News Page

On this page I'll report on changes to my web site or related news items.

Don't expect a full-blown weblog, more like a list of highlights in shorthand.

For a file based list of changes look at the What's New list.

2020-03-24

• Until recently I had never heard of Squarepusher, an English electronic musician.
Last week I got an e-mail message pointing me to one of his live performances where he uses snippets of program code as a background.
Try to find my 1998 Rexx CUT code

2020-03-20

• Barcode.exe had a minor update: I removed some duplicate code and improved error handling.

2020-03-13

• AirRegPHCmd.exe is a command line tool to search the downloaded Dutch aircraft registration file in Excel format for aircraft manufacturer and type.
Besides the executable, you will need the 3 accompanying DLLs, all in a single directory.
The downloaded Excel sheet must be placed in a subdirectory "PH".

2020-02-15

• AirReg.hta had another update: you can now add a local FAA database search feature by downloading the FAA's Releasable Aircraft Registry Database and placing the files in the HTA's parent folder.
Since these local searches are extremely slow, the HTA will only use them if no results were found on Airport-Data.com.

2020-02-13

• Though Airport-Data.com, the data source for AirReg.hta, has an extensive database of aircrafts, I sometimes encounter registation numbers that it cannot find.
Most of these are rare vintage aircrafts with N-numbers, that can be found in the FAA's Releasable Aircraft Database.
This database can be downloaded for free.
I am writing a C# program to search these database files, but it still is slow, whereas a quickly composed batch file AirRegNCmd.cmd works about 20 times faster.
The batch file will prompt you to open the database download page if it cannot find the database files.

2020-02-10

• Adam Yaakov Cohen reported that DropDownBox didn't work in XP virtual machines.
The problem was caused by DropDownBox's use of .NET Framework 4.5 (Console.IsRedirected function), whereas XP virtual machines end at 4.0.
Though I had switched to 4.5 to decrease dependency on unmanaged code, DropDownBox still does use some unmanaged code (to extract an icon from System32.dll), so reverting to .NET Framework 4.0 required only a minor change.
The resulting C# source code and compiled executable are available in dialogboxes.zip as DropDownBoxXP.cs and DropDownBoxXP.exe.
I did not change the version number, because the change is already reflected in the file name.
If DropDownBox works for you, just forget about DropDownBoxXP.

2020-02-05

• And another update of AirReg.hta: it now allows airplane registration "numbers" of up to 8 characters, and input filtering is improved.

2020-02-03

• AirReg.hta has been updated: it will now open external URLs in the default browser when links are clicked.