If you don’t know what Subversion is, I’d recommend taking a look here.

Here’s how to set up your own Subversion server, for Linux users only. I used Ubuntu 10.04, so keep in mind that your results may differ.

First, we need to establish your base directory for the repository. Simply create a directory where you want your repository to be located.

A while back, I realized that there must be thousands of people who sit around their computers, waiting for torrents to finish downloading, so that they can stop it from seeding. I’m talking about people downloading ethical torrents here, not the people downloading illegal files, although it applies to them as well. Many people don’t want their torrents to seed, for many different reasons. Some agressive ISP’s throttle download and upload speed, and many more have an upload limit. If you start downloading a torrent, then go to bed, chances are when you’ll wake up, it will have been seeding (uploading) for a while. The process of seeding can easily pass through your upload limit, charging you hundreds of dollars in extra “fees” that your ISP may charge for exceeding the limit. Whatever the reason, I realized that people must get tired of waiting for torrents to finish downloading, so they can stop them from seeding.

This got me thinking, and I wrote a script called SeedSlayer, which, as its name implies, stops seeding. With SeedSlayer, you can start your torrent downloading, and go to bed knowing that when you wake up, your torrent won’t have seeded at all, and will have stopped the process before it began. This means you can download files without having to worry about always watching your computer, because SeedSlayer will do it for you.

Although there are other means of stopping torrents from seeding, 99% relay that information to the torrent tracker (the server that keeps track of who’s downloading, who’s uploading, and what their settings are), so the tracker lowers your download priority, and you’ll get a reduced download speed. SeedSlayer doesn’t relay anything to the tracker. It simply runs in the background, waiting for your torrents to stop downloading, then it prevents the upload process.

In the simplest of terms,

Without SeedSlayer = Uploading (Uses valuable upload allocation, if applicable)

With other method = Slower Download Speed (Tracker knows you’re not going to seed, gives you a slower download)

With SeedSlayer = No Uploading/Seeding, No decrease in download speed.

If you’re interested in SeedSlayer, you can visit the project page (here), or the development blog (here).

Borrowed from HowStuffWorks.com

One of the main concepts of torrenting is that the file you’re downloading is not stored on a central server, everyone who’s downloading and uploading it has a piece of the file. When you torrent something, you’re essentially downloading a slice of the file from a bunch of different computers who are also downloading it, instead of the entire file from one server.

Pro Tip: When you’re uploading a torrent (sharing after you’ve finished, downloading it), it’s called seeding.

This entire process reduces the overall stress on the server, and on each individual client.

Related Portfolio Post: SeedSlayer: Auto-stop seeding on torrents

dwmcc

Notice, I didn’t enclose the ’0′ with quotation marks, because we’re recording an integer, not a string. Examples:

Integer: “123″

String: “The quick brown hippo jumped over the lazy car.”

Sikuli can determine if we are asking for an integer or string simply from the quotation marks. If they don’t exist around a base-10 numerical value, it defines it as an integer. If they do exist around a base-10 numerical value, or, for that matter, any letters or numbers in the define statement, Sikuli defines that as a string. In our sample Sikuli project, we will start with defining an integer as ’0′, and create a prompt, asking how many laps Mr. Hippo has completed, which will be written to the defined integer, and then printed in a popup. Keep in mind that a popup can only display a string, so the number of laps will need to be converted back to a string.

We’re done! We now have a simple Mr. Hippo laps tracker in Sikuli.

First, open Visual Basic. If you don’t have it, download it here.

Create a new ‘Windows Forms Application’, and name it ‘Hello World’.

You’ll then be presented with your new project, and we can begin creating our ‘Hello World’ application. Since we won’t be using an interface for this, commonly referred to as a ‘form’, we need to hide the main form. We can do this via code or in the form’s settings. If we’re not using a form, what will we be using, you ask? We’ll be creating a messagebox, and adding ‘Hello World’ to it. In Visual Basic, this is so incredibly simple, it can be done within seconds. We’re going to need to get to our ‘form’ code, so double-click on the form

We will then be presented with the code window, which will have code already written in it, and look somewhat like the image below. That’s okay, it’s just our ‘Public Class’, which defines our forum.

In the space between the ‘Private Sub Form1_Load’ and the ‘End Sub’, we’ll need to:

1. Make the main form invisible when the application is run, and

2. Create a messagebox with the ‘Hello World’ message.

First, to make the form invisible on run, we need to specify two things: The form, and the visibility. We will set this using the following code:

As you see, it’s incredibly easy to understand, as it’s setting ‘Me’, or the current form to invisible. Our code should now resemble this:

It is now necessary to add the messagebox functionality. We’ll need to use the following code:

An application I developed in Visual Basic, it allows for non-cluttered, easy access to the web. No toolbars, no add-ons, no themes, just a stripped down, extremely lite browsing experience. I developed this because of the want to have a browser on my flash-drive, that starts virtually instantly, and is incredibly fast. WBL, or Web Browser Lite accomplishes both of those goals.

NOTE: This is an alpha verison of WBL, meaning it’s even before the beta phase, vis a vis, there are many bugs, problems, and issues with it. I’m extremely busy and I’ll get around to furthering development as soon as I can. Thanks!

Download: WBL.rar

Installation Instructions:

1. Download File, and Extract it.

2. Run setup.exe

3. Done!

Problem:

We have students from three different schools that attend the After School Program. The grading application, Pinnacle, has different logins for each school. It is also built on the Java environment. The nature of the application does not allow for multiple instances of the application to be open at the same time, vis a vis, it is necessary to log in and out of different school, depending on where the student is educated.

Solution:

An application written in Visual Basic 2010, that we call PinnacleHandler, that easily manages and allows for more than one school to be open at once, by opening separate Java environments for each school. This slows down the computer, but allows for all schools to be opened and viewed at once.

More info: PinnacleHandler

—–

First, open the Sikuli IDE. For those of you without it, now would be a wise time to download it at http://www.sikului.org. We’ll create a version that opens a messagebox with your desired text, in this case, ‘Hello World’.

Now, for the first step. Creating a messagebox. This is incredibly simple, using the ‘popup’ function. Remember that Sikuli is based on Java, so some lots of the code will seem oddly familiar for a Java guru.

To initialize a messagebox, or popup, we need to call it, using the code below.

Now, we need to specify the text within the popup, as the command listed previously will throw an error without specification. To do that, we use quotes. The following code will create a popup, and populate it with the text within the quotes.

That’s it. Seriously, I’m not kidding. While other programming languages will have you create framework, layouts, etc, we’ve just created a simple ‘Hello World’ program using Sikuli in seconds. In the IDE, your code should look along the lines of this:

The Sikuli code to display 'Hello World'

When this code is run, it will display a nice messagebox just like this:

Enjoy!

That’s it! Here’s an example script using the ‘continue’ tag:

This can also be used to loop a script, like in the example below:

Tada! You’ve now looped a script in Sikuli.