I occasionally write little apps or utilities for myself that others might find useful as well, so I'll post them here. If you use one of them and like it, feel free to send a thank-you or whatever to the address above. The following apps are currently available:

An ID3 is a 128-byte string added to the end of an MP3 file that contains title, artist, album, etc. There are numerous ID3 taggers out there and I'm sure at least a few do basically the same thing as this. But in my case, I wanted one to do the following things so I wrote my own:

* Parse artist name and title from .MP3 file name and capitalize if desired
* Edit and "lock" attributes and automatically write them to all files
   IE easily set Genre to "Pop-Folk" for all files in a directory.
* When manually editing attributes, app will automatically advance to
   next file in the file list after writing ID3.
* Drag any folder or MP3 file over YAID3T icon to launch YAID3T pre-set
   to desired directory. Similarly, you can create a shortcut in Send To
   to give right-click access to YAID3T.
* Generates a basic WinAmp playlist (.M3U file)

Saves ID3 in v1.0 format unless you have set Track info, in which case v1.1 will be used.

Screenshots
Yet Another ID3 Tagger (interface)

I've finally made an active effort to learn JavaScript. I decided to port over a Mandelbrot set viewer I had written a number of years back in Visual Basic. The Mandelbrot Set is one of the better known examples of fractal mathematics. It is a 2D plot of a fairly simple complex equation. Complex equations have a "real" part and an "imaginary" part. In this case, the "real" part is graphed on the X-axis while the "imaginary" part is on the Y-axis. Colors are assigned to represent the number of iterations before the equation approaches infinity. Since Javascript lacks any methods for simply plotting points, I had to use standard HTML elements to plot the set. I chose to use table cells (TD) because I can set the color for each individually. The cell size is user-settable and goes all the way down to 1-pixel. Note: The total area is hard-coded to 360 pixels square. At a 1-pixel cell size, that makes 360x360 TD definitions or 129,600 TD cells...that's one big table! It takes some time, but it does render on my PII-400 w/ 128MB RAM, but on machines with less resources, beware.

Screenshots
Sample region plot 133KB

Point the app at a particular directory containing one or more TrueType or Type1 fonts and it will 1) Create a new subdirectory called "/friendly" and copy the existing fonts into the new directory at the same time renaming them with full font names -and/or- 2) Create an HTML document with full font names linked to the more cryptic original names. Also, 3) Clicking on any font in file list will display all info contained in the NAME table of each font.

Note: This app supercedes my original app "TrueType Friendly Namer" by adding the capability to rename Type1 fonts as well.

Screenshots
TrueType Friendly Namer (interface) | Sample directory before & after | HTML document

I wrote the following brief Microsoft Word macro a few years back when I worked at Microsoft. Hopefully they won't mind me posting it here since it is only a few lines and is pretty handy. It creates one-line samples of all currently installed fonts. To use the macro, open Word, go to Tools/Macro/Macros and Create a new macro called "FontList". Copy the code below between the sub statements, then close the macro editor. Open a blank document and run your macro.

    With Selection 'by Brent Aliverti/theACF.com
        For x = 1 To FontNames.Count
        .Font.Name = FontNames(x)
        .Font.Size = 12
        .TypeText Text:=FontNames(x)
        .TypeParagraph
        Next x
        .WholeStory
        .Sort SortOrder:=wdSortOrderAscending
        .Collapse
        .Font.Name = "Arial Black"
        .Font.Size = 14
        .TypeText Text:="Installed Fonts"
        .TypeParagraph
    End With

Screenshots
FontList sample output