|
Ted's Radio Weblog
 |
Monday, March 31, 2003 |
 After some sweet weather in the 60s in the past week, a little reminder that we're still in New England. Cold and windy in the 30s today, with a fresh dusting of snow last night.
1:57:26 PM 
|
|
And I still didn't make the list, bummer. The list is available for free browsing here, but the in-depth articles and back-stories are for paying customers.
Some interesting changes. Wal-mart's number one. It used to be the Fortune 500 list was held by companies that made things.
Many familiar names on the list, a few former clients and employers, too.
11:10:04 AM
|
|
|
Sunday, March 30, 2003 |
Amazing! First day I missed this month, first day since Januray, too. There just didn't seem to be anything that interesting to relay. My own time was spent putting the finishing touches on speaker's notes and slides for the upcoming Essential Fox conference, and puttering about the house doing Saturday-in-Spring things.
9:18:18 AM
|
|
|
Friday, March 28, 2003 |
Tim Bray wrote recently that XML was too hard for programmers, and many people (most didn't read the article, I suspect) turned that into "XML Sucks." Tim, one of the co-inventors of XML, needed to clarify that it isn't XML that's the problem, in this article.
5:45:21 PM
|
|
Dave Winer had mentioned an interview on NPR for blogging. I couldn't find that one on-line yet, but I did find these two on the NPR web site:
- Omar Wasow interviewed by Alison Keys on the Tavis Smiley Show, 13-Feb-2003, and
- Linguist Geoff Nunberg explains the phemomenon of blogs: personal websites that function as public diaries on Terri Gross's awesome Fresh Air, 10-Dec-2001
And, of course, NPR points to the requisite Iraq blogs.
It looks like Chris Lydon had a blogging show on WBUR's The Connection on May 5, 2000.
5:24:05 PM
|
|
Big salute to Andrew Coates of Civil Solutions, Australia, for taking my hacked-together code to generate XML-formated date-time strings from FoxPro for RSS feeds, and he turned the code into a nice, clean, timezone-aware snippet. Both of the feeds I am generating, FoxCentral.net and FoxForum wiki (available for syndication at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html) now use his technique for cleaner datetime information. Still in beta, still needs more work in the parsing and error-handling sections, but coming along well. (from FoxForum Wiki
10:04:23 AM
|
|
|
Thursday, March 27, 2003 |
Publishing a project weblog.
Configuring Movable Type
|
A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
1:33:27 PM
|
|
Gartner's opinion of Microsoft's strategies against the open source movement are in this ZDNet article. Bear in mind that Gartner does not have a 100% batting record. Of course, neither do I :). Enterprises will see major changes in Microsoftís competitive strategy as Linux and other open-source software continue to erode Microsoft's traditional sources of income. Don't expect Microsoft's bundling strategies to continue as before, and don't expect it to support Linux before 2006 at least -- if ever.
10:24:46 AM
|
|
A great meeting last night! Guy Pardoe wrapped up the year-long early session discussions on "Application Development Strategies." If you didn't attend, you missed a great series, which we will be repeating, with variation. The idea behing the early evening sessions (6 - 7 PM) was to discuss all of the aspects of application development, from initial contact with the client, through contract negotiations, specifications, choices of tools, assembly, construction, project management, quality assurance, final acceptance, and on-going maintenance. Whew! Needless to say, volumes have been written on the subject, and we could only gloss the surface in one-hour sessions, but there was a lively give-and-take and sharing of ideas at each of the sessions. Notes of what went on at each session are kept in a Yahoo! group for the BAFUG. Should we make these publicly available? We'll have to consider if there are other issues that might prevent it.
Next month we consider where to take the early evening meetings from here. A brainstorming session on what the members of the group want next. Should be a hopping session!
10:06:02 AM
|
|
|
Wednesday, March 26, 2003 |
 Just got email and a FedEx tracking number that VFP 8.0 was on it's way to me. Yahoo! (™)
10:38:24 AM
|
|
... I'm looking at using Rick Strahl's free wwXML classes as the basis for the next revision of RSS feeds for FoxCentral.net. Rick's classes are clean and offer simple high-level interfaces for doing a lot of the processing I have been doing the hard way. Looking forward to seeing the results!
10:17:24 AM
|
|
... meeting tonight. Details at http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston. Guy Pardoe will be continuing his excellent "Application Development Strategies" roundtable discussions from 6 to 7 PM. AppDevStrat discussions are highly interactive, well-moderated, and produce a lot of interesting information. We're archiving the discussion transcripts on the web, using the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bafug group collaboration software. Apply for membership there if you're interested.
Guy also takes the podium for the main meeting, where he will demonstrate moving FoxPro data over the web using WebConnection.
Should be an informative and entertaining evening.
10:15:29 AM
|
|
|
Tuesday, March 25, 2003 |
Ed Leafe has opened up the OpenTech forum so that new posts appear in an RSS file located here: http://leafe.com/opentech.xml. Let's see if we can avoid drowning in FoxPro forum posts...
8:53:19 PM
|
|
This technology stuff is hard. The deeper and more complex it gets, the less people are going to be able to follow you. Sean has a great illustration here: Sean McGrath: "By the time you hit the RDF triples, all but four people in the room are tidying the hard disks of their laptops or updating their blogs." Source: Scripting News
3:49:02 PM
|
|
|
Monday, March 24, 2003 |
That's the last dime Office Depot gets from me. Forcing their vendors to raise their costs by signing up for a logo certification! It's not only outrageous, I suspect that it's collusion, too. Well, Staples and Best Buy will get more of my business from here on out. Lets' see.... we've got six machines in the home office, and only one runs XP. Hmmm.
