Simon Butcher

At the office, we recently received a Google Mini. We finally had some time to open the thing and start testing it out. After one week, we're already pretty impressed with the power and flexibility, but there are still some things missing.

During Christmas, I escaped the cold of Brussels and headed off to the posh side of Bristol for an unusual but slightly traditional Christmas with good food, good company, and lots of grog. Apparently the thick freezing fog wasn't too bad compared with the fog in the south that grounded flights.

So, it's Christmas again, which means we're closing in on the end of another year. Time is flying past so quickly lately, that Christmas is a welcomed change of pace. As with every year, even the Mannequin Piss is in on the action!

With the huge amount of light emanating from the Grand Place Christmas decorations, and the constant requests for photos from those unable to come and visit themselves, I grabbed my aging Sony DSC-P52 and went out into the cold and fog to grab some pictures of this tackiness.

As an experiment, and as my way of proving that my life is just as mundane as the next, I thought I'd finally exploit the (horribly inadequate) camera in my Nokia E70 and capture a day's worth of mindless monotony. While some insight into my current lifestyle may not sway humanity, it will provide curiosity and humour to my future self, if the archive of my blog can be somehow assured.

Now, it's interesting to note that despite Gartner's predictions, modern archaeology is already taking note in the blogging movement, and some universities are beginning to encourage archaeology and philosophy students to blog. Ultimately, the incessant self-publishing phenomenon will provide future civilisations a window into our own; albeit for now, its view into a somewhat obscure facet of our present reality.

Armed with this as my primary excuse to cover up my general state of disregard and laziness, I've decided to leave the images from the E70 in their original state, including those which are blurry and normally inadmissable. This is my day, as seen by me, through my trusty camera phone.

I have been accused of posting entries that are too long.

I apologise.

It seems that calling Windows API functions from Axapta is viewed as some sort of mysterious magic by most Axapta developers. Unfortunately, there are times when you need to do something that requires tight integration with functionality that exists outside of the system. While there are other methods of interfacing between bits of code, including COM, XML-RPC, or even .NET, using the Windows API can sometimes be very efficient, and powerful.

For beginner WinAPI coders who are also Axapta programmers, with at least some programming experience in C or C++, I felt it might be better to answer a question from my colleagues about calling WinAPI calls from Axapta, outside of those already wrapped by the WinAPI:: or WinGDI:: classes.