In 2009, I was tinkering with the Windows multimedia subsystem and I wrote a short program to play MP3 audio files from the command-line ( cmdmp3.exe ). I created a second program that was a GUI application ( cmdmp3win.exe ) for those who didn’t want the console window to show. Althought it’s technically a GUI application, no visible user interface is present unless an error occurs. I have released a new version of the sources and executable programs tonight ( 26 Jan 2024 ).

My First Mac In July of 2012, I bought my first Macbook. It was a low-end model with the minimum RAM configuration and a 13-inch screen. I had come up through the ranks of 8-bit computing and I’d had a dalliance with the 16/32-bit Commodore Amiga, but I had spent most of my time with Intel-based PC’s running Microsoft operating systems. I wanted to try a few new things including writing an iOS app, at the time.

(The bulk of this post was originally written in June of 2012) In early 2012, I walked in the door of Krypton Comics in Omaha. I was unexpectedly greeted by Doctor San Guinary … a character originally from Omaha’s own Creature Feature TV show that graced the airwaves on channel 3 ( then an NBC affiliate ) in the 70’s. He was there seeking blood donations for a bloodmobile drive.

Originally published on: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:15:01 +0000 In my early days of computing, I used to read a lot of tech magazines. I had been reading about this “Operating System” called CP/M: Control Program for Microprocessors. The computers I had owned to date really didn’t have true operating systems, so I had a very vague idea of the significance of an OS. I did understand that different kinds of computers seemed to be capable of running CP/M.

I used to sell a command-line email utility that I had written for 32-bit implementations of Microsoft Windows. The utility was named MailSend ( not to be confused with the three or four other command-line mailers which share the name. ) The domain name that I used to host MailSend and other utilities, mailsend-online.com has come up for renewal. After 23 or so years of having that domain, I think it’s time to retire it.

Originally published on: Fri, 7 Oct 2011. The Y2K panic was not the first time I had encountered a date-oriented software bug. Years before Y2K problems were even a worry, I ran into a situation where an MS-DOS program written in C began to run amok on October 10th. There had been no new releases of this particular program in months. It had behaved normally running continuously on an unattended PC in a computer room.

My Secret Origin I had a head-start in reading comics with a hand-me-down collection. I began selecting my own comics in the early 1970’s. I was in the early years of elementary school, at the time. I’d never been to a large con before, but some fellow comic-book-loving friends were getting together at Baltimore Comic-Con this year. I made plans to join them. I was primarily interested in meeting with some of the professional writers and artists.

I saw a re-mention of a 2019 blog post tonight called I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it and the counterpart commentary at HackerNews/YCombinator … I thought that I’d reminisce a bit about my experience with Pascal and Delphi. Padawan Pascal Like many of my generation, I started out coding in 8-bit BASIC dialects and later began to code in assembly language. What I often did when writing assembly was picture the program in BASIC.

I believe that I first encountered details of the Perl programming language in the pages of The C Users Journal. I suspect that it was Sydney Weinstein’s article “A Perl of Great Price” in the April 1990 issue of The CUJ. At the time, I was developing software professionally using C almost exclusively. Perl’s use of various sigils and symbols were offputting for me. I didn’t give the language too much thought after that.

Setup I recently needed to draw a UML sequence diagram. That’s usually something I’d do in Microsoft’s Visio ™. I was aware of text-to-chart utilities such as Medusa so I assumed that similar tools would be available for generating sequence diagrams. A quick search of the web yielded an open source tool called PlantUML. PlantUML is a set of tools for converting text scripts to various kinds of UML diagrams. To use the bare-bones setup for PlantUML, you’ll need a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).