Functionality and stupidity

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.