Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

So I finally took out my kite for the first time in like 5 months. There wasn’t much wind, prob only about 3-5mph, so I had to work a bit at keeping the kite up, but that’s always good exercise. It was an onshore wind though, which kinda stinks cause the kite looks much cooler when I fly it over the water. For the uninitiated, this isn’t some one-lined diamond kite with a tail of bowties. Educate yourselves here and here, and be awed.

Today was pretty okay programming-wise. I got a bit farther with Tanto and made a few more modifications to Katana. The major addition to Katana was a callback function for each object, so that when the object precessed its messages, it could call a user-defined function and pass along the messages to allow extensible behavior. I tried using function pointers, but those came up short, so a friend (known as Clash around here) pointed me towards the Boost libraries Bind and Function. Very nice. However that led into this little fiasco. Shortly after, I had trouble compiling my code using the Bind function in VC++ 6. I’ve never had this much trouble with an out-dated compiler before, which is why I never upgraded. But this forced my hand, which led me into downloading VC++ 2005 Express.

And then the trouble began.

First off, I use FireFox. So I spent like 5 minutes trying to download the file from Microsoft and wondering why it kept saying it couldn’t find the file. I finally realized it was probably because I wasn’t opening it in IE.

Stupid Microsoft

So I open IE and download the file. Cool. I start the installer and it downloads like 9megs and then freezes. I restart the setup and now it doesn’t even start to dowload. I try this like 5 times before deciding that it’s a crappy wireless link. So I take my laptop downstairs and sit it under the router. Still no luck. For comparison, I try it on the family desktop, which is cabled to the router. It works. So I pop the cable into my laptop and try again. Still no joy. Finally I disable the stupid Windows Firewall.

It works

Stupid Microsoft

So now that it took me like two hours to install stupid VC++ Express, I have to go to bed.

Stupid Microsoft

As you can tell, I’m a bit grouchy right now good-friggin-night