Re: Stumped, baffled, and perplexed.......

On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 16:47:09 -0700, in 'rec.video.production',
in article <Re: Stumped, baffled, and perplexed.......>,
"Richard Crowley" <rcrowley@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Frank" wrote...
Well done, Mr. Crowley, but talk about CPU usage!

LOL! It was thrown together when I couldn't find anything
else. They had a dedicated laptop to do the countdown, so
efficiency wasn't a requirement.

I was just kidding about the processor usage, really. Your little
proggy is great.

Should'a made it interrupt
driven to play nicer with others. Its the kind of dumb
programmer stunt that gives MS Windows a bad name. :-)

Well, like Steve Gibson (SpinRite author at www.grc.com), you could
have knocked out something in under 4K in assembler. :)

Its been out there for years. I never thought it was anything
particularly special. Maybe I should have put it up on those
freeware search/download places online where I couldn't find
anything myself?

Dress it up a bit and it might become a minor shareware hit at $19.95
or even $29.95 - or at least you'll get a "Thank you!" e-mail now and
then.

There are a zillion little clock applications out there, but the bulk
of them simply display TOD (time of day) in various ways. There are
also some stopwatch apps, but I like your program better. It's obvious
that it was purpose-built for a specific application.

Yahoo Widgets lists 326 clock apps.

http://widgets.yahoo.com/

Of course when you go to the "clocks" page, it only lists 292. What do
I know?

http://widgets.yahoo.com/tags/clocks

Usually, when I need something like this, which granted isn't on a
regular basis, I fire-up that old clock.exe program from Win16. Works
just fine under any 32-bit flavor of Windows - and allows choice of
font face but not point size or colors. It dynamically scales the text
to almost fill the window horizontally. And you can double-click on it
and it will hide (or show; it's a toggle) the title bar and menu bar,
leaving about as clean an interface as is possible. It can also
show/hide the current date - controlled via a menu option - and has an
"Always on Top" option in the Control menu.

I just uploaded a copy that I saved from the old 16-bit Windows days,
in case someone wants to play around with it. It's just an .exe file
and an .ini file. No setup required, just stick it somewhere
("C:\Program Files\Clock" perhaps) and run it. It's called
Win16_Clock.zip and can be found in the following directory.

http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/files/

Most importantly, it's got a nice little About box - something that's
missing from your program. (I'm just kidding about the *importance* of
the About box, but it does have one, the same as yours should if you
ever return to it). You could have a picture of your smiling face, or
if you're camera shy, a smiling Mr. Smarty with the caption, "Another
happy customer!".

Why is it that whenever I hear from someone, "I can't find the source
code!", it reminds me of, "The dog ate my homework!"?

And you'll want to design and include a custom icon for your program
instead of using that generic-looking Microsoft-supplied thingie that
you're using now.

I didn't run your setup.exe file, by the way. I just unpacked the
CMcount.cab file and put a copy of CMcount.exe and CMtimer.ini into
their own directory. I looked at CMcount.exe in Steve Miller's Depends
and saw that it used the VB6 runtime and I knew that I was good to go
without any other DLLs.

http://www.dependencywalker.com/

Depends (the program, not the kind that you wear) has numerous uses.
It can come in handy sometimes when playing around with codecs because
if you see that a particular codec file (.ax, .dll, etc.) contains
functions called DllRegisterServer and DllUnregisterServer, you'll
know that almost certainly you'll have to register the file (using the
Register Server program - RegSvr32.exe in 32-bit Windows) before it
can be used.

If you should ever locate the source code, PLEASE re-write this thing
so that I can take advantage of all eight cores in my soon-to-arrive
(Xmas present to myself) dual-quad-core Xeon Nehalem workstation (16
threads, actually, if I turn on Hyper-Threading). Okay?

P.S. Actually, it would be nice to be able to choose from any
TrueType, OpenType, PostScript, etc. font on the system. Would also be
nice to be able to position the time in any arbitrary location. Right
now, with the background sized to 640 by 480, the time appears as a
sort of "upper thirds" within the background display area.

Yeah, meanwhile (6-7 years) I have collected a few suggestions
like this for improvements, enhancements, etc. Maybe I should
write a new version to practice my C++ and .NET with Visual
Studio 2008.

Excellent idea, really!

I had wanted to make the font selectable, but couldn't find the
font metrics lookup data to make it automatically scalable, etc.

Control of both font face and font size might be useful features to
some users.

And while you're at it, please update those BUTTONS so
that they look more modern! Damn thing looks like an old
VB app!

Well, it *IS* an old VB app! :-)

Again, I know. I really was just kidding.

I'm currently using a small onscreen clock that shows running
seconds. Sometimes I need to know time to that resolution,
or to use the running seconds to see how slow my network or
whatever is running today, etc.

Surely the slow running network to which you refer is your personal
at-home network and not that of The Great Chipmaker.

http://www.webxpace.com/software/freeware.shtml#Watch
It has a few problems of its own, but whadda ya want for free?

Just downloaded both versions, regular and skinable. Was pleased to
see that the author used GIF files for his sample screenshots! :)

Typical programmer, though. Spelled "prototype" as "prototipe" on
their Web page. :(

Only the regular version of the program shows seconds. The skinable
version doesn't. Nice little app, however.

--
Frank, Independent Consultant, New York, NY
[Please remove 'nojunkmail.' from address to reply via e-mail.]
Read Frank's thoughts on HDV at http://www.humanvalues.net/hdv/
(also covers AVCHD and XDCAM EX).
.

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