Once my dev environment was all setup again I went to set up my project only to find that somewhere along the way I had lost my generic all purpose Makefile, so after taking a little bit of time out to re-teach myself how to write a Makefile – from the best source that I know of – I recreated a makefile very similar to my original generic makefile. In an effort to not lose it again I thought I would share it with the world:

APPNAME = test
SRCDIR = src
OBJDIR = obj
BINDIR = bin

SRC = $(shell find $(SRCDIR) | grep .cc)
OBJ = $(patsubst $(SRCDIR)/%.cc, $(OBJDIR)/%.o, $(SRC))

.PHONEY: all clean init

all: clean $(APPNAME)

clean:
	rm -rfd $(OBJDIR) $(BINDIR)

init:
	mkdir $(OBJDIR) $(BINDIR)
	$(foreach DIR, $(patsubst $(SRCDIR)/%, $(OBJDIR)/%, $(shell find $(SRCDIR)/* -type d)), mkdir $(DIR))

$(APPNAME): init $(OBJ)
	$(CXX) -o $(BINDIR)/$(APPNAME).exe $(OBJ)

$(OBJDIR)/%.o: $(SRCDIR)/%.cc
	$(CXX) -c $< -o $@

To use this makefile you will need to run it from a POSIX like environment so it should work fine on Mac OSX and Linux but on Windows you will need something like MSYS or Cygwin, personally I use MSYS but that’s just a preference thing.

This makefile is intended to be a drop in start point for any C++ project, though it isn’t had to modify it for other languages. The following is the project structure that the makefile is designed to work with:

• Project Root/
  • makefile
  • src/
    • source_file1.cc
    • source_file2.cc
    • subfolder1/
      • source_file3.cc
    • subfolder2/
      • source_file4.cc
      • source_file5.cc

It will pickup all of the source files in the subdirectories eliminating the need for a recursive makefile. I have never tested this makefile on a large project so I don’t know how well it would hold up, but I’m guessing if your project is getting big you would most likely be better off using something like Autotools or CMake.

With that ins mind the next step I took was comparing the raw pre-hashed version of both signatures, to my surprise I found that the test passed.  This was beginning to not make sense, it wasn’t until I altered the test to fail that I saw what the issue was: when I retrieved the key from the database all of the characters were uppercase however when coldfusion retrieved the key all of the characters were lower case. After updating the test to use a lower case version of the key it passed successfully.

So it turns out that ColdFusion is not case sensitive when it does string comparisons, but the hash function does care what case the characters are, as you can lead to a frustrating situation.  Now I’m not expecting you to take my word for it so I have quickly coded up some example code showing the issue.

<cfset original = "secret-key" />
<cfset upperCase = "SECRET-KEY" />
<cfset match = "secret-key" />
<cfset random = "5q2up0awet530" />

<cfset originalHash = Hash(original) />
<cfset upperCaseHash = Hash(upperCase) />
<cfset matchHash = Hash(match) />
<cfset randomHash = Hash(random) />

<cfoutput>
	<h1>String Matching</h1>
	<table border="1" style="width: 30%">
		<tr><th></th><th>Upper case</th><th>Match</th><th>Random</th></tr>
		<tr>
			<th style="text-align: left">Original</th>
			<td style="text-align: center">#original eq upperCase#</td>
			<td style="text-align: center">#original eq match#</td>
			<td style="text-align: center">#original eq random#</td>
		</tr>
	</table>

	<h1>Hash Matching</h1>
	<table border="1" style="width: 30%">
		<tr><th></th><th>Upper case</th><th>Match</th><th>Random</th></tr>
		<tr>
			<th style="text-align: left">Original</th>
			<td style="text-align: center">#originalHash eq upperCaseHash#</td>
			<td style="text-align: center">#originalHash eq matchHash#</td>
			<td style="text-align: center">#originalHash eq randomHash#</td>
		</tr>
	</table>
</cfoutput>

When you run the code this is the output you should get.

As I found the hard way when ColdFusion says two strings are the same it may not necessarily be true.

Alright, that’s all fine and dandy to say but what does that actually mean? Brainstorming it I came up with seven key features that I want in my media player:

While watching Justice League: The New Frontier tonight I made a bit of start by making some rough UI mock-ups in Balsamiq.

To implement this I’m planning on using C# and WPF, I haven’t had a good chance to play around with WPF or some of the new Windows 7 features that are available so I figured this would be as good a time as any.  Finally my other goal with this project is an attempt to get me back into blogging, to that end I will hopefully be making a post at the end of each day summarizing what I’ve done – possibly with some screenshots.  Until then I should be posting some updates to my twitter feed.

The motivation for changing the theme in the end came down to a mixture of the following factors:

• Fluid Blue the old theme had been in service on this site for getting close to four years now and it was time for a change.
• I wanted to try my hand at a bit of design, I knew it was not going to be any hugely fantastic but I’m happy with the result.
• Finally I wanted to integrate some of the various social networking sites that I belong to into the site, I found that fluid blue didn’t really lend itself to how I wanted it all displayed.

