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Ted's Radio Weblog
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Monday, June 30, 2003 |
I'm disappointed to see a (un)civil war breaking out in the blogging community over RSS and a proposed new technique, nicknamed "Echo." While there are surely limitations to the older formats (lack of well-formedness, difficulty in parsing), there is the undeniable situation of an existing standard, or standards. ASCII had limitations, too, but tearing it all down and replacing it with a new format might not have been the right thing to do. Progress and evolution of a standard to a better one is better than breaking everything out there.
From [Jon's Radio]: Voices. So many voices in this most tumultuous of the many tumultuous moments I've lived through, in my five years of involvement with the RSS phenomenon. So many people taking time away from friends and family, this weekend, to consider the matters at hand. So tempting to simplify it all as a silly-season little-endian/big-endian tempest in a teapot. So much at stake. Update: So sad the voice that started it all has, for now, gone silent. Further update: And now is back, thankfully.
...
8:25:34 AM 
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The Inquirer has two parts of their series on "Engaging with the Open Source Community:" Part One and Part Two posted already. I've only skimmed the article so far, and I'm ploppoing them up here as a bookmark. Links via SlashDot
8:16:17 AM
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Sunday, June 29, 2003 |
Crashed the laptop hard this morning, just clicking on Windows Explorer. Restarting Outlook took many minutes, so I decided it was time to do some personal folders cleanup (after a backup, of course). Dropped about 20,000 messages from email lists with good archives, and decided to compact the file. Warning: don't try this at home kids, except perhaps overnight. In LookOut, er, Outlook 2000, File, Data File Management, Settings..., Compact Now, puts up a silly dialog with "Compacting" and a Cancel button. For hours. No progress indicator, no clues. What does "Cancel" do? Is it partially compacted, rolled back, or corrupted? (I know which one I'd guess.) How long will it take? What's the result? No clues.
Welcome to User Interface Hell.
Two hours later, and it is done thrashing the hard disk. The result? No change in size. Sheesh.
A shutdown and restart (for unrelated reasons) and Outlook hangs on startup. Another shutdown and restart and I get a message starting outlook that the "Send to Bluetooth" option hung up Outlook the last time, and allows me to disable it.
Do computers ever behave the same way twice?
12:15:40 PM
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"Ironic" seems to be the buzz-adjective of 2003, misused in nearly all situations. Zoe Williams of the Guardian attempts to set the record straight in this column.
8:15:10 AM
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The Chief Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, responds to the numerous requests FSF has received for comment on the SCO-IBM lawsuit. The short, sweet summary: "SCO, knock it off." Slashdot responds here with the usual assortment of punditry and flames (link set to a score threshold of 4 for better S/N).
8:11:13 AM
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Saturday, June 28, 2003 |
Patenting unique ideas for exclusive licensed use is an abomination to the software culture I was raised in. Good ideas should be shared, enhanced, amplified and refined. The *expression* of those ideas should certainly be copyrightable, to preserve, for a limited time, the rights of workers to protect their hard work from cut-and-paste. But, if I come up with a clever idea, say, of letting a customer order from my web site with a single click, well, that might be my competitive advantage for the week or month or year until my competitors can figure out how to duplicate my work, by which time I better have come up with a whole lot more clever refinements. That's the nature of competition.
Also, I don't believe that the patenting process fits well with the intellectual, rather than concrete physical, nature of the process.
Finally, if a patent is to be used, as is the rule within the mechanical community, the innovation must be shown to be sufficiently unique, and not just a clever extension of previous work. I don't think we yet have the cataloguing, nor the examiners the in-depth knowledge, to make that determination.
From Slashdot: pdajames writes "An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren't even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind."
10:37:42 AM
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According to this page on the Microsoft site, the Visual Studio 6 exams will no longer be offerered after June 30, 2004. I interpret the cryptic note "no candidate requirements to retain certification" to mean that current certifcation holders do not have to take exams. A few years ago, Microsoft was glad to terminate certifications left and right. I took core and elective exams three times to retain my MCSD certification. Now, I think they are facing dwindling numbers and will do what they can to artificially bolster those figures.
I thought the MCSD ("Solution Developer") idea was a good one, but I don't believe that Microsoft was ever able to estalish sufficient credibility and desirability for earning the certificate.
Disclaimer: I was a significant contributor to the VFP 6.0 Distributed Solutions examination.
