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60b3r · 4 years

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60b3r’s スクリプト: CUT (CleanUpTool)

IF anything that could happen with Windows, is it got cluttered fast. Especially if you (like me) love downloading and testing random freewares and then find out that the fucking installers contains major bloatwares and malwares. Most of the time, the crappy uninstaller bundles are also not that great to get rid of all the nasty shit they have already extracted into my computer. Sometimes I need to uninstall them one by one, from the broken shortcuts, unused runtimes and libraries, and the leftover config files on %AppData%. That’s why most of the time now I try to get myself used to PortableApps (no endorsement here, but they have done a great job!). Early this morning (well it’s still 3 AM when I suddenly woke up from my sleep) I find myself killing the time and went for a hunt for those sneaky registry keys I need to search manually to remove Corel’s Protexis services and Visual Studio Redist uninstallation entries which didn’t vanish after I declutter them yesterday from Control Panel.

One of the things that I find myself very hard to get rid of ONE BY ONE (other than the regedit entries stuff) is the unused empty directories and frustrating zero-byte files locked by services you don’t know you have, leftover from installations. After searching the whole freeware and portable alternatives for programs, I found Jonas John’s Remove Empty Directories (a.k.a. RED) and was immediately relieved. His app has so many features and help clean up jobs easily. Gonna get this app into the hall of fame with CCleaner though. I dont get it why Piriforn haven’t included this feature in their suite. Or has them? I don’t know. I use the free version. Hahahaha. However, being a very stubborn and eclectic former script kiddie that I am, I decided to quickly make a batch script for my own to automate the process of deleting zero-byte files and empty folders that are found scattering throughout my harddisk. No more manual screening like I just did with the registry. So damn tiring. I opened the Notepad and started writing these codes, while at the same time scrounging old batch programming books on my archives. I write this app from scratch, but time seems to move fast when you do something you love, right? By the time I finished coding and debugging the core functions, the sun is already out.

Problem is, I have technically forgot most of my hacker training programming forum pages back then when I was in junior high school. Particularty embarassing, I forget most of the simple yet powerful FOR-DO syntax: it was almost 5 years since I last code in batch programming to automate netsh, ipconfig, ncpa and inetcpl commands for my home office setup. To be honest, who likes to code using batch? I do. Because it is so simple with no databases (someone say yes databases ughh so relatable). I also code using VisualBasic scripts back then to make computer worms and the nasty virus I program to open the CD tray every 5 minutes. Really, man? VBS? YES. I then decided to join Biology classes for senior high school and graduated Biotech instead. No regrets. I love biology. Hope soon I will be able to join Master’s.

Sadly, I am not that ‘computer literate’ anymore like I used to be; since I put my efforts and energy into studying Biology, something I also love. Even sometimes I get myself to study coding (like making the spinning X sign on the blog’s top left navbar using CSS) from time to time whenever I am not busy doing other things. Come on, I am not those hackers over Mr. Robot. I am just a regular citizen, not a beautiful and unique snowflake. I am the same decaying organic matter as everything else. What. But, moving on. Just another sad story for another day.

I kept surfing around the stackoverflow to find solution regarding the CHOICE and ERRORLEVEL syntax because I am a forgetful tomato. I also scour other old—dinosaur-age—blogs for batch programming tutorials and found Raymond Chen’s old blogpost over here. He made a script to help delete empty folders. I tweaked it around a bit to include folders with spaces. Then I added the function to scan zero-byte files. The rest are the delete functions for the scanned file and folder. To conclude my early morning rush, I ended up making an executable file, complete with a cute icon from dryicons and packed by Fatih’s compiler. I then scanned the file over to VirusTotal to make sure people can distribute it. Problem is, I sometimes forget it that executables with file operations (especially deleting stuffs) are sometimes taken by antivirus engines as rogue attempt of some suspicious code. By the looks of it, 18 out of 70 engines flagged my tiny simple app as generic malware. Here is the detection report. But I can guarantee you as long as you can read and make your own script, you will not become a victim of software counterfeiting identity theft by some random trojan. Moreover, all the top antiviruses detect no harmful activities from my app. Phew. No problems with the file packer then. No rootkits, too.