As I noted above I wanted to integrate some of my social site activity into the site to that end I have also integrated my twitter stream into the left sidebar.  As with any new piece of code I will not be surprised if there are bugs, I have tested it in IE 8, Firefox and Chrome and it appears to work fine but these are not the only browsers in the world.  If you do happen to find anything wrong with the site don’t hesitate to report a bug over at the mlowen.com bug tracker.

In this list I am trying to avoid major tools (like an IDE) and rather focus on the small language agnostic tools which makes my day to day life just that little easier.

Notepad2 – This is just a simple text editor, what puts it above the notepad that ships with windows is the syntax highlighting that it provides for many

Putty – While my primary development environment is no longer Linux I do still need to access various Linux servers and putty is still the simplist and most light weight tool for the job.

WinSCP – This is yet another tool for dealing with linux servers, getting files off of a linux server (lacking samba) onto a windows box can be a PITA and that is where this tool comes in to save the day it makes retreival of files from linux machines a breeze.

WinMerge – An awesome visual diff tool.

7-zip – I can not stress how much I love 7-zip or how lost I’d be without it. Able to uncompress every compression format I have come across so far, you no longer have to fear others sending you files compressed in formats which are not zip.

Balsamiq Mockups – I think this is damn near the perfect tool to create mockups to show to clients, the sketched feel to them seems to strike the right balance between looking somewhat professional and not looking like a real application.

Filezilla – An ftp client that just works.

TortoiseSVN – This seems to be the svn client for windows, with it’s integration into explorer it is easy to see why.

IcoFX – A simple easy to use Icon editor, it can be used to create Icons from scratch or transform existing images to icons.

InnoSetup – Distributing an application and want an easy to use installer? Then InnoSetup is the tool for you.

Console2 – I do not like the standard windows command prompt window at all. I have my reasons and half of them can probably be solved quite trivially, the point is the shouldn’t have to be. The ability to have multiple tabs of different types of consoles in one window is great.

Sqliteman – If you deal with SQLite databases then you need this tool, it lets you get into the database and examine and manipulate the data contained within.

MSBuildShellextension – This is a neat little tool I only discovered recently courtesy of the 2009 Hanselman tool list. My life is a little bit brighter now I can build VS projects from explorer without having to launch Visual Studio.

Is there anything you feel that I might of left out? Or do you know or better alternitives to some of tools listed above? If so leave a comment so I can look into them.

Over the next couple of weeks the tool continued to evolve to better fit the specifics of the project we we’re working on, but in the back of my mind I kept going back to how other people must have this problem as well. Eventually I decided to re-implement the core of my tool. Having finished the re-implementation a couple of weeks ago I’m finally getting around to releasing it to the public under the GPL, below are the links to download the 0.1 release.

• [download id="1"]
• [download id="2"]

For those of you who would like to grab the latest source and stay current with any updates (which may be buggy broken code) you can check out the subversion repository which is available at the following URL:

• http://mlowen.com/svn/ratu/trunk

In other news I have signed on to be a contributor to lounge media a blog about digital media in the home, hopefully I should have a post up there soon – once I figure out a good subject to start on.

Now I don’t claim to be a designer, my hopes with this theme is to create something that I like and won’t make your eyes bleed if you stare at it too long.  The goals I had in mind when working on this was a clean, minimal design that incorporated curves, I wanted curves because the current theme is all straight lines and right angles.

Currently I have completed a mock-up which can be found at mlowen.com/mockup and is currently filled with dummy data from this site, if you have any feedback it would be appreciated.

Enough of that though and onto the purpose of this post this site and the collection of other sites who share the same server as I do have just finished transitioning to our new server at xlhost we decided to leave layeredtech after spending a couple of years there due to layeredtech shutting down the data center our server was hosted in and xlhost offering a better deal.

I was able to export all of the content from my old wordpress installation to import here. However it appears that I was not able to get all of the images which is a little disappointing, I might go looking through the google cache and hope I stumble upon something. Due to importing all of my posts from my old wordpress installation into this new one I’m not sure if people who subscribe to my rss feed got swamped with entries or not, if you did I apologise.

What is different with today you might ask? Well not a lot in relation to the lack of motivation to work, however enough semi-interesting – and one important – things have happened which together warrant me writing something.  Yesterday I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.8 any issues the site might be having will probably have been caused by the upgrade.  Last week I brought a HTC Magic (which runs Google’s android phone OS) I plan to do a post in the next couple of days about how the phone is working out for me so far.

Most importantly, a month ago I quit my job (that was the required notice I had to give) because I was approached with an offer I felt that it would be foolish of me to refuse.  Today was my first day at my new job working for LayerX, a small software company based here is Hamilton.  Like my last job I’m a software developer and I am looking forward to the oppurtunities that this new position has.  Due to this happening I finally got around to updating the about page, it still is not anything fantastic but at least it is up to date.