I hope the hard liners realize that the important part is seriously trying to solve a
problem before asking for help - and not
coming up with a problem that has no simple solution. (Again, I'm not trying to
ignore the problem of people who don't try to
answer their own questions.)
I have to keep reminding people that if you don't know something, you also don't know
if it has a simple answer. And after months
of getting acquainted with Palm, some people forget just how difficult it was to find
information in the first place. Some of the
experts on this list even have additional resources and a closenes with the palm
community that makes it second nature to them to
know what's going on.
I remember once I dealt with a crashing bug trying to draw to the screen between the
times when a form loaded and its first
FrmDrawFrom command. I finally came up with a workaround to not draw during that time.
Months later, I was reading though piles of documentation and saw something like
"accessing a form between load and draw will create
a bus error on debug roms." I had to laugh,. because that's the typical type of
statement where I know it now from experience, and
so it stands ot to me in the docs, but there's no way I'd ever remember it as a piece
of incidental Palm trivia ahead of time. And
both the knowledge base and the documentation are very much geared towards "you can
find it if you know what you're looking for."
It of course has benefits to the list to occasionally make examples out of people, but
many people have found ways to suggest in a
kindler, gentler way that they should have known this. I think that unless a person
is a repeat offender, a polite letter
explaining that their question was inappropriate and where to start looking for
information is the best solution.
Aaron Ardiri wrote:
> > Wow, tough crowd! Not to be defensive, but I don't think my question was
> > silly at all. Perhaps the wording could of been improved, but it's a valid,
> > non-trivial request for information.
>
> dont worry.. some of us actually hold back from hitting the send
> button after writing comments like that :P it gets to you when
> you start to realize that people dont RTFM or even *try* looking
> for a solution to the problems they have before they post here.
>
> > Isn't this one of the purposes of this list?
>
> not to ask questions that are readily available in the knowledge
> base, documentation etc.. you use the dev list to bring up issues
> that are not documented (in my opinion).. mostly, topics discussed
> here end up translated to the knowledge base eventually.
>
> i think its just a purpose of "hey, i cannot be bothered checking"
> and wola.. people post anyhow..
>
> > There is no MemIsValidPtr()-type of function, and would rather not
> > make assumptions based upon a given value.
>
> you know, *you* manage your pointers.. if you free a pointer,
> then set the pointer reference to NULL afterwards.. then a
> simple check if it is NULL will be sufficient.. you can also
> check lock counts on handles if you want to go that far :)
>
> > BTW, thanks to those who did respond.
>
> look for the Mem* API routines.. :)
>
> if i sound abrupt.. thats just the way i am after flying from
> USA and heading straight into email at 7am :) excuse me :P
>
> // az
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.ardiri.com/ <--- free games!
>
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