So I had the chance to watch the movie Grizzly Man the other night. It's a documentary about Timothy Treadwell. He decided he needed to go protect grizzly bears in Alaska, so he lived up there with them for a number of months out of every year for the last 13 years or so. The documentary is commentary by Werner Herzog with footage from Timothy's expiditions and interviews with friends and family members. So here are my thoughts on the movie: It was a good movie to watch. It had a lot of stunning footage of bears, fox and wildlife
September 2006 Archives
So it recently came to my attention that I'm a declare whore. There are some who are surprised by my proclivity for using declares at the drop of the hat, and I feel that I could probably shed some light on this subject. First off, I'm a Win32 API programmer by trade, and have been for many years now. I started my journey down the pure Win32 path when Windows 95 was released and that's where I have the most training. So when a problem comes up on Windows, my immediate reaction is "how would I solve this using Win32
Caution! If you're easily offended, you're on the wrong site. Instant classic Every meatatarian's dream? I wonder if I qualify to join up Sensei never taught me this move...but it could cause a massive loss of blood resulting in death! Ok, everyone else, add your own.
So one of the challenges that I've faced with working on the RB framework is how to mesh the Win32 APIs with the REALbasic way of doing things to accomplish a goal. One of those goals, recently, was how to make a modeless dialog frame type that fits with the REALbasic model. In traditional Win32 programming, modeless dialogs are created by using a dialog template and a call to CreateDialog (or one of its siblings). You can make this template either by doing some drag and drop operations, which then writes a resource file script out, or you can make
The 19th marked my two-year anniversary of blogging here on Ramblings. Of course, I've been blogging even longer than that if you count the classic Ramblings (if you included that, I've been doing this for around four years then). So here's to two years, and hopefully many more to come! :-)
One of my all-time favorite bands is the Tea Party. They're a pioneer Canadian rock band which fuses rock with Eastern sounds. Very original style of music which came during a time when most bands were more interested in the cookie cutter format of alternative and pop music than artistic style. Sadly, the band broke up last year. Seeing as how I own every record they've produced, I'm sad to know that there will probably never be another Tea Party release coming (unless they decided to release B-sides which didn't make the cut for previous albums). However, I did learn
1) Sarah Jessica Parker and Owen Wilson should never get married. Their childen would just be gigantic noses with legs and would run around making bad movies. 2) Gobo Fraggle is Canadian. Just listen to him, eh? 3) I have officially removed Katie Holmes from my "must have" list. 4) The Vikings don't actually play football. They just show up to the games and watch football. 5) All of my friends loving playing volleyball in the heat of the summer. But when it gets to be 70, sunny and a slight breeze, they suddenly don't want to play anymore. 6)
Long-time reader Uli was kind enough to point out a discussion of REALbasic on MacSB about some of REALbasic's strengths versus other toolkits. He brought up the idea that it might be interesting to hear some more of these strengths in a blog posting, so I'm going to give that a shot. So I'm going to start this little parade off with a toolkit feature that is near and dear to my heart: networking. One thing which many people tend to forget when looking at a toolkit or langauge is "what does this get me in the long run?" They
It's hard to believe, but three years ago today, Lis and I started dating. We've had our share of ups and downs, like any couple who's dated for a long time. And we've also created a lot of great memories together as well. It's been three wonderful years sweetie! Here's to many, many more! :)
Can someone please explain to me how cricket works? I have absolutely no clue. I was reading this article about some guy who was in trouble for chucking a ball at a fan, and I realized that I wasn't even reading real words anymore. In 1996 he was banned from schools cricket for knocking out his stumps after being given out, and three years ago he was sent home from Zimbabwe's tour of England for leaving the ground without permission after twice being dismissed for a duck during the second Test. What's a stump, and why is it bad to
I just have to say, GDI+ is really awesome. It makes graphics programming so much more fun and simple. Granted, you aren't going to be using it for making Quake 18 -- you'd still use DirectX or OpenGL for the truly hardcore graphics programming. But for your everyday graphics needs, GDI+ really does rock. For instance, I found myself needing to convert an image from one format to another on disk. So I had an 8-bit GIF file that needed to be converted to a BMP. Turns out that this is blindingly simple to do. The first step is to
Phew, what a whirlwind weekend! I had two weddings to attend, one on Friday night and the other on Saturday night. The first one was my friend Scott (Scomurr). He and Anne finally tied the knot, and I'm very happy for the both of them. It was a really nice wedding held down in Chanhassen and I had a great time. I spent most of the reception drinking wine and BSing with Abe and Krista (who are getting married next month) and playing with Brain's baby boy (Matthew). One interesting happening at the wedding was that I ran into a
At the bequest of a number of people, I made another video tour of my humble abode. The last one was sometime last year, so I figured it'd be fun for people to see how things have progressed. I've been in the house for just over a year (I moved in during August of 2005), and I've made a number of changes to things. Aside from the obvious stuff like decorations and furniture, I've also put on a deck, built a workbench, installed a sprinkler pump and landscaped part of the yard. However, there's still plenty to go with finishing
