Davide Archetti's personal website

Software and websites

In this page you can find some Windows programs I developd some time ago (it is clear that they are not recent) with Microsoft Visual Basic and some of the wesites I designed. The user interface of the programs is a bad mix of Italian and English.

Software

Simple but interesting applications. I wrote them some time ago for myself and I hope you'll find them useful today. Here is a short list, details follow below it.

• File Linker - Create a web page with links to all the files in the directory you choose with just one click!
• Line Recomposer - Correctly format the text you copied and pasted from Adobe Reader! NEW VERSION JUST RELEASED!
• Renamer and Modifier - Rename all files in a given folder if their names meet your criteria, with just one click. You can also add some lines of text, at the beginning or at the end of the file
• Montecarlo Helium-3 - Interaction between neutrons and matters made as simple as a videogame!

All the programs are STAND-ALONE, that is they don't require installation. All you have to do is run them.

NB: On some systems the Active X controls my programs rely on do not work correctly. Microsoft solved the problem with this patch (in case you don't trust me, here is the direct link to Microsoft website!). This patch is a SELF-EXTRACTING ARCHIVE: you need to decompress files (you'll be asked to choose a location) and then run "Vbcmpfix.exe", one of the files that are extracted. More about this patch:

• Is completely free (It is NOT necessary to check whether your Windows serial number is genuine)
• It is a very very small file, just 90 KB, then you can be sure that it is not going to slow down your PC
• It is not dangerous (please read here for more information)
• You only need to run it once in order to fix the problem (it is NOT necessary to run it every time you use my programs)

File Linker
It takes a second to create a web page with links to all files in a directory!



Very simple. In one click, you'll create an html page with links to all the files in a folder chosen by the user through a graphical interface. It is possible that this function is included in some web editors, but it would have taken me longer to look for one than to write it myself.

Line Recomposer 2.0 (new version just released!)
Format correctly the text you copied from Adobe Reader and pasted into Word!

DOWNLOAD: the link will let you download an archive contatining the programs and two Active X controls, which must be in the same directory as the program. In case you get ERROR MESSAGES, please use the PATCH (a self-extracting archive containing "Vbcmpfix.exe", which you'll need to run) developed by Microsoft to solve the problem.



When you copy text from a .pdf file and you paste it into a word processor, the lines are "broken" because the word processor makes no difference between the times the line ends because of the "end of the sentence" and the the times it ends because of "no more room on the line". This program processes the files and recomposes the broken lines where needed. It can distinguish the two kinds of ends of lines on the basis of two elements: 1) It checks what kind of punctuation signs (if any) or specific words are present at the end of the line before and/or at the beginning of the line after 2) It counts the number of characters in the line before. You can simply copy the results Line Recomposer produced and paste them into your word processor or save them to a .rtf, .txt or .html file. It is also possible to identify and remove some lines from the text (for example the lines such as "Page 1", "Page 2", etc... that appear when you paste an e-book into word). Line Recomposer 2.0 is highly customizable if needed, but comes with a default configuration that works for most frequent situations. In the zip file you will also find a one-page guide that, through a real-life example, will let you master the full power of the software in a matter of seconds. For the nostalgic users, the old version is still available, but why not to upgrade?

Renamer and Modifier
Rename all files in a folder with one click, according to flexible criteria! Or add some lines at the beginning or at the end of them.

DOWNLOAD: the link will let you download an archive contatining the programs and two Active X controls, which must be in the same directory as the program. In case you get ERROR MESSAGES, please use the PATCH (a self-extracting archive containing "Vbcmpfix.exe", which you'll need to run) developed by Microsoft to solve the problem.



