Applications

These are free utility applications I've written and am happy to share. They're all built with VB.NET and my own NamtiraLib library, and none of them contain ads, telemetry, or any other nonsense.

What's Inside The Box?

If you are like 41% of Americans surveyed in 2014, you have a desktop computer. You are also likely to own a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. And all those devices are built using the same basic technology…and you probably have no idea what that is. This essay will give you a high-level tour of the components that make your digital device possible.

How To Program

I wrote my first computer program in 1977. It was a little thing in BASIC that would have made my name scroll up the screen of a Radio Shack TRS-80 if I'd owned one (I wrote the program on paper, copied from a book), and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever done. Fifty years later, I'm still programming—though the word itself has shapeshifted so many times I sometimes wonder if what I do today even counts as the same activity.

Online Courses

I taught Visual Basic and Visual C++ programming for a living, but not everyone has the time or coincidence of location that would allow me to teach them in person. Besides, no one is offering classes these days for older technologies, such as pre-.NET Visual Basic. If that's what you need, please enjoy my learn-Visual-Basic course on-line, at no charge!

Projects

It's an ill wind that blows no good. Hopefully, my winds blow benefits to all. Below find listed programming projects (and programming-related projects) I offer to any and all who can benefit.

Welcome to CilwaWeb!

The year was 1997.

The number one song that year was Something About The Way You Look Tonight and the top-grossing movie was Titanic.

Bill Clinton was President. The worst the Republicans could find on him was he lied about having sex with a consenting partner, probably because they were mad at him for balancing the budget—something no Republican President had ever accomplished.

I had just moved to Snowflake, Arizona, with my then-husband Michael and "web sites" were the latest thing. Many companies had them; and as every Windows computer already had Internet Explorer on it, so as soon as it was connected to the Internet, all those pages were accessible, along with email (which, years earlier, I had helped develop) and newsgroups (an early form of social media, taking the form of a bulletin board). And, as a computer professional and the author of four Windows programming books, it seemed like my creating a web site of my own was a logical step to take.

Namtira

The basic premise of Namtira, and how it differs from all other shells, is that instead of being bottom-up (starting an app to work on a document) it is top-down (start with the document and do things to it). This is a much more natural way to work. When people begin a project, they say, "Today I am going to write my novel, or plan my vacation, or update my contacts." No one ever gets up in the morning saying, "Today I am going to use Microsoft Word! or Excel! or Outlook!"

Advice from Professor 'Puter

I love to help. And I've helped out a lot of friends with their computer woes, and some people who weren't really more than acquaintances. Here are a few of my better bits of advice.

Whining

As a computer professional who started working in that field before there was such a thing as email, as you might expect I have an opinion or two about the state of computer software and hardware—and little reason to keep them to myself.