October 2004 Archives

Well, so far, it's been uneventful but productive. I got my registration scheme done and handed my new secret product out to my single beta tester to see how well its received. I'm very excited about it finally being in beta! Now I just need to get the website done. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as excited about that as I am the actual product. ;-P I made a vat of homemade Old Time Beef Soup today and damn did it turn out good. I have about 2 gallons of soup to eat over the next week or so, and I'm

Bush Relatives For Kerry I think when the president's own family (albeit, extended family) start publicly campaigning for the opponent, it's time to kick the president out of office. Go vote!

I am a workaholic. I answer work-related emails from customers on the weekend even I have a set of window stickees from the 1960's that mom gave me when I moved out. Both the Halloween set and the Easter set. They're my most prized decorations I, like my entire family, am obsessed with small knick-knacks I prefer writing in pens instead of pencils, even if I think I'll be making mistakes or need to revise things I enjoy thunderstorms as much as I enjoy snowstorms -- which is a lot The thing that scares me most professionaly is getting

So Jake pointed this out to me today: They discovered a new species of humans that lived up until just 500 years ago before becoming extinct This got me thinking... These people lived on a tiny island near Java and were only about 3 feet tall when fully grown. They probably had almost no contact with our species of humans (otherwise the diseases we carry would have wiped them out in a generation like what happened with native Americans and Africans), and so they must have lived life almost oblivious to the fact that there was an entire world outside

My web hosting company provides the best user experience ever. Everytime I have had to work with them on something, they've been extremely helpful to the point of it amazing me. Btw, I host with 3SHost, and my friend Mike was the one who pointed them out to me. Those of you who know me know that I don't laud software companies hardly ever because I just expect good service. If they don't provide it, I just don't use their service. If they do provide it, then whoopie. I don't get excited when my car starts in the morning and

My full name is Aaron John Ballman I got my middle name from my mom's uncle My gandma (Audrey, on my mom's side) died 10 years ago this week I have lived in Sartell (MN), Vancouver (BC), Redmond (WA) and Austin (TX) I've never met Jake in real life, though we've been friends for about five years. And he's not the only good friend I have met online I am dating Elissa Star Wampler, and have been for over a year and a month I have worked for REAL Software for about three years. I was hired on as

So it's a rainy (but comfortable!) day here in Austin and boy am I dragging ass at getting things done at work. Console support has been a royal PITA to implement... I'm currently waiting for an API proposal to go thru so that I can go back to working on it even though I'd rather chew my arm off than keep working on that. It's not that I don't like console applications -- that's one of the features I originally implemented. It's just that it's very slow-going to support them in RB 6 since it feels like one step forward/two

1) Favorite anime movie? 2) Favorite anime series? 3) Favorite albumn from your favorite band? 4) Favorite town? 5) Favorite book? 6) Favorite friend you fell out of touch with? 7) Favorite author? 8) Favorite food? 9) Favorite day of the year and WHY? 10) Favorite blog to read? ;-)

I got most of my registration scheme done for my latest adventure. I am now able to register a plugin from within the IDE itself. I just have to make the dialog boxes prettier and get the nag screens working. Then I think it's feature freeze time! w00t! Once I have the feature set frozen, I have to make some documentation up and find some beta testers. So! If you know of anyone who does serial programming with REALbasic and focuses on Windows, lemme know! Hopefully I'll have the C libraries done rather soon as well -- so if you

Well, ok, not really. But still. This weekend I found a way to sneak around delete permissions on Windows. I wanted to write an application that deletes itself (don't ask...) and I found a nifty way to do that: spawn off a shell and tell it to delete the file for me. After implementing it (in about 8 lines of C code) and testing it out, everything seemed to work great. So I gave it to Jake to run under some more paranoid conditions (anal virus scanner, strict user permissions, etc. I can't believe I just found a valid use

No, not really. But this is another random post I've generated from the depths of my mind. ;-) I worked on my latest project pretty much all weekend long. Now I'm to the nitty gritty stuff on it. The actual product is complete and working (tho certainly not tested). Now I just need to do the little things like get a registration scheme working, documentation, website, marketing, a way to sell it, etc. Ya know, the important but boring stuff. :-P I'm going bowling today with Travis and a bunch of his friends from UT. Should be a blast! I

Some people really know how to piss me off. So I was answering work emails today, and a discussion come up on one of our lists about how a user doesn't want to pay the upgrade price to use one of the Pro features in REALbasic. This Pro feature happens to be one that I wrote... He was looking for ways to write this feature himself using just RB to do so. Well, the discussion digressed into people who really don't have that much knowledge about how complex networking code can really be explaining to this poor soul that it

So I've posted quite a bit lately about programming stuff, and I realize that a lot of my friends aren't programmers or just plain don't care to hear about programming stuff. So... I'm going to break up the posts with a shameless plug and a story. I remember when I got to DigiPen in Redmond (after being at the one in Vancouver), this new game came out that put everyone in a titter. Grand Theft Auto. Oh man, you could run people over and smash cars and it was awesome!! Well, it turns out that Rockstar isn't an evil empire

My friend Jake is having a discussion on his blog about whether having multiple .NET languages poses a problem. Your homework is to go read his blog and then come back here to see my thoughts on it. In short -- language does matter. But here's why: All compilers use the intermediary language. Some languages such as C/C++ and Pascal compile down into object code (this code is stored in .obj files on your drive), .NET languages compile down into IL to pass off to the JIT engine (Java works similarly as well), and yet even more languages (things like

So over a year ago I wrote a remote debugger stub for REALbasic. This lets you run the IDE on one machine (like, say, a Mac) and debug your application running on another machine (like, say, Windows or Linux) so you can track down platform differences or just to see what it looks like running on another machine. Obviously this application uses the network to do the transfer, and so I have to use at least one port on the user's system. Well, when you do this, good citizens don't just steal a port and hope no one else uses

So I watched the Red Sox/Yankees game last night and I must say: while I am happy with the outcome of the game, I am very sad about the behavior of the fans. For those of you who may have missed it... at two points during the game the umpires had to call the players off the field because the fans were throwing baseballs onto the field. Basically, the fans with upset with some very valid calls that the umpires made (this was probably the most technically correct baseball game I have ever seen) and so they started throwing anything

When talking with some people, the one thing I hear over and over is how you can't use REALbasic to do this, that or the other thing. Well, fine. Here's my rebuttal. Here's a list of products that are MwRB and are commercially very successful and cover a wide range of product types. SlayFire (low-level) SlayFire is a suite of optimizers for REALbasic applications that are written in 100% pure REALbasic code. The company is founded by Hank Marquis (whom you may have heard of before). Cast::Stream (media) The guys over at Caststream make a streaming audio/video product that's been

When you work for a company that does business internationally, you get the chance to see some rather funny translations. I came across a rather funny one this morning when I was looking thru bug reports that I figured I'd share with you. I'm almost tempted to post this one under Creative Writing.... Summary: Bond between data variables Description: If a data type variable is enhanced by a second one (dd = d), the two variables remain bonded and the change of one of the two variables is reflected on the other one. I enclose herewith the trial program that

So I decided that I want the user to be able to make standard property sheets (and hence Wizard windows as well) from within REALbasic. This shouldn't be such a scary undertaking, it's just Win32 API magic after all. Well, as it turns out... it's damn near impossible to do from REALbasic. First, to understand the problem, you have to realize that property sheets are really just a collection of various dialog box resources. If you were programming in VC++ or VB, you'd have the chance to make one of these dialog resources, which the MS resource compiler would then

So I decided to rename the Win32 Declare Library to be the Windows Functionality Suite. I think it was the best name I could come up with that was still accurate. I made the version 1.0 release today (which isn't entirely accurate since there were other releases of the Win32 Declare Library, but I figured the reset of the release numbers was in order since the paradigm was shifted as well). Hopefully people will enjoy it with its new name just as much as they liked it with the old name. We'll see If you haven't downloaded your copy of

For whatever reason, I've been getting really poor sleep lately. It's not that I'm not getting enough of it (I get about 7 hours on average), it's that I never wake up feeling rested. So today I slept in until about noon. I feel lazy, but a lot better! I've been doing more work on the Win32 Declare Library. Just added complete control over tooltips so you can do things like change their background color, text color, delay times, etc. I thought I had a bug with my code though since the tips would show up great until I clicked

A - Accent: Minnesotan with a hint of Texan. B - Breast size (omit if ur a guy obviously): Nearly A. Wait.. I can't tell. What's a "ur a guy"? I am feeling discriminated against since I now have one less question to answer than females would have. So B is now going to stand for Best Bowling Score, which would be a 230. C - Chore you hate: Changing the cat's litter box D - Dad's name: Ricky Lee (no really, that's what's on his birth certificate!) E - Essential make-up item: I'm going to go out on a

So I went out with one of our customers last night (Bob). He's a serial programming guru who works for Avnet, basically selling Motorola (among others) brand microcontrollers, chips, etc. We had an awesome time BS'ing about everything from politics to programming. It ended up being Jon (one of our testers), Bob and myself -- we went down to Shoal Creek Saloon after work for some good southern seafood. Bob's down in Austin doing some training on the new goodies being churned out of Motorola; something he does about this same time every year. He's a blast to get together

So one of my pet peeves about REALbasic is that a lot of the APIs are old, outdated, made only for Mac (and usually Classic at that!) and otherwise just misnamed. For example, what the hell is a "GrowIcon"? It means nothing to me. Well, it means that the window is resizeable. Because that makes sense. GrowIcon... resizeable... Whatever. In any case, I finally got tired of having this bug up my ass after closing about the 15th report this month of people mis-using Window.MenuBarVisible (which, btw, doesn't affect just the menu bar. It actually hides all the system UI

I was browsing Jake's awesome blog today and I saw a really neat idea on there. You're supposed to list 100 things about yourself. Well, true to form, I'm stealing the idea and warping the shit out of it. Here's a list of 50 Things About My Cat. I am not doing 100 things because 50 random facts is plenty of crap to know about a cat. Her name is Pixel She got her name by watching my screen saver for 2+ hrs when I first got her She was a stray that I picked up during an ice storm

So I added a new feature to WordPress -- I don't like that the entire post shows up on the main page. This causes for a lot of clutter and a ton of reading. So now I have it set up so that it will only show you an excerpt of the content on the main page, and you must click the title of the post if you want to read more. I am wondering what everyone thinks of the new format. Do you like the fact that you don't have so much clutter? Do you mind having to click

So I was hit with some rather interesting new this morning. Our lead programmer, Cortis, is leaving REAL Software. Cortis has been here longer than any other programmer (about 5 yrs) and is leaving to pick up a job in the Boston area working on robotics. It's what he went to school for and a job he's always wanted to have. I wish him the best of luck! But this brings up some really interesting points. For one, the programming staff here already feels over-worked because there's just not enough of us to get everything done. Now we'll be losing

She found a stray siamese cat in her parking lot the other day and he was such a lover. Would just purr and rub against you all day long -- that's how attention starved he was. So Lis decided to take him in until she could find him a good home (her mom decided to take him). He's a white kitty (about a year old) with tinges of orange on him -- really a pretty cat. We named him Pumpkin (since he's got orange and found him in Oct), but we don't know if that's the name her mom will

So I just bought my tickets home... for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Damn does that sting! Everyone is well-aware of how much I want to go home, but when it's 750$ spent in one night to make it home... it still hurts the pocketbook a little. ;-) I'll be heading home on Fri, Nov 19th (I'll get in late at night, so basically, I'll be home Saturday) and will leave for Austin again on Nov 30th. Then I head back to MN on Dec 17th (again, late-night arrival) and I am staying all the way until Jan 2nd! So I'm

WHO TV - Des Moines: Man accused of paying parking ticket with befouled bills This link is a rather VERY funny link. You see..it happened in our Jake's very own hometown of Burlington, Iowa. Yup, that's right... Jake grew up around people who wipe their asses with dollar bills before giving them to the government. :: grins :: So Jake (once you get back from UNI homecoming) -- what's your thoughts on this? Do you know the guy? ;-)

