After reinstalling SPSS version 12, VB scripts started working again. But everything else stopped working. I started getting errors saying my hard drive was full, even though there is still 2.4 GB free on this disk.

Now, an error saying &H800405e8 may be mysterious and unhelpful and completely alien to me, but there's at least the possibility that this error really does refer to something that's factually correct. It's comforting in some way to think that even though I don't know what the error is, SPSS knows, even if it won't tell me.

Saying my hard drive is full when it's not, on the other hand, is factually wrong. Not only am I unaware of what the problem is, but SPSS is outright lying to me. That's somehow worse. The computer has gone from secretive to immoral. I fear the next step in my computer's evolution is outright violence.

I reinstalled SPSS version 13 and it works again, including VB scripts. I don't know what more needs to be said at this point. What's the emoticon for "pleading helplessness"?

I'm trying to debug an SPSS Visual Basic / ActiveX script right now after it randomly stopped working. It worked perfectly fine for weeks, but yesterday it just stopped for absolutely no reason. Not a character in the source code changed. The thing was marked Read-only; it's not POSSIBLE it changed. So how can it work one minute and stop working the next?

This is very close to what I imagine Hell is like.

"Unknown internal error". You can't get much better than that. Oh wait, I'm sorry, you can. Utilizing state-of-the-art VB debugging techniques, I am able to expand upon that:

**ERROR** ((&H800405e8) Unknown internal error.)

Ah, the old &H800405e8. I should've known! Now I know immediately how to solve this issue. My solution does involve launching my computer in a somewhat ballistic manner off the top of this building, but it couldn't hurt.

SPSS 13 is such a shoddy product, the company that made it should be sued.

Vim 7.0 has been released! How sad is it that this made my day! (Answer: not sad at all. Vim is great.) Among other things, it can spellcheck and do code-completion and use tabs. (But who needs tabs when you have windows? And by windows I mean Ctrl+W, N.)

In honor of this occassion, I am posting a Vim section, and the first item is a Vim SPSS syntax syntax-highlighting definition. Although all the people in the world using Vim to edit SPSS syntax files could probably be counted on one hand (and likely all work within 5 rooms of my office) maybe someone somewhere will get use out of this.