25 Years of Programming Home Page

Welcome

Welcome to 25 Years of Programming, a collection of open source programs and libraries in C++ and other languages, Microsoft Office Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, templates, and macros, and How To articles and essays on a variety of topics including website security, management, and design, and safer web surfing. I hope you find things that are useful and interesting.

Site Purpose

The purpose of this website is to publish the hundreds of programs and other computer related projects that I developed over the past 25 years. They range from simple beginner-level utilities to complex experiments with artificial intelligence.

They are mostly open source, GNU GPL licensed, and:

• Have example code and example methods, often extensively commented. Almost all the code is presented on web pages for easy browsing, searching, and copying. Large projects also have .zip download files.
• Are starting points for similar projects.
• Some, especially the Access, Excel, and Word projects, are useful.
• Some are entertaining.
• Some demonstrate or discuss interesting mathematical or scientific principles such as machine learning, adaptation, evolution, complex adaptive systems, chaos, and fractals.
• The vintage Heathkit H-89 and H-100 programs serve a sentimental and historical purpose by giving vintage computer owners things to do with their vintage computers besides look at them.

Publication of the existing projects is nearly complete, but the website will never be complete. Reflecting how the journey into the world of computers is a never-ending adventure of exciting discoveries and new things to learn, recent blog articles take a turn toward topics I am now finding most engaging:

• Website security and related configurations and precautions,
• Website management, and
• Website design, at which I claim, for obvious reasons, basic competence but no particular artistic ability.

When exploring new territory, I enjoy writing about discoveries because it forces me to understand them better, and the result might help others.

Where To Start

• Table of Contents (Sitemap) to browse a list in outline form. It's dense, but complete.
• Search to find pages containing a keyword or phrase.
• Projects to drill down into the site projects by category.
• Blog is where the articles are. Most are long and detailed "How To's".

News, announcements, additions, updates

Latest additions

• 08/09 - Perl: Extract and produce a list of hyperlinks in text files
• 08/08 - MySQL Create script to hold output reports of the linkchecker broken hyperlink checker program
• 07/27 - Perl and SQL scripts to import the Moby Thesaurus and other word lists into MySQL tables
• 07/18 - Ways to migrate a Microsoft Access database to MySQL
• 07/17 - Introduction to using MySQL at home or in the office

Popular pages

• How to configure high security in Internet Explorer 7,8 using zones and settings
• How to block tracking cookies in IE7,8 and Firefox
• How to protect your website (and more): security precautions, best practices
• How to resolve the Google "This site may harm your computer" problem
• Calculate historical volatility for the Black-Scholes option valuation equation
• How to NOT make money: trading stock options
• Create and solve substitution ciphers online (with some puzzles)
• Microsoft Access database for your genealogy (family history)

Web design

• Preparing to become free from FrontPage: how to convert webbots to more standard and portable methods, step by step walk-throughs:

1. How to replace Shared Borders with included content webbots
2. How to convert included content webbots to PHP includes
3. How to replace webbot navbars with plain HTML navigation link bars
4. How to copy a FrontPage theme to CSS files that you control
5. How to convert a FrontPage Table of Contents webbot to plain HTML.

• Secure settings for php.ini and .htaccess before you start using PHP