.: Archives :.

Friday, January 10, 2003

While I'm waiting... - [11:33 AM]

We used to call it "Build Wanders". You'd wander around the building doing nothing important, talking to anyone you could, and eventually someone would ask why you were wandering around aimlessly to which you'd reply "I have a case of build wander". Anywho... that's why I'm doing this now.

Radio questions

I continually have more questions than answers when it comes to scripting Radio. Steven has been a tremendous help but I think I'm too stoopid to script it, hopefully they don't revoke my license and make me return my copy!

I'd like to do a couple of things. First off I'd like a script that would allow me to route e-mail to a category. Steven found one but as I said I'm too stupid to make it work. I've hacked it up as much as I can trying to figure out where the syntax error is, but I can't find it. And from the looks of the code it's not very generic. Notice it's hardwired to look at the e-mail address of the sender and to specific categories. I'd like something more generic. I'd like to be able to create a "Secret subject" for each of my categories and let the script decide where it should make the post based on that. Maybe someday.

The second item on my wish list is along the same front. I'd like to be able to specify which category to post to via the Blogger API support in Radio. Not sure how that would play out but has someone tried?

Eclipse

This is really just a thought for James to chew on. Have you, or anyone in your group, considered rebuilding Eclipse in J#? Now that may seem like a really dumb idea, and it could be, but if you did port it we could then create assemblies in C#, VB.Net, J#, etc, etc. that could work with Eclipse. Just a thought.

Next thing you know I'll be asking if Blogger's backend could be ported to J#! Sheese!

Movie line of the week answer - [9:58 AM]

There were two guesses to yesterday's line.

Tyler Love is our winner with honorable mention going to Dave Rogers.

And the correct answer is...

The Fifth Element

Gary Oldman's character, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, speaks that line when he's dealing with Aknot the mercenary.

Thursday, January 09, 2003

The Golden Cactus - [12:19 PM]

Scripting News: "Last year on this day, Mark Pilgrim won the Best Scripting Weblog award." - This makes me wonder when we're going to see the 2002 edition of The Scripting News Awards?

XBox - [11:39 AM]

Steven Vore and I have been exchanging e-mail about our XBox/Halo experiences. I'm not a huge gamer, I used to play on occasion with the family when we got our Nintendo 64. Now I'm totally addicted to XBox. Kim, the girls, and I have been kicking the snot-bubbles out of each other whenever we get a chance.

For Christmas we got the girls MechAssault, Blinx, and Offroad Challenge. After Christmas I used a gift certificate to pick up Unreal Championship. MechAssault is great because you get to kill each other without having to actually kill another 'person'. Unreal on the other hand is, well, graphic! There's even a setting to turn off how graphic it can be, and it's off by default, but it's still pretty graphic. I like it however and so does my oldest daughter, she's kicked the stuffing out of me quite a few times. The one thing about it I'm not so sure of is how touchy your head/weapon movement is. I'd like to be able to settle it down a bit but I'm not sure what setting to change. Any ideas, lemme' know.

After saying all that, my favorite game is still Halo. Go figure.

Motley Fool: "X Marks Microsoft's Spot " - hat tip, Mr. Vore of course.

Objective-C++ is real! - [10:04 AM]

Paul Wolpe: "Objective-C++ allows developers to mix C++ and Objective C code in the same source file." - This is awesome! I have two NeXT boxes sitting at home, a pizza box and a cube, that haven't been booted in years. They have Objective-C on them. I didn't know Objective-C++ was real. Thanks Paul!

B.T.W. Paul your site is absolutely beautiful! It's so clean, I love it.

The web rocks! A paradise for the lazy man. Just ask a question and POW you get an answer from someone with the knowledge.

Movie line of the week. - [9:41 AM]

Ok movie liners!

This one comes from a movie near and dear to my wife's heart. My youngest daughter suggested I use a line from it because it's a GREAT source of movie lines. Lots and lots of one liners in it.

This line comes from the antagonist in the film.

Look at my fingers: four stones, four crates. Zero stones? ZERO CRATES!

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Lots of activity today - [9:15 AM]

Wow! This is one of those days you look at your RSS feeds and fall outta the chair. Lots and lots of stuff that interests me today.

Cass McNutt's ThoughtsOnThinking: "YOU ARE HERE" - This is similar to what I'd like to do with folks blogRoll.opml file, if you have one. Add to the bottom of the list.

James Snell: "This is Blogger" - Nothing exciting about the post other than the fact that it has a title! My question to James is how did you get a title to post? The Blogger API doesn't support titles last I looked. Did the MovableType folks do something special to support titles?

John Robb: "My next computer is going to be an Apple" - I'm not sure you'll be so happy with a Mac either John, they've started heading down the PC path as far as I can tell. You still have to know what you're doing to do anything beyond the basics. Psssst here's a nasty secret.... IT HAS A COMMAND LINE! Not that I wouldn't like to have a Mac myself mind you.

I love the net

Yesterday I asked where the Safari source was and Steven went out and found it for me. Thanks Steven!

