AustinTech

I’ve been looking into building interfaces for some game ideas lately. Links to some decent tutorial sites follows.

• eyeball design
• Eyes On Design
• PSLover.com

As I’ve undergone the transition from HTML to XHTML I’ve collected various bits of information that I found useful. The following items provide an overview of the some of the more nagging issues that came up.

Anchor - target=”" attribute

Since the target=”" attribute is not valid in strict XHTML 1.0, the following allows the target to be used with a minimum of JavaScript.

The onclick=”" atttribute is valid XHTML. For those users with Javascript turned off, the link simply loads in the same frame.

<a xhref=”http://www.site.com/path_to_page.html” mce_href=”http://www.site.com/path_to_page.html” onclick=”target=’_blank’”>My Link<a>

TD - nowrap attribute

nowrap is not XHTML compliant since it doesn’t have the required quotes. However, transitionally it is legal to put nowrap=”nowrap”.

For a purer version use the style=”white-space:nowrap” css mark-up. Or, put it in an external stylesheet.

IMG - align=”" attribute

Since the align attribute is not valid in XHTML 1.0 we need to find the css equivalents. Instead of one css equivalent, however, there are a couple to consider. For horizontal aligning, use the “float” attribute. For vertical alignment use the “vertical-align” attribute.

Valid _float_ values: float:left or float:right

Valid _vertical-align_ values: top, bottom, middle, text-top, text-bottom, baseline.

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In my current study of wxWindows I found it extremely useful to use the built in wxLog classes. However, I was a little confused as to how they were to be implemented. After a few trials, I came up with the basic boilerplate steps below:

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This entry begins a new series to catalogue knowledge I obtain while working with the wxWidgets C++ Framework. I’ll be posting my thoughts on TrollTech QT versus wxWindows frameworks shortly. Both are fantastic, but I went with wxWindows for reasons I’ll describe in a different article. For now…Bitmaps.

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An ongoing set of links to various assembly language related sites on the internet.

• Art of Assembly Language Programming - Randall Hyde Excellent resource on beginning Assembly Language programming. This site and the associated book concentrate on using the HLA (High Level Assembler), which is somewhat controversial with the veteran assembly programmers. Being a beginner though, this site was exactly what I needed to get me started. The book is available online, but I went ahead and bought the book as it’s much easier to read and the number of printed pages was astronomical.
• Flat Assember - Tomasz Grysztar A very popular and useful assembler. This assembler is open-source and can also be used with HLA.
• ASMSource Assembly Language Programming - John A. Lyons Interesting list of links and examples for both 16-bit and 32-bit assembly programming.
• Iczelion’s Win32 Assembly Homepage A highly regarded site with the “standard” tutorials for Win32 Assembly programming. Most of the examples and tutorials use MASM (especially the MASM32 distribution).
• The Netwide Assembler (NASM) NASM is an 80×86 assembler designed for portability and modularity. It supports a range of object file formats including Linux a.out and ELF, COFF, Microsoft 16-bit OBJ and Win32.
• Win32 NASM - Unofficial Homepage - Tomcat Linksand examples on using NASM to create Win32 applications.
• Assembly Language Programming - Wayne J. Radburn Links and examples for Win32 Assembly programming, including a set of skeleton source code for building bare bones Win32 applications
• Chris Dragan’s Corner Several well-done example programs built by Chris Dragan including graphics examples and CPU identification
• Dr. Dobb’s Microprocessor Resources The magazine extension on Intel processors. Includes technical details and Intel Secrets.
• GoASM Assembler Sourcepage - Jeremy Gordon Homepage for the GoASM assembler and related tools (e.g. GoLink). Includes several examples and documentation.
• Small Is Beautiful Assembly Page - Steve Gibson Assembly Page of the Gibson Research site. Steve Gibson’s site is what inspired me to persue the idea of assembly programming. Excellent source of information and examples of what can be done with assembly. Steve only programs in assembly and it’s amazing what he’s created
• Nuvision Miami Assembly Links A great list of various links on assembly language including free resources and books
• MadWizard.com - Great resource for WinSock programming as well as other MASM oriented assembly topics.
• Win32Asm Forum - Community driven message forum on various assembly related topics. Contains lots of example code and tutorials. Also includes an HLA sub-forum.
• Masm Forum - Masm32 oriented form with various topics. Lots of flame wars (kind of annoying), but good information nonetheless. Also includes an HLA sub-forum.
• Bill’s Win32ASM Page - Good articles on general Win32 ASM programming. I was looking for more specific information on what the EAX, EBX, ECX, etc. register names stood for and this site had a nice little article on it. Of course, I should probably just read the Intel manuscripts…

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I found a great reference of named colors for HTML browsers. I’ve included the HTML in the “extended entry” of this post. The original source is at http://halflife.ukrpack.net/csfiles/help/colors.shtml

The full table of web-colors is in the extended portion of this entry.

HTML Named Colors

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An ongoing list of mathematic related sites that I’ve found to be worthy of keeping in my bookmarks.

• Cut-The-Knot
• Eric Weisstein’s World of Mathematics
• Mathematics Help Central
• http://www.mathpuzzle.com
• http://www.primepuzzles.net
• http://www.mathpages.com
• The Math Forum
• Problem of the Week

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Here’s a quick little class I wrote to encrypt text files from a web-server using GnuPG. I’ll post updates to it as the code improves, but this was a simple and useful start that helped me encrypt messages and then send them via email from the webserver.

Some uses could be:

• Encrypt and send credit card information via email without storing the numbers on the server
• Encrypt and send sales order information
• Encrypt and send membership information
• Encrypt and send database and server statististics
• …basically anything you don’t want others to see!

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