Re: Is your Radio Shack like this?

Article: 7936 of alt.hackers
From: dthomas@mack.rt66.com (David B. Thomas)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Is your Radio Shack like this?
Date: 1 Jun 1995 18:16:00 -0600
Organization: Engineering International Inc., Public Internet Access
Lines: 48
Approved: dthomas@rt66.com
Message-ID: 3qll80$kqd@mack.rt66.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: mack.rt66.com
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

Loki (loki@world.std.com) wrote:
: [radio shack story]
: My question is this:  Am I the only person blessed with a Radio
: Shack that has a complete moron for a manager?

I used to work at the Tandy Repair Center here in Albuquerque and we had
a name for the people who worked in the stores: "Store pukes".
Most of
them don't know much of anything, which wouldn't be so bad, but a decent
percentage of them think that because they work at radio shack they are
electronics experts.  Your experience is typical, I'm sad to say.

My favorite radio shack story is this: I wanted to pick up some cheap
rabbit ears because I just moved into a new house and it had no roof
antenna and no cable.  I go to the radio shack and ask for small indoor
tv antennas.  He asks, "What size TV is this for?"  "What
difference could
that possibly make?" I ask.  "Well, a big TV needs a bigger signal,
so you need a bigger antenna."

I immediately conjured up this image of a nice modern, sensitive, small set
and a gigantic piece of wood with an old tube set in it.  But I still didn't
allow him the benefit of the doubt.

ObHack: At work I have to use XVT software to write GUI applications.  XVT
is nice because you can write one set of code that runs on Windows, Motif
and more.  It's no-so-nice because there's a lot that the native windowing
systems can do that XVT won't do, just because some system out there
(usually Macintosh) can't do it.  [For proof that a macintosh isn't
a computer, see my web page http://www.rt66.com/dthomas/fun/fun.html]

Anyway I needed to be able to draw in dialog boxes, but XVT doesn't allow
that.  My first thought was to create a child window in the dialog, then
draw in that.  Alas, XVT doesn't do that either.  Then I got the idea...
why not create a child window with some other non-dialog parent, then
do the native call to assign a new parent, then draw in the thing.  That
way there's only one nonportable call.

Well, it *almost* works.  You can see what you draw, but after you run
like this for a while, XVT kills the app and beeps six times.  %&*#@!
Now what I'm doing is not using dialogs at all, but faking them with
windows.  It's a pain to get everything to look and act right, but at least
I can draw in them portably.  Man... if I were in charge of this project,
I'd just deal with the porting issues rather than rely on a portability
toolkit to almost do it for me.

David
--
Their address sums up their attitude: One Microsoft Way
	http://www.rt66.com/dthomas/

Back to index