7:41:22 AM
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Friday, June 27, 2003 |
Rick Strahl, VFP guru extrodinaire and recently named C# MVP (congrats, Rick!), has a section of his white papers site devoted to "Industry Commentary" with some great perspectives on what's happening.
5:11:29 PM
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250,000 people had signed up by 10:30 AM, and 370,000 by noon, meaning 1000 sign-ups per minute. It was a lead story on several news networks this morning. I tried to log on to do it, and got "Document contained no data." Perhaps it hasn't crashed, but it's not surprising that the site is laboring under the load. From the main FTC site: "Due to high registration volume, you may experience slow response time." Who doesn't want to opt out, after all?
Try: http://donotcall.gov or http://www.ftc.gov
The .gov site reports 635,000 by 2:30 PM and 735,000 by 5 PM. Trying to post at 6 PM, I get the site, but it times out reponding to my submission. I note the site is an ASPX extension. I wonder how many more registrations they could have had if they'd chosen a more scalable technology.
I logged in and registered Saturday morning at 7 AM without a hitch.
The New York Times has a story here.
2:24:16 PM
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Thursday, June 26, 2003 |
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Wednesday, June 25, 2003 |
I spent last night explaining, in 30 seconds or less, RSS and blogging and XML and VFP consumption of RSS and news aggregators and RSS production - whew! - and I'm pleased to see the discussion heat up again here (in the blogosphere) again today. Here's a sample of the links I'm trying to keep up with:
Fixing RSS's public-relations problem. Yesterday I spoke with two acquaintances, both of whom have decades-long track records in the high-tech biz, and neither of whom has ever used an RSS newsreader. When I mentioned RSS as an alternative to mailing lists, both said the same thing: "But I don't have time to visit 30 different websites in order to find things out." Of course, that is exactly the problem that RSS solves. And has been solving, for me, since 1999.
... [Jon's Radio]
Post IDs. FWIW, in RSS 2.0, I thought there should be a core-level post ID element, but I thought there was a pretty good chance, based on experience with the Blogger API, that each tool would have a different way of expressing it.
The compelling app for post ID's is backup and restore. If I'm using RSS to back up a weblog, and if I need to do a restore, the post ID's must be preserved, or when I regenerate the site after a restore, permalinks will break. Also since Radio and Manila are programming environments, developers may have created applications that depend on post ID's being preserved. The same is true of many other blogging tools.
Rather than put this in the core, I decided to put it in a namespace, specifically for Radio, and to revisit the issue after other blogging tools started using RSS 2.0 seriously. [Scripting News]
The lizard brain of RSS. Simon Willison is helping a friend get an RSS feed together for her weblog, and had some questions and had to guess because there is no FAQ. Of the three decisions he made, I strongly agree with two of them. Now for the third -- should he use link or guid to represent the permalink to the post? I believe he should use guid because that's what it was designed for. Link was designed for something else.
First, link has the easier name because it predates guid by three years, and its design is central to the initial design of RSS, to model items with three bits of data, title, link and description. Look at a News.Com story as the prototype for early, lizard-brain-level RSS. Every story they produce has all three items. My.Netscape presented each "channel" in a box, with TLD's. Now when weblogs started using RSS, almost immediately, not every post would have all three, in fact since Frontier was the main weblog tool at the time, and didn't support the common weblog-post model so familiar today, you might say that no weblog posts supported this model. It wasn't until Blogger came along in mid 1999 that TLDs were possible in weblogs. It wasn't until mid-Y2K that Manila supported TLD-type posts.
Anyway, I'm explaining all this background for a purpose, to say that, imho, link should be used only to link to the article being described by the post, it should only be used in the TLD context. I believe that was a very solid application and shouldn't be muddied. Of course many feeds these days take link seriously, like for example all 68 of the BBC feeds announced yesterday.
Now that said, Radio uses link the way Simon uses it. But then guid didn't exist when Radio shipped. Now that it does exist, I really feel strongly that people should use it, and let link be pure.
See also: Guids are not just for geeks anymore.
See also: RSS2-Support mail list. [Scripting News]
5:59:09 PM
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Pictures from the ETFUG kickoff meeting are posted to the ETFUG site. Volunteers took the pix with my new Canon PowerShot A70 camera, easy to use and pretty sharp results.
4:19:15 PM
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Tuesday, June 24, 2003 |
Steve certainly got the Wow! of the evening with a Universal Decorator Pattern using a clever feature of VFP. Interfaces can be kept in synch without having to constantly Xerox(ô) the properties and methods from the target object to its Decorators. Damn clever! Made it worth my trip to the meeting! The Agenda, briefly: Introduction by Curtis Jones, CTO of NetLearning. Ted Roche, 10 minutes on what happened at DevCon - see links here Steven Black on Niche Markets and VFP Ted on RSS/XML Steve on Advanced Design Patterns:
- Factory
- Decorator
- Hooks (and Hooks and Anchors)
- FoxPro Idiomatic Patterns: Set Path To idiom, Last Copy Wins idiom
Great Stuff! I suspect the only person who's heard the Patterns session more than me is Steve, and I pick up a new idea or subtlety every time.
9:28:36 PM
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Apple harvest yields computers, OS. The company says its new G5 machines are faster than any Windows-based PC on the market, but some are questioning that claim. Also: Putting a price on Panther, Apple's new operating system. [CNET News.com]
8:03:27 PM
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Blogging live from Knoxville! Demoing RSS, XML, Visual FoxPro's CursorToXML() and XMLToCursor() as well as scraping HTML using the Win32 API and consuming Web Services using VFP. Summarized the state of RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0 and showed how VFP could produce compliant RSS XML feeds, like the 2.0 XML feeds at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. The Task Pane manager for Web Services was handy for a speedy demo of Web Services.
First meeting of the East Tennessee FoxPro User Group (http://www.etfug.org) is a great success, with 18 folks attending. I presented RSS and Steven Black did a short presentation on "Marketing in a niche market" and a longer presentation of "Advanced Design Patterns.
8:00:09 PM
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Monday, June 23, 2003 |
Eric Kidd asks where his future is, where the industry will be in 2031, and what to do next?. I've been pondering the same question, although my timeline is a little shorter.
9:57:53 PM
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"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."
Thomas Jefferson, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 6, H.A. Washington, Ed.,1854, pp. 180-181.
From Miles at TinyApps.org via David Weinberger's Joho The Blog
9:50:36 PM
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Sunday, June 22, 2003 |
Made it back without incident. Glad to break that string of bad luck!
11:16:12 PM
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Abe Lempel, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch
Discovered a neat algorithm to squelch
CompuServe incorporated it into the GIF
Good programmers soon caught the drift
The format was published, free and open
Many useful things started to happen
Then Unisys Corp purchased the rights
And changed the terms on LZW overnight
The useful algorithm was off limits
Ransom to corporate greed and profits
On June 20, 2003, the LZW patent expired
Shame on Unisys for what has transpired
Someday Unisys books will be in arrears
While the ideas of LZW survive the years
Funny. From Slashdot.
11:58:04 AM
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David Pogue previews the Treo 600 for the New York Times. The good news: the best phone-PDA combination to date. The bad news: "to date" is a bad phrase, as it's not due out until the fall. A little FUD to depress sales for the summer, both on competitors and on Handsprings's earlier models.
Looks gorgeous.
11:14:07 AM
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I'm traveling back to the client this afternoon. Hooking up with Andy Kramek in Detroit and sharing the flight from there. I guess I'm learning to make this more of a routine practice and less of an event. I've got checklists and To-Do lists and bags of stuff. I've been pretty good the last few trips in remembering all the important stuff, and only needing to pick up minor stuff like toothpaste or sunscreen.
Three day turnaround from DevCon to Knoxville is just barely enough time to unpack, do the laundry, pay bills, monthly bookkeeping, repack and throw a combined birthday/Father's Day party. Sleep? Oh, darn. Knew I forgot something...
10:51:37 AM
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Saturday, June 21, 2003 |
Andrew MacNeill got to see my blog in Palm Springs and we sat down and walked through some of the power of Radio Userland's blogging and news aggregator tools. He was impressed. So, as soon as he got home, he set up a Blogger page here. Welcome aboard the blogosphere, Andrew!
8:25:33 AM
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Friday, June 20, 2003 |
What a tough trip! Twenty-three hours door-to-door. The AmericaWest Express puddle-hopper from Palm Springs didn't bother to show up until an hour late. Like many travellers, that meant I missed my connection in Phoenix. Had to wait hours and then fly in the wrong direction to the City of Lost Wages and wait more hours for a flight to Boston, arriving at 2 AM vice 7:30 PM the previous evening. Of course, there was no bus to get home to New Hampshire at that hour, either. Not one of the three flights I took yesterday left on time - two were over an hour late and the middle one a half-hour. While the staff were helpful and courteous, you can't run an airline if you can't move passengers where and when you promise them.
