You can set a program to be run at startup by adding it to the Registry under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

In regedit, do this manually, then export (File->Export...) just that key. It exports as a .reg file (which is Unicode text) that you can edit; clean out the irrelevant entries and just leave yours. It should look something like:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]"googletalk"="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Talk\\googletalk.exe /autostart"

(in this example, googletalk.exe is the program you want run).

Put the .reg file and your program on the target machine. Double-clicking on a .reg file like this one will bring up a confirm dialog; if you click "Yes", it will be added to the registry, and your program will run on next startup.

I'm okay at Python. I would say given a system of three ranks of knowledge, I'm an intermediate.

What I like about learning to program is that it's (very slowly) teaching me about the actual hardware and the OS.


I've kind-of dabbled in Perl; I have the camel and llama books on my desk right now, (of the two, I prefer the llama book but I highly recommend both of them,) and it's been very fun learning about it.

I took ESR's advice, (I know, I know, he gets on my nerves too sometimes,) and decided to at least learn how Perl works and how to read it; however, it's ended up being that, on paper, I'm starting to prefer Perl instead of Python.


I want to get to a mastery level of Python programming in the 2.x series by the end of the year, while also looking into the newer 3.x
I intend to write at least twelve Perl programs by the end of the year, and start to learn probably C.


I'm fortunate that while my public library by no means has a large selection on computers, what it does have is generally high quality.

What's everyone's thoughts on Java?

My math teacher will be having a half-year intro to java class (If enough kids sign up). So hopefully after an intro course, I'll be able to expand off of it.

What sort of stuff can you do with Java, and would you recommend learning more and more of it?

Java's a good language for Web applications that are too hairy for PHP, Python, or Perl. That's where it's most widely used. It has a lot of facilities for fooling around with the structure of classes and objects, so it's good for studying the structure of object-oriented programming and for creating objects that do magical things. It's not an especially good beginner's language (Python's a lot better for that), but you may be stuck with it, because it is the language used on the AP Computer Science exams. Finally, it's just awful for constructing stand-alone applications with graphical user interfaces.

Why the hell anyone would want to start with teaching a boring language like Java beats me. Most of the Universities over here do though so there must be some reason.

I think they use it just to teach the OOP model like dogsbody said. Just abuot every computer science degree here that I have seen will do an intro to VB, intro to Java, and then advanced Java as requirements for the degree.

Smalltalk and Lisp would be a far more intresting exploration of OO (The only two languages Alan Kay considers to be true OO languages). But I get what you mean. ((I want to (learn lisp (at some point))))


I have never seen VB listed on a UK university course, but that may be by year 2 most of the universities seem to want you to at least experiment with Mac and Linux which may be the reason.
They also for that reason can't use C# as mono lags behind quite a bit and isn't really official (Which is a pity as I like C#)

I haven't seem much variation from the Java start, although interestingly Newcastle starts teaching JavaScript for half a year as an easier introduction to programming (I would have picked Python, but JavaScript is possibly better as it exposes people to another type of OO model before they hit Java).
Edinburgh starts with Haskell and Java, Bristol (I think) starts with Haskell.
Of the ones I applied to (I didn't apply to Bristol) Edinburgh was the only one that required (A level) maths and Haskell makes a lot more sense coming from a maths background (You should have already encountered recursive (mathmatical) functions etc)

My university (University of Central Lancashire) is one of the few universities in the country which starts with C++ and focuses on it quite a lot which I find strange. We also do a lot of Java and C#, among other things (depending on the particular course). Can't say I've ever heard of a university teaching VB either.

I recently started a course in Computer Graphics. So far we've been only experimenting on manipulating 3D objects with our matrices just to learn how they look like. I have trouble understanding how a 4x4 matrix can describe how a 3D model should appear on the screen. Even worse is that the course litterature is expensive and hard to find. We use OpenGL with Glut as API.

The 4x4 matrix describes the position, orientation and scale of the model. An example:

Xx Xy Xz 0
Yx Yy Yz 0
Zx Zy Zz 0
Px Py Pz 1

The first, second and third rows are the local X, Y and Z axes of the model respectively, with the 0 indicating that they are vectors. The final row is the position of the model in world space, with the 1 indicating that it's a vertex. Note that the matrix could be set out in columns rather than rows as well, neither is right or wrong. In fact, I think OpenGL uses the columns approach (I'm more familiar with DirectX personally).

OpenGL uses the columns approach. I think understand more of it now, but I am still not 100% sure why we would use X, Y and Z three times for the local axes. Thanks for your answer anyway.

Each axis is a vector, so you need an x, y and z component for each axis to describe it.

Kinda obvious now that you say it. Thanks again.

No problem, I actually just explained this very same thing in one chapter of my report for my final year project a few days back so I basically just repeated what I wrote then.

Awesome. If run into more problems, expect som PMs.

"...because it is the language used on the AP Computer Science exams." The dominance of Advanced Placement (AP) classes in college-prep high school education in the US results in a lot of "teaching to the exam" :shrug:

For university, it has the advantage of a transparent (notice I didn't say "intuitive") object model that can be manipulated from within the language. Thus it's suitable for advanced adventures into things like self-managing application frameworks. But it's still not really a good language for lower-division instruction. My daughter's college starts with Python for general programming and C for robotics, which sold her on majoring in CS.

The fourth row is translation, and it has the interesting property that a point [x, y, z, 0] x T will not be translated, while a point [x, y, z, 1] x T will be translated through [Px, Py, Pz].

If it weren't for translation, you could get by with a 3x3 matrix. Indeed some implementations may choose to use a 3-rank multiplication and an addition instead of the 4-rank multiplication, as this reduces the number of operations from 16 multiplications and 12 additions to 9 multiplications and 9 additions.

(Though if you take advantage of the fourth column being uniformly (0, 0, 0, 1), you can eliminate 4 multiplications and 3 additions. The 3 rank plus translation representation still saves 3 multiplications.)

So I got both the books I posted about earlier. Tryign to decide which to keep and which to return. Not sure either way though. Any thoughts?

I bought both of these and looking through them they both seem similar. I can only afford to keep one. How should I choose which would be best? I do have an older (and much larger) C# book that I used for a class before. So I know the basics at least so far.

Not that user reviews are infallible, but the second book got mostly poor reviews and the first got mostly good reviews. I'd certainly take the time to read through the user reviews for both and see what people had to say. If they don't support their reasoning, maybe you're no farther ahead, but if they do, it may help your decision making. Also, I'd spend a little time with both books to see how they approach the subject matter ultimately to see if one is more geared toward your style of learning than the other. I learn by doing, so I tend to prefer books with a reasonable number of problems. You may learn differently, but I think it makes a worthwhile criterion in helping you decide.

Here's a very noobish question...

What is the easiest way to remove certain symbols from a string? (In Python)

let's say the string is:

string = 'blah blah < blah something'

and I want to remove that '<' thingie, how would I do that?

http://docs.python.org/library/string.html#string.translate

eh... could you give me an example?

from string import *exorince = 'blah blah < blah something'example = translate(exorince, None, '<')print example

Of course, you could also use string.replace, replacing '<' with ''.

from string import replaceexorince = 'blah blah < blah something'example = exorince.replace('<', '')print example