Laptop DVD drive certified dead.

I guess my 3-and-1/2-year-old laptop has reached its retirement age. It’s a Toshiba Satellite 2800 and it has been doing fine until I furiously kicked its floppy drive to death last year, after a very frustrating Differential Equations exam. But that was not a serious issue since floppy disks are always unreliable and I have been using a USB memory key for storing school work and such anyway.

Sadly, this morning, the computer’s DVD drive stopped working. It won’t read any disk at all and even seems to have a hard time to spin up. I guess the DVD drive has been suffering from some chronic mechanical arthritis ever since the day I kicked the laptop.

Anyway, the extended warranty period is almost over. I doubt Future Shop would agree to repair my laptop anyway since the damage to the floppy drive is very apparent. Compare the two pictures (the top one is of my own laptop, the bottom one is of my sister’s, same model) and you’ll see what I mean.

I almost forgot to mention that the battery of my laptop is also dead; It won’t recharge at all so I’m stuck with using it plugged into the wall all the time.

There goes some 3400+ CND$… >_<

I guess this means I really must get a job this summer… *sigh*

- SwordAngel

More .NET Stupidities: Enum::Parse()

Today I got totally pissed off by M$’s brilliant software
engineering again, while working with enum objects in C++ .NET. If you
are a C++ programmer, one of the things you must have encountered is
the conversion/casting of a string to an enumerated type. In .NET, M$
implements an absolutely stupid way of string-to-enum conversion,
through the Enum::Parse() function. Basically, you expect to just pass
the function a string and the custom enum type as parameters then get
back an enum value in return. WRONG!!!

3 Major Stupidities:

1. You need to make sure your enum type is a garbage collected
object, by specifying “__value” when you declared the enum type (e.g.
“__value enum fruits {apple, orange, banana, 1337fruit};”

2. You need to specify “__typeof” for your enum type in the argument
list of Enum::Parse() because .NET is stupid and doesn’t realize that
you’re trying to give it an enumerated type though you are using a
function in the Enum namespace (duh!).

3. Worst of all: the returned value of the Enum::Parse() function is
not even going to be in your custom enum type, it’s the generic garbage
collected Object*!!! You have to do “*dynamic_cast” like this:

some_enum_type enum_var = *dynamic_cast<__box(some_enum_type)>(Enum::Parse(__typeof(some_enum_type), some_string));

Now, if that is not retarded, I don’t know what is.

- SwordAngel

Hello everyone,
I haven’t updated in a long time because I’ve been busy doing 2 school
projects, besides catching up on the readings. The projects are still
not finished and I am quite tired and frustrated after two weeks of
work.

One of the things that made me laugh and pissed me off at the same time
is the installation of Visual Studio .NET 2003. M$ is known for making
stupid mistakes but this one is the cream of the crop. Here goes the
story: I had .NET Framework 1.1 and 1.0.xxx, Frontpage 2000 extension,
and MSDN for Visual Studio .NET 2003 installed on my laptop, but just
not Visual Studio .NET 2003 itself. When I popped in the first
installation disc of Visual Studio .NET 2003, the installer tells me
that I have an earlier version of .NET Framework installed and that I
should uninstall it before continuing; same thing for MSDN for Visual
Studio .NET 2003. You would expect that these components have been
designed to work together and thus you don’t need to uninstall them.
But AHA! It’s M$!!! So what I had to do is to fucking uninstall ALL
that crap, let the VS .NET 2003 install the fucking prerequesites, THEN
REINSTALL all the fucking .NET Framework and shit. That took me
valuable time that I could have used on the project. Thanks for the
fucking delay, M$. You have yet again proven that you excel in software
engineering. And I am really happy to hear you getting shit from the EU.

I’ve been using PHP in the database project and it’s really quite fun.
A good thing about PHP is it’s relax syntax. You don’t really need to
worry about return types, and bla bla bla. The design of the language
and the huge amount of public libraries allows you to write really
clean code to dynamically generate HTML pages. BTW, there’s a PHP
coding marathon on April 24, 2004. Check out the dotgeek website for more details. Too bad it’s in my exams session so I can’t do it.

On other news, SwordAngel got married to ZRuleZ, a handsome dark elf.
However, I’ve been also level’ing my dark elf lately because my friend
took back all the 1337 mage equipment that I borrowed. However, he lent
me DE equipment instead, lol. So whatever…

- SwordAngel