10:59:13 AM
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Thursday, June 19, 2003 |
Just checking out, I noticed that I was charged for four days of STSN internet access at $9.95 a day. Apparently, somewhere in the fine print I skimmed was the agreement that I was signing up for my entire stay, and not for a single day, as I had assumed. I had been taking advantage of the conference wireless and frugally avoiding use in my room. Hopefully, I can get the unused days taken off the bill. But watch it out there, folks! That's a rip-off I hadn't anticipated.
9:47:47 AM
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003 |
On my way into the closing session. Another DevCon done. Might not get to post again until I'm home - a long day on the road tomorrow.
5:30:11 PM
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Mark Michaelis, a SourceSafe MVP, posts to his blog the following:
Unfortunately I can't comment on the future of Visual Source Safe except to say that significant work is being done in this area. If this MSDN chat is any indication, the demand is huge as the entire chat is essentially consumed with, "will the next version support..." type questions.
It's great to hear that there's some progress being made. As the author of the only currently-available book, Essential SourceSafe, I've contacted aa number of Program Managers at Microsoft trying to get involved in new versions, and finding out if a revision to the book might make sense. I was surprised at finding SourceSafe 6.0d in my latest MSDN shipment without a word it was coming.
9:38:11 AM
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Tuesday, June 17, 2003 |
Saw great sessions today:
- Using Web Services with Visual FoxPro 8 - Doug Hennig
- Using Visual FoxPro 8 to Provide and Consume XML - Toni Feltman
- Graphing with Visual FoxPro - Ted Roche
- Lunch with the Speakers for me. Had a great time with the team at Omnicell, Inc.
- Building a Data Access Layer with Visual FoxPro 8 - Toni Feltman
- How to Be an Independent Consultant - Mac Rubel
Next comes the DevCon dinner party.
9:00:45 PM
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Steve Gillmor talks about the Allchin Tax in this article in Computer Reseller News. The punchline:
Microsoft's RSS engineers are already hard at work--they need buy in from the leadership and a core authoring object that plays fair across the XML blogosphere.
Sounds like quite the challenge.
12:06:06 AM
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Monday, June 16, 2003 |
William Grosso: "Is it just me, or did we have a month of good, old-fashioned, Internet time in the web browser universe." Link via Scripting News.
11:59:59 PM
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Europa goals
Based on wish list customer feedback
Enhance database language and types
Additional end user UI features
Increase developer productivity
Improve report writer significantly
Extend XML, .NET and SQL Server interop
More designer hooks for extensiblity
UPDATE: Thanks to Tamar Granor for a few updates.
Top 10 ER Rejections
Object oriented puzzle
Localized Pig Latin version
ACTIVATE WINDOW mywindow NOWINDOW WAIT WINDOW NOWAIT WINDOW IN WINDOW whatwindow
Help rewritten in Dr. Suess Language (Fox In Box)
DWIM() function
More product bugs and perfomance impediments
XCMD support
SET RTFM ON/OFF
BROWSE wizard
CreateObject(ìFoxClippyî)
Europa Reporting
Protect existing FRX investment
Added output flexibility
Open architectures
Better resuse story
Design-time improvements
Access to report objects at runtime
Design-Time Improvements
International
FontCharSet ñ font script support
Grid Scale dialog ñ inches, centimeters
Design-time labels
PROTECTED design mode
Tooltips
Better DataEnvirnonment story
_REPORTBUILDER, Design-time events
_REPORTDESIGNER
Runtime Improvements
Object Oriented syntax
More flexibility with Report Chaining
New output types (e.g., XML, HTML) and open architecture to plug-in 3rd party output engines.
Report processing events.
Europa has no limits...
Calvin video
USE Customer, IntelliSense kicks in, now color changing as it is being typed, compiling in the background.
Randy demos
New limits: arrays > 64k
Program code (individual procedures) unlimited
Huge number of features of SQL:
No limit on joins
No limit on subqueries
No limit on UNIONs
No limit on # of tables
No limit on IN() args
Multiple subquery nesting
GROUP BY in correlated subquery
Sub-select in FROM clause
Subquery in select list projection
ORDER BY using field name with UNION clause
Optimize LIKE "sometext%"
Optimize TOP N
UNIONs in INSERT INTO Ö.SELECT
Subquey in UPDATE
Correlate INSERT/DELETE
Optimize deleted tags
New data types ñ VarBinary, timestamp, VarChar (field width actually returns VarChar length),
CAST() function
ICASE() function
Binary indexósmaller than existing indexes (up to 30x). Size maintained during replace, only increases on append.
