Programming

So, I was learning a scripting language awhile back to help automate and secure some things with our public computers. The scripting language is for use with an application called "AutoIT", which is, well, both a compiler and run-time for the scripts themselves.

I needed to detect if an application window was present on the screen, and if it was, take appropriate action. So, looking at the following code documentation:

WinExists
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Checks to see if a specified window exists.
WinExists ( "title" [, "text"] )

I wanted to make sure that things were working as they should, so my test for this was as follows:
If 0 == WinExists("Please login.") Then MsgBox(4096, "Shutdown", "LOGIN FOUND! WinExists 1."); Else MsgBox(4096, "No Login", "No login found: WinExists 1."); EndIf

The problem, which I was unaware of, is that I apparently can't make the test (value) comparison in the manner that I did. The proper way to use this method was as follows:
If WinExists("Please login.") Then ; ...or... If Not WinExists("Please login.") Then

What a bummer.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

An online friend asked me for some help in hiding all empty columns for every sheet within an Excel workbook. I figured I'd share the code:

(also on pastebin)
Sub HideEmptyCols() ' Deletes all empty columns on the active worksheet Dim iCol As Integer Dim wsSheet As Worksheet For Each wsSheet In Worksheets wsSheet.Select With wsSheet.UsedRange For iCol = .Column + .Columns.Count - 1 To 1 Step -1 If IsEmpty(Cells(65536, iCol)) And IsEmpty(Cells(1, iCol)) Then If Cells(65536, iCol).End(xlUp).Row = 1 Then Columns(iCol).Hidden = True End If Next iCol End With Next wsSheet End Sub

Perhaps someone else will find it useful for some odd reason.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

There was recently a nice posting from PHPDeveloper.org linking to an article by Florian Eibeck, where on his blog he discusses some solutions to these extremely fun situations.

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/342-Multilingual-Websites-with-PHP.html

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Disclaimer: These are primarily notes for myself as I get accustomed to CakePHP's (v1.2) authentication and ACL. I've been building a website and wanted to finally make use of CakePHP before I start using it for the library's CMS. A CMS is a large undertaking and I don't want to go into it "cold-turkey", so I came up with some side-project to help me understand the framework a bit better. All in all, it truly is an extremely rapid development tool.

I decided not to go with ExpressionEngine or Drupal simply because I'd still have to take time to learn those systems and make modules or extensions within those languages - and there's no guarantee I'd be able to do what I'd need to do with them. If I build it myself, it would take just about the same amount of time with Cake. Anyway, to continue...

Continue reading "CakePHP Auth Component"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Those of you looking towards "widgets" and cross-platform application development, but are primarily web developers with some background (or none) of programming with a desktop application, perhaps you should take a look at Adobe AIR (formerly known as Apollo). It allows you to create rich, cross-platform applications using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript! ...and, technically, I suppose you could leave out the CSS and JS part of that and it would still run...but what's the fun in that? It can be integrated into a Flash application, or a Flex application - but it does not have to be.

If you're seemingly interested in the technology, I went through and found some interesting links on the subject (read: tutorials) that will hopefully help to get you (me) started. Okay...so I did it because I'm interested and this blog can serve as an access point for me rather than using my Bookmarks as a temporary storage medium. Whatever. I was looking for simple tutorials, so I ignored anything with an "adobe.com" or "ibm.com" (developer works) domain, so if you'd like more when you dive head first, you might want to look to those resources instead of the ones I've provided below.

1. Pete Freitag - newest one (by published date) that I could find
2. NOT A TUTORIAL - Get the AIR SDK here
3. Jonothan Snook on 2007's 24 Ways: Christmas is in the AIR - a simple to-do list tutorial
4. AOL Developer Network - Part 1 of a Series - Simple "Hello World" type page with a self-signed certificate
5. Jonathan Snook (again) releases Snoto Foto source code to help you learn! - No tutorial, but I'd imagine it's commented well

Enjoy! I hope I will!

Update: Make sure you've updated to the latest Sun Java JRE package or you might get some really, really odd and weird undocumented errors when trying to compile!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski