Convert FAT to NTFS, DMA

2 more ways to speed up your computer are the following:

1. Convert your drive to NTFS, if it's currently FAT32:

Shut down any running programs.
Click Start, then choose Run.
In the box, enter cmd, which will bring up a black command-line window. You’ll see a prompt that says something like “C:\WINDOWS” with a blinking cursor. (If you’ve ever used DOS, you’ll recognize this.)
Enter the following: convert c: /fs:ntfs (If your hard drive isn’t drive C:, substitute the correct letter, and don’t forget the space between the colon and the slash.)
When you press Enter, you’ll probably see a message saying the conversion will take place next time you start Windows. So click Start, choose Shut Down, and choose Restart. Windows will convert your drive--and it will also reboot your computer twice.


2. Use DMA (direct memory access):

Go to your Control Panel and double-click System, then choose the Hardware tab. Click Device Manager. This will bring up a list of every type of hardware your computer has, from “Computer” to “Disk Drives” to “Monitors,” and more.
Click the plus sign next to “IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.”
Double-click “Primary IDE Channel.” (If you have two of them, don’t worry. Just repeat this procedure.)
Click the Advanced Settings tab. You’ll probably see two devices listed (0 and 1).
For each one, click the drop-down arrow next to Transfer Mode and choose “DMA if available.” Then click OK. (If you have another Primary IDE Channel, repeat this procedure.)
Close Device Manager and reboot your computer.

C++ tagged unions continued

I have received indirect confirmation that using structs with tagged unions in C++ is not object oriented, as I suspected, and is most likely a poor way of doing things. This is a C method, not C++. No objects, no encapsulation. Not my idea to do it like that anyways. My idea used nice C++ objects. Oh well. I'm just low man on the totem pole and do as told. lol.

Clean your hard drive tips

One way to make your computer speed up is to clean your hard drive. Hard drives run faster & more consistently when there is free space. You can free up space on your hard drive by doing the following:

Eliminate software you don't use

Eliminate unused fonts - Create a folder and use Windows Explorer to go to your C:\WINDOWS\FONTS folder, and drag any fonts you never use into the new folder.

Use disk cleanup - From My Computer, right-click on your hard drive.
Choose Properties.
Click “Disk Cleanup.”

Clean the registry - Try EasyCleaner, it's free and easy to use. Once installed, click the Registry button. Click the Find button on the bottom. EasyCleaner will search your Registry for the leftovers of old programs. When it’s done, click the Delete All button. Click Yes to confirm you really want to delete the bad entries.

Defrag your hard drive, which helps your computer spend less time accessing files.


That's it. You should now have a noticeable amount of free space on you hard drive.

CNET, Speed Up Your Windows PC

I mentioned a while ago how CNET has free online courses. Many different topics and the information provided is worthwhile. I'm currently taking two courses, HDTV 101 and Speed Up Your Windows PC. I'm a bit behind in both courses, but one tip to speed up your pc has worked pretty good.
I use Webshots for my wallpaper and screensaver, which reminds me, I need to download some new scenes. I'm really not willing to part with Webshots, but if you are, one way to speed up your PC is to do this:

Go to Control Panel and choose Display (you may have to click Appearance and Themes first).
On the Themes tab, change your current theme to Windows Classic, which uses fewer resources than the new look does. You can then click the Appearance tab and change that look to suit yourself.

The following tip I did use and it seems to have sped things up a bit:

Go into Control Panel and choose System (you may have to click Performance and Maintenance first).
Click the Advanced tab.
In the Performance box, click Settings.
You can now select Adjust for best performance, or you can choose Custom and play around with the settings. The more you uncheck, the less work your computer will have to do.


If you are interested in speeding up your file browsing, you might want to try this:

Open My Computer.
Click the Tools menu.
Choose Folder Options.
Click the View tab.
Uncheck “Automatically search for network folders and printers.”
Click OK.

This prevents Windows from automatically searching your network for folders and files, unless you ask it to.

C++, Java Native Interface (JNI)

In my recent Java Native Interface (JNI) adventures, I have discovered that when calling the JNI function NewObject in C++, you need to cast the variables to their corresponding jni type. I didn't have to do this when using C and jni.
Example:
C++ struct ABC { double x, double y };

Using C++ create a jni object to pass to java:

jobject createABC( JNIEnv* env, jobject obj )
{
ABC abc;
a.x = 5.2;
a.y = 2.4;

jclass cls = env->FindClass( "ABC" ); // find the java ABC class

jmethodID mid = env->GetMethodID( cls, "", "(DD)V" );

jobject jabc = env->NewObject( cls, mid, (jdouble)a.x, (jdouble)a.y);

return jabc;
}

C++ tagged unions

Here's a question I posted at The Scripts Forum:

I have a class which does coordinate conversions.
I have several different data structures which are used to pass data in and out of this class.
I have a setCoordinate function which I use to pass one of these data structures in, to set the input coordinates.

Here's my problem:
How do I define these data structures? Should they be a class or a struct?
They need to have a base class in order to be passed into the set coordinate function. The base class doesn't have any parameters or functions for the derived data structures to inherit.

XXX Base:{};
XXX A: Base
{
int x;
int y;
}

XXX B: Base
{
double la;
double lo;
}

setCoordinates( Base* ba );


Next question: Should these data structures be included in the header file where setCoordinates is defined or should each one have its own header file.

If each should have it's own header file, then it should be a class, but should they be classes?
If this is an object oriented design, then it seems like they should be classes, but all they do is pass data in and out of the conversion class.


Unfortunately, I did not receive a response.
I poked around the web a bit and came across this link. http://java.sun.com/developer/Books/shiftintojava/page1.html, the Replace Unions with Class Hierarchies section. In C, this tagged union method makes sense. However, I'm programming in C++. C++ is an object oriented programming language. Tagged unions are not object oriented. Classes are object oriented. From what I've read structs only exist in C++ for backwards compatibilty with C.

Anyways, here's what I ended up doing:

typedef struct {
int tag;
union U
{
struct A
{
int x;
int y;
}a;
struct B
{
doublela;
double lo;
}b;

circleDimensions_t circle;
} u;
} Base;


Tagged unions in C++ condense things, but I don't like it.

SVG Logos

If you work with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), you might be interested to know there are now SVG logos. I believe they were created by Harvey Rayner. They are available here. Very cool!

Apache Batik 1.7beta1

The latest version of Apache Batik has been released.
Here is the announcement I received:

The Apache Batik team is proud to announce the long-awaited release of
Apache Batik version 1.7beta1, a Java-based toolkit for processing SVG.

This is the first release of Batik in approximately two years, and
brings many new features and improvements over version 1.6. Notable new
features include:

* DOM Level 3 Core/Events/XPath support
* Improved WMF transcoder support
* Near complete SMIL Animation support
* A few SVG 1.2 features, such as:
* resource documents
* shapechange and RenderedBBoxChange events
* SVGGlobal startMouseCapture/stopMouseCapture methods
* handler elements

Batik can be downloaded from here:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/download.cgi

For the full list of improvements and bug fixes over version 1.6, click
on the “release change log” link from that page.

The reasoning behind having a beta release rather than a full release is
that there has been a great deal of changes since version 1.6, and while
we believe the code to be reasonably stable, it would be beneficial to
get feedback from users on any bugs that may have been missed. We plan
to have a full 1.7 release in a month or two.

If you find any problems, please file bug reports:

http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/

And for more information, see the Batik project website:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/