Toolbox feature with dock-ability for native VFP form
Anchoring for resizable forms- no code running
Button graphic alignment with text ñ spacing between graphics and text: PictureMargin, PictureSpacing
Example of graphical button with hotkey
Checkboxes with multi-line text
Listboxes can hide the scrollbar if there aren't enough items to fill the list
Listbox RowSourceType of ìCollectionî
Grid MousePointer and MouseIcon property in Column and Header properties
Themes in labels support ìGroupBoxCaptionî
GDI support for labels ñ let's you specify an angle or rotate at runtime!
Polylines and Polygons
Bells and Whistles, arrow and shapes
Project manager will allow you to open Class Library in Class Browser.
When docked, there are many more items on the context menu.
Can load PRGs in Class Browser.
Property sheet: cursorschema string was limited to 255 characters from CursorAdaptor builder
Zoom dialog supports extended characters, like carriage return for captions
ExpressionBuilder with syntax coloring and background compiling
Add property features with default value!
Calvin video: new property dialog, default value, no longer limited to 255 characters, too.
Running user code in the property window reads a memo field and can execute script (IntelliSense in the memo field!) wrapped in XML. Example of Inputbox() call to prompt for custom properties. This might support Capitalization for custom properties or ìFavoritesî tab for property sheet.
10:46:20 PM
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Hope to polish these up a little later, but here's the raw typing, no spell-checking. About 300 attendees at the 8 AM keynote.
Taskpane
Toolbox
Empty class
AddProperty() and RemoveProperty()
Collection class
Structured Error Handling
TRY/CATCH/FINALLY
Event Binding
BINDEVENT() and RAISEEVENT()
enhanced getfile dialog
now auto-increment for tables
enhanced view designer
cihild member subclassing
vcs support for more classes
many new features for Grid control
Code Refences tools
Beyond XMLToCursor/CursorToXML
Hierarchical XML support
Multiple VFP data cursors to XML
XML to multiple VFP data cursors
XML diff grams
VFP data cursors, tables, DBC
ADO.NET compatible
XMLTable and XMLField classes
Full control of XSD schema used
CursorAdaptor Class
Similar to DataAdapter in ADO.NET
ADO/OLEDB
ODBC
Native VFP cursors
XML and XML Web services
Programmable events
Stored procedures control
New Data Features
DataEnvironment subclassing
DataEnvironment Builder
CursorAdapter class
CursorAdapter Builder
XMLAdapter class
Form BindControls property
Enhanced VFP OLE DB Provider
VFP 8.0 and VS .NET interoperability
VFP 8.0 Performance
LOCAL a1[10000]
x1=SECONDS()
FOR i = 1 TO 10000
a1[i]=CREATEOBJECT("Custom")
ENDFOR
RELEASE a1
x2=SECONDS()
? x2-x1
VFP 7.0 = 24.5 seconds
VFP 8.0 = 0.45 seconds
DevCon Tips-of-theDay
This is the 14th DevCon conference
msdn.com = msdn.microsoft.com
Free GenScxrnX suppot expires in 2004
dot prompt still works in VFP 8.0
VFP 8.0 runs great on Tablet PCs
VFP 8.0 is hotter than Palm Springs
Europa is a moon of the planter Jupiter
Microsoft is working on Europa!
