The excitement for tonight is handing out candy to kids, cleaning the basement (as I'm finally finished with the duct-work and just need to clean things up for the rough-in inspection on Thursday) and heading over to mom and dad's to solidify plans for deer hunting this weekend. On an interesting note, I've been quite busy with work recently on the bug fixing front. I've been hitting the lists pretty hard and done a reasonably good job of tackling a number of bugs. So I'm quite happy, and think r5 is going to be a much more solid release. One
October 2006 Archives
Well, I told everyone I had big news, and this is it. I got a major upgrade while I was down in Austin, and I'm really excited about it. I upgraded girlfriend 1.0 to fiancé 1.0! :-) That's right, Lis and I are now engaged. It happened on Oct 20, 2006 while out camping at Ink's Lake State Park in Texas. For those of you interested in the gory details, read on. But if you just want to see pictures, they're here. After a long afternoon (which I'll let Lis talk about in her blog when she posts about it),
I just made it back in to MN late last night, and so I should be getting back to a regular posting schedule rather soon. But my trip down to Austin was *awesome* (easily the best trip ever). I'll be sure to tell y'all the big news when I get the chance. But for right now (and until I get pictures posted), I've got to get some stuff done around the house. I harvested some more seeds this morning, and I've gotten most of my stuff unpacked. But now I need to go scrounge for food -- I have nothing
So I've been plagued by a concept for a while, and finally decided to take the time to solve the issue. The problem was that I had a function which took a variable argument list, and I wanted to pass that list along to another function which took a variable argument list. For instance, I wanted to write a function that would take a variable list, use sprintf to print the list into a buffer, and then call OutputDebugString to print it out. The trouble is -- how do you pass the variable argument list on? For starters, let's peek
Let me preface this with "I am absolutely disgusted by PayPal." So I apologize in advance for any strong language. They decided to suspend my account, and didn't give me any other reason than "we were reviewing your account and needed more information." Uh, excuse me? Piss off -- why are you randomly reviewing my account in the first place, and secondly, why don't you use the damned contact information instead of simply suspending the account? So I figure, ok, how hard is it to just give them the info they want? Well, the answer is "pretty frickin hard." 1)
Sometimes you want to know whether the current process is running with administrative privileges. Generally, you'll simply attempt whatever it is you want to attempt, and if it fails, then handle it gracefully. However, there are those times when knowing up-front whether the user is an admin is something you need. Unfortunately, the security code in Windows is very dense and doesn't contain much in the way of a simple set of APIs to query this information. Luckily, you have people like me who pour over the code for a few hours and figure it out. I'm also lucky that
I made it down to Texas alive -- got down here late on Tuesday night. American Airlines managed to get me down here, albeit a bit later than expected. Lis met me at the airport, and we had a wonderful time catching up until the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, her brother's cat (Link) kept me awake all freakin night long. He's a kitten, and like all kittens, he's overly playful. Cute, but throttlingly so. So far, I've been having a blast since I got down here. It's great to be able to hang out with Lis again --
Sorry about the site being up, then down, then up, then down (etc). 3shost is a terrible hosting company and I'm very excited to be in the process of moving everything over to Babbage Tech, which will hopefully be soon. I've been playing around with switching from Word Press over to Movable Type, and in the trials I've been giving it, I'm quite happy. Anyone have any experiences to share on this? I'm about to head out for a trip down to Austin, so I'll be posting irregularly I'm sure. Lis and I have a full schedule filled with hiking,
One of the changes to Vista in terms of user interface has been the start menu. It's been entirely redone, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It takes up more screen real estate, but that also means it can show you more information. One change which I really like is that by default, it shows you a list of your most recently run applications. This is really handy for me since I tend to run the same apps over and over again, which means I have quicker access to them than I have before. For instance, to run REALbasic 2006r4,
Oh man, the wedding on Friday was awesome. Krista and Abe's ceremony wasn't your typical Catholic ceremony, and it was really nice. They did a great job of planning it out. It was a small-ish wedding with about 50-60 people there, and it was at the Newman Center on campus. The whole ceremony revolved around light, and was really tactful. After the wedding came the reception (downstairs in the Newman), and that was a blast. The open bar didn't hurt anything either. ;-) I think I danced from about 6:30 until 11:30 almost straight through. I've come to the realization
