Slapout Tech

I recently built myself a new computer that's running Windows 7 64-bit edition. Most things worked fine with it -- until I plugged in my Western Digital Passport portable hard drive. I knew the drive was okay because it was working fine on my other Windows XP 32-bit machine. I finally figured out how to get it working. I'm not sure why, but it turns out that Windows wasn't assigning it a drive letter. To fix the problem I followed these step: 1) Plug in the drive 2) Open the start menu 3) Right click on "Computer" 4) Select "Manage" 5) Under "Storage" click on "Disk Management" 6) Find the external hard drive in the list at the bottom 7) Right click on it and select "Change Drive Letter and Path" 8) Click the Add button 9) Pick a drive letter and okay your way out

The way you do multithreading in PowerBuilder is to create an object that contains the code you want to run in another thread. You then create an instance of this object as a “shared object”. You also code another object – the “interface object” and pass the shared object a reference to it. You can then call functions on the shared object and have them run in the other thread. The shared object communicates back to the main thread via the interface object. The other day I set up a program using a shared object. I had a shared object that was running some code asynchronously. When it was done, it called a function on the interface object and the interface object called a function in my window to let me know it was complete (by setting a variable). At one point I needed to wait until the shared object was done with its processing before I continued what I was doing in the main thread. I had it coded something like this: Integer li_status Li_status = wf_get_status() Do while li_status = ...

This post is a test of the Android app Blogaway. It seems there are a lot more blogging apps for iPhone/iPod than for Android. Hopefully that will change soon.

This is a test post to see if I can post from my iPod using BlogPress.

You know, somewhere out there, there's probably a guy who works in technology and has the last name of "Wire". I wonder if he cringes every time someone talks about the 1394 standard and mentions "FireWire". :-)

StarTeam uses the MD5 hash of a file as the filename in its vault. (Pretty clever if ya ask me.) The top level folders in the vault all have a two letter name. These names correspond with the first two letters of the MD5 hash. Each folder also has a one letter folder inside it for each letter and number. These correspond to the third letter of the hash. StarTeam uses this scheme to determine where to place the file. So, for example, if you had a file whose MD5 hash was 0D0909082EF668C63FCD4437B9C787F7 then StarTeam would put it in its vault in the folder: /0D/0 Of course, you shouldn’t go messing around with the files in the vault. You should let StarTeam manage them.

I downloaded the new Netflix Manager (or Mobile Mgr for Netflix as they call it) for Windows Mobile today. I've only used it a little, but here are my initial impressions. After you log in you're presented with two options: "My Queue" & "Search". The former, of course, takes you to your DVD Queue. Here you can use the menu options to move items up and down the list or select it to see a synopsis. Several movies have a "See Preview" button that let you see the movie's trailer. Playback on this wasn't bad, but it was a little choppy on full-screen mode. The other option on the main screen, "Search", does what you'd expect. It doesn't have the "search as you type" feature that the Netflix website has, but it's not that big of a deal. Once you find a movie you can use the menu to add it to your queue. When you're in your DVD queue list, you can move between your other queues ("Instant Queu...