My company is using this program called Visma Contracting. This program is used to type inn a product number (example: 10 240 75) and how many of this item was used (example: 4). So these numbers we (me and my co-workers) put into an excel sheet and deliver to the guy in charge of the systematizing these (A column being product number, an B column being the used amount). From there it is retyped from excel to Visma. This is madness! There must be a way for the two programs to talk to each other? I have talked to the Visma support and they are giving me nothing else then a no. I wish i could give more info about this Visma stuff, but i fear that it is a locked program. I have also been searching around for a 3rd party software that can eliminate this massive annoying problem, with no luck. Does anyone have anything that might ease my itch?
Thanks in advance!
Sounds impossible but...
If you want to try blind keystrokes check out Mouse and Keystroke Recorder I have some experience automating stuff with this program. It works sometimes with varying degrees of reliability.
Be forewarned that nobody recommends this as it could cause problems. It simply plays back keystrokes without being aware of what it is doing. When used with care it can work but it could be dangerous.
Or use SendKeys from Excel VBA; that might work better as the data is already in Excel. But the same warnings apply. Use at your own risk.
I have for several years tried to get an estimate of the emacs user base.
Does anyone have good estimates besides the naive guess of the Linux/unix install base?
Getting hard numbers for this seems fairly difficult. Here's what I found:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/emacswiki.org/?metric=uv
Where it says in May 2010 there were about 13,000 unique visitors that month. Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/emacswiki.org
says that about .001% of all the Internet users visited emacswiki.org in the last month. Both sites put emacswiki.org in the top 150,000 sites on the web. It seems to me the number of times each version of emacs is downloaded could be discovered and might shed some more light on the topic.
I leave the transformation of these lies^H^H^H^Hstatistics into a number of users as an exercise for the reader.
resistors.org site and foxthompson.net download links are stale/broken.
http://www.resistors.org/index.php/The_SAM76_programming_language
Every other link I've been able to track down on the 'net (mostly in old newsgroup posts) are broken. E-mails to the respective webmasters all bounced.
I have a morbid curiosity for arcane programming languages, and SAM76 sounded really interesting to look into and mess around with.
There are quite a few lisp folks lurking on this site, so figured somebody might have a lead... as I heard SAM76 had some early redimentary functional programming ideas.
Extra credit: link to track down a copy of the SAM76 manual!
Wayback has a copy of S76.exe for DOS and Windows
http://web.archive.org/web/20070505122813/http://www.resistors.org/index.php/The_SAM76_programming_language
http://wikivisually.com/wiki/SAM76
http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Sam76
http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Algorithms_in_Sam76
======================= F R E E W A R E =======================
User-Supported Software
If you are using this program and find it to be of value
your $20 contribution will be appreciated.
A contribution of $30 will bring you the SAM76 language
manual and other useful and interesting documentation.
SAM76 Inc., Box 257 RR1
Pennington, N.J., 08534
U.S.A.
Regardless of whether you make a contribution,
you are encouraged to copy and share this program.
> ---------------------------------------------------
http://web.archive.org/web/20110726163455/http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list/2/2/1.html
I believe the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.s (have no idea what the letters
mean) was a group of kids who played with computers and
electronics in Claude Kagan's barn in Pennington, N.J. near
Princeton. Because the developer of TRAC, Calvin Mooers,
spent the rest of his life inventing the software patent and
sued everyone in sight, Claude (whose employer, Western
Electric Laboratories was sued by Mooers) created a very
similar language called "SAM76" supposedly based on S7 and M6
"languages from Bell Labs". I have the original tutorial
manual written and illustrated by the R.E.S.... and versions
on paper tape for the Altair and TRS-80 floppy disk. I think
it looked more like #os#is;; but you could change all the
special characters and command names so it could be made to
look EXACTLY like TRAC. Claude wrote some neat graphic games
for the TRS-80 in SAM76/TRAC.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110726163335/http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list/2/2/1/3.html
Yes, we RESISTORS did indeed meet in Claude's barn which was filled with old telephone and computer equipment. Claude's version of TRAC started on the PDP-8, migrated to the PDP-10, and for the legal reasons mentioned ended up as SAM-76. (FYI, SAM stands either for "Strachey and McIlroy" or "Same As Mooers". RESISTORS always stood for "Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Studies" as much as it stood for anything.