So as some of you know, I am the main author of the Win32 Declare Library. However, I am beginning to feel that the name just doesn't work. There's a few reasons for this, but mainly because I'm also working on another library with a similar name but vastly different functionality (the Win32 Api Library). The Win32 Declare Library is a set of Windows functionality in the form of helper modules and classes. It's full features that this library possesses. So it's thinks like OSVersionInformation and a Calendar class, etc. Granted, it uses declares to achieve these features, but it

My day started off with a really weird dream in which Lis and I were French living in Paris during the Nazi occupation. We had to go rescue Allied soldiers who were being shot down by the Germans. Except they weren't flying planes, but flying big balloons. Needless to say, it was an odd dream. Then I got to work and the day just went wonky from there. I started implementing the printing features for RB 6 until we got into a heated discussion about how headers should work. :: sighs :: Whenever we have a huge feature that's really

So I keep having to point people at various links because they have very standard programming questions. So tonight I finally added a new page to my main site specifically for developer resources. This page includes links to things like the user interface guidelines for all the major platforms, various API reference sites, etc. Basically, any time someone says "But Windows doesn't have a HIG" or "Where can I find information about such-such API?" I can just point them to this page and be done with it. Yay for standardized responses! For those of you who are programmers and reading

My god, what a crock! I have always hated printing -- it wastes paper and time, kills trees and bring little joy to the poor schlep who has to program the application to print. But today, I hate printing more. Why? Because no OS does it the same! For this rant, I want you to pretend that you are the program that's being run. It's a brain-fuck, I know... but just do it. On Mac Classic, you print the entire document and the OS says "oh, the user wants 4 copies, pages 2-5 only" and so it spits out 4

MMm.... Fall is approaching -- this is my favorite time of year. It's hard for me to be away from home right now because there is nothing prettier than the fall in Minnesota. Being down here in Texas has made me realize just how much I miss that. I'm going to ramble about all my favorite memories of the fall -- it might make me feel better (but it will most likely just make me miss home more...) Aside from the obvious beauty of how colorful all the trees are (sugar maples turning red, yellow and orange; red oaks turning

So I am Captain Eveeeel, the purveyor of all things diabolical. And today is another day for me to try to take over the world. But first, I must check my Eveeel ToDo List. :: walks over to the Eveeel Desk :: Aha! Here's my list... :: reads :: Eveeel Things To Do --------------------- Push an old lady down the stairs. Turn in random people to the Dept of Homeland Security. Get a three-way call going between 411 and 911. Step on a kitten. Give the kitten to a little girl and tell her Santa Claus did it. Go grocery

So Kodak is suing Sun Microsystems because the Java programming language infringes on a patent where a piece of software can "ask for help" from another application. For those of you who aren't computer programmers, here's a run-down of what that means and why it applies to Java (and how it can be extended). When you call a function, you either call one that you wrote yourself, or one that someone else wrote but lets you call. What Java does it it takes code you wrote and calls another "application" that happens to be the operating system (like Windows or

KABOOM! It's been raining now for over 30 days straight. KABOOM! The thunder and lightning haven't let up yet. When The Storm first rolled into town, we all thought it was great. It had been (KABOOM!) almost three months since we had any precipitation and so the rain was welcome. At first, it (KABOOM!) was a gentle rain... you know, like the warm spring rains (KABOOM!) that everyone loves so much. But soon the rain (KABOOM!) turned cold and hard. That's when the days started getting darker... Pretty (KABOOM!) soon you couldn't tell the difference in time. The sun never

So I've been working on a nifty little side project right now. Basically, I am writing a REALbasic application that serves up information for my web page to load on demand. You will be able to click on a link and that will bring up a new page with all sorts of useless facts about my machine (assuming the web server is up and running). Such facts include: what music am I listening to currently, if any. A random file that I have open (no, you won't get to see the contents of the file, just the file name), and/or

w00t! The weekend is almost here. I just need to survive a very sleepy 8 hours at work and then I can finally have a weekend! All sorts of good things planned. Lis is coming over tonight and I'm going to help her with her webpage (you can see the current incarnation here), and we're going to get ready for a little party on Sat. Her brother Lawrence (you know, the guy I play racquetball with all the time?) has his bday on Monday. But who wants to party on a Monday? So we're going to have a little gathering