Works well with Visual Studio .NET
Greatly enhanced XML support
XML Web services
ADO.NET
VFP OLE DB Provider
ASP.NET Web forms
.NET Windows forms
Visual FoxPro Toolkit for .NET
VFP and .NET teams working together
.NET
Software for connecting information, people, systems and devices
(video)
8:32
Building Connected Applications
Connected business, connected experience, connected development
clients, experiences and solutions, tools, services, servers,
.net in the center, web services wrapped around all
Visual Studio .NET 2002 (last version)
.NET Framework 1.0
Simplified deployment - no DLL Hell, no need for Registry, version DLLs
All language under one roof
All application types under one roof (web, windows, devices)
Single development paradigm
Language enhancements- object-orientation to VB.NET, C#
ENterprise lifecycle support
ACT, Enterprise templates, Microsoft(r)Visio
.NET Framework 1.1
increases scalability and performance
side-by-side execution with .NET Framework 1.0
Enables no-touch deployment from the internet
code access security in ASP.NET
ASP.NET mobile controls
Native ODBC and Oreacle DB 7i/8i support
IPv6
.NET Framework version 1.1 included with Mocrsosft WIndows Server 2003
Buildeing connected Applications
Mobile development
mobile web browser - visual studio.net, ASP.NET mobile controls
PocketPC devices used .NET Compact Framework - can use WinForms
Developer productiviity
increased IDE perforamnce
startup time reduced - now using a native control
improved IntelliSense(r)
Dynamic help faster
Object browser faster
Code editor drop-down menus faster
Upgrading applications
run multiple versions of VS side-by-side
- VS 6.0, 2k2, 2k3
upgrade from VS 2k2 to 2k3
only the project files are updated
doesn't change any of your sources
application configuration
Enhanced "Add Web Refernce" dialog
Code editor enhancements
net components
debugging enhancedments
community support and search
Languages
VB.NET
fullu oo, free threading, structured error handline
host vb 6.0 controls in WinForms
Improved IntelliSense
C++: managed extensions
ISO C_++ conformance
C# component-oriented, type-safe
J# Java-language syntax, full integration with VS,NET
Microsoft Visual SOurceSafe
Application Centter Tes
Enterprise Templates and Policies
Enterprise InstrumentationFramework
Visio - UML tools
Code Obfuscation
More information:
New .NET Framework certifications
MCAD
MCSD
Self-paced book/resources
Upgrade from VS 2003: $29
Empowerment through Ecosystem
Partners and community
150 VSIPs and compoent vendors, 300+ tools
.NET Code Wise Community
Third-party .NET community "influentials:
online communities reach 4.5M user sessions/month
Authors, publishers, trainers, speakers
INETA (International .NET Association)
200+ INETA user groups worldwide representing 66,0000
700+ MSDN user
Demo: VFP 8.0 and .NET
VFP Business Tier, COM object accessed bother from VFP Form and using ASP.NET XML We Services to connect to .NET WinForm, .NET WebForm, Pocket PC, Cell Phone
11:49:35 AM
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Got a surprise birthday party, cake and all, when friends interrupted my pre-conference session wth 5 minutes to go to sing "Happy Birthday." Attendees seemed amused. After one refrain, they let me get back to finishing the presentation, only 10 minutes late or so. Carrot cake, a clever card and a golf club cover in the shape of a fox made it a fun birthday surprise.
The conference starts in earnest in two hours, with an 8 AM keynote. Reception tonight and a bonus session, an outdoor dinner and another bonus session tomorrow night will round out the schedule. We'll be busy.
8:55:38 AM
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Friday, June 13, 2003 |
EastTennesseeFoxProUserGroup. Starting in June, the East Tennessee Foxpro User Group meets regularly in Knoxville, TN Next Meeting (inaugural meeting) When: June 24 2003 at 7:00 pm, though the room is open starting at 5:00 pm, and has Internet access. Where: 16 Emory Place, [FoxForum Wiki]
2:58:58 PM
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All my bags are packed, and I'm ready to go... (to OS X). I read David Weinberger's account of PC woe today, and a smile ran across my face. Not because I wish ill on David; I most certainly don't (and I feel his pain). I smile because his account of having to reinstall software on his Windows machine coincides with my re-reading for the second time David Coursey's Macintosh OS X for Windows Users: A Switcher's Guide.
You see folks, I can now admit it. I am deep into the planning stage of making my next computer purchase, which will be an Apple 15" Powerbook with OS X. I'm not going to get into the Windows bashing. I like Windows 2000 and Windows XP. They're pretty stable and it's not Microsoft's fault that it has to make its products compatible with every grain of sand on the beach.
But I have several computers in my home and it's not my fault that they require constant rebooting and reinstallation of software. Or that they attract viruses like horses attract flies. Even when they work as they are supposed to they require tweaking and configuring.
Of course, all computers require maintenance, and I'm glad for the very thorough education in this process that the various versions of Windows have afforded me. So now I stand before you today a very technically savvy man, with a great respect for Microsoft engineers, as I say: I don't have the time or inclination to do it any more. I'll always have at least one computer that has Windows in my home, but starting soon I'm going to have at least one that has OS X and I suspect that will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
And I will always feel a tremendous sense of loss for the poor souls who will have chosen to remain behind, toiling in the fields of configuration and reinstallation. I'd stay behind and help, but I just can't. I'm lazy and I don't want to fight my computer anymore. When I put it to sleep I want it to go to sleep and when I open the case I want it to wake up quickly.
