Monthly Archives: August 2008

Basic work.

I mentioned previously that I’m working on getting up to speed with both VB.Net and REALbasic, and that REALbasic (RB) seems like a more comfortable fit for me. Well, today I was working on actually getting a real program, if a small one, working in RB, and I accomplished that goal. It’s mostly a simplified (if you can believe that) version of my Dice! die-rolling application, without support for custom die types. It’s now working, and able to roll dice and do math and such things. Wooo!

There was actually a lot of work involved, since the application doesn’t just roll dice, but does math as well, so you can add multiple die rolls and bonuses and such all together at once. That meant I spent a lot of time and effort converting my evaluation engine to work in RB. (And that conversion may not be finished; a few places were very clunky because I don’t know how to type cast, of all things; and I haven’t tested all the features.)

I think I’ll continue working on this app to flesh it out more like the VB6 version of Dice!, which will let me work with objects, other windows, and various other things. It’s a nice learning tool, doing this conversion.

There are a number of things that I’m really missing, though:

  • The Debug.Print system of VB, to better follow what’s going on inside the app at times. I don’t know if there’s anything like this yet in RB, or if I’ll end up writing my own to plug into my various future apps. (I cheated around it this time by writing to an extra edit box on my app window.)
  • Being able to do my own indenting. RB does a decent job, but not entirely in my style. I also don’t like not being able to use the Tab key to move my comments one tab-stop off the end of the text I’m commenting next to.
  • Type casting. It has to be possible, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Probably should search through my book.
  • More useful searching in the Help system. (Searching in VB usually brings up tons of utterly useless stuff; in RB it tends to bring up . . . nothing.)
  • More robust If evaluations. Instead of treating anything non-zero as True, I actually have to make sure that I get a valid boolean result, which is annoying.

I’m pretty sure there were some more, but I can’t recall them now.

For the most part, not too bad a day at all.

Og fix confuser.

I spent most of my day today trying to replace the two hard-drives (striped in a RAID set) in my workstation with a single larger drive. Thankfully I had a full and complete backup, because things did not go smoothly, due to the annoying RAID stuff built into this machine, and my inexperience with it. 

At least it’s all done now, everything seems to be working fine, and the RAID controller should vex me no more. For the curious, the new drive is a Western Digital VelociRaptor (replacing some older Raptors), and Norton Ghost worked like a charm in simplifying the upgrade process. (Ghost would have worked even better if I hadn’t screwed things up at one point.)