I haven't died (so you can stop rejoicing now) -- instead, I've been spending time with my lovely Lissy and enjoying the nice Minnesota weather we've been having. The day after x-mas, Lis and I hung out most of the day and just sorta bummed around the place. But then on Tuesday, life started getting interesting. Lis came down with a nasty cold, so she's been spending most of her days in a haze (lucky girl). But we went to watch the Chronicles of Narnia anyways. It's a great movie -- I'd highly recommend you go see it (if you
December 2005 Archives
Have you ever wanted to set the line spacing on an EditField so that you can double space a line? I haven't. However, someone asked me (over the x-mas break) how to do it, and so I found some declares that do the trick well enough. You see, on Windows, everything happens based off the current selection. Which is very, very annoying. That means you need to select whatever it is that you want to modify. But then you end up with a ton of flickering from it. So not only do you have to do the selection, but you
I go to pick up Lis in less than an hour. I'm excited! :-) I hope everyone had a great Christmas (if you observe it). So I'm curious and have a few questions. 1) If you got gifts this season, what was your favorite and why? 2) For how many of you is Christmas celebrated inthe middle of summer? 3) If it's summer right now for you, how strange is it to hear songs about "winter wonderlands" and such? Do you have Christmas music that revolves around the fact that you celebrate it in the summer? 4) What's your favorite
Not certain which of you celebrate the Christian holiday, but I'd like to wish you all a very happy holiday season, regardless of religion! I had a very nice day with my family today. I got over to mom and dad's house around noon, and we promptly went out to eat some House of Pizza food. MMmm! No one really felt like cooking today since we're having turkey and all the fixin's tomorrow. After pizza, we came home and watched Alexander, which wasn't too shabby of a movie. I wouldn't have paid to see it in the theatre, but it's
Hoo, this should be a fun topic! So here's the question. What's the "best" game that comes pre-installed on a machine? And by best, I mean, what game do you find you play the most of out of these choices? Choices: Solitaire Free Cell Hearts Pinball Minesweeper Internet Spades Internet Backgammon Internet Hearts Internet Checkers Internet Reversi I was going to include the Mac, but after discussing with Mars and Jon, it sounds like your choices are Chess (OS X) and the Apple logo sliding puzzle (Classic). And to make matters more interesting -- why did you pick what you
I got Lis' X-mas gift today. She keeps asking about it, but I keep lying through my teeth to her. Hehehehe, she hates this game. :-) Her surgery went well, everything came back hunky dory -- so we're all happy (and relieved) about that. She gets up here on Sunday, which is coming damned fast and is awesome! I'm not looking forward to the long trek on the road to the Cities to pick her up, but I'll be happy to have her in the truck for the ride back. Spending long hours working on my side project, which I
I feel like I've pretty much gotten everything interesting into the WFS that I can get in there. I know there are some new features I could still add (in addition to some of the interesting features I've already got in there for the next release, like FTP support using WinInet). However, I feel like the next release needs a major structural change. One question I get over and over again, especially from people new to REALbasic, is "how do I use this?" The project has grown so quickly, that the structure gets in the way. This is especially true
I'm just curious to know how many people reading my blog are beta testers? Is it a large number or a small number? The reason I ask is because I feel let-down by our current beta testers, and I want to push them to do a better job. I sat down last night to use the latest beta for some "for-fun" programming and I ended up filing about 10 reports. The release before that, I filed about the same number of reports. So within a week, I've filed 20 reports, which is by far the most number of reports I've
I had a great weekend. :-) On Friday night, I picked my sister (Meggan) up from the airport about 11:30pm. I brought her over to mom and dad's place, and hung out for a little while BSing. Then on Saturday morning, I got up, met mom and Meggan over in Luxemburg at 9am and we drove down to Jan's place for our family Christmas party. I didn't get pictures this year since I forgot my camera at home, but I think Meg might have taken some. It was a nice party -- but smaller than last year. A number of
As of 6pm tonight, it's the official start of my vacation! I'm gearing up for it by writing in my blog. :-P I spent the better part of the morning shoving thru an API for a feature I was implementing. One of the mystery features from the previous posting. Everyone finally agreed that the way I proposed it was pure crap, so we moved on to their naming convention and ta da! It's done. That means I managed to implement 38 features in two days. Heh, they were all wrapped up into 5 features (and three release notes). I'd tell
I spent most of today adding new features to various existing features to take advantage of other new features. If that can get any more vague, just let me know. :-P I got a ton of stuff done today, but that's only because most of what I was up to involved a lot of redundancy. But that's why K&R invented macros, right? It's been snowing a bit lately. Started last night, still going right now. We've got about a foot (with drifts going higher) already. I got about half of my driveway shoveled before giving up. I figure that if
