What do you do with VB?

[Manxy]

Hello, I've been using VB for some time now using 2008 Express. I want to know what sorts of things can and have been made using it. I do a lot of practice material but nothing worth keeping and would like to know the sorts of things people here do. Take in mind I'm avoiding anything illegal.

This is an attempt to broaden the horizon and I'm sure some of you will have fun submitting ideas.

Thanks for reading and please do submit ideas. - NOTHING ILLEGAL PLEASE!

[Seraph]

DVD decryption software. lol..j/k


http://www.serysoft.com/software.php
Those are the software projects I have worked on.

[Manxy]

Those are great Ideas, traypad seems really useful. Thanks for posting that, cam't wait to see what others have been making.

Remember any Idea goes aslong as it is legal.

[Seraph]

Really you should work on something that may make *your* life/work simpler.
In the end, it will most likely help someone else too.

Both TrayPad and FolderPad (SysPad) came into being because of making some things simpler at work.

[stateofidleness]

Here's my projects: My Projects

[Seraph]

On a sidenote, glad to see your IRIS project has come such a long way. Looks slightly different than past iterations. lol.
I've occasionally taken a gander at your site and checked out the progress on that.
Wish I could make software that would interest that level of people (Mitsubishi).

Is this available to be downloaded? Does it work with USB Webcam input? Maybe I'll throw this on my PC at home and try it out; or is it meant to work with specific hardware?

[stateofidleness]

Thanks Seraph, I appreciate that.
I currently have two versions. The one in the screenshots is a highly-customized one which I use at work so it uses specific hardware and does some tasks that are organization-specific. I have another version which I'm tidying up that can be used by any admin that may have the need to monitor IP devices. The main difference is that it removes the service ticket submission functionality.

It will work for any device that has an IP address (for status only). To do the camera view, this (currently) is specific to the Mitsubishi line of DVR's (hence all the Mitsubishi references on the site )

I'm working on one that will be more universal and will include IP Cameras as well.

[Manxy]

These are great Ideas.

I particularly like the reasons you came around making these just to tidy things up and make life easier. Seems a wonderful goal to aim for. Thanks for posting and that IRIS Project looks great. I'll probably have to get my site up and running soon though got nothing to show at the moment.

Please if anyone else has a showcase available please add to the list.

[HongKongCV]

In my job, I've used VB to write apps for a banking firm. I've written a web-updater application on a contract basis. At home, I've used it for an application to keep track of my karaoke disks and print out the "By Artist" and "By Song Title" listings... then I adapted that application to track our DVD's and CD's. I wrote a program to organize and manage sound effects and clips for amatuer theatre groups. And I'm currently working on a couple of other theater-oriented applications.

My current job uses C#, so I do a lot of my home programming in VB just to remain fluent.

You can use VB to do anything that is useful to you. I've lost count of the stopwatch, countdown, and birthday reminder apps I've written over the years.

I have a request from a political organization to write an app that monitors a mailbox, automatically downloads incoming emails, determines if it is a first-contact or repeat contact and what the topic is, and then routes the email to the correct person in the organization to deal with it. I'm in a design phase for that application now.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Much of my weekends are spent working on the concepts described in this thread:

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=598244

It's a sprawling project and will take months to even get to the point of testing, but it's coming together pretty well.

For work I have written dozens of programs that pretty much just manipulate data related to fish. Some pieces of those programs are technically interesting, but the overall projects would only be of interest to someone who is pretty specialized.

[Manxy]

Cool, as a school student I don't really come up with problems that encounter the need for such things so there I can't really do much. However birthday reminders and stop watches are good ideas I never even thought of and seem to be good practices/reminders of the language.

[Seraph]

Shaggy, just got done reading the thread about that robot AI. Very cool indeed. I'm sorta more interested in the old project than the robot project. Too bad that couldn't ever be completed.

[Shaggy Hiker]

The point was the AI, which I hope to generalize enough that it can be stuck into a variety of situations. The basic idea is to give a GA all the options it can possibly use, and let it evolve correct actions. Unfortunately, the idea is impractical due to the time it would take for evolution to occur. In the fish project, I could hardly convince myself that significant progress could happen in a solid month of runtime, and I suspected it might take a year. I had some means of speeding that up, but no confidence that I could speed it up enough. The point to dreaming is that each self exists in its own virtual world, which means that responses can evolve in parallel across as many processor cores as I can make available. Still, the underlying concept is that GAs will evolve, so it's just a matter of giving them enough test cases that they will evolve something meaningful.

[Seraph]

But all possible Dream scenarios have to be fed to it?
It obviously couldn't think up a dream on it's own.

But, of course, I know what you are doing with the dreams.
They aren't dreams, but circumstances that an entity would encounter, things it would have no control over that influence the entity's exist in a "real" sense to the AI, but in tandem with other "Dreams" to speed up the learning process.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I have not ruled out the possibility that dreams couldn't be created on the fly. We certainly do it. One of our dreams would take a variety of snippets from real experience and other dreams (I keep dreaming about a mountain that doesn't exist), toss in a bunch of personal parameters, and have at it. I'm not going there to begin with, but there is no fundamental reason why I couldn't get there eventually. The main reason I won't start there is that lots of those dreams would train similar traits to other dreams, whereas I need to do the maximum training possible in the shortest times, so I want to hand craft the dreams for maximum variation.


On the topic: One ripe area for exploration is GAs in general (Genetic Algorithms, in case anybody missed that). They make for interesting hobby projects, they aren't terribly difficult to code, and they can do really odd things. For example, I have a program that builds relationships between sets of data. I can enter something relevant to me, such as the number of salmon returning to the state each year for as far back as we have records, then enter the factors that I think might influence that pattern, and let it run. The program eventually spits out a function (a model) that uses those factors to predict the number of returning salmon. If you trust that function, you are a fool, but in addition to the function, the program outputs some things that have practical value. One obvious use for such a program would be for looking at patterns in stock market values.

I have another example of a GA in the codebank as a solution to one form of the Knapsack Problem.

GAs are nice for throwing at problems that can't be solved by brute force approaches.

[stateofidleness]

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