"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Free homeschool (or anything else) progress bar generator program

Those of you who read this site know that, during the school year, I have a progress bar at the top of the page that shows how many days we have been in school relative to the local government schools.  I wrote a Windows program to generate one or two bars with whatever text, progress and completion values, colors, image size, and orientation (horizontal, vertical rotate left, and vertical rotate right) you might require.  I used several open source libraries and released the program under the GPL 2 (GNU General Public License).  This is the first time I have done such a thing, but you can download a Window binary installer here and the source code here.  I know, it is kind of embarrassing to have released a Windows program as my first piece of open source code in as much as I am a Linux guy, but I have a couple of cross platform projects that are of a significantly larger scope that I should have ready to release in six months to a year.  This was a small little program that was kind of fun and that I use every day so I just thought I would put it out there.  At any rate, I will keep links to the binaries and the source code on our homepage.

Here is the story of why I wrote the thing.  When we started homeschooling, we decided that we would try to stick to the same schedule as our local government schools so our children could play with the neighborhood kids on their normal days off.  We have found that to be fairly difficult for a couple of reasons.  First, the government schools are in session a full two weeks less than us.  This year actually might be even less than that depending on whether they decide to make up any snow days they missed.  At any rate, I was going to do a program that compared the number of hours the students were actually studying, too.  Like a lot of homeschool kids, Kelly and Christian get up, read their bibles, do some memorization, and practice their instruments before breakfast.  The other neighborhood kids are usually just getting on the bus when Kelly and Christian finish breakfast.  The bus gets home in the afternoon about the same time Kelly and Christian finish studying for the day.  They go out and play for awhile, then we do a couple of hours of corrections, reading aloud, and project work in the evening.  All in all, I think our kids are studying at least a couple of more hours per day than the government schools, but I think that would be a little too much to put on a bar graph.

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10 Comments

  1. Dad

    Dad, I could not use it on the homeshcool computer because it said I needed core_RL_wand_.dll. What IS that anyway?

  2. Dad

    I will look at it when we get home. Let me take a look to see that I have everything in the right place.

  3. Dad

    Christian, re-download it and try it again. Then let me know how it went. I also need you to upload the picture of Kelly. Be sure not to exit FireFTP until the full upload is done–I only got half of one picture the first time. Thanks!

  4. Kelly

    I re-downloaded it three times and it still came up with the same message.

  5. Kelly

    the pictures are re-downloaded now. I think that should do it.

  6. Kelly

    But with 2 progress bars, I took the install from linux and put it over onto the windows computer and it came up with a new error message saying X11.dll could not be found.

  7. Dad

    OK. Let me add that.

  8. Dad

    OK download it, reinstall it, and try it again. Christian, I do not see the pictures.

  9. Anonymous

    They are on FIREFTP dad! I waited for it a long time and it said that it was completed.

  10. Dad

    Thanks Christian. I got them.

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