http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.phpMad Rablings01234212223http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=174Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:07:59 -0500My blog has moved. Check it out here at http://cully.bizhttp://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=173Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:59:25 -0500Hello faithful readers! I'm moving my blog! Sorry for any inconvenience. Please update your links to point to http://cully.biz. I'm switching over to a WordPress blog and it gives me greater controls and greater options including categories. For the next couple of weeks, if I make a posting there, I'll post a cross link over to it from here. Thanks, and see you on the flip side!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=172Sat, 30 Dec 2006 10:38:14 -0500I'm reading the “Vista: The Essential Guide” issue from PC Magazine (January 2007) and it's full of confusing contradictary information. BTW, this is a “double issue” but somehow, it still feels light compared to what it was historically. We start with the “First Word” by Jim Louderback. He starts his article off with the statement “Our long,national nightmare is over!” I'm sure he had a grin on when he wrote that. Louderback was interviewing Jim Allchin about Vista. Allchin stated “It's preordained that we are moving to 64 bits. I cannot predict how long it will take, but we will get there.” Louderback reports that Allchin believes “that with Vista, the time is now.” Okay. I'm confused. Are we now at 64 bits or not with Vista? Are all of the driver manufacturers delivering 64 bit versions? We'll have to see what kind of fallout this is going to have in the public sector. Louderback goes on speaking with Allchin about IPv6. Louderback states “Why go IPv6? Better quality of service, better connectivity, and the death of NAT.” Is the death of NAT a good thing? I wouldn't want all of my machines to have a public IP address and be addressable from the outside world. This puts too great a of a burden on my firewall. NAT is a great tool (one of many) in protecting my machines from attack. Is there something that is going to take it's place? Looking deeper into the magazine we have to differing opinions from Michael J. Miller and Bill Machrone. Miller states “Though long overdue, Vista offers some impressive features. The graphics finally takes advantage of the hardware that most PCs have had for quite some time.” The very next page (after the Matrox advertisement) Machrone states “Don't upgrade to Vista – Buy a new computer instead. To get all the performance that Vista has to offer, chances are somewhere between good and excellent that the system now on your desk isn't going to deliver.” He goes on later to state “... opt for the gut-level improvements” “That means hardware that can deliver more than a new graphics card and an additional gig of RAM” I think Machrone is more on the mark on this subject. Don't bother upgrading an old machine. It's time for a brand new one, even a machine that might not exist yet. It feels like Vista is targeted for a machine that isn't on the mass market. Who wants to run Vista on a machine that was designed for high-end gamers? It feels like we're in a “tweener” stage here. We're moving away from XP and the $1K hardware, and moving into an area where we're not going to be happy with hardware and OS performance for a year or so to come.http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=171Fri, 01 Dec 2006 13:29:41 -0500I've been deluged with spam lately with the attached GIF files. The GIF files are even using OCR defeating technology now!!! Gag. I don't have Spam Bayes or other advanced spam filtering implemented at the moment, so what am I to do? I just found this web site that details how to create a message filter that really helps and has great step by step instructions. It doesn't actually look for a GIF attachment but looks for email that is multi-part and the sender isn't in any address book. What can I say except that it seems to work! (for the time being. {g}) http://compserv.physics.harvard.edu/imagespamhttp://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=170Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:04:27 -0500I had a few minutes to play and I wanted to see if I could get a REALbasic CGI application running. I opened up RB on Windows, and opened up a RB Project file (cgiapp.rbp) that I had pulled from the web. I made a small change to their "Hello World" application, built for Linux. I copied it then into CGI directory of my Linux laptop, and ... it worked!!! {Happy Dance!} Rocking! Amazing. Amazing that a guy of my limited intelligence could get this working. Hmmm. Can I get this to work on my hosting account at HostMySite.com? I FTPd the files up into my CGI directory and ... 500 error. Dang. I checked the execution settings via CHMOD. Nothing there. I called the normally excellent HostMySite technical support and they said they would look into it. I received an email back saying that the application was looking for libstdc++.so.5 and that I should include this in my application. Well, I searched around on the web and the RB forums but this seemed to be a problem that has more or less resolved itself in mid 2005, but not at my hosting site. I copied this file up to the CGI directory and the TMP directory hoping that the application would just find it and run with it. Unfortunately not. I called back and asked if they would install libstdc++.so.5 on the server for me. They said that they would pass this onto their server team and let me know their decision shortly. I finally heard back from them this morning. Here's their response: We took a look at the complied executable that you are trying to run on your server and unfortunately that will not be able to be run in a shared environment because it requires the gcc libraries that are installed with gcc. Unfortunately for security purposes we cannot install gcc on a shared server and allow executables to run. If you would like to be able to run executables on your server and though apache we recommend a VPS plan. A VPS is your own virtual server where you have root access. The hardware is shared between vpses that are fully isolated from each other. Dang. Their VPS plans are $30 a month, more or less. I was really hoping that RB would run on the servers with a $8 per month plan. Yes, I'm cheap. I guess I need to post into the RB forums and I'm a bit disappointed considering how easy it was to get running on my own Linux laptop. Stay tuned!