Starting when we were members of the RESISTORS, Peter Eichenberger and I wrote a PDP-10 TRAC processor and later reimplemented it for the PDP-11, eventually adding a little multi-terminal time-sharing monitor. We kept a lower profile than Western Electric (either that, or as 19 year olds we had no noticable assets) so we and Mooers stayed on cordial terms.
I don't know if this is useful, but on this page there is an email adress dsf#hci.ucsd.edu which seems to be Dave Fox's one, the guy who maintained the page hosting the SAM76 file.
There's a pile of information in the old SIMTEL archives, specifically CPMUG Volume 34, which is included in the nearly 13G download here including example code. You have your choice of "DSK" and "ARK" (ARC) format images. The standard {file} utility knows what format it's in {CPMUG034.ARC: ARC archive data, dynamic LZW} SIG/M v. 53 also has SAM76 information and you can find it here.
Now that Wolfram Alpha is released, I am interested in finding out if it can be used as a time-saver in daily programming.
What would you use Wolfram Alpha to do, that earlier took you more time to do manually?
I guess the "Web and Computer systems"-examples is a good start, but there must be more hidden gems that will be really practical for us programmers.
A short list of examples:
MD5-hashing / SHA-hashing
Quick lockup of unicode and HTML-codes for symbols
Color-codes
Please only include one search query per answer, then we can rate them to get the best ones to the top.
(I made this one a community-wiki, since we will be using the voting for ranking)
Note: If some of the links in the answers don't work (eg: wolfram doesn't find any results, then replace all + with spaces..
I might 'save time' by not playing around with it and doing real work instead. :)
Calculating lift coefficients of NACA profiles (example).
(I made a program for this, but it's nice to have the option to do it quick)
I probably won't use it for anything. I don't know about you, but I deal with enough black boxes on a daily basis, and I'd rather use the ones that have been tried and tested thoroughly.
This might come back to haunt me later, but it strikes me that although there might be a point to WA used in a mechanical manner, from my perspective I'm thinking it's not the hard calculable information questions which are the problem which needs to be solved, it's the soft human data which defies classification or rigid modelling. Google seem to understand this, not sure Stephen Wolfram does.
OTOH it could be that anyone can be Colin Laney now.
Someone double check me here:
The MD5 hash of "Wolfram Alpha" (no quotes) is:
882b 0be2 79eb 7e88 86cd 3dae 19c1 d267
And not:
a615 9984 9aee b7be 3091 68bc 0ab7 ?
EDIT: The hash changes every time given the same query...what kind of hash is this?
http://www14.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=MD5%22Wolfram+Alpha%22
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
Throughout the history of software development, it sometimes happens that some person (usually unknown, probably unwittingly) made what, at the time, seemed a trivial, short-term decision that changed the world of programming. What events of this nature come to mind, and what have been our industry's response to mitigate the pain?
Illustration (the biggest one I can think of): When IBM designed the original PC, and decided to save a couple dollars in manufacturing costs by choosing the half-brain-dead 8088 with 8-bit-addressable memory, instead of one of the 16-bit options (8086, 680n, etc.), dooming us to 20 years of address offset calculations.
(In response, a lot of careers in unix platform development were begun.)
Somewhere toward the other end of the scale lies the decision someone made to have a monster Shift Lock key at the left end of the keyboard, instead of a Ctrl key.
Paul Allen deciding to use the / character for command line options in MS DOS.
Allocating only 2 digits for the year field.
And the mitigation was to spend huge amounts of money and time just before the fields overflowed to extend them and fix the code.
Ending Alan Turing's career when he was only 42.
Microsoft deciding to use backslash rather than forwardslash as the path delimiter. And failing to virtualize the drive letter.
Actually the 8088 & 8086 have same memory model and same number of address bits (20). Only difference is width of external data bus which is 8 bit for 8088 & 16 bit for 8086.
I would say that use of inconsistent line endings by different operating systems (\n - UNIX, \r\n - DOS, \r - Mac) was a bad decision. Eventually Apple relented by making \n default for OS-X but Microsoft is stubbornly sticking to \r\n. Even in Vista, Notepad can not properly display a text file using \n as line ending.
Best example of this problem is the ASCII mode of FTP which just adds /r to each /n in a file transferred from a UNIX server to Windows client even though the file originally contained /r/n.
