Computers & Programming

Maintaining old code is what I do at work most of the time. If there is a new feature to be added to the product, there will still be a large amount of existing code that needs to be waded through to get to the places where the…

It was an easy fix once I read a few forum posts that were slightly related. Paths to an old Windows NT 4.0 DDK were specified before the standard library paths and it caused the wrong libs to get linked in for 64 bit builds. I don’t really…

I have installed Visual Studio on two Windows 7 x64 machines. One has Visual Studio 2008 on it. The only for this post is to rant about Microsoft. I created a new console project, accepted the defaults for everything in the new project wizard, and built it. This…

I’ve been messing around with that evolution simulation code. There’s a few things in the code that I don’t yet understand but that’s common when trying to understand the inner workings of code you didn’t write. For instance, some values related to behavior rules are initialized using random…

Thanks to Andrej Karpathy, I have code that simulates evolution. He wrote code that has a population of herbivores and carnivores and they have inputs and behaviors that are complex and can evolve. The physical attributes cannot evolve and each creature is fixed with sign and hearing and…

A few days ago, I bought a used AMD Phenom 720 x3. That’s a three core processor which seems just a little odd in a world where everything comes in powers of 2. The Phenom II core is supposed to be 0% to 25% faster than the Athlon…

I rotated my monitor to the portrait orientation for a few years. It was wonderful. It’s hard to understand why anyone who edits any type of documentation, including code, would want a landscape oriented monitor. Now I have a 24″ widescreen and it’s just too dang tall when…

The ribbon bar code that comes with MFC in Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t work right. Well, it certainly isn’t exactly the same as the ribbon bar that is part of office 2010. Maybe that’s how Microsoft wants it but I can’t find any way to get it to…

First, designing a user interface has almost nothing to do with writing software. There are software limitations that affect the design but other than that, the underlying code and data structures should not be considered until after the user interface is fully designed. I ran into this issue…

This is some Microsoft code in an example program: CMFCRibbonColorButton* pBtn1 = new CMFCRibbonColorButton(ID_RIBBON_CBTN_1, _T(“&Simple”), TRUE, 0, 0); pBtn1->SetAlwaysLargeImage(); pBtn1->SetDefaultCommand(FALSE); pPanel1->Add(pBtn1); CMFCRibbonColorButton* pBtn2 = new CMFCRibbonColorButton(ID_RIBBON_CBTN_2, _T(“Simple with Options”), TRUE, 1, 1); pBtn2->SetAlwaysLargeImage(); pBtn2->SetDefaultCommand(FALSE); pBtn2->EnableAutomaticButton(_T(“&Automatic”), RGB(0, 0, 0)); pBtn2->EnableOtherButton(_T(“&More Colors…”), _T(“More Colors”)); pPanel1->Add(pBtn2); CMFCRibbonColorButton* pBtn3 = new CMFCRibbonColorButton(ID_RIBBON_CBTN_3,…