If it's not listed, it's read-only... at best
Language	Proficiency
BASIC	My preferred language family
PowerBASIC	My overall favorite BASIC
REALbasic	What I use for Linux GUI
Visual Basic	What I use for Windows GUI
QuickBASIC	My most-used language
Batch File	Somewhere between "decent" and "good"
UNIX Shell	Nowhere near as good as I need to be
C	I often write in BASIC, then translate
VBScript	I'm... okay...
PHP	Still learning
Assembly	Read-only, for the most part
Pascal	Read-only, for the most part
Ruby	Read-only, for the most part
GML	Minimal knowledge
Visual Basic .NET	Minimal knowledge
Befunge	Shrug

Somewhat obviously, my name is Erik Siers. I'm one of the BASIC cheerleaders on RC. (I can do other languages, but I prefer BASIC by a lot.)

I've been working on a VB4/5/6-to-ANSI-C/C++ translator for a while. A long while -- first got the idea several years ago. No released code as yet, but it's progressing... slowly. Really slowly. One problem is that I'm writing it in VB6, so that it can translate itself (a Self-hosting compiler). I also need to do it without using any API calls whatsoever. (Not that hard, but I've already had to kick myself a few times.)

(Another problem is that I have very little motivation to actually work on this project.)

I could use some help, actually. Anyone familiar with non-.Net Visual Basic, C, or (especially) C++ would be very much appreciated. If you wanna join the party, drop me a line.

Current events

This has easily been the worst week of this year... so far.

Operating Systems

I use a lot of OS's:

Slackware Linux 12.2 (because I don't like the changes made for v13)
- Also Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a server I recently bought -- but only until I get around to putting something else on it... maybe Slackware, maybe not
Windows XP (I will not be spending money on another version of Windows, unless I happen to buy a computer that includes it. I bought at least one copy of every major version of Windows, from 1.x through Server 2003; that's enough, I think.)
- Also the free beta version of Windows 7 on the new server, just because. Shrug.
MS-DOS 7.1 (from Windows 98SE)
Mac OS 8
- Also System 7, on a different machine

I also toy around with numerous other operating systems under emulation (too many to list).

My code contributions

Unless otherwise specifically indicated, I disclaim any rights I might have to any code that I have posted to Rosetta Code, and assign any appropriate copyright to Michael Mol. (Everything posted to RC is automatically covered by the GNU FDL anyway.) This specifically applies to code that I have posted. Other people's code that I have made changes to belongs to them, not me, and I disclaim any rights I might have to those changes.

My very first RC edit was adding BASIC to the task Convert an integer into words (now Number names).
My 100th edit was the QuickBasic -> QuickBASIC redirect page.
My 250th edit was the Windows Scripting Host -> Windows Script Host redirect page.
My 500th edit was re-adding the implementation template to PowerBASIC Console Compiler. (Sigh.)

So far, I've only created a single task -- Sorting algorithms/Pancake sort -- but I have ideas for a few more.

REALbasic

It should be noted that all REALbasic examples that I've written (which can be found by looking through my user contributions page) were written in REALbasic 5.5.5, which is several years old. (For comparison, this might be considered somewhat akin to writing in C90 instead of C99 (or C1X), or writing for the original VB.Net instead of VB2010 -- my examples will probably work under modern versions... but they might not. YMMV.)

Unsorted Code

Some stuff that I wanted to put up here, but don't have any idea how to categorize (or else they don't fit any one category very well, or whatever).

Prime numbers
to OS (I really need to update this one...)
My email
Alternate (broken) VB solution to the unbounded knapsack problem

Written Languages

The only spoken language I am only able to understand is English, but I can bull my way through several different written languages (and of course, various online translators help a lot); most notably:

Spanish, slowly (and incompletely)
French (sorta)
Latin (sorta)
Japanese (pretty rusty)
Russian (a bit)

Languages and/or alphabets on my "to learn" list:

Chinese (dialect shouldn't matter, since they all use the same written language... in theory)
Arabic (entirely cursive... sigh)
Hebrew (um... I know "aleph")
Thai (maybe)

Links

I put up my programming links on their own page. Have fun.

This is my Wikipedia user page.

This is my Sourceforge profile.

Sorting

Some neat pages that graphically display various sorting algorithms.

http://sortvis.org/
- Software to generate these images available here.
http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/
- This one offers a few different ways to compare various algorithms.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sort_algorithms
- Also http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animations_of_algorithms
- And also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nmnogueira#Graphics_and_Diagrams

My Sourceforge projects

EEShell2 -- a replacement shell for 32-bit Windows
IgrokYa -- a file type identifier (like file(1))
- lost interest in this one... sigh
KanjiFinder -- a tool to help English-speaking users find Japanese kanji
- data files nowhere near complete
Proxlat -- a general-purpose binary translator
- effectively abandoned as freakin' impossible
QuickRun a simple program launcher (started as part of EEShell2)
Visible -- a Visual Basic-to-C/C++ translator
- in progress
Erik's tools -- a small handful of tiny utilities I wrote
- I really need to update this one...

Quote of the Day

Hawking! I checked the math! 2 + 2 isn't 5, it's 6! 6!!!