What I've Been Up To

In terms of work, I've been focusing mainly on getting us into beta. I've done a bunch of work on hooking up remote debugging (as I've mentioned before). I have all the preferences stuff hooked up, you can auto discover the new stubs, and I was able to remote debug with it yesterday. So I'm setting that down (for further testing) and working on our registration stuff. I did a lot of it in terms of the low-level stuff last week. So I can generate keys, validate them, etc. But I've been hooking up the UI for them recently. But I've been working on some "fun" stuff as well, which is basically me making the IDE feel more like a Windows app when running on Windows. So I added things like roll-over effects to the command bar buttons, and a true status bar control for the tips area. The IDE is finally starting to look like a Windows app! But that's been my work lately -- just fixing stuff and adding stuff. In the last two weeks, I've worked just under 40 extra hours. Yay for more vacation time! Boo for burning out at work.

In terms of home stuff, I've been mostly veging out lately due to brain overload issues. I've watched a few movies, and some Law and Order (watched the last four episodes of season 14 last night), so that's been cool. I was gonna play racquetball on Wed with Lis, but St Ed's wouldn't let me play! The chick at the "front desk" told me that because I don't have a student ID, I can't play. I use the term "front desk" loosely -- she pulled an exercise bike out into the hallway and was riding it while talking to two guys when we walked in. Obviously she's a stickler for the rules. :-P NEwho, that was a bummer because I was looking forward to playing.

I've started nabbing empty shipping boxes from work and bringing them to the apartment. I figure I'll start packing the things I don't use ever (like a lot of my books and stuff like that) now so that I don't have to monkey with it later. But the boxes are currently strewn around the living room for Pixel to play in. They're her new favorite hiding spot. She'll either sit inside of them and play, or she'll knock one over on her so that she's hidden under it and play that way. She's an odd cat...

I got some new pictures with my digital camera put up on the web page. Check the Misc page out under Pictures. The pictures look kinda grainy, but that's not the camera's fault. It's because I saved them as a JPEG from within MS Paint. The originals came in absolutely huge (like 2MB per picture as JPEGs), so I tried to crop them and resize them. Obviously I'm going to have to do the photo editing some other way because I'm not too pleased with the results. They're not horrible, mind you. But they're also not high quality either.

I've been doing a little bit of fun programming on the side (for days when I don't get enough programming at work, of course!). I've been working on the Windows Functionality Suite. My hope is to have the next big release coincide with the release of RB 6, and make the entire suite unicode savvy. But with 500+ methods, that's a fairly large job. Thankfully, I'm most of the way done (been doing a handful of methods a night for the last few months). But I've also added some new stuff as well. I have made a lot of improvements to the StatusBar control (so that we can use it to make RB 6, heh), as well as adding stuff to the Registry module that I missed. Oh yeah, and I've been helping Charlie Boisseau with creating an ICMPSocket in REALbasic. I got it fully functional under Windows last night for giggles. So that's been an interesting time as well.

I am looking forward to relaxing a bit this weekend. I will probably end up coming into work one of the days, but I'm also planning on taking one of the other days and spending it doing something fun. Maybe I'll go to Book People, find myself a good new book, and read the whole thing this weekend. In any event, I'm hoping to not chase a whole bunch so that I feel like I get an actual break from work. We'll see if I stick to my plan though. :-)