Why Not to Shop at Office Depot. The Inquirer: Microsoft logo scheme means Office Depot won't sell non-compliant XP products. Only products that conform to Microsoft's Designed... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
8:53:08 PM
|
|
Like our word processors, our stereos, our video cameras, there are so many features of Radio that I doubt I use 10% of them. Here's a helpful link to access a few more: "One year ago today, a text editing cheat sheet for Radio." from Scripting News
9:41:47 AM
|
|
|
Sunday, March 23, 2003 |
Extensive testing by Paul McNett seems to indicate that:
- VFP running under Wine locks tables and records properly,
- Multiple instances of VFP or other applications under the same instance of Wine respect each other's locks,
- VFP clients on Windows can properly lock records and files on a Samba share or a native Windows share,
- VFP clients under Wine do respect locking when sharing files via NFS,
- VFP clients running under Wine will not see locks on SMB (Samba or Windows) shares because the outgoing SMBClient does not understand locks.
So, all is not lost, nor is it won, just yet. Wine is doing it's thing properly. Samba needs to learn the Windows Way of locking. So, if you are looking at transitioning existing Windows systems to Linux:
- Consider moving to client-server, which eliminates all the locking issues, and gives you increased scalability, reliability and other - ilities, OR:
- Put the DBF files on a Samba share, and access them via SMB (the native networking) from Windows clients, and via NFS from the Linux clients.
With the rich assortment of data servers available for Linux, I'm inclined to strategy #1 for new systems, but strategy #2 for existing DBF-based systems, to simplify the transition. Once the existing systems were working without a hitch under plan #2, I'd propose plan #1 for the next major upgrade of the system.
8:50:14 PM
|
|
Ars Technica features a discussion that Microsoft server release schedule uncertain (from Ars Technica). I attended a Windows User Group meeting last month where Steve Carbone, a local Microsoft rep, explained that Windows server OSes needed to change on a longer cycle to accomodate admins in large shops with muilt-year rollout plans, while client OSes could change more rapidly. With Win NT, they rolled them out separately, and people complained they got one without the other. With Win2K, they released them together, and people complained there was too much to change at once, Win XP, they released the workstation separate from Windows Server 2003, and people complained. What's the constant here? You're not going to satisfy all of the people all of the time.
1:30:36 PM
|
|
|
Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
 Paul McNett has been leading the charge to get VFP working on Linux. Here's his website, and here's an article he recently published in FoxTalk. There are still some limitations, like the locking issues in the last post, but there are work-arounds to those, too (using client-server data rather than local files), but the Wine project is still in alpha and the progress is exciting.
Click the little picture on the right for a large (1600x1200, 320kb) screen shot of VFP running on the Linux desktop.
6:30:18 PM
|
|
Looks like we may have celebrated a bit too soon. The Wine project, an environment (not a slow emulator!) that lets Win32 programs run on non-Windows OSes (Linux, primarily), announced support for file locking that *should have* meant that Visual FoxPro, Access, Delphi, Office, and many other applications that depend on file locking would have another chunk of functionality working. Unfortunately, the problem is fixed but not fixed, and I'm still trying to sort out the details. It seems that Wine is doing it's part - two VFP applications running on the same Wine session will respect each other's file locks, but Samba, the SMB/CIFS emulator that lets Linux present network shares in Windows Neighborhood, does not support those locks over the network. Locking does seem to work on NFS shares. More as I figure it out...
6:15:23 PM
|
|
|
Friday, March 21, 2003 |
Steve and I try to catch a movie at the theater at least once a month. The trailers are an important part of the preparation and of the experience. Tease, Thrill or Scare 'Em, You Have to Snare 'Em. "Movie trailers embody the great promise of modern consumerist entertainment: that there will always be more." By A. O. Scott. at the New York Times: Business
9:30:28 AM
|
|
|
Thursday, March 20, 2003 |
 The "What's New in VFP8 book is following right behind the product, with an expected shipping date of March 24th. Friends and collaborators Doug Henning and Tamar Granor have written this one. Looking forward to it!
9:03:36 PM
|
|
News.com on RSS traction. "News.com ran this piece about growth in the use of RSS as a non-news format. This is a theme many of us are tracking. What will be the first truly broad killer app to use this?" from Jeremy Allaire's Radio
The news.com piece makes the good point that RSS has nothing to do with blogs. It is a generic mechanism for pushing notices onto the web in a publish-and-subscribe metaphor. With a standardized format (okay, four), sites can easily be written to gather and process many of these RSS notices. There's an opportunity there, folks. Wish I could work it out.
8:44:55 PM
|
|
If you're still looking for a great opportunity in the rapidly expanding blogosphere, consider the area of searching and cataloging. In this entry, Dave Aiello compares rssSearch and Feedster for features (Hint: try searching for "FoxPro" in both of them.)
8:12:14 PM
|
|
Just got word from http://www.foxtoolbox.com that they have shipping confirmation that Visual FoxPro boxes are on their way. FTB seems like a good company, run by a couple of FoxPro guys I've met, and they are offering very competitive prices on VFP upgrades and full versions. In addition, they promise to contribute 3% of their sales to VFP user groups. If you haven't placed your order yet, jump on it! This is an upgrade worth getting.
6:08:19 PM
|
|
According to the Boston Globe, Cisco is acquiring Linksys for a cool half-billion dollars. Our home office and home is black-and-purple LinkSys routers, wireless Access Points, and network cards. I hope this doesn't negatively impact the quality of hardware and support. I've been very happy with LinkSys, and Cisco is new to the consumer market.
LinkSys is a remarkable company: privately-held, with 308 employees, and sales of $429 million last year, according to the article. That's pretty impressive $/people.
11:58:38 AM
|
|
In what could be considered a major compatibility milestone for the Wine project, support for file locking was introduced into the product. File locking is essential for ISAM-style database applications like Access, Visual FoxPro, dBASE and Paradox, and is also used in products like Microsoft Office. This vastly increases the utility of those tools on the Wine platform. Exciting progress!
10:15:17 AM
|
|
If you're like me, you probably have a box of 12" vinyl LPs around somewhere, even though you may not have the ability to play with them - for me, the cover art and memories are worth the space they take up. One of these days, I promise myself, I'll get around to digitizing them. And the photo albums. And the cassettes. And the video tapes, VHS and 8 mm. Ya, right. Well, onto that list you can now add The Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing (from Ars Technica)
10:09:31 AM
|
|
Garrett's found a news aggregator that integrates into IE in this blog entry: "The Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds opens up a news aggregator on the left of your screen, borrowing the Search Companion sidebar in IE. Cool idea. Got some problems, but I'm sure they'll go away as snarf's author develops it."
