W-Shadow.com

It’s pretty easy to get the average CPU usage, but how about calculating the per-code load on multicore systems? Turns out it’s also simple enough if you use performance counters.
Windows API includes a subset of functions that provide various performance-related information, which includes data on how busy individual processors or cores are. In this [...]

Don’t you hate it when programs hang or crash? I find it especially annoying when a background application like an IM client or a bandwidth monitor silently crashes – sometimes I only notice the problem hours later when I’ve already missed a bunch of messages. I’m sure you’ve encountered a few “Not responding” errors and [...]

I need an embedded database for my next project. During the last few days I’ve done a lot of virtual leg-work researching and comparing the various alternatives, trawling through documentation and forums. The results are below. Hopefully, if you’re ever in the same situation, this list will make your life a bit easier.
Of course, the [...]

I decided to put a person name database I found to good use and make a person name generator. Here it is! The generator uses Markov chains. Most of the source code is available for download.

Long time, no post! Now that Christmas and New Year festivities are in the past, I’m going to tell you about one of the ideas I started lazily implementing during the holidays. Basically it will be (if I ever complete it) a simple 2D arcade snowfight with a side-view camera.
After toying with GLScene [...]

This project has been going for a while, so I’ve decided to write a short overview of the results seen so far. If you don’t know what’s it about – The Living Image project is a website where anyone can vote for one or more digitally generated images. Those pictures are created by artificial neural [...]

Recently I was doing a PHP script that combines some images and needed to clip some of them to a specific rectangle. PHP doesn’t have a function to do that explicitly, and due to some technical restraints I couldn’t compose the required image in another buffer (which would let me to clip it implicitly).
After some [...]

This is a proof-of-concept Invaders-style game where the invaders are controlled by neural networks and each new wave is evolved by genetic algorithms. This is made possible by DelphiNEAT library. I’m also using the GR32 library for semi-fast 2D graphics and PNGDelphi for PNG loading.
Update : Unfortunately, the Delphi NEAT site has been offline for [...]

Handles can represent files, ports, mutexes and other objects. By using the undocumented Native API function NTQuerySystemInformation() you can list all open handles from all processes. Here’s a small program that does that.
This is basically a ported version of “HandleList” application by someone known as Napalm on sysinternals.com forums. I added and removed some bits, [...]

Driver development has always been the privilege of C/C++ and Assembler programmers. If someone needs to write a device driver in Delphi, he has to settle for “adapter” drivers that would allow their user-mode program some ability to interface with kernel-mode functions. There are also “wizards” that (supposedly) allow one to create a driver without [...]

To avoid any confusion, let me say that this article will talk about the taskbar buttons that represent the visible windows of currently running applications. I will not discuss the system tray or Quick Launch. Most information given here is applicable only to Windows XP and possibly newer versions of Windows (though I am not [...]

This week I’ve mostly been trying to figure out how the taskbar works in Windows XP. As a result, I created wsTaskborg – a freeware utility that lets you organize your taskbar buttons by dragging them around and grouping/ungrouping them as you wish. You can read more about it and download it at http://w-shadow.com/wstaskborg/.
I will [...]

Did you know that under Windows 2000/XP (and possibly others) it is possible to rename the exe-file of a running program? Furthermore, you can even move it to another folder, provided it is still on the same drive. The application will then appear in the Task Manager with the new filename (not path), and even [...]

This is another idea I have had for a while. I use Wikipedia nearly every day, and every time I encounter an unknown word or concept, it’s the first place to look for it. So I thought it would be more comfortable if I could just select the text to be searched for, press some [...]

Here are some tips about getting/controlling the memory usage of a given process…
Current memory usage
You can use GetProcessMemoryInfo() API function to get the current memory usage (in bytes), peak usage, number of bytes in pagefile currently used by a process, and so on. Add Windows to your uses clause and use something like this : [...]

Some words have a tendency to appear in certain contexts. For example, “jumps” is likely to be followed by “over”, but “cabagge” is probably not going to appear there. It is possible to analyze a text and determine how often words appear in specific contexts. These statistics can then be used for various purposes.

This method is useful for various tasks in natural language processing, but the fun part is you can use it to generate a random text that appears to be meaningful, and that’s what I’m going to do

If you are a programmer you have probably encountered a situation when the program you are debugging suddenly enters an infinite loop or somesuch and starts consuming 100% CPU resources. Sure, you can press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and kill it from Task Manager, but it takes ages because everything is slooow and sometimes you’d just rather hit [...]

In this short tarticle I will describe how to obtain the CPU usage of a single process (like the “CPU” column in Task Manager). I have also created a small unit that implements this functionality.