Rename and modify many files at the same time. In case you get an error message regarding Active X controls, please download the patch above and things will be all right. This software will let you rename many files with one click, by searching for one string in the name and replacing it with another. The only known case when it gives some problems is when the string which is searched for is present in both the filename and the extension. There are a lot of options, such as file numbering, the total name substitution, etc... Have fun experimenting! The modifier part only works with text files (txt, htm, html, log, css, php, c, cpp and many others) and goes "by line": replaces one line with another in many files. The advantage over other web editors is that you don't need to open all the files at the same time, which allows to process thousands of files together. The most interesting feature is that it can add text at the beginning or at the end of all files in a directory. Not many editors do that! I recommend to backup the files before renaming them. On the other hand, the modifier allows to save the files with "_modified" in their filenames, so that you do not overwrite the original ones and can then rename them easily with the renamer.

Montecarlo Helium-3
The interaction between neutrons and matter had never been as simple as a videogame!

DOWNLOAD: the link will let you download an archive contatining the programs and an Active X control, which must be in the same directory as the program. In case you get ERROR MESSAGES, please use the PATCH (a self-extracting archive containing "Vbcmpfix.exe", which you'll need to run) developed by Microsoft to solve the problem.



Through a forced Montecarlo simulation, it calculates the energy spectrum of the impulses produced by a Helium-3 neutron detector. Neutrons are assumed to be thermal. The neutron flux is assumed to be uniform, which is the base hypothesis to sample the trajectory of each neutron on the device. The detector is cylindrical and the software user can choose the neutron cross section of the gas (not very realistic to change this value), the gas pressure, the radius of the detector, the number of neutrons for the simulation, the number of channels (energy tiers used to "collect" simulated impulses). Default values are those most frequently used in commercially available neutron detectors, then the calculated spectrum looks exactly like the ones you see in a laboratory (which is good neough! If this was not the case, it would mean that the program is wrong or too much simplified with respect to the real problem). The program also calculates the total number of neutrons interacting with the device (not an integer number because the simulation is forced). In order to produce the diagram, the wonderful NTGraph Active X control is used. It saves, in the directory where it is running, a .dat file containing two tab-separated columns: the first one contains the average energy (in KeV) of each channels, the second the number of impulses collected in that channel. The file name contains information about the detector radius and the gas pressure used for the simulation. If you rename the file as an .xls file, you can open it with Excel by simlpy double clicking it (skipping the import wizard). The same goes with EasyPlot, if you rename it as an .epl file. Unless you're a student studying this stuff or a professor that won't let students play video games in the computer lab, you don't need this software.

The license accompanying these programs is: you can use them however you want and give them to whoever you want. Before you modify them, you have to ask me. In no circumstances I'll be responsible for damages to your hardware and/or to your software and/or to your data and/or to third parties because of use and/or abuse of of my programs. If you want to see the source code, I'll be more than happy to share it with you. We'll agree on related terms and conditions at that time.

Websites I designed

Esami LdB (in Italian)
It is the teaching website for a professor at Milano Bicocca University. The template is XHTML and CSS and respects the standards. I developed it by modifying a layout (available on Internet) created by a great master. The contents, taken from the old version of the website, are perfectly readable by several browsers, though the source code is not fully valid. The website is managed by the professor with NVU visual editor and I only deal with "extraordinary maintenance". All scripts are server side, for example the form that lets students submit requests is in PHP, based on a script I found on Giuseppe Calbi's website.

Master 2003/2004 (in Italian)
I developed this website for the Milano Bicocca University, concerning a Master about environmental problems. I tried to give it a pleasant look and a structure that allowed interested people to intuitively browse around and find all the inromation they needed. At the time I did not know what CSS, interoperability amd World Wide Web Consortium were. The source code does not respect the standards and contains several client-side scripts, but is perfectly visible with the last versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox and Opera. The website for 2002/2003 edition is accessible from one of the links. Because of privacy and copyright reasons, I removed all confidential data and some pictures from the version available on this server.

Personal website
It is the website you're seeing. The code is valid by international standards, as you can see by clicking on the logos on the bottom left corner of the page. It is tested on the three browsers you see on the bottom right corner. On the home page the latest headlines are shown, thanks to a PHP script. The RSS feeds are parsed by LastRSS.