Just wanted to let everyone know that we're now Mr and Mrs Ballman officially. :-) The wedding was beautiful, not that I remember much of it. Honestly, the entire ceremony was just a blur. The only thing I could do was look at Elissa -- she was so pretty in her wedding dress!! The ceremony went mostly without a hitch. I did manage to forget some of my vows. Heh, oops! The reception was really great. The food was delicious, and our caterer did an amazing job. The DJ did a good job of engaging the crowd, and we danced
March 2008 Archives
Phew! Time flies when you're busy as hell, right? ;-) REAL World went really well this year, but unfortunately I wasn't able to hang out with users nearly as much as I wanted to. I enjoy talking to users, so when I'm not able to do that (but have the opportunity to), it's disappointing. However, on the plus side, I didn't get sick this year! After REAL World, it's been a strange mixture of laid-back hanging around, and chasing like mad to get everything ready for the wedding. We've spent most of our time out in the beautiful countryside of
I noticed a question over on the forums about how many objects are created when working with Introspection. The poster noticed that when they called GetType on a BevelButton instance, the Runtime.ObjectCount went over 3000 objects, even after the TypeInfo object goes out of scope! That seems like an extrodinarily high number, to be sure. And it may seem disconcerting that the object count doesn't drop. However, this is not a bug. The Introspection module caches everything in sight, because otherwise there are performance implications when you try to use introspection. So let's run through BevelButton to understand these numbers
It's that time of year again -- REAL World 2008 is approaching quickly! I fly out to Austin today for the three-day extravaganza for REALbasic programmers around the world. I am pretty sure this year we will have someone from every continent except Africa and Antarctica, actually! This year is going to be a strange one for me. For starters, I only have two talks (instead of four). I'm going to be doing the talk on Debugging, as well as one on Accessibility. Both talks were written from scratch, and should be pretty fun. The other thing that's going to
Here's one of those little-known, probably never-been-used features of the REALbasic IDE. When you look at the window editor, on the left-hand side, you'll see the control's "palette" that contains the various controls you can add to a window. Above the palette is a popup menu that lets you pick various views. One of those views that you can pick is "Favorites", which is basically the list of the most commonly-used controls. However, this list is modifiable too! You can add any control you'd like to the favorites by right-clicking on it in the control's palette, and selecting "Add to
There have been a number of times I've wished I could create a RegistryItem using an HKEY handle that I've gotten from the OS. For instance, the REALbasic RegistryItem class doesn't support remote registries. So instead of writing my own RegistryItem class, I want to use the RegConnectRegistry API to connect to another machine, and then pass the resulting HKEY into a RegistryItem constructor -- voila! I'd have a RegistryItem that I can use for a remote computer. Alas... but this is impossible currently. What's more, but this will probably never be possible due to an unfortunate, but often useful,
One question I see come up with reasonable frequency is: "since REALbasic can put an enum in a module, why can't I put it into a class too?" This question is repeated for more than just enumerations -- I see it for structures, delegates, etc. It's a very reasonable question, and so I think it makes sense to spend a bit of time discussing it. The 50,000 foot answer is: because the compiler doesn't support it! Seems kind of obvious, eh? But it's worth saying -- just because you can do something in a module doesn't mean you can do
After much pain, I've upgrade to the MT 4 version of Movable Type. And true to form, Movable Type is the largest pile of crap on the face of the planet. I was upgrading from 3.3, and while initially everything seemed fine, it turns out that really... MT can't handle large blogs very well. Comments went wonky, archives got hosed, etc. It's still not working properly -- comments come in fine, but no matter how hard I try to publish said comments, they never actually show up on the main page. The only way I found to get new comments
Just so everyone's aware, the blog has been moved from an old, bad server to a new, pretty (or so I've been told) server. So if you experience anything out of the ordinary, please let me know. I'm pretty sure I got everyone's comments over, and all the old posts, etc. But things always manage to slip through the cracks (like RSS feeds and other things). The current plan is to also try to upgrade my copy of Movable Type. However, to say that MT migrates data poorly is to understate the situation drastically. ;-) Once the upgrade happens, I'll