There were a lot of suboptimal decisions in the design of C (operator precedence, the silly case statement, etc.), that are embedded in a whole lot of software in many languages (C, C++, Java, Objective-C, maybe C# - not familiar with that one).
I believe Dennis Ritchie remarked that he rethought precedence fairly soon, but wasn't going to change it. Not with a whole three installations and hundreds of thousands of lines of source code in the world.
Deciding that HTML should be used for anything other than marking up hypertext documents.
Microsoft's decision to use "C:\Program Files" as the standard folder name where programs should be installed in Windows. Suddenly working from a command prompt became much more complicated because of that wordy location with an embedded space. You couldn't just type:
cd \program files\MyCompany\MyProgram
Anytime you have a space in a directory name, you have to encase the entire thing in quotes, like this:
cd "\program files\MyCompany\MyProgram"
Why couldn't they have just called it c:\programs or something like that?
Apple ousting Steve Jobs (the first time) to be led by a succession of sugar-water salemen and uninspired and uninspiring bean counters.
Gary Kildall not making a deal with IBM to license CP/M 86 to them, so they wouldn't use MS-DOS.
HTML as a browser display language.
HTML was originally designed a content markup language, whose goal was to describe the contents of a document without making too many judgments about how that document should be displayed. Which was great except that appearance is very important for most web pages and especially important for web applications.
So, we've been patching HTML ever since with CSS, XHTML, Javascript, Flash, Silverlight and Ajax all in order to provide consistent cross-browser display rendering, dynamic content and the client-side intelligence that web applications demand.
How many times have you wished that browser control languages had been done right in the first place?
Microsoft's decision not to add *NIX-like execute/noexecute file permissions and security in MS-DOS. I'd say that ninety percent of the windows viruses (and spyware) that we have today would be eliminated if every executable file needed to be marked as executable before it can even execute (and much less wreak havoc) on a system.
That one decision alone gave rise to the birth of the Antivirus industry.
Using 4 bytes for time_t and in the internet protocols' timestamps.
This has not bitten us yet - give it a bit more time.
Important web sites like banks still using "security questions" as secondary security for people who forget their passwords. Ask Sarah Palin how well that works when everybody can look up your mother's maiden name on Wikipedia. Or better yet, find the blog post that Bruce Schneier wrote about it.
EBCDIC, the IBM "standard" character set for mainframes. The collation sequence was "insane" (the letters of the alphabet are not contiguous).
Lisp's use of the names "CAR" and "CDR" instead of something reasonable for those basic functions.
Null References - a billion dollar mistake.
Netscape's decision to rewrite their browser from scratch. This is arguably one of the factors that contributed to Internet Explorer running away with browser market share between Netscape 4.0 and Netscape 6.0.
DOS's 8Dot3 file names, and Windows' adoption of using the file extension to determine what application to launch.
Using the qwerty keyboard on computers instead of dvorak.
Thinking that a password would be a neat way to control access.
Every language designer who has made their syntax different when the only reason was "just to be different". I'm thinking of S and R, where comments start with #, and _ is an assignment operator.
Microsoft copying the shortcut keys from the original Mac but using Ctrl instead of a Command key for Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. (Z, X, C, V, etc.), and adding a near worthless Windows key in the thumb position that does almost nothing compared to the pinky's numerous Ctrl key duties. (Modern Macs get a useful Ctrl key (for terminal commands), and a Command key in the thumb position (for program or system shortcuts) and an Alt (Option) key for typing weird characters.)
(See this article.)
Null-terminated strings
7-bits for text. And then "fixing" this with code pages. Encoding issues will kill me some day.
Deciding that "network order" for multi-byte numbers in the Internet Protocol would be high order byte first.
(At the time the heterogenous nature of the net meant this was a coin toss decision. Thirty years later, Intel-derived processors so completely dominate the marketplace it seems lower-order-byte first would have been a better choice).
Netscape's decision to support Java in their browser.
Microsoft's decision to base Window NT on DEC VMS instead of Unix.
The term Translation Lookaside Buffer (which should be called something along the lines of Page Cache or Address Cache).
Having a key for Caps Lock instead of for Shift Lock, in effect it's a Caps Reverse key, but with Shift Lock it could have been controllable.