CoderJoe.net

After writing my first post describing Road Runner’s annoying practice of redirecting all invalid DNS requests to their own advertising laden search page I opted out. I figured that would be the end of it.

I was wrong.

As of this morning Road Runner ha re-enabled the DNS redirecting again.

How stupid are they? At least now I know how much they actually actually care about their user’s settings.

Road Runer, if you’re reading this. Stop turning this feature on. It’s absolute rubbish and I really don’t want it. When I opt-out of a service this does NOT mean you should re-enable it a few months later and hope I won’t notice.

Advertisement filled domain search sites, once the domain of shady domain squatters, have shown up on Road Runner High Speed Internet for URLs of invalid domains.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit the website for a paint ball field in Syracuse NY. Looking for their address I tried to visit their site http://www.headrush.com. Unfortunately I mistyped and ended up at http://www.headrus.com. I was greeted with the site pictured below.

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I find myself doing more and more Javascript development as the days go on, and while I do not consider myself an expert on the language, I do consider myself well versed enough to get things done the right way.

More often than not my solutions will involve heavy use of the Prototype.js library to make my life a little bit easier.

I won’t be shy, I love this library. I love that it isn’t based on XPath, and I love that it provides me with common extensions to common objects to make my life easier. It would seem, however, that there are quite a few people who disagree with me.

Following the Rails Spinoffs mailing list (a hangout for users of Prototype and Scriptaculous alike) I came across a post entitled “Why I Don’t Use the Prototype Javascript Library“. As I’m always willing to be pointed in the right direction when I’m doing something wrong, curiosity got the best of me and I checked the site out.

I’ve got to say, I’m quite surprised at the number of times I hear the arguments presented in this post.
To be honest, I don’t really understand what the problem is.
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It’s been years since I was given the gift of my first compiler by my parents.

It’s been almost as long since I’ve experimented with the Windows API.

Shortly after receiving the gift of Visual Studio 6 I made the switch to Linux as my desktop operating system of choice. Unfortunately this left me with minimal experience with windows programming. To this day the majority of my programming projects and tasks have taken the form of simple 2D graphics engines using SDL, or simple form based applications using QT or GTK+.

Until recently I had always felt like I was missing something, I never had the most basic experience developing applications for the Windows operating system. This always left me with a bit of a pit in my stomach, as I didn’t have the funds required to purchase a copy of Windows, purchase Visual Studio, and begin my experiments anew.

Thankfully I was very recently offered a paid internship position with a company called Railcomm Inc. At Railcomm I was given the opportunity to develop some Windows programming skills. I developed screen after screen of graphical Windows application with relative ease. I considered myself at least a successful basic Windows programmer.

At the start of this project I figured setting up a Window to contain my DirectX 9.0c rendering context would be simple as pie. “It’s only a few function calls” I had been told over and over again. I was sure I’d have no problems at all.

Boy was I wrong.
What follows are the steps I used to learn to develop a “simple” Windows application.

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