Jeroens blog

Two months back I dug up the project files of BN+ Converter Pro, a .Net application I created when I was in secondary school, and did some high level refactoring to optimize it for .Net 4.0 and version 3 of my .Net class library. This was soon after I released a similar update for BN+ Brute Force Hash Attacker, another of my old .Net apps. On top of the changes I made, and a very few new features I’ve added, the code is now publicly available under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later on SourceForge. I waited with releasing this since I wanted the app to be compiled with the stable release of .Net framework, which was released a while back now.

Changes in this release

* Use of BN+ Library 3.0.1
* Use of native components of .Net framework 4.0
* Implemented a new update platform
* Refactored namespaces and moved around a bunch of files
* Redesigned the about interface
* Redesigned the help menu
* Moved documentation to a wiki page
* Added ROT 5, ROT 13, ROT 18 and ROT 48 codecs
* Made the source code available under the GPL on SourceForge

Downloads

• Setup file (zip, windows installer, includes update platform)
• Executables tarball (latest version of the executables, straight from the SVN repo)
• SVN repostory

Links

• Project home
• Documentation

This is a screen shot of the previous version. This part of the interface is pretty much unchanged.

This screenshot shows the redesigned about interface.

the terms of the GNU General Public License

With my last commit I made yesterday, I entered the top 25 all time MediaWiki contributors. The below screenshot from Ohloh shows and my current commit count

I estimate It’ll take me just over 2 months to enter the top 20, as I’m currently committing roughly 150 changes a month.

I created 2 brand new Ohloh projects for Maps and Semantic Maps. This is really cool since I can now analyse my own commit behaviour for those extensions better, as well as see contributions by other people in a more graphical way. It’s also sort of a win that I got the project named ‘maps’ there. Now time for some eye candy widgets of these 2 projects

References

• Maps Ohloh project
• Semantic Maps Ohloh project

This diff, which I seriously made without realizing how epic it was at first, is definitely worth a blog post.

I noticed something fun on Ohloh, a open source contribution tracking site. I reached 347 commits, which is just as much as Icrocker, which is the original developer of the MediaWiki engine. What should happen in that one of us is put on spot i, and the other one on spot i+1. Since i = 30, and i+1 = 31 in this case, that would mean someone on page 3, and someone on page 4. Due to a bug in the paging system, one person will be shown on both pages, and the other one will not be shown on the list.

This is the situation as it was yesterday.Page 4:

And page 3:

As you can see, the (evil) original author (of doom) threw me off the list! Today ceiling cat ruled in my favour though. Page 4:

And page 3…

And I entered the top 30!!!!!1!11!!

Now the Google Summer of Code coding period has finished, I can divide my attention between multiple projects again. Since I’ve been doing PHP and JavaScript only for over 2 months now, I’m starting off with taking a PHP-break. This means I won’t do any development of mayor new features for Maps or Semantic Maps, and definitely won’t work on any other PHP project. Of course I’ll still ensure bugs get fixed for my mapping extensions, and help people out with code when needed, but that’s about it. So basically I’m closing my Zend Studio, which has become one of my most used applications in the last months, and starting my Visual Studio again. Now I think of it, this is really awkward. I used to start my VS practically every time I booted my computer for over a year, and then only opened it a handful of times in a 2 month period.

So, what am I going to work on now? One of my last projects before I started GSoC was a VB.Net background file downloader, of which I released an article on The Code Project, and later on created a C# version. I got quite some positive feedback on this project by people, although it was initially created with the sole purpose of helping that needed a simple downloader someone out, to improve my own skills, and to demonstrate how to create a simple to implement downloader. I’m now continuing this project, by rewriting it from scratch, to both add some mayor new features, and mess around with some multi-threading stuff I’ve been wanting to try out for months now.

The mayor new features that will be added are simultaneous downloads (the current classes only support one download at a time), segmented downloads (woot!), download priorities and bandwidth limitation options. This will require a nice OOP approach, with some more advanced multi-threading. I’m basing part of my code on MyDownloader, an extremely nice C# downloader, which has quite some more functionality then what I’m doing. It’s more extensive then required for most people though, and not all that easy to implement. I also don’t really agree with some naming choices, and it lacks both code docs for devs that want to modify it, and devs that want to implement it. So clearly, I’ll put a lot of effort in keeping the new project as small and to-the-point as possible, and pay attention to easy of implementation, and usability. Another obvious difference is that this project is in VB.Net and not C#.Net. This has more advantages then disadvantages IMHO. If the project is compiled to a .dll or is used in a multi-project solution, it simply doesn’t matter what language it uses. A lot of casual programmers don’t know how to handle either, and the majority of these uses VB.Net, and not C#. And the ones that do know C# are more likely to know VB.Net then the other way around.

I’ve created a project on SourceForge to host the code, and be able to commit to the project’s SVN. Since the project now contains multiple classes, I renamed it to .Net DownloadLib.

After that project I’m planing to put some real effort into my mapping extension for MediaWiki again, and possibly to have a look at Python and Ruby. When school starts again, somewhere half way through September, some new project opportunities will probably arise for me, but I guess I’ll see that then. I’m also looking forward to ‘learning to program’ at school, which is destined to give me some great laughs. Luckily for me I’ll have to learn C++ at university, so I won’t be totally bored with it. I hope they don’t drive the low-level aspects of the language to far, since that’s pretty useless in today’s world IMHO.

I’ve been trying to get the hang of how SVN works, and to be able to commit to the repository on mediawiki.org for a few weeks now, and finally succeeded – YAY!

The tools I’m now using are the PuTTY applications (this nice U3 app package), TortoiseSVN and Zend Studio. Subversion allows you to do a whole variety of nice things, and I probably won’t be able to grasp how I could ever have worked without it a few months from now.

I had a lot of problems with getting all settings right, mainly cause of some tutorials that just omitted some important step, or where unclear about some stuff. Since I had never worked with SVN, PuTTY or YotroiseSVN before, I did not notice that. This tutorial helped me out though.