In less than an hour, Lis and I hit the road on our way to California. :-)
May 2007 Archives
(I know, two posts in one day, that's crazy!) I absolutely cannot believe Apple... but they really managed to irk me today. I mean *really* irked me. Bad enough that once I calm down, they're going to get a "complaint" from me. So I went to a website (http://realbasic.tv) because I wanted to check it out. And when I got there to watch a QuickTime movie, I was prompted to install the QuickTime plugin. But I don't like installing QuickTime on any of my Windows machines (because it breaks just about every Ux guideline on the planet). So I hit
How time flies, right? Packing is coming along very nicely. I've started packing my essentials up already, which means the office has been packed, my gaming stuff is all put away and I'm going to start working on clothes and that stuff this weekend. Basically, the house is starting to look depressing. The going away party is today, and it starts at 4pm. I hope the weather holds out for it because I'd like to do stuff outside (I've got some yard games). However, there's a 60% chance of rain, and 20-30 mph wind gusts. So who knows. At least
From 1891 until 1991 (a span of 100 years), the price of stamps rose from 1 cent to 29 cents. That's just under .3 cents per year. Basically, every 3-4 years, the price of stamps goes up one cent. From 1991 to today (a span of 16 years), the price of stamps has risen from 29 cents to 41 cents. That's .75 cents per year -- over twice the historical rate in under a fifth of the time. It wouldn't bother me so much if it weren't for the fact that every time postage rates hike, I get mail returned.
I've only had one complaint about Vista since using it as my main desktop (back when it was still in beta!), which is the file operation speed. When you go to move a bunch of files, or delete a large file, etc, it seemed as though the operation took so much longer than XP did on the same machine. And it turns out that it does so because of a "feature" of the OS. The feature basically calculates with better precision how long the operation will take. So, for instance, if you want to delete a directory with 5000 files
If you came to REAL World (which you should have -- it was awesome, as usual!), and you came to my Design Patterns I talk (which you also should have, unless you're an OOP expert), then this is not new information for you. However, since many of you missed out on the year's greatest REALbasic related gathering, I'll release this tidbit into the wild. Interface contracts can be satisfied by non-public methods. I'll let that sink in for a moment before continuing on... ;-) .. .. .. .. Ok, so what does that mean? It means that you can satisfy
I learned something new over REAL World last week (see, even REAL Software employees have something to gain from attending!) with regards to the way the Encodings.GetFromCode API works in REALbasic. I was always under the impression that this API was a Mac-only one. However, it turns out that I was wrong -- it works on Windows as well (sorry, I'm not certain about Linux one way or the other). GetFromCode takes a codepage on Windows, but it takes it in a strange enough fashion that we can figure out what you really mean. If you add &hFFFF0000 to the
Phew! Sorry about the lack of posts while REAL World was happening, but I was rather busy. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I figured I'd continue my series post. Day 1 was a blast -- there was Geoff's keynote (which I find boring, since I already know the information in it). But this year we had keynotes from others aside from just Geoff, and that was really cool. We got to see applications from REALbasic users, and they're pretty freakin awesome. After the keynote was over, I had to give my Deep Look at Threads talk, and
I got into Austin on Saturday night, and had a fairly sleepy, yet eventful adventure up to today. However, it was only eventful to me and otherwise rather boring for the rest of the world, so I'll move right along. ;-) Lis is out in California, soaking up the sun and finding us a place to live. I'm really excited and think she's found some great choices. She gets back into Austin in two days, and hopefully by then, I won't be homeless anymore (once we move). I've spent the better part of my free time working on some "5%"
REALbasic has a Permissions object which is used with FolderItems to assign the UNIX-style permissions for the FolderItem. One very common gotcha that I've seen several bug reports on is forgetting to specify in Octal instead of Decimal (these reports are Not a Bug). The documentation on the Permissions class points this fact out to you, but it is still blindingly easy to forget since most people don't use octal ever. Basically, what people mix up is this: // Set Read/Write/Execute on Owner, and Read/Execute on Group and Others -- WRONG!! Dim perms as new Permissions( 755 ) Oops! That's
I've been doing all sorts of crazy playing around with various things, and keeping up on random topics. And since I've not posted in a while, I figured I'd start a discussion about some various technological "stuff." 1) The Ribbon. I've posted about this before, but have been using it a bit more recently with PowerPoint (getting my REAL World 2007 presentations ready) as well as Word (for RBLibrary stuff). I must admit that I really like working with the Ribbon. I find that I use more features of both Word and PowerPoint than I used to with older versions,