9:30:34 AM
|
|
|
Wednesday, March 19, 2003 |
DAFUG - March 2003 Meeting. The Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) is proud to announce that Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing, will be presenting "New tools that will provide additional business opportunities for Fox developers" on Thursday March 20, 2003. This will be Whil's third stop during his "Fox Is Everywhere" user group tour. Afterwards we will be discussing other FoxPro and developer topics at a local eatery. Directions, maps, email contacts, future meeting dates and topics, and other details can be found on our website www.dafug.org. [FoxCentral.Net]
5:06:11 PM
|
|
Jon Udell says the Secrets of the XML Gods are that they are cobbling together XML by hand. He cites Sean McGrath's blog and Tim Bray's XML Is Too Hard for Programmers essays. Dave Winer retorts that his tool of choice has a good XML compiler built in.
I'm stuck with a similar conundrum, only I am just starting out. Up until this point, I've cobbled together XML using the CursorToXML() function built in to Visual FoxPro, but that's only suitable for flat, repetitious XML. With the FoxCentral RSS File, I just manually wrapped header and footer elements around transformed XML. But with some other projects, like SMBMeta, I need to create truly hierarchical, multiple one-to-zero-or-many structures, and CursorToXML isn't built for that. I'm looking for a simple "Hello, World" example of creating a document with XMLDOM or another tool, adding attributes, elements and nodes to it. Anyone got one handy?
2:22:28 PM
|
|
I've mentioned before I love the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla. I often skim a hundred article extracts in my News Aggregator, rigt-mouse-click and "Open in New Tab" all of those of interest. As a few seconds allows during the day, I peruse those articles, and right-mouse-click and create new tabs in turn, closing old or irrelevant ones along the way. At this point, I have eleven tabs opened.
The problem comes with the close box. That dratted little "X" in the upper right corner will irrevocably, irretrievably close everything. I usually just mean to close a tab, or minimize the window. But, no, *whoosh* and it's all gone. Solutions I'd welcome:
- An "Are you sure (Y/N)?" messagebox. Normally, I detest these, but I'd welcome the option in this case.
- An option to restore all tabs when I next start Mozilla. In this version (1.3b), it can open the one last site opened, but not the contents of all the tabs
- Disabling the close button altogether, forcing me to select File|Close or Alt-F4 to close the main window
I regularly lose my work through my own clumsiness. It sure would be nice to have the computer help me help myself.
10:49:58 AM
|
|
|
Tuesday, March 18, 2003 |
U.S. Army Web servers hacked. The incident occurred last week, when an undisclosed number of U.S. Army Web servers were hit in a so-called "0-day" exploit, one that takes advantage of a flaw nobody knew of and for which there was no available patch. [Computerworld News]
5:56:21 PM
|
|
Woo-hoo! With transaction support, replication, speed, scalability, and a low cost of entrance, this should give the other database manufacturers incentive to innovate. MySQL 4 Declared Production-Ready from Slashdot
4:02:05 PM
|
|
Happy anniversary to my blog. I started a year ago today. I've only used Radio since January 1st, but the older blogs have been scraped off that web site and are archived here in month-to-month format, as the Twiki Blog Archives 2002 link over to the right.
I've enjoyed this outlet for my writing, although I hope to start doing some more in-depth essays. On to Year Two!
3:59:34 PM
|
|
 Blogging is a bit light this week, with some work keeping me busy, and my evenings absorbed with the SciFi Channel's "Children of Dune" mini-series. I really indulged my geek self this weekend and sat and watched the entire 3-part, six-hour original on Sunday, and I've caught the two hour episodes each night. It wraps up tonight.
Frank Herbert's "Dune" is one of the finest pieces of science fiction written, with complex ecological, scientific, political, religious and philosophical threads running through it. It is one of my favorite science fiction novels. The follow-on books were never as bright and sharp and innovative as the original, but the entire bunch were well worth reading. It's a good adventure plot, too. Cute chicks and lots of explosions, too. Fun for the whole family.
2:28:38 PM
|
|
|
Monday, March 17, 2003 |
User 10,000 at PortalFox - Usuario Numero 10,000. It is our Pleasure to say that Didac Royo from Sant Cugat, Spain. It is our PortalFox Register User 10,000
Nos es grato informar que DÌdac Royo de Sant Cugat, EspaÒa, es el usuario 10.000 de PortalFox.
Thank you very much for all your support at 3 years of the creation of PortalFox Web Site
Muchas gracias a todos por permitirnos llegar a este n[dot accent]mero a 3 (TRES) aÒos de la creaciÛn de PortalFox
PortalFox Team
Equipo de PortalFox [FoxCentral.Net]
10:45:42 AM
|
|
|
Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
64.35.112.148 - 3 days after I have sent them notice. I'll just block their address from the server.
150.183.190.4 - The Korea Institute of Science and Technology
64.136.144.62 - Dock.net, Camarillo, California
64.110.98.80 - Ichinet, Chittagong, BD
64.119.79.88 - TXKNet, Texarkana, Texas
66.255.146.107 - Connexsys, Atlantic Beach, Florida
Only six unique attacks today. What do other people do with these? Put the IP address on a permanent black list? Ignore them?
10:07:59 AM
|
|
|
Saturday, March 15, 2003 |
So, we need a spare machine as a file and print server to let us straddle the transition of existing machines and make an on-disk backup of essential systems. (Current backup strategy is CD-Rs, ZIP disks, and duplicated spindles). The problem is that the machine with all of the hard disk space to store the backups is also the one getting the overhaul (including a DAT tape backup) so we can make the industrial-strength backups that we need. So, Steve and I hit the web, scouting OEM sites for a cheap, simple server. It needs a CPU, a NIC and a hard disk. Most everything else is optional.
