So today Windows was (unsuprisingly) slow again. It takes 20 minutes to get not very far when my computer starts in the morning and it makes me wonder if the login process subtly lies to you. The other day I started my computer but disappeared to help someone else out. When I came back and logged into my computer it was almost lightening fast to get to the desktop. Today when I do it it states its applying settings, running login scripts and a few other useless messages before actually logging me in. Is Windows trying to fake its boot time by prematurely loading its user login dialogue even though its still loading in the background? Rather annoying.

I’m still ahving fun relearning visual basic and its weirder limitations with ‘components’. I keep wishing to use a ‘component’ completely programatically however it appears the easiest way to do this is to assign them to a form somewhere. Perhaps I’ll work out how to get at them entirely programmatically but perhaps that just isn’t possible.

Following on that note I’ve found that the Microsoft INET control that they offer is completely pathetic and useless so I’ve taken to integrating curl into the system to handle the file upload aspect of the system. It seems a whole lot easier and logical that constructing entirely the body and headers myself and then telling the inet control to handle it – might as well just open a socket connection for the extra few headers I’d need to construct. I’m also looking at integrating lame with VB6 as well to handle mp3 conversion for the other application that I’m going to need to rebuild sooner or later. All in all much fun integrating various external pieces of technology together. The interesting thing about curl is its use of some of the more lower level functions that Microsoft offers as hidden functionality and is exposed by a specific API. IMHO its very interesting and facilitates some nifty toys within Visual Basic but at that point I’d almost be tempted to just cut and run going to a better language.