Functionality and stupidity

Bryan Forbes — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 14:42:28 +0000

I start my internship today. As a result of this, I woke up early and dressed in uncomfortable clothes so I can look “respectable”. I don’t see how wearing pants that feel like they’re restricting your movement and shoes that have horrid support makes you respectable, but I don’t make the rules. If anyone has some suggestions for comfortable dress pants (business casual) and shoes, please let me know. I normally wear JNCO jeans and they’re comfortable. They settle a little below your waist (unlike the pants I’m wearing, which feel like they’re at my chest) and give me room to move. If there’s anything out there like that in a dressier style, I’d love to know.

Coaster
While waiting for my internship to start, I figured I’d put some functionality into Coaster. I’ve uploaded a new erase dialog which checks for all the burners on the system and populates a combo box with them; when you select one, it checks if the disc is eraseable and makes the OK button sensitive depending on the result it gets back.
I also tried to get erasing working. This was much harder and I pulled many hairs out working on it. The first thing I did was just call the code to erase a disc from the “OK clicked” routine. This worked except that while the disc was erasing, the GUI would hang. Not acceptable. So, on the advice of Daniel Elstner of regexxer fame, I called the status update routine in a timeout. Result: Coaster blew up. This is my first experiment with threading, so I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, but if anyone wants to help me out here, feel free to download the code and help me figure this out.

VBScript
I have never met a more horrid language. I was trying to parse a string today and found out the hard way that strings are indexed from 1 to the length of the string. What the crap? There is no consistancy in this language (arrays are indexed from 0 to length – 1) other than it consistantly sucks. I can’t wait until this class is over.

Proof of Idiocy

Bryan Forbes — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 13:58:36 +0000

I’ve spent the last 40 minutes hacking out (if you can even call it that) VBScript for a class I’m taking. I am thoroughly convinced that M$ is completely retarded now (not that I didn’t have my doubts before). I had to do some work with arrays and the declaration of arrays is one of the most horrid implementations I’ve ever seen. The first thing I noticed was that dim myArray(9) declares an array of 10 elements. It goes downhill from there and I won’t hurt anyone by subjecting them to that nonsense.

Truck
A strange, high-pitched whine has been coming from the backend of my truck ever since I drove home from Council Bluffs on Sunday so I woke up early this morning, hoping that if I got into the shop early enough, they would be able to loan me a car while they fixed my truck. I forgot that I needed to make an appointment for things of this nature (oil changes, tire rotations, and such don’t need appointments… it’s quite convenient). A mechanic and I took the truck for a spin and he told me it’s probably a rear diff or axle bearing that’s out. That sounds to me like it’ll be a lot of money in labor; something I don’t need with a wedding coming up. I drove the truck to school since they couldn’t get it in and hopefully they can fix it this afternoon. If not, I’ll need a loaner.

Halfway
Can you believe it? It’s freaking halfway through June! This summer is going too fast (maybe that means I’m getting old…) and the wedding is approaching even faster. The only good thing about June going fast is that my birthday is at the end of the month (the 26^th, I’ll be 22). Presents are welcome .

Coaster
I think I’m getting closer to the initial release of the GUI of Coaster. The GUI doesn’t do much functionally (like burn CD’s), but I think I need to make a release to get feedback on the layout and HIG’ness of the interface. I’d also like to get some people working on translations. The next step (I think) is to get libburn behind the GUI. I’m going back and forth with myself (which produces interesting conversations at times…) whether or not to make a wrapper for libburn or if I should just throw the C behind my GUI. I’ve never written a wrapper for a non-GNOME project, so I don’t want to screw it up royally.

Internship
Yesterday I went in for an interview at Iowa Health System and got an internship. Hopefully, it works out that they hire me but if they don’t, at least I’ll have some experience under my belt. The only downfall is that they code in Java; maybe I can get them to change . Doubtful…

Reign Drops Fall... » vbscript

Functionality and stupidity

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