For you who wants to just use the final program and scrub those nasty dirt off the disks right away, go here (GDrive). For those who just want to make a batch script file for ease of use and editing, you can use my script. Here is the core function, raw, non-user friendly version of the script:

@echo off echo CUT by 60b3r pause echo executing purging sequence... for /r %%F in (*.*) do ( if %%~zF==0 del "%%F" ) for /f "delims=" %%i in ( 'dir /s /b /ad ^| sort /r' ) do rd "%%i" 2>NUL pause

You can modify it and redistribute it freely, and also if you can get the deprecated features working (see about page), do email me. Gonna fix those and add more features. Also follow me on my GitHub repository, though I am not going to update much on there. I am no 1337 programmer, you know? Just a regular hobbyist doing random stuff. This is actually one of my numerous simple scripts collection (yeah, I was just a script kiddie gathering ready to use scripts for pathetic hacking dramas). Next time, I will update you on how to make the ultimate simple networking toolkit, merging all my script tools into one executable suite. All only using batch programming and notepad. No big deal, just a simple, humble, and very disgusting reuse of existing MS-DOS command.

Thanks for reading my simple tutorial!

#batch #programming #tutorial #cleanup #text

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wanderingnork · 6 years

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Cherry, Honey, Gloss and Opal, please

cherry:what words of advice would you give to a stranger?

take it easy. take a moment to breathe. don’t be a jerk, the world’s hard enough and you can be a hero just by holding the door for someone.

honey: what do you do to relax?

ostensibly, i relax by lying in bed listening to music or taking a long walk and playing pokemon go. here’s hoping i get to do these things soon.

gloss: list ten songs you love right now

hold on (triumph)

good times (all time low)

it’s time (imagine dragons)

level up (vienna teng)

we will live on (nate van winkle)

six feet under the stars (acoustic) (all time low)

reckless and the brave (acoustic) (all time low)

above the timberline (five for fighting)

plant life (owl city)

nothing stops another day (ghost)

i refuse to apologize for having three atl songs on this list

opal:talk about your interests and passions

good lord where to begin?????????? is there a damn thing about which i’m not passionate? is there?

at the moment...we’re discussing, primarily, computers. @avaesta, @a-driftamongopenstars, and @wehavekookies (among a host of others) have decided that it’s important to the world that i write a cyberpunk au for dishonored. this fucker just keeps on getting longer and longer and at this point i’m reduced to scouring stackoverflow and messaging every computer science major i know begging them to talk about processors, error messages, x86, cybernetics, the ins and outs of network building, and other things.

for once, the smut is the easy part.

when did this become my life.

in other news, i’m back on the final fantasy iv train, that game has a certain purity and loveliness to it that i just can’t seem to kick as a habit. it’s been a couple years, but i’m back, and it’s as good now as it was before, 16-bit graphics and all. also rediscovering my appreciation for elric of melnibone and the legend of drizzt. and watching mulan! and falling back in love with loki! i must be going through a rough time: watch me turn the fuck around and cling to all my formative media, finding new meaning in it.

in some really weird ways.

once upon a time, i was basically in love with cecil. you wanna know why i claim paladin as my class? HE’S why. and for a while i think i had a crush on rosa (let’s be real that’s the kind of girl i fall for)

but in my old age, it turns out that kain really does it for me.

stupid antiheroes.

(ask me anything, it’s Aesthetic Time.)

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

It doesn't happen the same way to everyone, but at some point every programmer made the conscious decision to learn how to code. For me, it was wanting to build a game with my husband and since he was an established artist, that meant I needed to learn how to code. Making that descision is only the first step, from there you actually have to well, um, learn to do it. This is one of those articles I wish I could give to my younger self to help understand how to get started, what languages are the right ones for the final product, and how to use all that to maybe make a living.

Getting Started

The best way to find your path (no we aren't talking A* pathfinding here), is to dig deep about why you want to get into programming. Was it your passion for gaming, or your love for a mobile or desktop application? Was it a really cool website, or even a really bad website? Maybe you are interested in how to defeat our robot overlords in the nearing dystopian future. Or maybe you just feel like you understand the logic of how something should work, but no one is creating it the way you want. Depending on which one of these you aligned with most, you can visit the idea of being a back-end developer, a front end developer, a machine learning expert, a web developer, a mobile developer, a game developer….well the list goes on.

Once you decide on which type of developer that you want to be, the languages you can learn will reveal themselves. With there being so many languages in programming it is impossible to just learn one and be done. You'll find that you need knowledge of at least three different coding languages, because they all interact with each other some how. Before you can pinpoint the exact languages, you'll also want to decide what platforms you want to support. Each platform will require a different coding language, because well, life is hard that way. If you want to support web, you'll likely go in the direction of HTML5, but there is also JavaScript. For desktop, will you support Mac, because you'll likely learn Objective-C, or Swift. For PC, well you have .Net, Python, C# (that's sharp not hashtag), C++, etc. Having various languages will also be the case for mobile applications. If you want to make things easier on yourself (I said easier, not easy), then the best idea is to decide on a platform and find an engine that will support it as well as other platforms in your field.

In my case, I've traveled the route of game and application developer and I deploy to mobile, desktop and console. While that may sound like a lot of different platforms, there are actually a handful of great engines to choose from, like Unity, Unreal or even a smaller one like Cocos2d-x. Engines will typically allow you to write your code in just one language, then it will compile for your target platforms, doing all the major lifting for you. They also have amazing features built in, so that you do not have to write (for example) your own animation or lighting tools. Along with having the right engine, you'll also want to find a source code editor that works with your engine and that has all the features you need. There is a pretty lengthy list of editors you can find here, but my two favorite have been Visual Studio and Xcode. They both have great intelligent code completion and the (forever useful) syntax highlighting. Again, the ones available to you will depend on the platform you choose.

Tutorials, tutorials, tutorials...

At this point you have the type of project that you want to work on, the engine that will support this, and you've decided on a language and code editor, but what next? Well, now is the time to start learning how to use all of these tools! There are some incredibly useful resources out there to learning the fundamentals of programming, as well as diving deeper in to the languages and tools. From my experience, it is best to buy a book or two and read through some of the tutorials to understand what is going on in each line of code. The next best step (or an alternate first step) is to take an online course. It doesn’t have to be an expensive course at your local University or college, but maybe simply a course from Lynda.com, Udemy or Codecademy. These are all websites full of different courses, lead by different instructors that have been in their respective fields, so you will learn a lot and by the end of the course you have a project that you've worked through line by line.

After understanding the fundamentals of the coding language and the engine, but you still run into errors or get stumped on how to do something, then the next best place is reading through the specific documentation relating to your engine or targeted operating system. The documents are out there to help you and it took several people tons of effort to write it, so please at least skim through it. After that, if you are still stumped, then there are so many forums full of willing people that are ready to help you out. The primary forum, and almost everyone's go to is StackOverflow.com. This site has been around for a long time, so a big chunk of questions that can be asked, have been asked on there. If not on Stackoverflow, then it's possible your engine has a forum with active members and experienced moderators. Taking the effort to write a detailed post goes a long way with people that are active on the forums, so don’t just ask for some one to write your code for you. You will get stumped and you will need help, because, as I said before, this is not an easy field you chose.

Write Something, Deploy It

Now that you feel like you have a basic understanding, you can start writing that program that caught your interest in the field to way back at the beginning of all this. Just kidding! Start with a much, mush smaller subtask or version of that big project that you envisioned from the beginning. If you wanted to make a game, well then make a Arkanoid clone. The point being, you do not want to overwhelm yourself, that will only lead to defeat.

Your first program isn't going to be amazing, or original... it is going to be basic and most likely a clone or something already published. Creating this first project will give you the understanding you need to make the bigger program that you aspired to do in the first place. But go through all the motions with this first one, delpoy it to the platform that you chose, make friends and family test it for bugs and quality, and finally publish it and make it public. All of this will give you the experiences you need to do it better next time when you want to launch something original.

Take small steps and create something that you are proud to put your name to and even more importantly, something that you can show at your interview. Which brings me to the next point of finding a job in the field, after all you want to make a living right?

The Job Prep

The whole job search charade is such a grueling process, and finding the right company to interview at is a process in it's own. There are (once again) several online resources to search for a job, and with this being such a large industry you will likely find several places to interview with. Start with searching sites like Monster, Indeed, Hired, and even Stackoverflow. If that doesn't work out, try joining a local group of other developers like yourself through a site like Meetup.com and search their bulletin board. While doing all of this it is also important to continue working on your portfolio.

Keeping all these small projects to yourself will not be of any use, so create a website that show cases each one and most importantly get on LinkedIn. Do not underestimate the value of LinkedIn, as head hunters are constantly scouring it for talent. Now that you've also gained more experience with these small projects, try to make time to create a Stackoverflow account and start gaining reputation points there by answering the noob questions that get posted all day, every day.

Like I mentioned, the job search is a grueling process and preparing for the interview is just as important as learning the language. The interview will be a three, five or even eight hour long day at your prospective company. They will put you through the ringer. You will code on a whiteboard, complete coding tests, and just talk experiences. Start taking online coding interview test (Codility is a good resource for this), and make sure you have a basic understanding of the concepts, and know the lingo. You'll go through this process a few times, but you will eventually find a company that fits you and one where you fit in to it's culture.

Good luck!

After all is said and done, you may find that this wasn't what you wanted after all….or you might just absolutely love it, like I do. If the latter is the case, then keep at it and you will find the right position at the right company. The best advice I can offer is that coding/programming/software engineering it isn't easy; but if you love a challenge, you read this whole article and are still in the game, well, then maybe it is the right path for you. Either way, good luck in your newly found hobby! May it consume your time and leave you broke, fat, hairy and living in your parent's dark basement, like most people envision us.

Happy coding!

#IFTTT #Blogger

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