BootBlock.co.uk

Why do I even bother installing Wordpress updates? I installed 2.6 and it toasted the entire admin area so I couldn’t log in. Almost every update has caused the installation to spew, which is quite amazing considering that the files that get updated aren’t touched by us mortals. Lame-o!

Anyway, Romulator has been released. It’s an application that renames ROM files for the Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Colour, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and Wonderswan systems. It uses the magic of the CRC hash to work out which files are ROMs and then renames them according to a user-specific naming mask. Unlike other ROM renamers, there’s no need to put it into a specific system mode.

This release is v0.90 Alpha. There are missing features and I personally want to redesign its interface. Rather than delaying the thing for a billion years, I’ve decided to go ahead and just release it. I’ve done a load of testing and all that and it seemed to work without a problem.

While I’m here, WoWus v1.09 will be released soon which fixes a bug that can stop WoWus installing addons on some systems.

View: Romulator

I took a bit of a PC break, but now I’m back and working on a new application. The application allows the clustering of data (hence its name: Cluster), along with metadata, genres, and so on. Here are the reasons why Cluster is now in development …

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m doing a lot of interface work recently after having purchased a pretty awesome icon pack and creating that Vista-style gradient panel I mentioned a couple of posts back. Today we have a new release of Mass Extract, which incorporates these changes.

Speaking of the panel, I’ll be making the BiQubic.Suite .NET libraries available sometime soon. This suite includes class libraries such as (BiQubic.Suite.)Controls, (etc.)Filesystem, Media, Network, and so on, which provides various useful controls and methods for use in application development. This used to come in the form of the BiQubic.dll library that I linked with 98% of my dotNet apps and was a monolithic 280KB.

I couldn’t be doing with such a bloatfest and so I’ve split everything off into their own libraries and removed a lot of the rubbish that I barely used. I’m still organising the methods into their own classes and writing the XML documentation; once done, there will be a first public release. Source code will come at some point.

View: Mass Extract, BiQubic.Suite

For something that’s a small program, it certainly has had its fair share of development time. This time round it was merely a test-bed for an update library I wanted to write. Without really going into it, the updater ties into the software section of this site and queries it for any updates on behalf of the host application.

But when I finished that, I went and added a Vista mode to my GradientPanel control. The Windows XP look is starting to get somewhat stale, so I’m going to be going for the glossy Vista look where I can. Take a look here for a screenshot of the Vista-style GradientPanel in the new updater. The GP update came about due to seperating the interface controls from my BiQubic.Functions library and placing them into their own.

But anyway! That’s why there’s a new version of YouChoob. Oh yeah, for those that don’t know: YouChoob allows you to download videos directly from YouTube and save them to your harddrive or another location of your choice.

I’ve also got some news on BlockBox, but I’ll leave that until later. In the meantime, check out the BlockBox site to download it (its home-theatre PC software) and view some info on the new Windows Presentation Foundation version that I started the other day.

View: YouChoob

Another day, another release.

This is a rewrite of the original Wake On LAN Ex I did quite a while back. What’s new in version 2? It’s been rewritten in .NET (bang goes the instant loading, damn!) and is more complete. The biggest feature is the pinging of entries in the address book and notification of when they change status (eg. going offline).

View: Wake On LAN Ex 2

Maybe it’s just because they’re retards or something, but Microsoft have removed a load of the MIDI configuration tools from Windows Vista. Because of this, I wasn’t able to use my MIDI keyboard. Which pissed me right off.

Thankfully, using skills that can be classed as “quite mad”, I did a little app which allows the selection of the Midi output device so I can hear what the hell I’m physically doing with the Midi device and stop Midi-aware apps from barfing.

Truly, it is the space year 2008.

View: Vista Midi Picker

You’re impressed by the title, aren’t you? I can tell.

Here’s another application. This one was done in an afternoon and allows you to directly download videos from that video crapheap they call YouTube.

Enter the page URL that contains the video you want to save and click Download. It’ll prompt you for a location and filename to save the video under and download it for you. It’s multi-threaded and gives you lots of progress information, too. Aren’t I just too kind?

Incidentally, I’m going to be releasing the home-theatre software BlockBox over the next couple of days. So watch out for that. Or don’t. Your choice.

View: YouChoob

Despite being in development for a long time, it hasn’t had that much work done on it. In fact, I’ve managed to 99% complete work on its big brother Timeline before I’ve gotten around to releasing it. So, here it is.

WhenThen is an application that responds to user-specified events and reacts to them. For example, you can transfer a file via FTP in another application and get WhenThen to shutdown your computer when that window finishes transferring closes. WhenThen can also react to target and elapsed times, and other things.

The main aim of WhenThen was to be very user-friendly in that it was quick to set it up to do whatever you want without having to mess about.

Take a look and download WhenThen or its (as yet unreleased) bigger brother Timeline.

Wow, erm, hello? Let me release something quickly so it looks like I was working on stuff all along.

Here are a couple of apps that I did years ago but sort of forgot about. The first one is …

Mass Extract [link]. ME automates the process of parity checking and extracting a ton of archives. Drag and drop the directories containing your files and away you go. This one is a bit rough around the edges but seems to work without any problems on the machines I tested it on. It’s also pretty intelligent, as software goes.

MediaCore [link]. Apparently I made this available but for some reason it wasn’t downloadable when I rewrote the Software section of the site. This app lets you read, watch, view, and listen. TV channels, comics, images, music, etc, are all viewable in the application as it provides a preset of available material that is freely accessible over the internet. Now this one is extremely rough around the edges. Hell, it might not even work properly. I did this years and years ago when the .NET framework first came out; the code is so different to how I write now that it would be quicker to rewrite the entire application than to update it. It’s probably not worth downloading this, but I’ve made it available anyway.