So, here's what we ended up with:
- Biostar M7VKQ w/Duron 1300 CPU, integrated sound, video and NIC, $96 at Tom's Computer Warehouse
- Generic case with 300W power supply
- Generic CD-R (56x), floppy, 256 Mb RAM
- 100 Gb 7200 RPM Maxtor HD on sale at the local big box for $89
Total damages, with shipping $400. We'll dig a 14" VGA monitor, keyboard and mouse out of the cellar for the time needed to set it up, and then operate it remotely after that. Quite a good deal!
8:16:28 PM
|
|
... and your stuff always expands infinitely to fill your space. A few years ago, when Steve and I assembled my last desktop tower development workstation (Athlon Thunderbird 800, 512 Mb RAM - woo-hoo!), we installed a 40 Gb boot disk and striped two 30 Gb drives on the built-in Highpoint RAID controller (KT7-RAID motherboard, for those of you into those things). So who's ever going to need that much space?
After several years of faithful service, the machine is getting re-assigned as a file and intranet server. Re-deployed and re-tasked, as the PHB in me would like to say. And I have to clean up the mess. And what a mess it is. With an infinite amount of disk space, you hardly ever have to clean up after yourself :). I'm a faily well-organized guy, so lots of the software is just where it should be. My 4-CD collection of movie trailers and their backups, my Install directory, with all the files I've installed on the machines. Backups of those machines which have gone before us.
But some of the little junk is amazing. The Install directory was 11 gigabytes in size. Something's wrong there. It turned out that I had full RTM ISOs of VFP 7, VFP 8, Mandrake 8.1, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 and lots of other treasured little goodies lying around. Figuring out what to burn to CD for posterity and what to dump is going to take a while...
8:06:24 PM
|
|
"There are only twenty-three problems in computing and we solve them again and again." I heard the quote from Larry Barnes, then of the "Bob and Larry Show" at the local Microsoft office, now with Accenture, last I checked. He didn't claim the quote as original and I, as well as he, may have paraphrased it. Does anyone know the original source?
It does certainly ring true. I have coded the linked lists, the tree traversal, the parent-child-grandchild, the move-the-program-pointer and pop-the-stack, etcetera, etcetera. There only only a finite catalog of problem patterns and we solve them over and over again. But I would like to give the original author some credit. Any leads?
10:19:58 AM
|
|
|
Friday, March 14, 2003 |
Up and running. Seems like I had to add the MSXML4 and SOAP SDK files in order to get the web service to run correctly. So, now I have the first VFP 8 driven RSS subscription. Pretty cool!
The documentation was abyssmal. The VFP 8 help file stated that "If your application accesses only existing XML Web services, you must include only the SOAP Client merge module." There is no such module, or at least no module with a name or description even close to that. Much as I dislike installing unneeded glorp on a production server, I tried MSXML4, the SOAP Toolkit 3.0 redistributables and finally the MSXML4 MSM module from the InstallShield package that came with VFP8. The latter seems to have done it, although we all know that the former bits probably left parts of their "upgrade" behind, so I can't be sure it will always work with just the last step. It seems like there should be a better way to identify and resolve these dependencies.
The RSS file for FoxCentral.net is available for those who like to subscribe at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. Feedback would be welcomed!
4:10:05 PM
|
|
NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today. The Web is ten years old. How much it's changed, and how much it's still the same. Interesting commentary as always at SlashDot
3:06:02 PM
|
|
So, I'm plodding through the SOAP 3.0 Toolkit, looking for the clue on what component needs to be installed on a machine with the VFP 8.0 runtime in order for it to consume web services, and I come across this pearl of wisdom in the readme:
If you are first time user of SOAP, read the documentation.
Words of wisdom we should all live by. RTFM.
And if you are technical writer for Microsoft, spelling and grammar checker help lots!
11:41:51 AM
|
|
|
Thursday, March 13, 2003 |
... and falls back to VFP7. It seems that the Web Service support in VFP is not only accessed differently, it also works differently than its VFP7 counterpart. Plan on re-coding your Web Service calls: ffc\_webservices.vcx is no more, and the new VFP 8 IntelliSense script uses ffc\_ws3client.vcx. The good news is that you can use TRY... CATCH, the bad news is that you'll have to, while you iron out the bugs. While alpha tests on a development workstation worked fine, deploying to the production machine failed, presumably because of a dependency with new Web Service DLLs. Out of time for testing tonight; hope to get back to this over the weekend.
8:50:28 PM
|
|
Part of the process of rearranging the home office is moving a mini-tower system out to the server room (aka cellar) so that there are no more noisy machines in the office. Here's a machine I'll gladly check out: Hush ushers in silent PC [CNET News.com]
6:58:34 PM
|
|
Klings's Korollaries. Suits and Geeks is Arnold Kling's latest, and a complement to World of Ends. Arnold lists Five Clues for Geeks: - Intermediaries add value
- Property is not evil
- Computer animation is not a killer application
- Bashing Microsoft does not make you smart
- Markets are not exploitative
Lots to talk about there. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
5:52:46 PM
|
|
|
Wednesday, March 12, 2003 |
Chunking and scanning RSS feeds. "I've been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it's a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that's just a couple of clicks -- modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it's more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work."
... [Jon's Radio]
8:55:14 PM
|
|
SQL and XPath. V.S. Babu wrote to ask what product was executing the XPath-enabled SQL query I showed yesterday. It's a beta of the new version 3.0 of OpenLink's Virtuoso. I've refined the query a bit, so that it also picks up RSS 1.0 feeds:
... [Jon's Radio] Very cool. I checked out the site. I thought the killer graphic was here. Isn't this every protocol you ever wanted to connect? Wow.
8:05:26 PM
|
|
Jon Udell talks about the promise of power and freedom in this entry: "To have a multitasking and multithreaded operating system, right on my desktop, for my own personal use, seemed an incredible luxury." Good points. Pre-emptive multi-tasking would be so much cooler if it was the user who could preempt whatever the machine is doing that it thinks is so important that it's ignoring our clicks!
