

-- Marcus Kwok

I heard this song on the radio while I was helping my friend move: Trey Songz ft. Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy - "LOL Smiley Face"[^] (possibly some NSFW language) I was pretty disturbed.

-- Marcus Kwok

February 27 too!

-- Marcus Kwok

Yes, he gives his reasoning here: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#whitespace[^]

-- Marcus Kwok

Thanks for the PortMon tip, using the tool I was able to see that the machine was receiving what I had expected. It appeared that the values were being received properly, but then I found out that the software was expecting the data to be encoded differently than what I thought had to be sent. I also suspect that the terminal program only recognized ASCII encoding and not Baudot, so it was not able to decode the message into plain text. Thanks for your help. It seems that the ultimate solution to my problem is application-specific.

-- Marcus Kwok

Thanks for the tip. I looked at the PortMon tool and it looks like it might be very helpful in diagnosing what is going on. If I manage to get it working, I will post here for the archives.

-- Marcus Kwok

Can anybody help me in implementing a method to send 5-bit Baudot codes over a serial port? I have an application that must communicate with a piece of hardware that sends 5-bit Baudot data, so I am building a simulator to run on a different computer to send the same format data to our receiving PC for testing. The simulator is written in C# using .NET 2.0, so I am utilizing the System.IO.Ports.Serial interface. I can send and receive the data as 8-bit with no problems at all. The receiving PC has a serial card that does support 5-bit communications. In the implementation, I tried manually doing the encoding to Baudot and sending it as 8-bit using the trick given here: http://graffiti.virgin.net/ljmayes.mal/baud/baud.htm[^] (bitwise OR'ing each character with 0xE0 to set the 3 MSBs to 1, which should simulate sending multiple stop bits). However, on the receiving end, when I set it to 5 bits, I just get a bunch of boxes in the terminal output, and when I set it to 8 bits, I get gibberish characters. I'm not sure if I need to set the encoding to UTF8 or ASCII, or if it even makes a difference since I am using the SerialPort.Write() method that takes in a Byte[], offset, and length. I have tried setting it to both ways and it didn't work. Has anybody done anything like this before, or has any ideas on how to implement it? Thanks.

-- Marcus Kwok

Thanks for the suggestion; however, I forgot to mention in my original post that the keyboard and mouse will also be disconnected under normal use; they only get connected for maintenance.

-- Marcus Kwok

Well, it's kind of like a server room in that there will be a large amount of equipment in there, but I believe people will be working in there for a significant part of the time as well.

-- Marcus Kwok

Johannes, Thanks for your reply.

Johpoke wrote:

simply replacing a file with a large amount of data at certain intervals would work.

This probably would work, but my concern with this method is that it might contribute to the hard drive failing sooner than otherwise. In this application, the device is intended to be in service for many years with minimal user intervention. For the units that we are replacing with this new unit, the hard drives were the most common point of failure.

Johpoke wrote:

you could use Beep(int freq, int duration);

This method might be a little too intrusive/annoying for the people working in the room.

Johpoke wrote:

Or maybe you could use inpout32(); to control the binary outputs on a LPT/printer port, and then connect a LED and resistor to make it blink...

However, this idea is very interesting. Thanks for the pointer!

-- Marcus Kwok

I am working on an application service that will be running on a PC with no monitor attached to it. Is there a way to force the hard drive activity light to blink (maybe like 1 second on, then 1 second off) so that we can tell whether or not the service is running without attaching a monitor? The normal disk activity that occurs while the service is running happens so fast that the light just flickers so dimly that it is hard to see if it is even on. Thanks for any help, or pointers to resources that may be useful. The only things I could find from searching are people asking why their activity light constantly blinks.

-- Marcus Kwok

char is 1 byte, by definition. However, this byte may not be one octet (8 bits), so that the system uses e.g. 9-bit (rare) or 16-bit (used on some DSPs) "bytes".

-- Marcus Kwok

Rob Grainger wrote:

Similarly char is a character - this could be 8-bit or 16-bit. In C++, they tend (I've never seen an exception) to be 8-bit, but the standard doesn't actually rule it out.

Some DSPs use 16-bit chars. Also, some weird machines (maybe it was the PDP-11?) use 9-bit chars. The standard just says that char is at least 8 bits.

-- Marcus Kwok

Pete O`Hanlon wrote:

Romanes eunt domus

Not knowing Latin, I read that as, "Romans eat donuts" :)

-- Marcus Kwok

Well, it's not a book, but there is an open-source project called Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)[^] that may be informative.

-- Marcus Kwok

You could try Vongo[^] (Video On the Go), and I also hear that Netflix[^] is now allowing you to watch movies online as well.

-- Marcus Kwok

I second the recommendation for foobar2000[^]. I used to use Winamp for visualizations, but now that there is a MilkDrop plugin for foobar, I no longer use Winamp.

-- Marcus Kwok