So, better let windows find the drivers you require on your driver cd’s instead of using those selfish flashy traybar spamming driver control panel installers.

It now supports aliases and you can set whether the parameter should accept a value or not so you can use -foo bar where foo doesn’t accept a value and therefore bar is regognized as a position dependand parameter.

An example parameter definition:

[Parameter(Position = 0, IsMandatory = true,
AcceptsNoValue = false, Name = "folder",
Description = "The folder",
Aliases = new string[]{"target"})]
public string FolderParameter
{
    get { return _FolderParameter; }
    set { _FolderParameter = value; }
}

(Ignore the slashes placed before the quotes, wordpress seems to add them automaticly) I also have added the Intrepid.Automation.CommandLine.OutputHelp function, which outputs help for the parameters of an object to a stream. Like this:

SUMMARY
Creates playlists in a folder and its subfolders

PARAMETERS
-target

[String excludefilter = NULL] (efilter)
Only files not matching this regex are included

[String includefilter = NULL] (ifilter)
Only files matching this regex are included

String folder (target)
The folder

[Boolean expand]
Whether to expand referenced m3u’s

REMARKS
m3u playlists are automaticly excluded; use -excludefilter to add additional excludes.

You can still download the Intrepid.Clorelib assembly here and you still may only use it for non-commercial open-source usage and may not change/reverse engineer/etc it in any way.

Hope it will prove usefull .

It’s very simple, first get yourself a program class, which contains some properties you want the user able to set via the commandline and apply the Parameter attribute:

class CopyProgram
{
    private string _Source;
    [Parameter(Position = 0, IsMandatory = true)]
    public string Source
    {
        get { return _Source;}
        set { _Source = value; }
    }
    private string _Target;

    [Parameter(Position = 1, IsMandatory = true)]
    public string Target
    {
        get { return _Target;}
        set { _Target= value; }
    }

    private bool _WalkRecursivly;
    [Parameter(Name = "recursivly")]
    public bool WalkRecursivly
    {
        get { return _WalkRecursivly;}
        set { _WalkRecursivly= value; }
    }   

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        new Program().Run(args);
    }

    void Run(string[] args)
    {
        CommandLine.ParseCommandLine(args, this);

        // Do stuff here
    }
}

The CommandLine.ParseCommandLine function takes care of parsing the command line string array and filling the required properties of the class provided.

You can call this program in a few different ways:

copy.exe c:\source.txt c:\target.txt
copy.exe -s c:\source.txt -target c:\target.txt
copy.exe -targ c:\target.txt c:\source.txt  -r

Although it only required around 250 lines of code it certainly is an enourmous time safer and makes stuff a lot easier for the user.

At the moment I’m programming a few small utilities and will change the code a bit and fix some bugs if any.

For those interesting in testing it themselves (I encourage it), just download the Intrepid.Corelib .net 2 assembly*. The classes required are in the Intrepid.Automation namespace. Please send any bug reports to: bas.westerbaan@gmail.com.

(* You may use everything in the Intrepid.Corelib assembly freely for non-commercial open-source usage. Do not modify or reverse engineer the assembly in any way.)

Update:
Got rid of some bugs and added the RequiresValue property to ParameterAttribute. Will replace lateron with Type, this allows you to use -e bleh where -e takes no value and bleh is interpreted as a nameless parameter. Will add alliases too.

When creating a Regex with the compile flag the regex will actually be compiled to very optimized native assembly which makes the .net regular expression library faster than any c# code you could write for one specific case.

This was a pleasant suprise for now I know I can use regular expression for all those small things like parsing input.

Sine gamma effect results and positive linear gamma results

Negative linear gamma effect results

first up, the gamma wave effect.

The gamma wave effect pulls the amplitudo’s either to the 0 line or the -1/1 line, just like the gamma on your monitor does:

The effect basicly makes the wave a lot louder and gets rid of the faint sounds. When on fully applied as in the images above it also creates some distortions due to either making the wave unharmonic-ish or getting rid of the nuances.

Another image taken on a higher oscilation (smaller zoom):

This clearly shows the distortion

(The inversion of peak and valley doesn’t matter for for sound only the transition from a valley to a peak matters)

We came up with about 3 different methods:

(When I got my osciloscope control working I’ll take before and after pictures, for now I ain’t sure how the formula’s effect real-world sound yet)

Gamma corrections
This works a bit like the gamma of your monitor. The input for graph for gamma correction is called the epsilon which comes in 2 forms, linear and sine. The first one creates a more distortion like sound than the latter but also makes the wave not harmonic anymore which possible means that most of the distortion like sound is caused by the speakers not handling unharmonic waves very well. The latter one only sounds near the amplitudo distorted.

Sharpening valleys/tops
This method requires some buffering of the current top (or valley) of the wave and sharpenes it by a specific amount. This works a bit like the gamma correction method although it works on every volume making it usefull too for low-volume sounds. The major problem is that it requires tracking a top or a valley, which with a high bitrate requires a really big buffer to analyze, and it has a delay of one top/valley. The big problem is that this isn’t ideal for live playing for which it was designed, a delay of a few extra hundreds of a second would be noticable and it is fairly possible that this algorithm requires too much resources.