5:20:25 PM
|
|
Road Rage. "Neither United nor Air Canada appears to have any idea where my bag is, because they have no record, other than the tag they gave me when I checked the bag in Santa Barbara, of its existence." Poor Doc. Travel nightmares seem more the norm than the exception these days. Last time I travelled, luggage handlers in Detroit misplaced my bag, but fortunately I have such hideous tastes in colors that I could pick it out at 50 yards. I think travel is not as much fun as it used to be.[The Doc Searls Weblog]
11:29:27 AM
|
|
VFUG March Newsletter Now Available. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just released the March issue of its monthly newsletter. Articles in this issue include one by regular contributor Les Pinter, Email VFP Reports by Phil Bartow, Understanding Structured Exception Handling in Visual FoxPro 8.0 by Mike Helland, Part 4 of A Basic Introduction to Automation using MS Visual FoxPro by Matt Jarvis, We Are All Visual FoxPro Beginners by Carl Warner, Wireless Devices, Part 3: SMTP > SMS > MMS by Tom O'Hare, tidbits on conferences, what's new for Spanish members, assorted URL resources, tips including Using the Registry Class, End of File Gotcha, Extended Characters Showing Incorrectly, Office Menus - Prevent the Automatic Collapse, Paste from the Clipboard and then call a specific keypress, and more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version and all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. [FoxCentral.Net]
10:32:58 AM
|
|
Latest CodeRed variant lacks built in obsolescence. Same old tricks with moderate-to-low risk worm [The Register] Saw a couple hits in the web server log yesterday: GET /default.ida followed by a slew of NNNNNNN's. If you didn't see hits in your logs (you do read your logs daily, don't you?), perhaps you'd better check to make sure you're not infected.
62.212.113.49 - France, ADSL
61.222.207.187 - Taiwan
64.35.166.213 - Digital Solutions, San Jose
and on the second day,
64.106.162.220 - a customer of DataPipe of Hoboken, NJ
64.229.11.167 - a customer of HSE, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
64.35.166.213 - a repeat, from above. Five times.
64.35.112.148 - XO Communications, seven times.
64.231.108.158 - Bell Nexxia, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
64.252.199.131 - SBC Internet of Meriden, CT
So, I went from three to sixteen attacks in a single day. Hysterial media would predict the end of the world by the end of the week. Me, I think I'll just send email to the abuse aliases for the clients I can find.
Thanks to the ARIN WhoIs for the lookups.
9:48:22 AM
|
|
|
Tuesday, March 11, 2003 |
VFP Etch A Sketch. Dave Aring's VFP Etch A Sketch combines the nostalgia of the classic childhood toy with the modern computer. Created using only Microsoft Visual FoxPro, the VFP Etch A Sketch demonstrates just a small portion of this powerful software development tool's versatility. [FoxCentral.Net]
8:14:39 PM
|
|
In the past few days, I've had well-meaning friends and strangers forward on messages and postings from Andy Rooney, George Carlin and John Cleese. None of them were really from those authors. Check out http://www.snopes.com before sending along such silly stuff.
Far more seriously, an associates spouse sent on a warning and instructions on how to remove a virus that had somehow infected his computer. It was also a hoax, but a destructive one, with bogus instructions that removed the Java debugging manager from the machine. Folks, if you get a warning telling you to do something to your machine that you don't really understand, here's what you should do: check it out. Search Google for it. Check out the virus sites (http://www.symantec.com, http://www.antivirus.com, http://www.mcafee.com) for it. Call a knowledgable friend. Don't just blindly pass on instructions you don't understand. If you got an anonymous call telling you to shake up a seltzer bottle and unload it into your fuse box, you probably wouldn't blindly obey. THINK.
10:12:41 AM
|
|
I love the Radio News Aggregator as a way to collect the news of the day, but the only thing it doesn't give me is more hours in the day. I've got 11 tabs open in Mozilla with articles I want to read, and by the time I've gotten around to finishing an article, and deciding if I want to blog it, it's rolled off the end of the 100 articles in the aggregator. Not a big problem for Radio fans, you simply reset the number of articles here (Note: link only works if you run Radio). However, there are still too many articles for my brain to capture, even if my computer can. Here are a couple I missed blogging before they scrolled:
Whew! Drinking from a fire hose!
Postscript: And did I mention that Radio rocks? Having changed my settings from 100 to 300 articles, all of those articles above that had scrolled now appeared. No time delay waiting for the queue to fill up. What a well thought-out piece of software!
7:06:26 AM
|
|
|
Monday, March 10, 2003 |
Dave Winer's last post from his former home, heading East: 10:23AM. Logging off from California. Not sure when the next update will be. Seeya soooon! ";->" [Scripting News] Godspeed, Dave
4:57:04 PM
|
|
"CRM is the poster child for what's wrong with enterprise software," says Dan Farber, in this opinion piece on ZDNet.
1:04:41 PM
|
|
 Steve and I saw Daredevil yesterday. I thought the acting was pretty good. Some of the action scenes were too dark for me to follow exactly what was going on. I felt they could have supplied more depth, as I am a big fan of the original comic series, and like any good novel, you can't do it justice on the big screen. But they couldn't have stuffed any more into the movie, I think. A tantalizing teaser at the end hints that there may be sequels (I hear the main stars have already signed up for them), but we'll see how it does at the box office.
11:12:10 AM
|
|
DAFUG - March 2003 Meeting. The Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) is proud to announce that Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing, will be presenting "New tools that will provide additional business opportunities for Fox developers" on Thursday March 20, 2003. This will be Whil's third stop during his "Fox Is Everywhere" user group tour. Afterwards we will be discussing other FoxPro and developer topics at a local eatery. Directions, maps, email contacts, future meeting dates and topics, and other details can be found on our website www.dafug.org. [FoxCentral.Net]
8:06:17 AM
|
|
|
Sunday, March 9, 2003 |
 They say the red sqirrels are nastier than the grey ones, and will actually attack the grey ones. So far, we haven't see anything but cowardice out of this little guy - he vanishes the moment we appear.
2:26:18 PM
|
|
As I blogged early, sorry I missed this conference. Two items from David Weinberger's notes that I'll need to invvestigate a little further and consider integrating into an upcoming conference: SocialText is working on a wiki solution, and QuickTopic more of an instant bulletin-board setup for collaborative work on the net.
