Choose One Photo

Resizing Several Photos

Most changes were made to the multiple photo re-size tab.

Re-size Several Photos

The first thing apparent on the “Several Photos” screen is the progress bar. This is active during the resize operation and the Cancel button on the bottom left allows you to stop the process. This is similar to the using the cancel on the Photo Open dialog while it is refreshing the thumbnails.

On both pages you will see the photo name is now displayed above the preview.

Release Notes for V1.3

Here is the complete list of changes for V1.3.

• (v) Display photo name above preview image to avoid confusion. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Filter resized photos out of the list in PhotoOpenDialog 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Splitter can cover children. This is confusing. 11-Jan-2011
  Turn off Children Collapsible
• (v) Report image sizes as W,H not H,W to be consistent with Windows. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Photo List text font size larger – 12pt. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Progress bar in photo list resize. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Crash if use open list twice. 11-Jan-2011
  Apparently QListWidget can never contain zero items after the first time. If so, an ASSERT fails in QList. So get around this by putting a dummy item in the list rather than removing all items from the list.
• (v) Photo Open dialog initial message 11-Jan-2011
  “Use Open or select folder from pulldown list”
• (v) Sort photo list after we fill it. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) PhotoOpenDialog does not display all images 11-Jan-2011 Fixed bug introduced with crash fix.
• (v) Update photo label as images are resizing. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Update the photo pixmap as images are resizing. 11-Jan-2011
• (v) Allow cancel of resizing the list. 11-Jan-2011 Report number of images resized of canceled.
• (v) Resize images if tab changed. 11-Jan-2011

If you have comments or bug reports, please post them on sourceforge in the Open Discussion Forum.

Enjoy,

Windy

PhotoResizerQt

SiteProbeQt

These folks actually did a simple video tutorial showing the installation and use, although they didn’t do a view of the log file.

We’ll see if there is much confusion because they don’t point folks to SourceForge to get updates. I have tried to remember to update the About boxes with the URLs on SourceForge so folks can check for updates.

- windy

PhotoOpenDialog with preview at 96 pixels

The preview image size can be changed to, 96, 128, or 256.

Preview at 256 pixels

The list of folders are saved in an INI file in the same folder with the other settings. Up to 24 of the last folders accessed are saved.

Folders are saved

Other features include:

• At top left is a folder browse button to select folders.
• Next is a green arrow button to remove a folder from the end of the current path.
• Next is a selection for the size of the preview: 96, 128 or 256 pixels.
• When the dialog opens, a preview is not immediately done on the folder since a preview might take a long time. Clicking Open will preview this folder.
• Changing the folder at any time will update the preview.
• As the preview occurs, the progress bar at the bottom of the dialog will update.
• If the preview is taking longer than you would like, you can click Cancel to stop the preview and then choose another folder with either the dropdown list or the folder browse button. The dialog will not close if you use Cancel in this way.
• Each time the dialog is closed, the list of up to 24 folders is stored in a settings file and restored the next time you open that dialog.
• Each time a folder is accessed, it is moved to the top of the list so that the most recently used folders are near the top of the list.

You can find the new versions of the program here on SourceForge.net.

Enjoy,

- Windy

SiteProbeQt Main Window

Add a list of sites, then click Start Monitoring and minimize the program. Each event is logged

After a long time, you can view the log from the File menu.

View Log Dialog

The log lines are formatted as CSV so that you can process them using spreadsheets.

A Log line is added each time the program is stopped and started.

The program will not restart when the system reboots. Perhaps I’ll investigate this enhancement in the future.

You can find the program here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/siteprobeqt/

A Windows Installer, and the sources are available. The program should be easily portable to the Mac, or Linux since it uses the Qt framework.

Enjoy,

Windy

Update: This program fails on Win XP Sp3. I’m investigating why this is, but it appears to be a bug in the QPixmap class of the Qt Library. I’ll fix the program as soon as possible. You can follow the discussion in this post.

Friends of mine have their digital cameras and need to resize their photos to send over email. All the programs I’ve found on the web are either too complicated with way too many options for a novice computer user or strange to use like the program that you rename to change the size of the photo and then drag and drop photos onto it to resize the photos. I have designed a very simple program to resize either one or several photos.

Resize a Photo

PhotoResizerQt is a simple program to resize one or several photos.
To resize a single photo, the program leads you through a set of steps
to open a photo, preview it, select a size from a list of typical sizes,
and then resize the photo. When a photo is resized a suffix is added
to the filename so that it is easy to find a file that has been
resized. A PhotoFile.jpg that has been resized to 800 pixels has the
filename of PhotoFilex800.jpg. The program is unwilling to resize any
photo with an xnnnn suffix.

