ATT Rewards for Referrals

I just checked att.com to see if DSL were available in the somewhat rural area in which my in-laws live, and was pleasantly surprised to see that, yes, it is. ATT has a extremely attractively-priced package for new DSL customers who don’t need a lot of bandwidth. For $10 a month, you get a 768 Kbps connection. From the terms of service, it appears this rate is for the first year only and after that the price becomes $20 a month, the amount normally charged for this package.

I was further surprised to discover that ATT also offers a good referral program.

So, if you want to sign up for ATT services — like phone, internet and tv — and you don’t have a referral number, I would be most appreciative if you used mine!

ATT Referral Code: DA1010931

Just enter my code at http://www.attreferrals.com/.

Thanks!

Using a Custom Bitmap for a PowerBuilder Window Icon

Sybase’s PowerBuilder allows you to choose an icon for a window. However, the list includes only the .ico resources. Menus and toolbars, which can use the bitmap resources, have a much larger set of images in their drop-downs.

I don’t really care about the nuances that distinguish icon and bitmap resources. I just want the image choices to be consistent throughout the product.

The Problem

Here’s what can happen:

You find a custom image you really like for your dialog, and you assign it to the menu item, the toolbar item and perhaps a picture button or two. So you have your image appearing consistently throughout your application so the user is really dialed-in to what you want that image to convey. Then, you think, hey, let’s also put the image as the icon for my dialog (by icon, I mean the small image that appears in the window header, usually on the far left).

But, you discover that the choices for your windows are limited only to .ico resources. A very small listing in PowerBuilder.

The Solution

Here’s how you get the bitmap out of PowerBuilder so you can use it as an icon:

Using Resource Hacker, open the pbvm DLL. For PB 9.0, this is Program Files / Sybase / Shared / PowerBuilder / pbvm90.dll.

Select View / Expand Tree.

Now, scroll through the list looking for the image you’re after. Once you find it, right-click and choose Save [Bitmap : 25 :1033 ] (your numbers will be different).

Now, you simply convert that bitmap to an icon. Using IrfanView, open the image, and save it as an .ICO file with transparency. Select the color you want to be transparent (usually the gray color), and you’re all set!