2:15:30 PM
|
|
I spend a fair amount of time in the evening escorting the dogs around the yard. The view upwards is often more interesting than the opposite. Sky and Telescope magazine's web site keeps me informed of what I'm seeing up there, helping me keep Aldebaron and Saturn straight. Tommorrow, Monday, I'm informed that "Mars reaches its most southerly declination of the year (ñ23.6[infinity])." Check it out: you can enter your location and the "Sky at a Glance" link will tell you what there is to see.
11:14:40 AM
|
|
Sounds like everyone is having an interesting time at SXSW Saturday. David Weinberger: "I gave the opening presentation: "Why the Web Matters." It was close as I've ever come to doing a straightforward "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" presentation. It was largely new material, which always makes me nervous. After all, if I have any capacity to learn from experience (discuss amongst yourselves), then the debut of new material will always be the worst presentation of it. I, of course, have no idea how it went. Now I'm in the Social Networks session. It's up against stuff competition: Cory Doctorow on a panel about Doing Good Online, and the cyborg guy, Kevin Werbach...." more at [Joho the Blog]
10:36:31 AM
|
|
|
Saturday, March 8, 2003 |
Another feature of Mozila I use a *lot* is the text-zooming using Ctrl+ and Ctrl-. Anytime the fonts come up too small in a page (or the hour starts to get late and the old eyes just can't keep up any more), a simple Ctrl+ and the font is bigger and far easier to read. Since I'm on a 15" 1600x1200 ThinkPad running Windows XP and ClearType, small type can be *really* small. The quick shortcut to zoomed fonts is greatly appreciated.
8:28:09 PM
|
|
Since switching to Mozilla, I have become a fan(atic) of tabbed browsing. I had been enjoying the MDI interface of Opera, too, for the speed and variety, adn still think that has the advantage of actually being able to look at more than one windows at a time. In this blog entry, David Hyatt, who coded the tabbed interface for Mozilla and two other browsers, discusses some of the interface design decisions that had to be made.
11:37:12 AM
|
|
Doc Searls interviews some of the players and provides an explanation for what SCO is up to, in suing IBM, in this Linux Journal article.
8:46:39 AM
|
|
|
Friday, March 7, 2003 |
Two of the bad boys who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto - Doc Searls and David Weinberger - are at it again. World of Ends is their next set of clues to the rest of us, especially the blockheads. Check it out.
5:39:14 PM
|
|
Boston FUG, March 26th: Application Development and Data over the internet. The Boston Area FoxPro User Group meets the fourth Wednesday of nearly every month at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA, 6 PM - 9 PM. Open to the public. For directions and more information, visit the group homepage. Subscribe or read the meeting announcements by clicking here. Wednesday, March 26, 6-7 PM: “Application Development Strategies: Final acceptance criteria, sign off, future enhancements. ” 7 - 9 PM: Guy Pardoe discusses how a VFP application can use a data source located anywhere on the Internet with the use of West-Wind Web Connect. Demonstrations will include the use of VFP and SQL Server backends. [FoxCentral.Net]
2:28:54 PM
|
|
Due to connectiviity issues, I've stopped trying to sample the FoxForum wiki. I can't tell if there's some problem with my connection, or if the server is refusing my connections. Ah, well, on to other things...
Update: Owner Steven Black posted a message that the site is down due to a failed router or server at his office. He's off on a skiing vacation this week and next, so we're wiki-less for the duration. Bummer.
11:23:16 AM
|
|
In his latest blog, Craig decides that Microsoft is right in enforcing their upgrade rights. I still think it is nonsense. The only people entitled to the upgrade are those who probably don't need it, since they aren't supporting previous deployments of FoxPro.
I think the upgrade discount ought to be a reward for loyalty to previous owners. I think the change in EULA is Microsoft's way of extracting more revenue from their customer base. They've done really well at this, keeping up their revenues in a period where nearly all high-tech businesses have reported a downturn. But they are doing it at a cost to their customer base.
Finally, the real problem I have with the EULA is that Microsoft slip-streamed it in, and didn't alert their customers that there was a license change they needed to be aware of. That was a violation of trust.
I had resolved to purchase a copy this time around, despite the seven MSDN subscriptions, past and present, and the many existing copies of VFP I own, as a means of communicating to Microsoft, in the language that they best understand ($$$) that VFP was an important product I wanted to see continued. I chose to purchase a full version, to avoid any question about my rights to use every version of VFP I need to support my customers. But I am not happy about the damage they are doing, once again, to their loyal VFP customer base.
10:05:04 AM
|
|
"Ah yes, Free. Nobody who's been awake online for more than five minutes can have missed Stewart Brand's famous aphorism, "information wants to be free". What he said next is just as important, for all it gets forgotten: "Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better"
-- Rupert Goodwin's commentary on ZDNet.uk. Read more here
9:39:36 AM
|
|
|
Thursday, March 6, 2003 |
What a great question! Asked in this c|net news.com article about the new InfoPath program, a tool for integrating Office documents. That Microsoft is considering Office as a "platform" for development is no surprise to us who have used the Developer's Kit for the last three or four versions. However, Micrososoft has had many tried-and-failed attempts with "Office-as-a-canvas," non-document-centric interfaces. One of these times they'll get it right.
8:31:46 PM
|
|
The Washington Post has this article. "...I have been testing a promising new breed of software that is helping me on the daily news hunt. Called "news readers," these programs fetch headlines and site summaries from hundreds of Web sites I preselect and present all the information in one spot on my computer desktop."
Everyone seems to be covering RSS and news readers. The question is whether someone will come out with the "killer app" that "crosses the chasm" or if it is just another interesting technology that fades into a niche. I'm not one to predict (I poured all my time, money and effort into Amiga), but it will be fun to see how it plays out.
8:18:26 PM
|
|
Dan Gillmor at Silcon Valley.com: "These deliberate waffles have two effects. They deter other developers who might do such a product for the alternative platform. And that deterrence further reinforces the Windows lock-in."
