Talking to Machines

Last week I ran into this interesting CRC Reverse Engineering challenge at Stackoverflow . I immediately felt this is something I should be able to figure out using our Docklight Scripting tool , and indeed I managed to find the correct CRC within two hours. (Update 2016 - the Docklight CRC Finder also found the answer for this second CRC puzzle .) Now here are my personal sentiments about CRC: The fact that the most frequently cited reference is called  A Painless Guide to CRC Error Detection Algorithms  only proves - it's painful. It really is. So if you are with CRC aches, too, here is my personal list of painkillers on the subject: Sven Reifegerte's great Online CRC Calculator  and his related C sample implementations . A somewhat comforting article about  CRC Implementation Code in C . This article was originally called "Easier said than done (Michael Barr) - A guide to CRC calculation", and I much respect the honesty.  The Boost CRC Library documena

Update 2017: Microchip now has a Qt 5 example in their MLA folder "apps\usb\device\bootloaders\utilities". It uses the popular HIDAPI by Alan Ott / Signal 11.   It makes the below approach obsolete , and I really recommend to download and check out the Microchip MLA package instead. ============================================== While working on a Microchip PIC32 based USB HID Composite Device for our Kickdrive environment, we realized the need for updating the PIC application firmware from our own UI, instead of using an external tool.  Firmware updates for any Embedded device or accessory are an essential part of product support and should be done in the least disrupting way. So even launching an external Windows command line tool did not look like a good solution to us. What I found was Microchip's own sample code  from  Application Note AN1388 , but the PIC32UBL.exe code was MFC / Visual Studio 2003 and not designed to be anything else than a GUI applic

We were in need for some basic Python syntax highlighting in a QTextEdit box, and didn't immediately want to go fully pro with a Scintilla wrapper. (Update: We did that, too, in the end, according to this scintilla/qt post ). So we looked for a QSyntaxHighlighter subclass for Python formatting, but only found a PyQt example  which seems to be from Torsten Marek (  shlomme.diotavelli.net  ) originally. I asked Frankie to create a C++  Qt4 QSyntaxHighlighter class based on this, so here it is: /* $Id: PythonSyntaxHighlighter.cpp 167 2013-11-03 17:01:22Z oliver $ This is a C++ port of the following PyQt example http://diotavelli.net/PyQtWiki/Python%20syntax%20highlighting C++ port by Frankie Simon ( www.kickdrive.de , www.fuh-edv.de ) The following free software license applies for this file ("X11 license"): Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"