I have the feeling that switching to Mac OS X will be an awakening of sorts for me to. It's not a panacea, but I will be that I won't be rebooting as often as I do now. I'll let you know.... [Ernie the Attorney]
2:58:05 PM
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 A typical frantic day of pre-flight chaos. Gotta be on a bus 10 miles from home at 6 Am tomorrow to make the connection to the wait-in-line to the flight to the place where I start talking at 8 AM the next day (fortunately, a couple time zones to the left). Ah, such a life...
Forty-two errands to run today, including a 250-mile round-trip dropping off computers and visiting clients. I can sleep, I've been told, when I'm dead. Good. I'll be ready then.
12:23:17 PM
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Great news, and hopefully a step in the right direction. I've been following SourceGear for years, as I use their SourceOffSite products to connect to client's remote SourceSafe databases. SourceGear has developed a powerful replacement for the file-server model SourceSafe, a new product called "Vault." While a promising client-server, low-bandwidth architecture, I was disappointed when they chose to limit themselves to the Microsoft platform with .NET languages and SQL Server as their back-end, making for a more expensive and more platform-dependent application, a more difficult sell to my clients in these lean times. Now, SourceGear has announced a venture with Mono to port clients to other platforms. My hope is that the server may follow.
SourceGear and Ximian Announce Partnership. Link from OSNews
9:40:47 AM
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Now, to see if the cutting edge hardware I bought back in January is upgradable and workable with the new standards... IEEE approves 802.11g standard. The new standard sets ground rules for wireless LAN gear capable of at least 24Mbit/sec. and up to 54Mbit/sec., while remaining backward compatible with 802.11b gear, which tops out at a maximum 11Mbit/sec. From Computerworld News
8:26:49 AM
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In a CNET interview following the release of a company-wide memo, is Ballmer actually trying to steer a new course, or offereing up marketing fodder? Hard to read, as always... Ballmer: We Have to Think Differently Linked via OSNews
8:15:17 AM
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 A fixture in our house in the 60s, a way to know that, despite sometimes horrific news, there was always a basic humanity I could count on. Brinkley never liked it, according to an interview rebroadcast with Terry Gross yesterday, but the simple ritual of two men wishing each other good night set a remarkable tone to the entire news show.
David Brinkley, 82, Newsman Model, Dies. David Brinkley was the wry reporter and commentator whose NBC broadcasts helped define and popularize television news in America. By Richard Severo. From the New York Times: Business
Good night, David.
8:05:46 AM
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Thursday, June 12, 2003 |
Dad got to celebrate his first Father's Day when I was born on the day... a few years ago. It's also my birthday this year. To celebrate the day, and because I finally got around to it, I picked up Dad's computer and took it home to tune it up. It's a PIII-550, Dell Dimension, 128 Mb RAM, 10 Gb HD, Win98SE, IE 5.00.000 (oh, oh), a couple of years old. Did the usual scandisk, defrag (had to go into safe mode to get it to work, oh-oh!). Ran Windows update to get IE 6.0 SP1 and 17 other critical patches. Then on to virus check. I used HouseCall's online service (http://www.antivirus.com), as his Norton subscription had expired years ago. Oh-oh, again. 512 copies of Klez.H had infected just about everywhere. Used Symantec's tool to clean it up, and it looks like it was able to repair nearly all the files. Then, on to Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoft.de) to remove Alexa and a doubleclick.net cookie it didn't like. Got 512 Mb of RAM and a new copy of Norton to keep things clean.
12:07:33 PM
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Tuesday, June 10, 2003 |
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Monday, June 9, 2003 |
 A wooded area adjoining my property, known locally as George's Park, is town land that houses the town high school and ball fields. In the corner by my land, it is heavily wooded. A dozen pink ladyslippers, like the one at right, spring up this time of year. The New Hampshire state wildflower, it is an endangered species in several nearby states.
5:44:13 PM
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Testing interoperability of some web sites, I just downloaded, installed and paid the $15 upgrade fee for Opera 7.11. What a great browser! Well worth the cost - and I didn't even have to buy an operating system to go with it!
9:23:11 AM
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Sunday, June 8, 2003 |
A disturbing question here: Is Linksys Violating The GPL? If true, am I, as an owner of the WRT-54G, an accomplice or victim?
I hope that LinkSys can be pursuaded to do the right thing here.
5:52:42 PM
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Saturday, June 7, 2003 |
Leland F. Jackson, CPA posts yet another interoperability success story for VFP here. UPDATE: Leland points out that since Perl is using the ODBC driver, not updated for VFP since 6.0, there are a few limitations: no stored procedures will run, and 7.0/8.0 features such as auto-incrementing keys will fail, too.
