So I had cause to play around with VirtualVolumes for a project today, and I ran into a gotcha that you really should watch out for. It turns out that VirtualVolumes don't play nice with UTF-16 encodings, at least with regards to the file operations. I was getting file paths from the command line, which on NT-based versions of Windows will usually be in UTF-16. I was then using this information to create a folder hierarchy within a virtual volume, and couldn't figure out why my folders were never being created. What was even more strange was that the code
January 2008 Archives
Riverside, California (January 28, 2008) - RBLibrary.com is happy to announce the purchase of RBLibrary by Great White Software. "We are proud of providing expert articles about REALbasic to the community, and are excited that Great White Software can continue this tradition.", said RBLibrary co-founder Aaron Ballman. "Great White Software has been providing REALbasic users with excellent software and services for the past ten years and we're pleased to see them continue their commitment to the REALbasic community by acquiring RBLibrary." "We acquired this site so that REALbasic users will continue to have a well-known, trusted, and dependable source of
Oye! I don't think I can handle much more in the way of travel. It's about all I've done for the last month. Lis and I went from CA to TX to visit her family and take care of wedding stuff in the middle of Dec. Then we went from TX to MN to visit my family at the end of Dec. We went from MN back to CA for a few days. Then there was a death in the family, and so we drove from CA back to TX. Then we turned around and drove back. And then a
I never knew this before, so I figured that it's entirely likely no one else knew about it either. REALbasic has a single-line if construct for "pre-compiler" #if statements! In order to use this, you have to do: #if someConstant then expression It's not something I expect most people will be using, but it does have one very handy use: debugging statements. Instead of having to do: #if DebugBuild Log( "Some Debugging message" ) #endif You can instead do: #if DebugBuild then Log( "Some debugging message" ) which is much more succinct! There are some cases where the single-line #if
This is a blog posting about the current behavior of the REALbasic compiler. This information isn't documented anywhere else because it's liable to change at a whim. As such, you should take this information with a grain of salt. Don't assume this will always be the case. I've seen a few bug reports about this particular issue, and so I feel it'd be a good idea to warn people: do not mix signed and unsigned integer operations without careful thought. REALbasic doesn't have a warning system (for good or for bad, that's the way it is currently) and so the
Earlier, I challenged everyone to write a bug-free program that appears to be trivial. All it has to do is raise one number to an arbitrary power and display the results. However, bug-free is a very difficult thing to achieve, as anyone with experience in software can agree to. Here's a set of of the most common bugs that this particular project suffers from: 1) Since it's meant to provide *arbitrary* exponents, you cannot assume that an Integer input is sufficient. What if the user really wanted to do a square root by passing in .5? So you need accept
Here's a fun little challenge I came up with while on my flight back to California: create a simple application that is bug free. This is a demonstration of the fact that "bug free" is a very difficult thing to achieve, if not out-right impossible. I came up with this challenge because I was reading yet another diatribe on the forums from some users who don't seem to reside in the same world as the rest of us. ;-) So here's the challenge: you are to write an application which calculates arbitrary exponents in pure REALbasic code. It should accept
Phew, thank goodness for Park Plaza's explanatory text on their fire escape route signs! Now I know that the "alarm sounds like" Whoop, Whoop. Because.. you know.. if it went Beep, Beep or Buzzzzzz, I'd simply assume that it wasn't really an alarm, but was in fact something entirely else. Back to SoCal tomorrow morning. Our flight (the first of three, anyway) takes off at 6:30am. BLEH!
