Monday, June 26, 2006

CatX - A Story of Determination

CatX Loading an Archived File
CatX Loading an Archived File
I was looking for a program to catalog my cd collection, but unfortunately none seemed up to scratch. At first I was going to settle for an external program that worked off a central database, but after sifting around for a while I had other ideas.

What I wanted was something that'd show all my files in the main tree on the media drive in their respective directories. When you double click on an archived file, it tells you to insert the cd, then proceeds to execute it. I played around with WinAPI until my head hurt, but I did come across one thing I made use of, SetupPromptForDisk which handles the CD stuff. In the end I wrote the cataloguing program in mIRC, and just used a stub program I wrote to handle the association.

Lo and behold, CatX was born. In less than a day I managed to hack up this little program to run an archived file from CD anywhere on my network, so now the tedious task of remembering what is on which cd is no longer a problem, and it fits in with my nice little tree of data.

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