Kier's Blog

I’ve been meaning to update this for a fair while now as an uncharacteristically large amount of stuff has happened. Since exams finished I’ve managed to get a job at ECS working for two of my lecturers on two separate projects, which is pretty good because it means my work is varied. Both are IC design projects though, so there is a similar vein running through them.

One of my minor duties on this dual-job is to assemble slides from about twelve people into a large presentation, with cover slides for each speaker, every Friday for a progress meeting we all have. Naturally the first Friday I just did it by hand by importing each one in turn into PowerPoint. However it is a fairly tedious job, and to paraphrase a certain member of staff: why do something by hand when I have a powerful computer under the desk?

So I began to investigate automating the process.

Turns out that Python has an IMAP module in its standard library, which isn’t too surprising I suppose as the Python standard library is enormous. After some playing I managed to write a program that logged into my university email account and downloaded the appropriate PowerPoint attachments.

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Following from the spirit of yesterdays post, little victories…

Yesterday I managed to download the front page of my website using libcurl. As good as that was as a learning experience, it wasn’t interesting or useful in the slightest. Today however, I decided to see if I could fetch my status updates from Twitter and display them in a program. So I had a look at the API documentation and it looks quite easy to use, with the exception of OAuth which I’m yet to get my head around. Thankfully, for now, basic authentication is still supported.

The Twitter API uses the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) paradigm which means there’s no concept of a state on the server; i.e. each transaction is considered separately. It also means that it uses HTTP, which is pretty simple to understand. Basically in a REST protocol the URI’s are objects in the system, and the HTTP verbs are how you interact with them. So a GET on a http://server/article?name=REST object would download an article named REST. Simple eh? Check this article if you’re interested.

Anyway, onto the meat ‘n’ taters. Data in a REST transaction is typically stored as XML or JSON. I considered downloading LibYAML and taking the JSON route but a) I already had Xerces, b) I understand XML more than JSON, and c) I couldn’t be bothered to learn yet another new thing.

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I seem to blog the most about needing to blog more often. Unfortunately for me, interesting things don’t happen often. So instead of waiting for something cool to happen, I’m just going to blog about the little things and hope for the best.

I drafted a post about my adventures with trying to compile some open source software, but it turned out far too long and it didn’t actually concentrate on the point I was trying to make. So instead I’ll jump right to it.

Yesterday I decided, randomly, to have a look at libcurl. It’s a surprisingly powerful library for C that supports a huge amount of internet protocols with only a few function calls. The code examples on the website made it look easy enough to use, so I thought I’d download it and see what I can do with it. Unfortunately compiling it myself turned out to be annoyingly difficult, so I just downloaded the binaries. Naturally these were all in MinGW form and I needed them them to be MSVC compatible.

After some googling I found that MinGW comes with a tool called pexports which dumps all the symbols of a DLL. So using that I wrote a Bash script that does this for all the DLLs in a directory:

for i in $( ls | grep ".*\.dll" | sed "s/.dll//" ); do
    pexports "$i.dll" > "$i.def"
    echo "lib /machine:i386 /def:$i.def" >> makelib.bat
done

This creates a .def file for each DLL which lists all the symbols that must be exported, and adds a line to makelib.bat which will create the MSVC import library. The two pronged approach is unfortunately necessary here because the Microsoft LIB tool won’t run through the Cygwin prompt.

The first line might seem complicated, but it’s not too bad. ls lists all the files in the current directory, grep then singles out all the .dll files, and finally sed removes the trailing .dll. In the loop itself $i will therefore always be of the form “<mydll>” instead of “<mydll>.dll“.

I’m no expert with Bash scripting so there’s probably an easier way to do it.

Title pretty much says it all. I’ve written a Shell Extension!

I can’t remember what I was doing now, but for some reason I needed to copy the full path of some file into some program to do some… thing. I was finding it increasingly annoying that I had to copy the path from the Explorer window, then either hand-transcribe (complete with mistakes) or rename, select all, copy the file name.

“Why can’t I just right click and select Copy Filename or something?” I said to myself, “I wonder…”

So I searched CodeProject for some information on how to write my own damn Shell Extension (with Blackjack and Hookers) and stumbled across this fantastic article by Michael Dunn. In the space of an hour I had managed to learn enough to make half of my extension: I added a context menu item to Explorer!

Now over to MSDN to learn about the Clipboard and history was made. After around an hour and a half I’d gone from knowing nothing about writing Shell Extensions or using the Clipboard to having a working Shell Extension that used the Clipboard. I love the internet.

This is one of the smallest pieces of code I’ve ever written and, ironically, one of the few projects I consider myself to have finished. For more information, including how to download it, go to the CopyExt page.