Re-size a List

To resize a group of photos, choose all the photos from a folder.
The list of photos is displayed and they can each be previewed.
Photos that have already been resized are removed from the list and
a message in the status bar indicates that this has happened.

When previewing a photo, you may resize the window, or change the
setting of the Shrink to fit checkbox. When not shrinking the photo
the mouse will drag the photo around to easily examine it in the window.

When previewing a list of photos, click on a photo name in the list to
display that image. Drag the splitter between the list and the preview
to change the display.

You can find the program on Source Forge here:

PhotoResizerQt Project.

PhotoResizerQt Windows Installer.

Qt Toolkit – Development a Dream

The program took me less than two days to write. I used Qt Creator and the Qt Toolkit. The program is probably easily ported to Linux and I will be trying to do that soon. All the features that I need to build the easy to use Gui and the Image features including the bi-cubic resizer function are built into Qt. It was easy to build and integrate a custom Windows icon as well as other standard features that Windows expects. If you want to port the program to the mac, Qt is available there as well. The sources are provided on the Source Forge project site so I encourage you to port it to the mac and provide the changes back to the source forge project for all other users. The program is licensed under the GPL-3.

Enjoy,

Windy

I recently wrote a program to test my new computer. I wanted to test the wattage range and cooling of the new processor so needed a program that would keep all the cores of the processor busy. The Core i7-950 is a 4 core processor with Hyper-Threading which means that there are a max of 8 threads. Since AMD provides server processors with up to 12 threads so the program has a maximum number threads of 32. I use the HWMonitor program to monitor temperatures and wattage if your processor supports it.

The program is written using the Qt toolkit, which allows it to be easily ported to Windows and Linux.

Program Dialog

To use the program:

• Select the computation type: Integer, Real, Both.
• Select the number of threads.
• Select the array size. The arrays will be this size x 1024 x 1024.
• Use Start to start the threads.
• Use Stop to stop the threads.
• Use Task Manager to see the size of the process grow when the threads are started.
• Use Task Manager to see how many cores / threads are busy on your processor when the program is running.
• Use the HWMonitor program to check the case, processor temperatures and wattages [if supported] as the program runs.

The program is licensed under GPL 3.

Downloads are on Source Forge.

We can discuss any issues you have with the program in the Source Forge Project Forums.

The link might change. If that does not work, try this: CoreHeaterQt project

MFC Version

An MFC version, with sources, also available under GPL 3 is here:

CoreHeater_MFC_V1

CoreHeater_MFC_V1_Src

- Windy

An iCal importer for Open Office Calc would have the widest appeal and widest platform support.

I have written a simple importer for Open Office 3.1.1. I have not tested it on other versions of OO.

You can download it here: iCal_Import_04

After an Import

One of the things that I needed to do was to add up times that I spent on certain activities. By adopting conventions about how to fill in the event summary field, and adding a column for Duration, it’s easy to do this.

To use the importer, download it and unpack it to your hard drive. You may need to adjust your Security settings to allow macros to run, and possibly set a folder on your hard drive as a trusted source.

Open the spreadsheet with Open Office 3.1.1 or later. I suggest you Save As… to a new name as soon as you open it to avoid modifying the original file. Once you have saved it with the name you like, run the main macro as follows:

Run a Macro

and choose the macro MAIN from the file.

Select the Main Macro

Browse for the ics file, and set the time zone offset:

iCal importer dialog

Next click the Import File button to import the calendar file.

After an Import

After the import you can adjust the column widths, sort the data and add new colunns to analyze the data.

Select to Sort

Select rows 2 to the end to sort the data. Do not select the column headers.

Sort Dialog

Here we sort by column C, the subject.

After Sort and adding Duration

The import sheet comes with the duration column pre-loaded. The formula for the duration is:

=24*(TIMEVALUE(B2) – TIMEVALUE(A2) )

Of course charts and other analyses can be easily done now that the data is in a spreadsheet.

The importer is distributed with a GPL V3 license.

Enjoy,

- Windy

Startup Control Panel

This allows you to check and uncheck the programs that start and all the various types of items are available to set.

Watch4D Program

Here’s a program that will let you manage your hard drive space and efficiently clean up your files.

For those of us with big space problems, or too little space, Usage can scan those disks. In addition to displaying the space in and below the folder, it also displays the space in the folder. And if the problem might be some large and pesky files, any files above a specified size can be called out specifically in the list. The entire list can be formatted and saved as a text file.

