Another day of Visual Basic 6 fun. The VB error of the day is below:

This charming little error occurred reproducibly when I try to load up two copies of VB6 at the same time. I have two copies running with the new project I’m working on and the older project that I’m trying to pull code from to improve. Dismissing the dialogue doesn’t appear to cause VB6 to crash horrifically so I’m not quite sure what it is about but its a wonderful error though.

Developing more and more with Visual Basic and hitting its limitations and today yay for Microsoft: http://www.thevbzone.com/secrets.htm – secret API functions! You know, the ones that Microsoft said didn’t exist and said didn’t give them a competitive advantage? Yeah, look at that, they are there! At least I have callbacks but in the end I worked out a way to solve the problem differently that avoided the need for callbacks after fighting with trying to get them to work. No fun, but anyway.

For the most part I’ve got the backup system (of sorts) mostly functional and working. It doesn’t shell out to handle stuff and has some better error reporting but its still not perfect. I guess I can do that on Monday. At the moment it should be enough to get us across the line and thats an improvement on where we are now.

We also had some ePrints weird slowness. Personally I think its the system trying to regenerate itself from the cached data because its expired. It then doesn’t help that they think its slow and then start clicking around the place to help make it even more slower. “It feels slow, I’m clicking on all of these links that I wouldn’t normally click – hey! Do you think that has anything to do with it?” Gotta love users.

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.

Today started with a prime VB6 annoyance: the project deciding that it didn’t want to work and wouldn’t load:

It turns out that this is a known error thanks to our friends at Microsoft with IE7: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/iewebdevelopment/thread/21935021-1dc7-445b-a829-b02489009aab/. I had installed IE7 the other day but the bizarre thing that gets me is that the project worked perfectly fine the day before and then suddenly became broken for some reason. I’m not quite sure how that happens since the IE7 installation took place a week ago but that forum thread had the solution to my problem. I used the solution where in you change the reference instead of the registry hack, not sure which should have been better but it worked.

The next bit of fun I had was remembering how to quit a VB6 application. For some reason the application wasn’t quitting properly because I had forgotten to unload a form somewhere. After all of this time I’ve been used to calling a function that killed the system or halted the run loop so this was a bit of a spin for me again to have application existence controlled by a window. VB6 tries very hard to tie you to a window (or “form”) somewhere to the point that some items don’t appear to be programmatically accessible unless they exist as a ‘control’ on a form. Sucks but thats life.

With all good dinosaurs, they have issues with the modern world. The VB6 IDE is very much a dinosaur and has no mouse scroll wheel support. Thankfully someone at Microsoft realised that having the IntelliPoint software wasn’t a real fix and released an add-in that does the trick: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837910. Add-in’s in Microsoft Office and its IDE tools appear to be one of the better thought out and developed aspects of the system. The ability to extend the functionality easily I feel has been done well. I might bash Microsoft a lot for their bad stuff but there are tonnes of items that they do well too – and add-ins at a macro level I think are one of them.

Another annoyance I had today was how VB6 has a habit of dislodging files from project repeatedly and when you restart it wants save file wrong directory. Instead of automatically selecting the project file’s directory when available, it always defaults back to the program file directory instead. So you end up having to wander around the FS to get back to your project if you want to save a file after you start the IDE when continuing on an existing project. After you’ve saved one file it’ll remember the directory for the rest of the session but once you shut down the IDE and jump in again you’re back to scratch.

I’m also relearning how classes work in VB6, its been a rather long time since I’ve done work in it so I’m back to picking up things. Some stuff sticks around like using “Option Explicit” to enforce explicit variable declaration instead of the default implicit declaration on use, however some other stuff has disappeared. One of which is the use of classes within Visual Basic. Compared to almost every other language its support is beyond limited but it is still at least there I guess – so I figure I should sort of be grateful for at least that. However its still a bit sad that it doesn’t have more full support but I guess it is a bit much to ask from a system a decade old (mind you C++ is over a decade old in various incarnation and had support for objects, as did Java and I think even Python at the time but anyway).

To end with on a Joomla note, the site of the day is the Botswana government site (http://www.gov.bw). It looks like a Joomla! 1.0 site and I saw it when one of the Uni’s email’s to the domain bounced and I wondered what they did. Very cool.

This morning we had a presentation on the Oracle IDM system. The ‘IDM’ is comprised of OIM (Oracle Internet Manager?) which pushes (at least in this system) information into the OID (Oracle Internet Directory; a directory which exposes an LDAPv3 interface). The system has a rather hackish, ugly user edit screen, generic technology converter, limited AD integration (push only, no pull) and the system appears to have limitations on its fields, for example it can’t hide fields on new user screen as opposed to the edit screen. Bummer. They’re purchasing another product to handle password changes from Active Directory but thats rather weird. Coming from an environment with Novell, it seems strange that it can’t handle it but anyway the University has bought all of the Oracle junk and now it’ll be time to put it back together. The team I work in (Learning and Teaching within Application Support and Development) has the sneaking suspicion it will come back to us, either our group specifically (L&T) or our parent group (AS&D). Either way we’re not looking forward to getting the mess.

Today also revealed a queer ePrints security problem. One of my deployment scripts failed to reset the security on the external site which caused the system to be inaccessible externally. The change was made on Friday morning so it took until this morning (thats 4 days later) to detect the issue. The question was asked how much attention is really paid to the system, but thats neither here nor there. I fixed up my mistake and reran the server configuration scripts and it was all back and running. Whilst I was working around with it I found some large ePrints log files – over 2.7GB of log files in the archives going all the way back to 2007 and none of them compressed. Having a chat with people we’re probably going to burn them off for reference and reclaim a bit of space.

We had some Moodle fun with one of my issues appearing to be a mysterious self fixing problem (could do with more of those). We’ve had other changes that impacted on that area in part so perhaps that fixed it. There was also a Moodle migration today and I believe one of my changes are now in production – already I’m leaving my mark on the systems!

Last but not least, the Adobe Presenter is broken after just two days of semester. In those two days however its managed to generate 400MB of data. This happened late on the day so the rest of the week will be taken up fixing up this stuff as well as shifting data when we get a larger disk to store the presenter stuff.

Today was a bit of a mixed bag and I started off with some ePrints minor customisation work. Nothing major so far, but that is certain on the horizon, its just cosmetic changes more than anything.

I also had some more Moodle fun configuring my box to connect to the internal Moodle Oracle Development server. Looking through the config file I came across this at the bottom:

// MAKE SURE WHEN YOU EDIT THIS FILE THAT THERE ARE NO SPACES, BLANK LINES,
// RETURNS, OR ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THE TWO CHARACTERS ON THE NEXT LINE.
?>

Basically instead of just not putting the final close for PHP, they put it in with a warning. I used to be in the habit of doing this however increasingly I’ve stopped putting it at the end of files for the simple fact it isn’t required and using it can cause issues, which is what the above is causing. I’ve also discovered that Moodle has some serious memory issues: it can use up to 15MB to render a simple page – this is one hungry application!

Yesterday I tried to grab some money from my bank account only to find that my NAB debit card had expired. This is weird because I didn’t think I had received a new card. Tripping off to the bank today during lunch time revealed that due to the bush fires in Victoria the bank hadn’t sent me the card. Whilst I was there I also double checked that they had the right address on file which they do. They’ve extended this morning and believe that I should get card this week.