I'm actually slightly bothered by the fact that the ContextualMenu control is not deprecated. The simple fact of the matter is that it's the incorrect control for almost any job you might want it to do, and the reasoning is simple: you have to work really hard to get the correct behavior out of it. Sure, we can add all sorts of new features to it that are already elsewhere, such as the ability to make a hierarchy of menus, or add icons to items, display shortcuts, etc. However, the fact still remains that the programmer is the one responsible
Let the fun begin! It's snowing outside in MN and has been for most of the afternoon. It's just a light fluff that melts when it hits the ground, but it's still nice to see. It's a whopping 36 degrees outside right now. :-) However, this won't last -- I think it's supposed to hit 60's to 70's again by the weekend. Hopefully the weather turns nice by this Friday -- Abe and Krista are getting married. :-) I was over at Krista's parent's place last night, helping to carve pumpkins for the wedding (they're being used as decorations). Had
Some people tend to forget this, so I figured I'd bring it up again. You can use the extends keyword to extend datatypes in REALbasic. So, for instance, you can extend the Integer datatype and it will work. A good example of this is for those people who seem to think C is the gold standard and REALbasic requires increment and decrement operators. Using extends, that's trivial to do yourself: [rbcode] Sub Increment( ByRef extends i as Integer ) i = i + 1 End Sub Sub Decrement( ByRef extends i as Integer ) i = i - 1 End
It took me almost six hours today to realize why I didn't get any mail today (was expecting some NetFlix movies to come in): it's another stupid US holiday that no one gets off except government workers. Columbus Day. What the hell is the point to calling it a holiday when the majority of the people don't get the day off? Not much of a holiday, if you ask me. More of a nuisance than anything. It's a lame-ass excuse for retailers to have a "sale" and for me to be stuck without Samurai Champloo. You want to know what
I got out on the lake with dad today for what will probably be the last day of fishing we get in this year. We took off for Big Birch around noon today, mostly fearful of the winds. Once we got on the lake, we realized just how crappy the wind really was -- even the quite bays were bad. So after spending about a half hour on Birch, we left and headed over to Mary. That lake was a lot quieter, so we found a nice bay to sit in and fish for about 3 hours. Unfortunately, we caught
While doing some refactoring, I noticed a distinct pattern which I've seen frequently in other people's code (not just REALbasic related). Quite often, I'd see code like this: someType *buffer = (someType *)malloc( 4 * sizeof( someType ) ); memset( buffer, 0, 4 * sizeof( someType ) ); The purpose of the code is to allocate a buffer large enough to hold four items of someType. Then the newly allocated data is zeroed out. You'll see this coming from C an awful lot because it's the easiest way to make a dynamically-sized array. Since you've allocated enough space for four
I downloaded the latest release candidate for FireFox a few nights ago, and have been using it for a while now, and I've found myself with some fairly strong opinions about my experience. Visually speaking, the user interface is a slight improvement over the previous one. They're both clean UIs, but the new one looks slightly better on Vista. What's more, I've had less issues running FireFox 2 on Vista than I have with the 1.5 series. For instance, the interface no longer goes entirely unresponsive until I deactivate and reactivate the browser. Paste seems to always work, and so
Just in case you were under a rock when the announcement went out: 2006r4 shipped this morning. :-) And, following my usual tradition of "what's your favorite", let's take a peek at what things I like the most from this release. All of the updates to the plugins SDK are really welcome additions. The SDK was beginning to lag behind the feature set of the language, and so this release pulled it back on-par. The SDK now supports all of the new data types, including structures and enumerations. It also lets you define your own structs and enums, shared methods
So I've been listening to Exile and the Kingdom for a good part of the day, and so far, I'm digging it. It's reminiscent of early Tea Party work in terms of style, but it still has some hard sounds to it. Overall, it's like a mixture of Edges of Twighlight and Triptych, but with a bit lighter of subject matter. If you're a Tea Party fan, I'd recommend you pick this up, it won't disappoint you. Here's my list of funnies for the day: Math joke #1 Math joke #2 Good geek humor The always amazing Medium Large I'm
Busy, busy, busy! I managed to get about 8 lilac sprouts planted on Friday night, but I was outside planting in the dark until about 10pm. It's not quite time for DST around here, but the nights are certainly getting shorter. I figured I still had summer daylight when I started the project. Oops! I'm hoping to finish my planting on Thursday. I'm going to pick up some bleeding heart bushes, snowball bushes, irises, lilies and probably some more lilacs. Yay for yanking stuff from mom's garden! :-) Oh, and my willow tree is sprouting new branches all over the
