NilObject

The Time Warner tech came out yesterday afternoon, and ran a few tests, and determined that the outlet itself was bad. This is of course the last thing I wanted to hear, this being a brand new house. So for now my nicely set up “server closet” has a few items in the guest bedroom, and wires galore move between the guest bedroom and the office.

So now I get to find out if my 2 year “complete” home warranty will cover it or not. If not, Time Warner actually doesn’t charge an outrageous amount to replace it. It appears that the worst case scenario is that I’m out $70 plus potentially money to deter squirrels or mice from my attic, which while I’ve never heard anything in the attic, the tech scared me by saying, “it is a pretty common thing, especially in new homes. Mice love the rubber on the wires.” I’ve seen mice in the far side of our backyard a few times. Not what I wanted to hear.

But at least I’m online again. It’s strange how often I will be doing one thing, and want to Google something. You never realize how much you use something like the Internet until it’s gone. Then you truly appreciate it.

I guess that’s like a lot of things in life.

Have a great week everyone. With my trip leaving out Wednesday morning, I’m not sure how much blogging I’ll do until I get back.

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Well, I came in this morning to work on some Cocoa stuff, but found that something else was broken, preventing me from viewing array properties in the debugger. So, I dive in.

After about 10 minutes, I’ve narrowed it down to where it’s failing, but for the life of me, I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s one of those, “Huh?” situations:

If address = mAddress Then
  // Do some stuff with the array
End If

So, I figured, “The address coming back must be messed up for some reason. I wonder what it is.” Upon viewing both values, they showed the same number in the debugger: 26402988. Well, since I was narrowing down a problem with the debugger, I better not trust it. Changed the code to:

If address = mAddress Then
  // Do some stuff with the array
Else
  System.DebugLog Str( address ) + " <> " + Str( mAddress )
End If

Debug it again, and sure enough this was printed to my console:

26402988 <> 26402988

Yep, it’s going to be a fun day figuring this one out…

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A few weeks ago, I came into work greeted with a sticky note reading, “You own the registration code now.” Oh, goody!</sarcasm>

Well, I sat down this morning and coded for three full hours without a single run. The window had been designed, but needed to be integrated and coded. Since the code already existed in the main project, just needed to be refactored and some rewritten, it was time to integrate the external project into the IDE. Because of the size of the REALbasic 2005 project (now over 110k lines), it takes a long time to compile, and it made me defer running until I actually had 95% of it done.

Surprisingly, it mostly just worked. A nice delight after coding for that long. Time to put the final tweaks into it.

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Well, I had been putting off one of my assignments at work for a while. It involved writing something in VBA for use in Microsoft Office. Not only did I have to deal with VBA, but I had to use VBA to execute AppleScript.

AppleScript, in my humble opinion, is a [b]read-only[/b] language. It makes perfect sense when you read someone else’s code, but try to write some on your own, and frustration ensues. With Autobuilder, I was trying to get CodeWarrior to do a recursive fetch on our projects through AppleScript. Well, previously one of my coworkers had it almost working, but occasionally it failed. It was overly complicated, and should have had an easier way to accomplish it.

Thankfully, Mac OS X 10.3 introduces AppleScriptable UI. Now, instead of having to loop over every file in every part in every project and attempting to do a fetch, we can just programmatically refer to the menuitem that has always worked for us.

However, even this is ugly. It turns into:

click menu item “Fetch Read-Only” of menu 1 of menu item “Recursive” of menu 1 of top level menu “VCS”

(Etc..) Thankfully, I don’t have Script Editor open, and I don’t have to deal with AppleScript this weekend. My other complaint about AppleScript is the pain it is to enable your application to be scriptable. Despite how difficult it is, people still do it, thankfully.

Back to VBA. Although I know REALbasic, VBA is a different beast. For example, the “set” keyword. REALbasic doesn’t even have it, because it’s not really needed to form an expression. Example:

VBA:
dim foo as String
set foo = Application.GetSomething

RB:
dim foo as String
foo = Application.GetSomething

Why in the world is “set” required in VBA in that case? Okay, okay, it’s the language. I can live with that. However, not the error that I got. If it simply said, “Hey, you forgot to use ’set’,” then I would have been just fine. However, after looking at a piece of code and a cryptic error message, I finally typed “set,” and it worked. Sure, relief flooded over me, but so did anger at such a silly language construct.

Well, enough reminiscing over things that thankfully I am finished with. Everyone have a great three-day weekend!

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