POETS Day

That’s what workers in the UK and Australia call Friday. It stands for Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday. Today is Friday. What did you do today?

What’s that? What did I do today? Nothing of importance. I’m too old to know or do anything useful to society. You don’t have to be very old to be too old, as many ex-workers younger than I am will testify.

But lessee. I slept fitfully last night and consequently awakened late – around 9:30. I say “late” but in truth I have no reason to be up at any particular hour, nor do I have anyone to admonish me for sleeping too long.

I got up and ate, then Skyped with an amigo in Roanoke for a while. Around 10:30 I realized the sun was getting high in the sky and I still had to mow my back yard (did the front yesterday). So I hastened out to do that before the sun got too hot. Okay, technically the sun is always hot, but you know what I mean.

Back inside, I watched cable news, surfed the Web, watched a little television. Then, on some unfathomable impulse that apparently wafted in on a stray breeze coming through my window, I decided I would fire up my VB Express IDE (integrated development environment) and write a GUI (graphical user interface) for Microsoft’s FCIV (File Checksum Integrity Verifier). FCIV is a tool for generating MD5 and SHA-1 hash values from files, but it’s a command-line tool and so not very easy to use. Ah, something to fix!

So I created a Windows project and coded the app, and a few hours later I had it working. But then the thought occurred, “Why make a GUI for another app when I can code an app that does it all?”

So I created a new project (named Integrifier, for Integrity Verifier) and soon I had the new app working. Initially, it supports the MD5 and SHA-1 cryptographic hash functions, which are the two most commonly used file integrity algorithms.

I’ll put the app in my online Library so others can use it. Before I do that I want to add features to it, such as the ability to hash multiple files with one click, and hash all files inside a specified folder, and create reports, and maybe I’ll add a toolbar with pretty icons. That’s enough work to keep me out of trouble for another few days.

And don’t tell me it’s been done and maybe done better. Would you tell an artist not to draw a picture of a beach or a mountain because they’ve already been drawn?