7:34:38 PM
|
|
Announcing a new site: TaskPane Central. The URL is http://taskpane.com. TaskPane Central is designed to encourage and facilitate the sharing of Task Panes, a wonderful and powerful addition to VFP 8.0. You can upload your own panes, and download those created by others in order to learn how to make them yourself, or to make suggestions for improvement. The site has a link to the corresponding section in OpenTech, so it's easy to post questions or comments on any of the panes you find there. Start playing with panes as soon as you get VFP 8.0 (you are getting it, right? ) - you'll be glad you did! Posted at FoxCentral.Net
7:27:06 PM
|
|
WCVB-TV is reporting there was a one-hundred-car pileup on Interstate 95 in Attleboro Massachusetts today, due to a couple inches of snow on the ground and low visibility. Fortunately, it seems like most injuries were minor.
It's pretty hard to imagine going back to commuting each day after a year in the home office.
5:37:27 PM
|
|
Oh No, SNOW!. Oh No, SNOW!Doesn't seem possible -- yikes! Ugh! Please, say it ain't so! We're in the middle of a big storm again. Oh no, no more snow! From Halley's Comment
Wasn't Halley skiing only a few weeks ago, in twenty below weather? It's two weeks until the astonomical end of winter, and usually a few more until New England can really claim to be in Spring. I was just talking with a fellow Contoocooker (Contoocookian?) and she was complaining that winter has been so looooong. It's been cold, and the snow's been a bit more than usual, but I can't wait to see what comes next. To paraphrase Twain, if you aren't griping about the weather, just wait a minute. Much as I gripe, too, living in someplace where the weather hardly ever changes would be pretty dull.
5:20:08 PM
|
|
The Pathos of Blogging. In a wide-ranging interview, Vint Cerf, the serendipitously-named Father of the Internet, explains the popularity of blogging: I think this is merely an indicator that we would collectively and individually like our lives to "count" somehow and if someone finds our blogs of interest, it is confirmation that our lives and opinions are making a difference to someone. I am not that pathetic! Ok, yes I am.... [Joho the Blog]
1:46:17 PM
|
|
How Important Is Copy Protection? By David Pogue. From the New York Times: Technology. David's a great wirter. I loved his Palm Pilot books and his O'Reilly "Missing Manual" series, but I don't think he gets it when it comes to copy protection.
I think David misses the point here, when he points out the DVDs were copy protected from the beginning and no one objects. What about DeCSS? You can rip a DVD if you want or need to, perhaps not legally. However, DVD video is too huge to move around right now. Music, otoh, is something we want in our cars, on the beach, in our own mixes, playing on our PCs. I bought my albums and I want to rip them to my machine for my personal use. I haven't had the urge to rip DVDs to my PC yet, as I can't think of a reason to do so. However, I should have the right.
The music and movie industres still haven't really proven that they lose sales, and I don't think they can. Bootleg copies of some teenie-boppers's latest music does not equate to lost sales; it is freely distributed marketing. If the recording industry stopped trying to sell such slop, maybe their sales would go back up.
I don't have a scientific sampling, but I know from talking to the local high school and college kids that they buy the albums of the artists they like. How do they know who they like? They hear the music. On the radio. On the TV. And through shared files.
Next gen home computing is going to have terabyte data storage in the basement and the ability to play any home video, CD or DVD in any room in the house, and it is right and proper that the music and video distributors let us do this.
Copy protection is dumb, a waste of money, and it doesn't work. I wish we'd get out of this hole we're digging.
10:24:43 AM
|
|
FutureDevconSpanishSessions. There is a market of VFP developers in Spain and Latin America that are hungry for Conferences, books and materials in Spanish. The same is true for Brazil (in Portuguese) and - I suspect - for other languages.There are regular Conferences in Europe ... posted from FoxForum Wiki
9:57:54 AM
|
|
I was beta-testing the http://www.foxcentral.net RSS feed publicly at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html, but thought I'd keep quiet about the other one still in alpha. However, I forgot that I updated my main blog page to show my subscriptions in the lower right corner. Doh.
The FoxForum Wiki is just a proof-of-concept, and updated only irregularly. The actual RSS is some time away, and probably will be hosted at a different site altogether, so feel free to experiment, but keep visiting the actual site.
9:56:08 AM
|
|
|
Wednesday, March 5, 2003 |
 A deeply disturbing image as I check to see who's looking at my weblog today. It gets even weirder when I click on the picture of, yes, that's Bill Gates, and I hear this. Creepy.
3:39:35 PM
|
|
NY Times: "Let's say you are the replacement for Jerry Garcia in the Grateful Dead. Your new job is to go in front of 20,000 fans and play music that they probably know better than you do."
from Scripting News
3:30:17 PM
|
|
SmartLetter. David Isenberg's new SMARTletter is terrific again. This one leads with the story of oil and applies it to the telephone system: If John D. Rockefeller were alive today, he would be building fiber to the home... And that David goes on to explain everything you need to know about how the future of telecommunications will unfold. Must reading. David has unearthed a graphic that's astounding because of its source.... reposted from Joho the Blog
9:22:07 AM
|
|
|
Tuesday, March 4, 2003 |
February VFUG Newsletter Now Available. VFUG (the Virtual FoxPro User Group) just released the February issue of its monthly newsletter. Articles in this issue include The XMLAdapter Class by Les Pinter, What The “Slammer” Worm Means To You by Mark Altenbernd, Part 3 of A Basic Introduction to Automation using MS Visual FoxPro by Matt Jarvis, Wireless Devices, Part 2: Addressing the Issue by Tom O'Hare, an article and resources on conferences, and some assorted utilities that include an Updateable SQL Server Cursor Class, a Wrapper for Gather, Number pages in multiple reports, Excel-VFP Functions, and more. As usual, you can view this monthly newsletter online or download its text version and all other back issues free at the VFUG site. Not a member? Join VFUG for free at the site. [FoxCentral.Net]
8:52:24 PM
|
|
 I enjoy watching the birds frolic, one of the advantages of a home office. I just saw a hairy woodpecker feeding on a suet feeder in the side yard. We get a fair variety of birds, including cardinals, robins, chickadees, nuthatches, goldfinches, purple finches, blue jays, tufted titmouse, hairy, downy and (rarely) pileated woodpeckers. There's a local murder of crows who keep watch over the neighborhood. I've also had a few solitary sightings of birds probably blown off-course by storms, including a red-breasted grosbeak and a bluebird. I enjoy the show, and a few dollars of birdseed each winter keeps the yard from becoming a frozen, desolate wasteland.