5:46:34 PM
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SCO, Novell continue bickering over Unix ownership. "SCO says newly uncovered documents further prove its claims, whereas Novell says it has retained patent rights to Unix." from Computerworld News. I wish SCO would stop beating around the bush are reveal what the problem is. Vendors who choose to continue using their code could pay them a license fee, and vendors who choose not to could stop. Of course, that might not advance the value of SCO as much. Perhaps we should start a PayPal fund to buy them out.
1:51:49 PM
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Made it home in one piece, 7 hours door-to-door, after a long day of work. On impulse power only for today.
12:52:07 PM
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Friday, June 6, 2003 |
On the road again, 1500 air miles to cover 1000 great circle miles, with no change of time zones. Going home. See y'all tomorrow.
1:40:54 PM
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Thursday, June 5, 2003 |
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Wednesday, June 4, 2003 |
US Robotics Claims 100 Mbps. "US Robotics offering proprietary 100 Mbps + speeds in new "Turbo" 802.11g gear: The explanation that they're placing all the speed on a single channel doesn't make any sense, of course. They're limited by channelization, so they're increasing the symbol rate in some way, which certainly would decrease distance because of issues of reflection in OFDM (or whatever the Texas Instruments underlaying chips are doing at 100 Mbps -- PBCC?). More interesting is a $250 product they plan to ship in July which has the Linksys WAP54G features (AP, point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, client) but also can act as a repeater for relaying signals. It's unclear whether it can be a bridge and an AP simultaneously...." from Wi-Fi Networking News
6:29:13 PM
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A flaw in IE6 that requires a patch to Windows Server 2003 is rated as "moderate" with the logic that servers would rarely need a browser. Oh, come on! Too funny!
Update: Okay, that's overstated. It turns out that IE on Win2K3 ships in a highly secure mode not vulnerable to the patch's target. However, the security mode may need to be downgraded in order to access some content, so the threat is still there.
Windows Server 2003 gets first patch. "Microsoft says the flaw's details are a positive sign for "Trustworthy Computing," despite the embarrassment of releasing a patch barely two months after the OS launch." From CNET News.com
3:10:23 PM
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I'm not sure I'd tick off a guy who blogs under the nom de plume of Ernie the Attorney. Here's his story: It's raining inside my car - I wonder if that is the sign of a major design flaw?. Well the drought finally ended last night, and it looks like we got about 2 inches of rain. I know this because I measured the rain collection in my BMW X5's center console cup holder. So how could I be so stupid as to leave all four of my windows and the sun roof open during a major downpour?
Believe me I didn't. Here's what happened. Last night, during the rain storm, the car spontaneously lowered all of the windows and opened the sun roof. Really.
And this is not a design flaw, or a bug. It's a feature.
Here's how it works: BMW makes their ignition keys so that you can wirelessly lower the windows to your car by holding down a button on the key. It takes a good 30 seconds of holding to open all of the windows, but you can do it just by holding down that button. Obviously, the problem occurred not because of a key button being held down, but because of some stray electrical signal in the car's vicinity (perhaps from the electrical storm).
So I asked the service manager (after I explained this problem, which apparently has occurred before) if he could disable the "feature." He said "it can't be done." I asked him if he thought it was a good idea for a car to be susceptible to opening all of the windows because of some freak electrical activity in the car's vicinity. He made an effort to understand my point, but obviously I'm biased. He said most people like the ability to open the windows with their key. So he didn't think there was any sort of design flaw.
Oh, and any damage that might have occurred won't be covered by the BMW warranty. Remember, guys, this is not a bug it's a feature. And a mandatory feature.
So what if, while parked outside a downtown restaurant, the car decides to open all the windows and invite a few thieves to get inside and poke around, where they can find the valet key and drive away? (hint to the thieves: bring a bathing suit)
I can't wait to talk the boys from BMW NorthAmerica and commend them on their fine engineering. I am definitely going to ask them what frequency their key system operates on.
6:25:06 AM
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Tuesday, June 3, 2003 |
... or no way at all. I don't know if I actually coined that in the Hacker's Guide, or if I was just passing on a meme of the community, but here's a sterling example. How do you force the Visual FoxPro Report Writer's Preview window to maximize on display? MaximizePrintPreview from FoxForum Wiki
8:16:56 PM
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Had a humbling reminder today. I was looking for a little util | |