One thing I see a lot of, is code like this: [rbcode] for i as Integer = 0 to SomeFunctionCall - 1 . . . next i[/rbcode] While this code is clear and concise, it also could be hiding a very simple optimization. You see, the "SomeFunctionCall" is being evaluated on every pass thru the For loop. If it's a slow call, then this loop will slow down a bunch. So if you know that SomeFunctionCall is always going to return the same value, then you should pull it out of the looping construct to save time. So you'd do
So I was having a discussion with Mars today, and we got on the topic of using the extends keyword to project methods onto data types. I always figured that the way extends works is that it inserts a method into a class' vtable. This leads to certain assumptions, like the fact that an extends method can be overloaded, overridden, must be on a class, etc. I was wrong. And it's AWESOME! Extends doesn't mess with the vtable in any way -- so extends cannot be overloaded, overwritten, etc. It's really just a syntactic sugar... a fall-back (if you will)
I spent my weekend exactly how I wanted to, which is always great! I got up Saturday morning and just sorta hung out around the house. I read for pretty much the entire day (managed to finish a 600 page book in about 1.5 days). When I wasn't reading, I was napping. I haven't been sleeping too well lately, so I've been rather exhausted. So it was nice to have a day to just lay around and be a bum. I also went furniture shopping on Saturday with mom to see if I could find a few items for the
It's the little things in life that make me happy. Do you know what little features I'm proud of in r4? 1) The mode switch buttons are keyboard accessible on Windows, same with the disclosure widgets 2) The window editor is keyboard accessible. 2a) You can highlight a control in the list, hit enter to have it put on the window 2b) You can move the control around on the window with the arrow keys. Hold down shift to move it faster. 2c) You can tab to different controls and the window itself with the tab/shift-tab keys 2d) You can
Busy day -- I took the day off from work today so that I could do some holiday chasing and prepaer for Lis coming up here (she gets up here in about two weeks!!). I ran to the craft store and got some more holiday decorations for the house (as well as some gifts). Then I went to lunch with mom. Then I went furniture shopping to see if I could find an entertainment center (I didn't find one). Then I went shopping for curtains for the kitchen and dining room at J C Penny's (and found some nice ones).
Who here is going to attend REAL World 2006 this year? It's over Feb 27-Mar1. If you're going to attend, have you bought your earlybird tickets, or are you waiting? If you're not going to attend, why? If you're coming, what is the session you're most looking forward to? If you're not coming, what is the session you really wish you could attend?
Because it makes my life easier. I hate having to search for documentation all over the place while programming because most doc search engines blow. Have you ever tried using MSDN to find anything? Le suck. So try this on for size... In the location field (not the search field), type in NSButton and hit enter. Neat, eh? Now type in SetCursor and hit enter. Ooooh. Type GtkWindowGroup and hit enter. Ta da! This is just one of the reasons FireFox r0x0rs!
If you've ever made an app with custom UI that needs to respond to double clicks, then you've probably caught yourself wondering how to do it. And you've probably come up with a solution. But was it the proper solution? Here's the things you need to remember when testing whether something is a double click. 1) Are the two clicks close enough in time? That's a no-brainer that everyone gets right. You use system declares to find out what the OS thinks the proper time-between-clicks should be for a double click and you save the old click time to compare
I am enjoying being a homeowner. I spent Saturday doing domesticated things. It was snowing and about 26, so a gorgeous day to go get a Christmas tree. So dad and I went out to Hinkemeyer's (near Rice) and got a tree for him and another one for me. Then I had lunch with mom and dad before coming back to my place to set my tree up with dad. We got the tree up (but decorating hasn't happened quite yet -- I need the little hook dealies to hang some of my decorations) with relatively little pain. Then I
I suspect that one of the reasons people aren't using System.DebugLog (at least, on Windows) is because there's no built-in viewer for it. On OS X, you have the Console (not to be confused with the Terminal). On Linux, you have the console (which is the same thing as a terminal). But on Windows, you need to download a 3rd party application in order to view this output. So that got me to thinking -- I wonder if I can write my own debug string viewer in REALbasic. I figure, hey, if I can make this work on Windows, then
So I just have to yell and gripe and complain about this... because I honestly feel it was one of the stupidest, most easily avoidable user experience issues I've ever run into. Console and Terminal on OS X. What a terrible naming idea; whoever picked the "second" (in terms of time) name should be fired. The two words are synonyms -- it's like making a distinction between kleenex and tissue! To make matters worse, you access one (the "console") using the other (the "terminal") under the hood, and many other platforms refer to the "terminal" as the "console." Yech! All
Oh man, this is bad. I have so much stuff to get done, and then the game comes along and sucks the soul right out of me. I'm a mindless zombie once I hear the theme music. I had to build the moon last night. They wanted a 300 meter ball of stuff. Mine ended up being 678 meters. It got to the point that my katamari was rolling around picking up ISLANDS and CLOUDS. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen, and made me feel like I had achieved katamari nirvana. So if you're wondering why there was