12:02:55 PM
|
|
People who post things on the web have to understand what they are doing. Wired: "When your medical records are indexed in Google, something's wrong." [Scripting News]
11:11:45 AM
|
|
Posted at Scripting News:
Last week I got a demo of the new Microsoft Office suite. Poor Jean Paoli, his hardware wouldn't cooperate, and every dozen keystrokes it would freeze up. Even so, I got the gist of what it does. I told him in advance not to expect much from me. Been burned by Microsoft too many times. Don't tell me it's open, because I expect, fully, that you will break anything I build in the next corner-turn. Anyway, no matter what I said, however begrudgingly, I think people will like and use the XML capabilities of the new suite. However, as a professional, I gotta say, it's not smart to do so. Microsoft's track record is really bad. It would be like booking a seat on an airline known for never making its schedule. Interop is not a feature you can sell if you don't honor past agreements. And Microsoft doesn't. And it's not the usual Evil Empire reasons. It's just corporate arrogance, the kind that plagued Apple in the late 80s and early 90s. Yup, today SOAP means "works with Microsoft" and that makes it no more interesting than COM was. [Scripting News]
9:53:31 AM
|
|
OzFox2003. The first VFP Converence held in the Asia-Pacific region since the mid 90's.July 21-23 2003 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Coogee Beach, Sydney, AUSTRALIA. Actual View from the Conference Venue. Carefully timed so our friends from the US can tie in a trip down... Posted onFoxForum Wiki
8:02:21 AM
|
|
Pre-order Visual FoxPro 8.0 and help the FoxPro community. FoxToolbox.Com is currently taking pre-orders for Visual FoxPro 8.0 Professional. Besides offering the lowest advertised price, FoxToolbox.Com donates 3% of sales to FoxPro User Groups for local marketing programs.
The Upgrade version is $299.00 and the full version is $562.47. Pre-ordering now could help lower pricing even further. Posting from FoxCentral.Net I've already ordered my full copy.
7:59:20 AM
|
|
|
Monday, March 3, 2003 |
One of the problems with testing out stuff on yourself is that you can easily screw up your own system. In trying a couple variations on the RSS scheme for Foxcentral.net and FoxForum wiki, I managed to purge my Radio Userland page of any real news, leaving only dozens of my self-generated entries. Hope nothing too interesting happened over the weekend. I'll have to catch the posts on the replies-to-the-replies, I hope.
8:10:21 AM
|
|
Brett Glass has some interesting observations about setting up the first community wireless network. Established in 1993 in Laramie, Wyoming, this not-for-profit group has brought broadband to the community, but faced some serious regulatory and legislative challenges.
8:05:46 AM
|
|
|
Sunday, March 2, 2003 |
Okay, I get it. This stuff's not so hard. (Beginner's luck, my pessimistic side thinks). http://www.foxcentral.net has a well-documented WebServices interface. I tap that to get the most recent news, convert the XML returned into the XML required of RSS news aggregators, and post it to the web site. Here's a sample, unedited:
Long Island, New York - VFP Boot Camp. Long Island, New York - VFP Boot Camp. Limited seating is available for our highly acclaimed VFP Boot Camp, March 18 - 20, 2003 on Long Island, New York. For more information, call 888-904-7900 or email sales@vfpbootcamp.com. [FoxCentral.Net]
5:32:12 PM
|
|
According to Steven Levy, Dr Pepper is going to use pseudo-weblogs to promote a new milk-type drink they're coming out with. Doc Searls is quoted as saying it won't work. I suppose it's fair play, I borrowed their I'm A Pepper song for the title of an essay I ran saying it's okay to be new at something. My song goes like this. "I'm a newbie, he's a newbie, she's a newbie, we're all newbies, wouldn't you like to be a newbie too?" [Scripting News]
5:06:22 PM
|
|
Struggled for a couple hours last night to get a Belkin f5d6020 wireless PCMCIA 802.11b card to work with Redhat 8.0, either with the wlan-ng drivers or the orioco-cs drivers. No joy. (Disclaimer: I am a clueless Linux newbie, but follow directions well and use Google a lot to RTFM). Belkin provides no support on their site for anything other than Win?? drivers. Hope they get a clue.
Finally swapped it out to one of the Windows machines and swapped in a LinkSys card I'd got working earlier.
5:03:26 PM
|
|
http://www.foxcentral.net was created by Rick Strahl based on an idea of Ken Levy's, as a technical proof-of-concept of using Web Services in Visual FoxPro, and also to serve as a bulletin board for the FoxPro community.
Once I've gotten a little further along in RSS generation for the FoxForum Wiki, that's the next place I'll set my sights...
3:48:40 PM
|
|
Dave Winer's perspective on how things got to be the way they are. Two years ago today: "To this day they think the battle over Java was with Sun, when it was really with the developers. Microsoft says they love developers, they live for developers, and at some level I believe them. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I don't think they have a clue how their actions cripple the developers." [Scripting News]
3:46:35 PM
|
|
FoxForum Wiki RSS, continued. Carl Karsten asks: HowToInstallAWebService. Ok, so I have a W2k box with IIS, and I have a dll that I made from WebServiceExamples. What do I need to do to the IIS box to get this to run? Install VFP runtimes. Is this a good use of ?ISX? If not, what needs to be done? from FoxForum Wiki
11:06:34 AM
|
|
|
Saturday, March 1, 2003 |
I ordered the *full* version of VFP 8.0 yesterday, to ensure I wouldn't be violating Microsoft's noxious requirement that an upgrade discount forbade me from maintaining previous versions on my machine. Ordered it from http://www.foxtoolbox.com, which had a very low price, and will donate 3% of it's revenues to VFP User Groups.
9:08:41 AM
|
|
|
