Author: Norman Palardy

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Nice week

Last week Trish & I went to Cancun
We’d planned this sometime ago and we had a really nice week

Visited Isla Mujeres, Chichen Itzá, and went snorkelling a couple times

On the ride over to Isla Mujeres we sat near this gent from Goa India who was on board without his girlfriend (she was sick that day)
We struck up a conversation and it turns out he’s in the same line of work I am
And we had a great visit for about 2 hours
I’m sure Trish was bored as heck as we talked nothing but tech & geek topics the entire time

And when we finally departed the boat we both made a deliberate & concerted effort to find the other & thanked each other for what turned out to be a great conversation which made the trip even nicer

It made nice day even nicer to meet someone as passionate about the things we talked about

And then the last evening we were there we sat with another resident of the condominium and her daughter.… Read the rest

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Water + Horse ≠ Horse drinking water

The saying is of course “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot are it drink”

And that applies in many contexts
You can show a person a solution to a problem but they’ll still refuse it – for whatever reason they have.

Sometimes the real saying that should be applied is “You can only help someone if they want help”

Again, despite seeming to ask for it, when they get an offer of help that isnt EXACTLY what they wanted they’ll refuse the help.… Read the rest

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Byref and ByVal part II

Long ago I wrote about byref & byval
Apparently this wasnt widely read not even by some long standing members of the community as I still see completely wrong explanations of bevel & byref persist.

First you have to understand that there are two types of VARIABLES.
VALUE types and REFERENCE types.
With a VALUE type the compiler sees there is space in memory set aside when your program runs to hold a value – a number a floating point value etc.… Read the rest

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Fixing code by not touching it follow up

In the case I described the code is in a subclass a Xojo class

The idea here is to INSERT a new subclass between the existing subclass and the new one. And the newly inserted subclass will expose things in a way the OLD existing code wont break

So we never touch the old code
We just modify the inheritance chain in a way we can then alter how things behave

So in his case we can add a new subclass of EmailMessage that exposes the Source as a Method pair ( get & set) and then make the existing class inherit from our new class

And the existing code will then JUST work without ever having had to alter any of it

Next time you have an issue like this consider that as an option !

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YAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the past 3 days I’ve been on a training course and today I got my certification as a CSIA level 1 instructor !!!!!

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Fixing code by not touching it

The other day I was helping a friend with some code that worked fine in several versions of Xojo but then in a newer one wouldn’t compile

Seems he found a compiler regression Whether this _should_ have been caught by regression tests etc is an entirely different question.

It exists. And now his large project doesn’t compile.… Read the rest

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Never had to think about this before

Was chatting with a potential client. And they are new to Xojo.

When I mentioned that I had worked at Xojo Inc for more than 10 years they didn’t believe me. And they asked for some proof. I had never encountered this before.
So here’s a quick few references where you can see that I was once a member of their development team.… Read the rest