Adjusting speed resistance
At a certain point in a wave you can derive the speed and the angle. By registering the original speed and resistance of the wave a derived one can be created which could leed to sharper or softer edges of a top/valley just as the previous method but without being required to analyze the whole top/valley. We’re hoping this method will work best but this is just a concept hoping to work out as it should.

If anyone actually knows how analog distortions work exactly we would be more than happy to learn about it, just comment.

More on this to come…

The most challenging part is getting effects to work, to explain this in more detail you need to know how a computer handles audio.

Sound itself is nothing more than a vibration in the air. It can be represented by the amount of force the air is pushing or pulling.

A tone of a specific frequency would look like:

A computer stores sound by sampling the amplitude of the air at regular interfals.

It would be easy to write a program to increase the frequency of the sound above, but a normal sound doesn’t look that regular:

Increasing the bass or treble of that wave would require some advanced algorithms, which take time to execute which creates a larger delay. One thing that a distortion shouldn’t do is lag.

More on this when some stuff is working.

• The GC is really slow
  malloc is way slower! The Garbage Collect of .net actually is faster than any Unmanaged code for it nows whether a value is a reference (pointer) and therefore can move objects in the memory. The GC puts objects of about the same age (generation) close to eachother in the memory. Objects tend to refer and use objects in the same generation. The processor itself doesn’t directly load a value from the memory but loads a whole block of a few KiloBytes in the Cache. When the processor directly caches all the objects which one object uses it just runs a lot faster for working from the cache is a lot faster than recaching different parts of the memory over and over again which happens with unmanaged languages which just put objects where there is free space.
• Interpreting that stupid Intermediate Language is damned slow
  .Net doesn’t interpret its IL, it compiles and optimizes IL runtime
• Compiling runtime is very slow anyways
  (That compiling a C++ is slow doesn’t mean that .Net is slow) It saves a lot of time for compiling at runtime allows great optimalisations like getting rid of unreachable code and inlining depending on the current runtime variables. Also operations can be compiled with processor specific optimalisations from one IL source. Most of the resource intensive compiling is done at the startup of the application, it is done while the program is running too but that really makes it a lot faster instead of slower
• If I write assembly myself it will be way superior to anything .Net can generate
  .Net can’t make all the optimalisations possible for it would take longer to analyse code than the optimalisation would gain. But usualy it creates still very optimised code. The big problem with writing very optimised assembly yourself is that the most optimised code is very processor specific and would be very hard to port, and even worse to maintain. Wanting to add one little extra feature could let you rewrite the whole code again. (Yes I indeed have made programs with assembly). Languages which avoid this a bit like C++ still require you to make a different build for every specific processor when fully optimising. Also it is nearly impossible to debug fully optimised unmanaged code but in .Net it still provides you with at least the functionname in which it has happened with the offset (try to accomplish that with C++ in release mode)
• The runtime is soooo damned big, it sucks
  20 Mb’s isn’t a lot. It only has got to be downloaded once, and the .net framework is in Windows Update so everyone who updates his computer would have it installed by now. Usualy there is room enough on your software installation CD to include .net, it is more than worth those 20 mb. Also languages like C++ require certain runtimes which arent that cooperative. Does ‘DLLHell’ ring a bell?
• The .net library naming SUCKS
  Yeah.. its naming is different than what MFC uses. At least the naming is very consistant which is way more important than ‘nice naming’, although when seeing some C++ API names used I still wonder why someone could prefer that above the clear .Net naming
• The .net library itself sucks
  Really? Like what? What can’t it do?
• You can’t use API calls like CreateFile
  Now I can’t…
  [DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]public static extern IntPtr CreateFile(string lpFileName, uint dwDesiredAccess, uint dwShareMode, IntPtr lpSecurityAttributes, uint dwCreationDisposition, uint dwFlagsAndAttributes, IntPtr hTemplateFile);
  … now I can!
• .Net sucks cause it is Microsoft
  Yeah, so what. .Net is a ECMA standard so you are pretty free to use it, and if there is a catch then that one hasn’t been exploited yet for on linux people are happily using mono to run .net stuff

When having Avalon installed it adds a few new project templates to my Visual C# 2005 express, with which avalon applications can be made. Avalon is a Window system which uses xml files to define a form. At the moment I couldn’t find a designer neither reference to it in the help files and assume it isn’t implemented yet, which is rather a pain for creating a form by editing Xml by hand is just a pain: Xml is hard to write and I am just too dependant on the user friendlyness of the form designer.

When compiling Avalon generates classes and serialized data files in your application to replace the Xml files.

So what does it basicly do? Lets you design your forms easily (although there isn’t a proper designer yet) maintaining a good performance by replacing the slow Xml files by generated classes and serialized resources compile-time.
Having a few test applications decompiled and having looked at the sdk it seems that Avalon can do practicly the same as the current Windows.Forms dll.
So now I wonder, in what way would Avalon be better than using the great current form designer and the Windows.Forms dll?