Now you can delete the pesky files right from inside Usage. No need to go back to the explorer to delete files.

Get control of your space problems. Get Usage today.

features include:

• Window can be resized.
• Support for files and drives larger than 4 GB.
• Informative help file.
• Displaying All or No files in a folder
• Deleting a file or all files in a folder tree.
• Stop long operations with the Esc key.

Download usage22.exe

• Building ZIP files for game programs such as Quake that use ZIP as their archive format.
• Building distribution archives when an installer is not appropriate.

Quake and other game formats use ZIP files, renamed to pak or another file type, to store an archive that represents a game level. These pak files require a specific internal folder structure that mimics the file system folder structure. WinZip and other archive programs are not suitable for building these files since they do not allow flexible definition of the base folder for the archive. During the building of the level within the game environment, the files for the level are in the file system and are scattered throughout the folder tree. To build the pak file for distribution, these files must be selected and zipped into an archive without the other files.

When building a distribution of, for example, a source tree, one would like to include or exclude files by type and based on the folder. For example, OBJ and BSC files are intermediate files and are not distributed, however, CPP and H files are included. The folder structure for a source distribution may be complex. Also source control directorys, such as those for QVCS, may be scattered in the source tree and perhaps the distribution should not include these source control files.

PakZip solves these problems, and builds standard zip archive files.

PakZip Application Main Window

The elements of the GUI are:

• The Pak Source Path three pulldown contains a recent list of base folders. The selected base folder is removed from the folder path in the archive as the archive is built.
• The browse button allows the path to be set.
• The Scan button scans the base path and populates the tree display to allow files and folders to be selected.
• Types may be excluded or included in the tree scan and in the final pak or zip file. Enter a list of types separated by semicolons. Check the box to exclude the path, otherwise they are included. Files with no type are always included in the scan.
• Paths containing substrings maybe excluded from the scan and the final pak or zip file. It may be best to include a leading backslash to provide an unambiguous path string. Any substring is matched. Paths may be excluded, but not included in this way. If the box is not checked, the path string is ignored.
• The PakZip window can be resized to provide a better view of the folder tree.

Building a Folder List
Once the folder tree is scanned, individual files and folders may be added to the list for the archive. Select individual folders in the tree:

Each folder of the tree display displays the size and files in the entire tree below the folder and
( the size and files in the folder itself).

Then use the add buttons to add entries to the folder list:

At any time, the refresh button scans the folders and populates the pak file list. Do not use the refresh button if you have added individual files to the list since only folders are considered by refresh.

The chosen folder can be removed from the folder list with the remove folder button.

Adjusting the File List

Once the files have been chosen, the list can be adjusted with the buttons at the bottom of the dialog. And then the archive can be built using the ZipPak button.

Saving and Opening a Pak File Definition

Download PakZip

Features New for Synch 3

• Supports CD/DVD RW drives, including verify.
• Threads rather than idle-loop operation provides better performance.
• Substitution allows easy redirection of drives and network paths.
• Options to remove empty directories after files are deleted.
• Options to provide handling of files with no extensions.
• Sizes and positions of windows and column widths of lists are saved and restored.

The Main Window

Pairs Window

• Remove removes files from the list without disturbing the files.
• Details displays the details dialog for the selected file.
• Confirm All performs all the operations in the list.
• Do Some performs the selected operations in the list.
• Delete allows deleting one or more source files.
• Save stores the pair and updates the window title.
• 2=>1, 1=>2 scans for files between the paths in either direction.

Download Synch3

Geodesic.

The program can export the objects in OBJ [Wave] format for import into your favorite 3D rendering environment.

Download Geodesic.

Geodesic creates and displays several types of objects:

• Geodesic shapes
• Moebius Strips
• Catenary Arches
• Gears
• Polyhedrons

Geodesics

One of the best known inventions of Buckminster Fuller, a geodesic shape is a cross between a polyhedron and a sphere. Take either a tetrahedron or an icosahedron and divide its edges into multiple segments, and then map each of the resulting points to a surrounding shape, such as a sphere, and you end up with a geodesic. The program allows choosing all these parameters.

Moebius Strip

The Moebius Strip is a strip attached at each end after one or more twists. Geodesic allows modifying many parameters including width, thickness, and twists.

Catenary

Gears

Watch3D

Gemstones.

I am releasing the source in case you would like to learn how it works and modify it. I would appreciate it if you would let me know of any interesting modifications that you make.

Gemstones Program Source.

Enjoy,
ww