March 2005 - Posts
My wife and I started doing TaeKwonDo about six months ago and it has been a lot of fun doing it together. After only three weeks, we were able to do a triple grading to take us from White belt to Orange three tip. Since then we have done a double grading to go to Yellow two tip. The next grading is in a week or so. We will be able to go to Yellow three tip, or maybe double grade again to get to Green belt.
I have now been asked if I want to become an instructor. After several weeks thinking about whether I would be able to fit it in, I am going to give it a go.
I normally don't like to do the online quizzes. I started doing the first few when they started to become popular, but then they began to come in thick and fast over the blogsphere. I realised that I was going to spend a lot of time doing the quizzes and not much else. This morning, however, I came across a Simpson's one and I was just too curious.
I am:
Homer Simpson. You represent the easiness in life. You are the spice and fun in the group. You don't care what happens as long as you're having a good time. Enjoy being FUN.
What Simpsons Character Are You
brought to you by Quizilla
It is so true...
I've just got back from my little holiday and I only have 1338 blog entries to go through. I'll need another holiday after I get through all of those.
I used to think that public holidays were the greatest things around. They still are, but now I am a contractor, they don't come with the added bonus of getting paid for having a day off.
Canberra is having a public holiday this coming Monday for 'Canberra Day'. The following Friday is Easter Friday. This leaves three lonely days in the middle of two public holidays. What to do, What to do? I know, the public gets a holiday, so I will go one better (three actually). My wife and I will be away in the hills for the whole week.
Thinking of you...
Really, I couldn't help rub it in. I makes me feel better because I don't get paid for those public holidays.
Over the last couple of months, I have been developing a new skinning engine for the new versions of my applications. To help me test the new skin object model, I have created a skin builder application that relies heavily on the property grid control...
I came across a blog last week (sorry, can't find it now) which linked to ReallySlick. Among other things, it has several OpenGL screensavers that you can download. Helios is a serious cool screensaver.
There has been a lot of posts going around the blogsphere over the last week about Microsoft planning to ditch support for VB6. For this argument, I sit completely on the fence. If Microsoft keep or ditch their VB6 support, it won't affect me in the slightest even though I have a strong history with both VB6 and VB.Net. Maybe I should be the umpire of the VB6 support wars.
I am not going to get into the technical details of the arguments for and against (although I think Geoff does a good job). Like Geoff, I never called Microsoft support and Google was my friend. Ok, so I had to have a bit of an opinion. I guess while I am sitting on the fence, I would lean towards supporting Microsoft on this one, but only because I don't care for the VB6 support in the first place.
I have to admit that I get a good little chuckle about this because it never ceases to amaze me how two opposing sides of an argument can be so passionate about something that doesn't bother me in the slightest. This is kind of like my view of politicians. I often think of them as little kids in a sandpit squabbling over who's turn it is to play with the little plastic toy soldiers (John Howard perhaps???).
What I was thinking about this morning as I was reading the blog arguments was about when I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia at the start of last year. I saw a road worker, who didn't have any forearms, sitting down beside the road trying to eat his lunch with his upper-arms. I saw so many disabled people in Cambodia due to land mines who are struggling to survive and here we are passionately arguing about the lack of VB6 support from Microsoft.
Personally, I think there are more important things to argue about and I am a little curious about how many people really used the Microsoft VB6 support anyway.
Over the last month, I have been mainly working on the new .Net based skinning engine. So far, I have been working on five areas in this development process.
Firstly, I have built most of the object model that supports reading and understanding a skin file. The object model defines the structure of the skin file itself. There are several features that I am trying to achieve in this skinning engine that the current applications don't have. These include in-memory zip reading, resizable skins, generic skins definitions and multiple application definitions and maybe some effects. The generic skin definitions allow the skin to be applied as a default look. This means, for example, that any skinnable button in any new Higher Tendencies application can use the same skin to render a button. Other than generic definitions, the skin structure allows for specific applications and forms to be defined as well. Many of these can be defined in the one skin file that can be used by multiple Higher Tendencies applications. Skin Suites will be great with this feature as it will be just the one skin file.
Secondly, I have been developing a skin builder application. With the skin builder, putting skins together will be a snap. This also makes my testing of the skinning engine easy as I can change the definition of the skin quickly.
Thirdly, I have created some generic controls that are based on the Windows form, button and textbox controls etc that will handle skinning the element as appropriate. It is these controls that will do the grunt work of converting the skin file information into the rendered display.
Fourthly, I have started to develop the new Switch application that will be written in .Net and support the new skinning engine. This is a great opportunity to overhaul this app and test the skin engine development.
Finally, I have also been looking at skin upgrade code. As I am developing the new version of Switch, I still want to support the existing skins. It turns out that the work I have done in the skin file object model has made creating an upgrader quite simple.
It is good to see things coming along. I hope to have a beta of Switch and SkinBuilder out in a month or two.
Along my travels of creating web custom controls, I have put a lot of effort into making the controls as dynamic as possible on the client. This typically means running a JavaScript function as a result of some event, such as the page load or control...
On Friday, I came across a little problem with some JavaScript. It just wasn't doing what it was supposed to be doing. As I was debugging the code, what I found as that a value was being tested for being either null or "". The value in question was the boolean value false. It turns out that false is equal to "".
Go Figure!
I remembered the other day about a feature that was in the VB6 IDE that didn't come across to VS.Net IDE.
I have been upgrading some code for a couple of weeks and some of the files are lengthy and also have some lengthy procedures. This makes the scrollbar thumb tiny and basically not usable. VB6 had these really cool buttons down in the bottom left of the IDE (on the left of the horizontal scrollbar I think). The buttons toggled between each other so that if one was selected then entire file was visible, but if the other was selected, just the current procedure was visible. This made the scrollbar thumb usable again.
While I'm having a rant on the IDE topic, I don't like how the VS.Net IDE collapses regions and scrolls to the top of the page when you split the file view in two. But hey, that's just me.