Project Euler

July 9th, 2010

I recently found out that my job is moving to Plano, TX which my family and I have chosen not to follow. This has placed me back in the job market which I have not been for more than 10 years. In looking through numerous job postings and descriptions I came across one that referenced providing a code sample from the Project Euler site. I had never heard of this before so I had to investigate more.

Upon reading through some of the problems I must say I feel challenged and am seriously considering working through a few of these over the coming weeks.

Example Problem:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=1

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Posted in General, Programming | No Comments »

Canon EOS Digital SDK (EDSDK) v2.8 Released!

April 24th, 2010

I was very excited to receive an email from Canon today about the release of the newest version of their EDSDK, verison 2.8. My excitement was short lived as I discovered that Canon has yet again decided to not make a 64-bit version of their SDK. This is a real shame since OS’s are quickly going to 64-bit as the norm and 32-bit is dying. Seeing that the software being developed using Canon’s SDK is graphically oriented the extra memroy addressing of 64-bit would be a big benefit. Maybe version 2.9 or 3.0 will support 64-bit.

Anyways enough with the ranting here is the content of the email.

Canon is pleased to announce the release of a new version of EOS Digital SDK (EDSDK) v2.8 supporting the new EOS Rebel T2i / 550D launched in the first half of 2010. Changes to the Supported OS were also made for this version, namely adding Windows 7 / Mac OS 10.6 and stopping Mac OS 10.3.

Detailed information as to which Canon cameras are compatible and what properties have been added or modified to the SDK are available by clicking here.

All Canon Digital Camera SDK versions are written in C. There are no current ActiveX versions. Furthermore, there is no explicit support for other operating systems or development environments including but not limited to: Windows XP X64 Edition, Windows CE, Windows Mobile Edition, Windows Media Center, Linux, Sun, Unix, HP-Unix, OS/2, Free BSD, Java, Cocoa, etc. Canon Inc. has indicated no plans to develop SDKs for any of these operating systems or development environments.

Additionally, please note that as per the current SDK License Agreement, the Canon Digital Camera SDKs are offered as is, without technical support. However, the current SDKs are provided with written documentation as well as several tutorials and sample files. The sample code is available exclusively for Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. Canon Inc. has informed us that they will no longer supply sample code for Microsoft Visual Basic or other development applications.

1. Who is eligible to apply for the Canon Digital Camera SDKs?
Software developers residing in North, Central and South America are eligible to apply for Canon Digital Camera SDKs through the Canon U.S.A., Inc. web site.

2. Canon Digital Camera SDK Compatibility Charts
A list of compatible cameras can be found on the Canon USA web site.

3. Canon Digital Camera SDK Development & Target Environments
A list of compatible operating systems can be found on the Canon USA web site.

4. Canon Digital Camera SDK Development & Target Environments
A list of compatible operating systems can be found on the Canon USA web site.

5. How to obtain the SDK
A link to the application process can be found by clicking here.

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Enumerating Device Properties with WIA and C#

March 10th, 2010

It’s been a loooong time between posts and I apologize for that. The resent months have been quite busy and a somewhat recent change in direction on my software development has led to me no longer diving into WIA.

In this post I am providing a functional class that provides a means to enumerate the devices properties, set a device property and take a picture. What this class does not include is a function for downloading the device image. This class is meant to be a simple basis from which you can build upon. The code is offered as is.
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FireFox 3.6 whoas

January 22nd, 2010

Well I was excited to kick the wheels on the newly released Mozilla Firefox 3.6 (here). So I downloaded the new installer and ran on my work PC. Everything went smoothly until I got to the importer, then Firefox become completely non-responsive and ended up having to use task manager to close it. I captured a screen cast of this crazy behavior because it was so annoying, you can see it here (opens in new window).

Aside from this hiccup everything is running pretty smoothly. Firebug has an update that allows it to run in 3.6. Unfortunately ySlow does not yet run on 3.6.