From the Safari, WebCore, web site...

KHTML is written in C++ and KWQ is written in Objective C++, but WebCore presents an Objective C programming interface.

Is that statement about KWQ being written in Objective C++ a typo or is there such a language?

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Where's the source? - [5:28 PM]

Ok, I may be wrong about this because I'm not an "Open Source" kinda fella, but doesn't Apple have to include the source code to Safari because it uses components from Konqueror?

Don't point the flame throwers over this way, I scorch easily.

Blogger feature request - [10:25 AM]

Steven Vore mentioned on his blog that my RSS feed is truncated. Yes it is, and it's intentional. Blogger gives us the choice to create RSS feeds of type None(Title Only), Short(Title + 255 Characters), and Full(Entire Post). And when I last checked it didn't support RSS 2.0.

So here's my request. I'd like to have the choice to post any and/or ALL of the feed types and be allowed to name them. So I could create TitleRSS.xml, RSS.xml, and FullRSS.xml feeds. And I'd like to publish them in RSS 2.0 format.

Please add these to the bottom of the list. I'm sure you have bigger fish to fry at the moment. Thanks!

Playing with Mud - [9:47 AM]

At one time I was criticized because I experimented with code too much. Honest truth is sometimes you don't know how to solve the problem until you've solved it. On many, many, occasions I've written code that I look at later and think to myself "Boy I'd love to rewrite all of this." Some folks say that rewriting code is a bad idea because it could introduce bugs, fair enough, but how many bugs are introduced because folks have to code around bad behavior in the code that needs to be rewritten? It happens every day. I say like a good farmer you need to turn the soil once in a while, not just because, but because it help produce a better crop. Likewise with source it makes sense to find areas that need improvement and turn that code over, find a better answer, it's worth it.

Monday, January 06, 2003

No Class - [5:25 PM]

Yesterday after the Forty-Winers (yep, I'm a Niner hater!) pulled out a late victory over the NY Giants I was extremely mad, I mean mad. I'm a Cowboy's fan so I MUST hate the Niners. Now to see that the refs botched the call and the Giants should have had another stab at the victory makes me feel a bit better. You never know how those things will turn out. They could have missed it, they could have made it.

The thing about it that chaps my hide today is statements like this....

When Pereira called 49ers coach Steve Mariucci to explain the league's statement, Mariucci's response was sarcastic: "Bummer."

Steve Mariucci has about as much class as that loud mouth Terrell Owens. If Paul Tagliabue had the guts, which he doesn't, he'd suspend Owens or at least fine him for his behavior late in the game yesterday. Remember it's always the guy that throws the second punch that gets caught. Owens taunted a Giants cornerback then on the next play had a late hit out of bounds. That's not tough, that's stupid.

No matter. I hope Owens gets his head knocked off by John Lynch next weekend. Ok, ok so that's a bit outta line. I'd never wish anyone get hurt, but I do hope they lay the leather on him and make him think twice about catching the ball.

Oh, and Mr. Mariucci you'd better get your resume together because I don't think you'll make it to the NFC Championship game.

Pre-Christmas Lunch - [4:08 PM]

Our little valley is best known for agriculture; oranges, grapes, cows, etc. Just prior to Christmas a group of us got together for lunch and it was so nice to sit around a table with these folks. They're all so bright you just want to sit and listen. The conversation was wild and varied and I'm sure it could have gone on for hours on end, but all good things must come to an end.

It was fun hangin with ya'll, let's not wait so long to do it again.

So who can pick me out in that picture?

This would be a good thing - [11:16 AM]

Steve Zellers: "Produce a non-ui version of the Frontier runtime." - This would be extremely cool! It would make Frontier look more like VBA, or VSA, or Embedded Python. Those types of engines are extremely powerful and useful to the handful of folks that use 'em.

Visio for one wouldn't be the same without VBA.

If UserLand could do that they could extend Frontier to be a native .NET language, now think about the power that could afford you? If done properly you could use all the development tools you're used to in the Windows environment, namely Visual Studio.NET. That's power baby!

C# - [10:14 AM]

I've been messing with C# off and on for about a week now, I guess. It's been pure joy. The language is familiar enough to C/C++ folks so you can dive right in. There are some things that are hard to get used to like initializing a base class.

In C++ you'd do something like this...

SoftwareEngineer::SoftwareEngineer(int x) : Engineer(x)

In C# it's quite a bit different and was very confusing to me at first. I'd attempted to use the tried and true C++ way of initializing the base class only to get a gob of errors.

In C# you have to do it like this...

SoftwareEngineer(int x) : base(x)

Weird isn't it? Well maybe it's not so weird BUT it looks weird to me. I'd imagine since you cannot derive a class from multiple base classes it makes sense to just use base since there can be ONLY one.

Last night I compared the outputs of my original C++ version and the new C# version and they're the same for the VancoBolusDose so we're off to a fabulous start! Now all I need to do is get Jay to give me the math for the other Dose and Regimen types.