The Glade 4.0

About 5 months ago, I became curious as to whether or not I could write a VBA macro that would be capable of editing itself. In total, I spent about 4 weeks researching, writing, testing and polishing code to accomplish this. I then shelved it as an entertaining and educational bit of work, but one that had no current practical application.

Today, my boss told me I need to train a co-worker to take over maintenance of my project. I dusted off my re-write subroutines, incorporated them into the project, and told my co-worker "click that button to perform the update".

Conclusion : writing spiffy code is good, finding useful applications for said spiffy code is even better.
Also, I think I deserve a long lunch today

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

3 years later, Skynet has become self-aware.

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Holy shitsnacks!

You are now the third person to make that connection, and you know what they say about threes

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I'm sorry, but if a VBA script destroys humanity, we deserve it, because that's pretty pathetic.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

They are prime?

I've worked with it (and fixed a lot of it), and I can say VBA does slowly destroy your humanity...

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Hmmm...polymorphic/self-modifying ms-office-embeded VBA scripts?

In all seriousness, I'll be at least slightly surprised if you project doesn't wind up setting of someone's AV heuristics

As aside, I remember that one of my first mind-blowing experiences in my first high-school CS class was writing a program that prints itself (i.e. its source code). I'm not sure why I thought the source code should somehow be different than printing any other file, but it just seemed weird to me that you could do this.

Years later, when I first got involved with Linux, my mind would be blown yet again when I learned that part of the standard process for making a binary release of a new version of gcc was to make the new compiler compile itself.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Okay, touché, Vlad. I laughed.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

The automated editing doesn't worry me near so much as the portion of scripting which reads data from the registry. The day I wrote that bit, I was concerned about getting a call from IT but they seem to have either not noticed or not cared.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister