Category: programming

Stimulating the economy

I bought a bunch of stuff this weekend:

  • The new Badly Drawn Boy album.
  • “Retro,” the New Order 4 CD box set.
  • A couple of Spider-Man TPB’s, reprinting all the JMS issues that I didn’t already have.
  • A Hulk TPB, reprinting the first Bruce Jones issues.
  • The Powers “Who Killed Retro Girl?” TPB.
  • ASP.NET in a Nutshell. Not as fun as the other stuff, but necessary.

So, I’ve got a lot of listening and reading to do. Too bad I still don’t seem to have enough spare time for all this. Oh well!

(The motivation for buying all the comics, by the way, was a gift certificate that I got for Christmas. I’m not on some mad buying spree. Really.)

Geek Stuff

Spent a bit too much time today trying to figure out how I could create a DLL containing user-defined functions callable from Crystal Reports 8. The obvious route was to use Visual Basic. Well, I don’t normally use VB, I use PowerBuilder. However, creating a DLL in PowerBuilder resulted only in a new and exciting way to crash Crystal every time I tried to open a report. So I went hunting for VB. I have no problem buying a copy. However, I couldn’t verify that VB.NET could create the kind of DLL I needed. I knew VB 4, 5, and 6 would work, but no one reputable seems to have VB 6 for sale anymore. Eventually, I found a dusty copy of VB 5 in a box on top of a bookshelf, underneath a bunch of other stuff. And it worked! Yay!