Ok, I'll admit it... I am somewhat of a linguaphile. I enjoy learning about language roots, ancient written texts and other very geeky subjects. Not enough to really go over the deep edge, mind you. But enough that I figured I'd give you a new type of post today. I'm sure all of my readers are aware that the Western style of written language is from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. That's how you read this entry, for instance. I'm also pretty sure that you're aware that other writing systems exist in the world. For instance, some Middle Eastern text (such as Arabic
And so it starts... I've begun calling around for estimates on finishing the basement today. I have most of the electrical stuff already done (just needs to be hooked up to the box), and the walls are already framed. But now I'm going to kick it into high gear. I've called the electrical, HVAC and drywall guys to get some estimates on how much it'll run me, but my hope is to have the entire basement finished by Christmas. We'll see how well I'm able to stick by my time table. :-) Since I was calling for those estimates, I
So a while back, Uli asked for a bit more information about what it is I do and how I fit into the whole REAL Software scheme of things. It appears as though I've been somewhat mysterious, so let me rectify things. I was hired on at REAL Software in the Spring of 2002 as a Windows developer to assist in porting the IDE from the Mac to Windows. At that time, the IDE was written entirely in C++, but used a fair amount of the underlying framework code to abstract things. So a large part of my job was
Had a blast this weekend, and I'm still recovering from it. Scott's last day of freedom was on Saturday, so a bunch of us got together for his bachelor party down in Robbinsdale (first time I've ever been there -- nice little burb). I got down to Scott's about noon and was followed by Joel, Abe and Brever. We proceed to open Cold Ones and grill some burgers and brats, when Jay showed up. Now the party was ready to get started. :-) We grilled, drank and BS until we were ready to go on a frisbee golfing adventure. From
My junk mail filter hates me and ate my domain re-register email, which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that I thought I was registered until 2010 or so, but was in fact registered until today. Oops. We're back up and running (until 2011), and once the DNS caches are re-seeded, things should be fine. Sorry!
Just too funny not to pass along. Thanks to Uli for pointing this out to me. one two three
So I learned something new about C++ today that I hadn't known before. Let's see if anyone can spot the bug in this code: class SubFoo; class BaseFoo { protected: SubFoo *mSubFoo; public: BaseFoo( SubFoo *foo ) : mSubFoo( foo ) {}; virtual ~BaseFoo() { mSubFoo = nil; } // Bunch of function declarations which don't matter }; class SubFoo : public BaseFoo { public: SubFoo() : BaseFoo( this ) {}; virtual ~SubFoo() {}; // Bunch of function declarations which don't matter }; void main( void ) { SubFoo foo; // Use foo to do things which don't matter }
So I've been doing a lot more work in Visual Studio 2005 lately, and I've noticed something truly strange: there's absolutely no progress indication aside from an animated icon in the status bar. Yes, it's nice to know that it's still doing something by having a whopping three to five frames of animation in the status area. However, that's pretty worthless to me -- I *know* it's still compiling since it's using 100% of my CPU. What I am most interested in is what percentage of compiling is done and what's left? I can understand that for very small projects,
In a word: almost. I've been playing with pre-RC1, the August CTP drop. While it's leaps and bounds better than beta 2, I'd still say it's not quite ready for prime time. I've seen many improvements between July's drop and August's drop in areas I was previously finding bugs. But many of the glaring issues I was seeing are still around. The screensavers don't play nice with my video card. When I come back from having the screensaver on, I have dozens of taskbar notification messages telling me that my display driver has recovered from a fatal error. That wouldn't
I think I should take the week off -- I was productive enough yesterday to cover me for a while. I got up around 9:30 in the morning and worked on the deck with dad. We got the 4x4 posts down, the hand rails up and it's almost ready for spindles. We worked on that until about 1:30 or so. Then I borrowed the neighbor's power washer and washed the Dodge up. Then vacuumed out both trucks really well. Then Armour-All'ed the Dodge. Then I decided to go over to mom and dad's with the Ford and clean the inside
But you still love me, right? So it should come as no shock to you (especially since I've mentioned it before), that I play Magic the Gathering. Well, played is more accurate since all my friends who played moved away. So I was browsing thru some of my more evil decks the other day, and I decided that I'd tell everyone what my most evil (and most tournament illegal) deck is. Oooh, aren't you all just excited now? On the edge of your seats? Left the site already because this will bore you? Mountain * 4 Swamp * 6 Strip
Well, new to me, anyways. :-) My grandpa was selling his 1999 Ford F-150, so I went down to Cleveland (MN) and nabbed it today. It's only got 28k miles on it, so it's got a ton of running life ahead of it. It's in good running condition. The only things I need to do with it are: add a decent radio in it (this one doesn't even have a tape deck) and add more refrigerant to the AC system (it's blowing a bit warm). It ran like a champ all the way home, and I'm digging it. :-) Boy,
So I just ran into this while working on an assertion for the REALbasic IDE, and I figured I'd share this with you. I'm assuming that everyone has their own mechanism for dealing with invariants in their code, such as assertions. But if not, here's a little refresher course: It's never a bad idea to double-check your assumptions in code. If you're assuming that Foo = Bar, then check it. The way most people do this is they make a global method called "Assert" which checks to see if an expression evaluates to false. If it does, then it throws
