Wednesday, 01 October, 2003
Odd lots
It's been a busy week. Some odd lots to start the new month:
- It is possible to get VGA cables longer than 6 feet (see my entry for September 22). Lots of places online sell them. My friend Randy Schafer over at Earth LCD was kind enough to send me a 15-foot cable, and suggest that I run the automatic setup on the LCD monitor once the cable was installed.
- I gave up trying to debug with Visual InterDev (see September 25). The ASP experts at my company all said it was a time sink, and that even if I got it running it might just stop working for reasons unknown. I'm pretty tenacious, but I have better things to do than throw my time into a lost cause. Apparently even Microsoft doesn't know how to get it working. At least, nobody on their Visual Interdev Debugging newsgroup could help me out. So it's back to Response.Write. I'm sure glad I learned how to use Pascal's WriteLn statement for debugging 20 years ago.
- Visual Basic is such a wonky language that I'm surprised people actually get useful work done in it. The list of wonkiness is long and varied. Irregular syntax, seemingly random use of parentheses in subroutine calls, the sometimes-optional set keyword, and the idiotic notion of using a newline as a statement terminator (with the requisite line continuation character, of course). Most of these problems are fixed in Visual Basic .NET, but that silly end-of-line thing is still there, reminding me of my punch card days every time I write a program. I have to think that somebody on the language redesign team at Microsoft proposed that it be fixed. Either the team decided that fixing this wart would break too much existing code, or somebody with a lot of pull and a sick sense of language design decided that it should stay there.
- From my house to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, TX is 350 miles. A friend and I are going to ride it next spring, in three days. My training program started today. I'll post periodic updates here as my training progresses.