Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Saturday. The Register is carrying the news that Charles wkpgSimonyi, the man who gifted Hungarian notation to the world, is leaving mscMicrosoft. This cannot be right. My secretary has not mentioned an invitation to his fancy dress leaving do; a man of Simonyi's calibre would surely wish to secure the social stars of his guest list before announcing his departure to all and sundry.
If it is true, I won't now have time to arrange his leaving present. Ever since Richard wkebaamtedwgDawkins was made the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, I have been scheming to contrive it that Simonyi should be crowned Richard Dawkins Professor of Private Bafflement of Everything Else at Cambridge. Now my pleasingly symmetrical plan is spoiled.
Never mind. At least I have my costume ready: I shall go as Queen Boadicea, resplendent in period robes and carrying a reproduction Icenian ladies' throwing spear with one end of a traditional Celtic mistletoe rope tied to its steel tip, the other end trailing free. Yes, that would make a long pointer to a zero-terminated string, well done.
(Key to Stobian Notation: wkpg, well known prefix genius; msc, massive scary company; wkebaamtedwg, well known evolutionary biologist and atheist, married to ex Dr. Who girl.)
Monday. Following a complaint that this column is insufficiently technical, here is a hot tip. Full source code will follow on page 317 [no it won't—Ed.]. There is a fashion with message boxes of the "Are you really, truly, madly, deeply sure?" sort to add a little checkbox labelled "Never show me this dialog again, so long as I live," so that the punter can thereafter conveniently delete corporate databases with a single keystroke. Sure, this is easily implemented with a Boolean entry in the user's settings file (and yup, gorillas may use the Windows registry), but there is one difficulty—what to use for a unique key? These little dialogs tend to be ad hoc affairs that can come in the middle of, for example, complex calculations or printing modules. Unless one takes precautions, they are all likely to use keys with names like "IsSure" and "CanDelete." Only masochists would seriously consider a centralised key assignment scheme.
The answer—and you can use this if you like, I won't mind—is to bung in a GUID. Apart from overcoming the difficulty of uniqueness, there is, as a bonus, a certain pleasant thrill in generating them: Hit the key and whoosh! another one splurges out. I like to make a couple of dozen and then pick out the prettiest.
While we are on the subject: As a public service, I should once again remind everybody that next month is the Great GUID Renumbering Month. In order to serve you better, and to guarantee the supply for the next five years, it has become necessary to renumber many existing GUIDs. Those of you in the south, please prepend 0xE4 as appropriate, whereas those of you in rural areas must add a carryover quartet of 0x1C7A to those GUIDs with an even number of primary factors, treating residuals obliquely. Don't delay until XP crashes on you first day of next month—do it now.
Wednesday. I am just settling down with a large glass of driest whitest to enjoy the Big Treat of the week, BBC TV's "What Not To Wear" with Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall, when the phone rings. Damn. I had forgotten that I am on call for the Delphi Voluntary Emotional Support Line. (Delphi programmers have evolved to the point where mere technical support no longer suffices.) With a sigh and heavy heart—for Susannah has begun the preliminary humiliation of the victim: "Lets face it, you have a really HUGE ARSE"—I lift the receiver.
"Verity? Is that you?" A male voice, but hoarse with crying. I must be gentle.
"Of course it's me. Who did you expect, Philippe Kahn?" (Meanwhile on TV, Trinny, the alpha bitch, picks up the attack perfectly. "And that skirt makes it look EVEN BIGGER!")
"Have you heard?"
"Heard what?" (Susannah grasps the offending garment by the hem, and delivers the dreaded F-word of Power. "Frumpy!")
"It's Borland...they've changed the name."
"What? You mean they've gone back to Inprise?"
"No, it's even worse." A barely suppressed sob. "It's to do with Version 7. They are pretending that the language that we use, what we all know is 'Object Pascal,' is now called 'the Delphi Language.' As if. They're doing it to us again, Verity. We'll be the laughing stock of the RAD community!"
"Now calm down. Just because they've made another mistake in the renaming department, it doesn't mean they aren't prepared to fix it. After all, they did last time." Eventually. "Why don't you drop an e to their Head of Developer Relations? I'll wager he won't rest for a moment until this terrible error is put to rights."
And, after a few more reassuring noises, I am able to put the phone down with the sense of a job well done and return to the telly. Where Trinny, now moved on to demo mode, is shoving 12 ounces of raw chicken up her shirt. Bliss.
Friday. Clear user messages are important, especially during installation. Here is one I have devised for our own software, inspired by a recent experience with a certain drawing package:
"The version of Microsoft Windows Installer that is installed cannot install the installation that you wish to install until it has first installed an installation update to the installer. Please proceed with the installation of the installer update and reboot, after which the updated installer will continue with the installation."
Beat that, Visio team! Ooops, giveaway.
Ends
DDJ
