It comes tomorrow!

Well, I was going to announce my super-secret side project on Jan 15th... but that's a Sunday and way too far away. ;-) So it's been bumped up to Friday the 13th! Ooh, sounds ominous, I know. ;-)

I'm excited that it'll be announced tomorrow; hopefully it goes over well.

I had a nice lunch with mom and dad today. We went to O'Hares in St Cloud. I don't recall ever eating there before, but they had a pretty nice pasta. Dad happened to be in town while doing some chasing for work. Mom and I usually try to get together once a week for lunch just to keep in touch and find out what's going on. So it was nice to have a meal with the three of us.

I found an interesting (read: annoying) bug today. You can't use shared libraries for plugins anymore. So if you're on Windows, you can't put a DLL file into the Plugins folder. Similarly, if you're on the Mac, you can't put a dylib in there either. Thankfully, there's an easy enough workaround. Download the Plugins SDK and convert the shared library into an RBX file. Then life gets better. This only affects people trying to launch the IDE with a shared library for a plugin, so it's not too wide-spread. But it'll catch you by surprise if you're not careful (the IDE just crashes during the splash screen).

Hopefully I'll get the chance today to post my cool RB2006r1 example project. I implemented the Mersenne Twister algorithm in REALbasic. I think I'll get that project posted sometime tonight; I'll make an announcement about that too. But I promise, that's not my super secret big side project. That was just a way for me to test the new integer datatypes out. :-)

I've been working on Trucker more lately (my ODBII reader app). It's coming along great since RB has structure support. I, too, wish I could have class-specific enumerations though. I've found a few places where I've just used constants instead because I can encapsulate better that way. Oh well, hopefully sometime soon! I'm almost to the testing phase though since my protocol tester seems to be handling everything I throw at it.

Is anyone else annoyed at the fact the price of stamps was raised yet another time? Maybe I'm crazy, but I recall buying 25 cent stamps for general postage not that long ago (cripes, now that I think about it, that was around 1987 or so!). Oh well, what can ya do? Thankfully, I managed to run out of 37 cent stamps just before the price went up. So the next time I'm in shopping, I'll get the new-fangled 39 cent stamps instead of those stupid 2 centers.