VB diary, part two.
Friday, March 10, 2000Despite its efforts to maintain the strict “what you can do with your mouse, you can do with the keyboard”, m$ persists in violating that rule. Just try to manipulate Properties window in VB without a mouse. Tab moves you around the object combo – property grid tab – left column of the grid (property names) – property values. Now if you press Alt while you’re on a property name, the focus moves to the property value, but the main VB menu is also activated. If you have a value of False selected, and want to type T for true, you get the Tools menu activated. Same happens if you want to open a combo using Alt+DnArrow – the combo doesn’t drop. Actually, I haven’t found any way to have the combo dropped from keyboard. Using all possible modifier keys with arrows didn’t work… until I eventually clicked the drop arrow, and then it started behaving. Still, the Alt key worked as “do a Tab and activate the menu”. Once you get into the value cell, the property name cell remains selected, and tabbing around is actually necessary if you want to know where you are.
Tried with Tabstrip control, since Toolbar control simply won’t – it’s designed to be used in Word, not in a MessageBox replacement. Seems almost fine, except that it doesn’t play nice when it comes to getting vertical – it actually turns the buttons vertically, but stays horizontal itself. After extensive play with the property sheet, it started looking decent, though I figure it will be a major PITA to tame and have it behave programmatically.
This hassle comes from my attempt of using the TabStrip control instead of CommandGroup, because the later doesn’t exist in VB, and I need it for the MessageBox replacement, which was probably intended to cover all the possible needs of a Windows programmer, and then why would anyone want a CommandGroup which would behave as a group. The ‘ok, cancel, quit and save, quit and don’t save’ buttons should be programmed individually, right? Why would anyone want to have a free choice of button captions, and of the number of the buttons?
When you look at the properties for any object, and then accidentally click on code for any other object, this other object’s properties are displayed in the property window. To get back to the properties of the first one, you have to click back your way down the object hierarchy (which is, luckily, never too deep).
It seems not to have private variables, just local, module level, or global.
TabStrip’s click method doesn’t give any indication on which one was clicked. How the hell am I supposed to know? And it says there’s no such thing as TabStrip.SelectedItem. It’s intended to activate a page, not to know when it’s clicked.
And I never looked back.
And, BTW, pLazić is now in California. On thirteenth, Boća writes:
And I'm sitting in wee hour and writing to my frendz in diaspora. I god lazy on the keyboard, and also this male exemplar of mine [later known as Piton] has not a bit of understanding for my wish to write to my pals. We reached a fair agreement, went to the video klub for a cartoon, and I got the makina to type in a couple of mails. And then again Quake, Age Of Empire, Starcraft... as small as he is, as a fucked player he grew, stuck onto some strategies, and when it doesn't work, calls dad. He threatened to have to learn english to be able to use cheats in the games.
Well, as things are standing, we're doomed, although it's milk and honey everywhere... The petty Lorka had fits of dicking out on Forum [a section of sezam], what with sticking the Greens on a spit, tonsilectomy for the četniks and other fifth column... The Fatso is silent like shit in the grass instead of giving the guy a kick ticket, and many old sezamers rose to protest. Pure fascism at work, and they are scared to be subject to the Law on information... Shit.
The oldwave works full steam, we have expanded a bit with Sonyboy and Apostolka. We have a synchronized action in the conference, Škrba has fired up some 300 megs of material to his BG server, and keeps letting on bit by bit, and then we join in... we miss you, true... we'll start collecting a voluntary contribution to extend your subscription. Just follow the groups and Music, so not to waste your days away :)
What will probably interest you the most, we started execution of long term works on domestic music. Momentarily the disks are being compressed, then the vinyls will follow... there's tons of material. The good news is that Forge came out as a m$: you can get very quality recordings if you have patience and good plugins. I test them on that beautiful song of the DAG band - Legenda, with those compilations which were published by Komuna few years ago. Some recordings are so bad that I ask myself why didn't they invest effort to put them in some semblance of order...
An open question remains how do we cast it to you there. Did you make a deal with Škrba to leave them on his server or should I send disks? The list will be with the next mail.
On seventeenth, next installment... obviously written in sezam's tool, because it cuts the quotes at 72-80 characters (minus the quote mark, and not hyphenating the words), and you couldn't quite select text, you selected lines to quote, and then whatever falls into those lines.
two big ones rip across Srbijan Kafe (if you know any kids hanging out in there, just ask about Luna and Skviki, they write scripts, invent macros, rob
Sve se ne{to pitam na koga su :))) [„I keep asking myself who they got it from...“, and yes, he was using juski]
And as for sezam, I'm not forking a coin to the fat man, until he runs out on the meadow and says loud that he ate shit. If he did that meanwhile, I'd beg to
Ah, the frail dream... you know yourself that it will never happen. I have long ago understood sezam as a big toy of many adults, so I never participated in forum or similar discussions. And when you have not a puppy nor a kitten at home, which we established together in the case of the LRW, then you use all your available time to punp your own ego. And since The Fat Man is not anywhere close to being Gayts, but would love something of the kind, it all comes out... pathetic.
The LRW case relates to the Left* Russian Writers affair. The phrase was invented by user Novim, who was actually a writer and a member of the so-called Government of Civilization, which was a group of mockers there, which put itself in charge of publishing a monthly bulletin of the Civilization conference, and each one of us was a minister of something, me of language, of course. What was exactly a LRW, and how did the Government manage to provoke a dozen people on the forum to step forward with their views on the matter, and how did The Fat Man show himself as he did... sparse is the memory. Don't even remember how was the question what was a LRW and what was not decided. Foggily I remember that it mostly included the writers whose books were mandatory reading in high school although there's no sex nor fight in them, just philosophering and daydreaming; whether these included Dostojevski, Gogolj or Turgenjev is beyond me.
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* not any kind of political left, but rather in the slang meaning of it, „some left guy“ - a nobody
24-I-2020 - 20-VI-2024