I like the new personas (I know they’ve been around for a bit) as they do add a little character to your browser. I think that I might even make one in the not to distant future.

The JavaScript engine does appear to be a bit quicker though no too noticeably. I have been working on a large JavaScript application here at work and it is performing a bit better in 3.6 than in 3.5.x but Google Chrome is still the quickest from my experience.

I am not much of a plugin guy in Firefox so if you have had experience with 3.6 yourself and there are certain addons or pluggins you like I would love to hear about them!

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My favorite web host!

December 14th, 2009

If you are anything like me you like to know that you are getting most out of your money when investing in a web host. You want near 100% uptime, great transfer rates, flexible back-end management and tons of scripts. I am glad to say that I was lucky to have come across Blue Host a few years back.

As an independent web designer for the past 7 years I’ve come across lots of web hosts. Some have been good experiences others have been horrible experiences, but most are simply middle of the road. Blue Host I must has one of the most comprehensive packages I’ve ever used. They use cPanel for the back-end management with lots of features and goodies packed in. They provide one of the largest bandwidth packages I’ve ever used and all for under $8 a month!
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Posted in PHP, Web Development, Web Hosting | 8 Comments »

Integrating BBClone into Joomla!

December 10th, 2009
IP address,
hostname,
operating system,
robots,
browser,
referring URL (where do they come from),
visit date,
number of time the visitor has loaded the page,
number of visitor
the visited pages in the order someone viewed them
the last visited page
the search engine query that lead to your site (if applicable)
ranking of the most frequent countries, referrers, OS, browsers, robots, page views and hostnames

BBClone is a great website statistics application that provides great insight into how visitors access and navigate your website. BBClone provides many useful statistics including:

  • Visitor IP address
  • hostnames
  • operating systems
  • robot visits
  • browsers
  • referring URL (where do they come from)
  • visit date
  • number of times a visitor has loaded each page
  • number of visitors
  • the visited pages in the order someone viewed them (bread crumbs)
  • the last visited page
  • the search engine query that lead to your site (if applicable)
  • ranking of the most frequent countries, referrers, OS, browsers, robots, page views and hostnames

As you can see this application can provide you with invaluable information. Unfortunately for Joomla! users the component that was released to the Joomla! Extensions directory was removed because it did not work with Joomla! 1.5.x. Luckily for any developer with a bit of familiarity with PHP and the installation/organisation of Joomla! 1.5.x a simple core hack can give you the statistics you want from your website.
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WIA and 64-bit Vista Whoas

October 16th, 2009

So I’ve been working on a tether program for my Nikon D40x. My current development platform is 32-bit Vista, but my target machine is a 64-bit Vista machine. So today I’ve finally got everything working on my development machine and migrate it to my target machine. Everything seems fine under normal test cases until I go to exercise a couple of key events used to detect if the camera is available or not. Well they are not firing as they do under 32-bit Vista.

Has anyone ran into this themselves, and if so have you found a workaround yet? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

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Posted in C#, WIA | 2 Comments »

Using C# and WIA 2.0 to connect to an imaging device

August 28th, 2009

Welcome, in this article I am going to how to get your project setup to use WIA, how successfully connect to an image device and finally how to enumerate all the properties and events the device supports. While this article will only touch the surface of what all you can do with WIA subsequent articles will continue to delve deeper into WIA’s full capabilities.
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Posted in C#, WIA | 8 Comments »

Let the journey begin…

August 25th, 2009

This is my first personal blog related to my coding endeavors. I thought I would put this up after spending many hours trying to find information on communicating with my Nikon camera through C# and the .NET platform.

After many hours of sorting through cryptic MSDN documentation and vague partial blogs and personal pages I thought that I would begin to document my findings as I continue to build out a full fledge camera tether with C# and WIA. This is my way of giving a little back to the online community from which I have used a lot over the years.

Hopefully those of you that find this blog will find the information useful and complete enough to get you going on whatever your project is.

Happy coding!
Mike

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