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=169Mon, 16 Oct 2006 10:21:40 -0400 This weekend I finally got around to creating a screencast on creating TeX files using my Visual Foxpro class. The screencast is about 43M and about 26 minutes long. Hopefully this will help get across the concept of what TeX is about and how to use the Visual Foxpro classes. If you end up using the classes, please let me know if they've helped you out. Likewise, if you have found any bugs or if you have any enhancements or suggestions for enhancements, please let me know! Visual Foxpro to LaTeX http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=168Sat, 07 Oct 2006 09:06:03 -0400 MODIFY FORM is my new favorite Foxpro command. Or is that MODIFY CLASS? It's really neither. There is a parameter "METHOD" that is really what makes these commands my favorite. How could I get along without this for so long?!? First off, some back story. I like to keep my methods short and concise. I feel that this allows for code re-use. In fact, I end up with too many methods sometimes, where I get confused. I end up documenting which methods call the method I'm editing just to help me keep them straight. Each approach has it's drawbacks but I feel that keeping methods atomic is well worth it. So, it's a pain to be testing a class, where there are tons of methods, and the class gets closed in the IDE during the test, to get back to this method. Thus, "METHOD" is so helpful to me. I can type in "MODIFY CLASS MyClass METHOD SuperDuperHelpfulMethod", and Fox opens the class right to the method. This command is always available to me in the Command Window for easy access. I wasn't originally sure if this would work with visual elements, but sure enough it does. “MODIFY FORM MyCoolForm METHOD pgfCool.Page2.List1.Refresh” gets me right where I want to be. I've been doing Fox for a long time, and I'm still learning! I hope this helps someone as much as it's helped me. http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=167Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:13:33 -0400 100,000 REALbasic Developers Gain Fast Path to Intel Support Release 4 was ... released yesterday. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. The big feature of this release is that RB now supports the Universal Binaries for the Mac OS X which means that applications developed in RB will run wicked fast both on Intel and PowerPC Macs. Before, the applications would need to run inside of Rhapsody to run on an Intel based Mac, and performance suffered. I'm not a Mac guy but I can see where this would be of major importance to keep up the industry. RB claims that it will be twice as fast as before on Intel platforms. Congratulations REALSoftware on this release! So, being that I'm interested in Windows and Linux, what's in this release for me? Plenty. Already, in RB, it does type checking on variables at compile time. This is a huge time saver over my Visual Foxpro development as this catches most of the bugs that I introduce. I mistakenly will be passing a string when the method is expecting an integer. Foxpro doesn't catch this until run time. RB caught this at compile time. With release 4 (R4), they now allow for "check for errors" without compiling. I guess this is "compiling - light". Very cool. Compiling didn't take that long but it will be a nice addition. I've been waiting for years to hear the words "we've done away with the 2 Gig limit". Unfortunately, I was waiting to hear those words from Microsoft in regards to Foxpro DBF tables. I'm still waiting. Well, RB has overcome this limitation with their files. Let's give up a cheer for the mantra "No Limits!" I'm sure that OS limitations still apply but they don't need to be built into the development platform. Evidently there are also over 100 bug fixes as well. I'm hoping that this leads to a more stable development platform on Linux. I would get an occasional error on Linux where the entire environment disappears. RB recovers pretty easily but it was annoying. Anyway, I can't wait to give it a spin. I promise, (PROMISE!) to do some screencasts on RB soon. Yes, I'm a newbie, but lots of people at FoxForward were asking me about RB. I'd love to do a "RB for Fox Folk" series of screencasts similar to what Ed Leafe and Paul McNette have done for Dabo/Python. I'm still very excited about RB as an excellent alternative to Visual FoxPro. Stay tuned and give RB a spin!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=166Thu, 21 Sep 2006 11:01:43 -0400I owe everyone a wrap up entry, eh? One week ago today, Kim and I were printing stuff off, stuffing books, shirts and paper into the attendee bags. Today, my office is a mess with the remnants of the conference. {g} Wrap up. What to say. I've spoken with so many people and emailed with so many people, it's hard to feel as if there is anything left to be said. Of course I haven't spoken with everyone or said everything to everyone so its time to get it down in writing. Bottom line is that I think FoxForward was a success. No major blunders. There is a lot of room for improvement for next time. “Next time” is the big question of course. The jury is still out on that one. New acronym: ITIANT is “If there is a next time”. {bg} If there is a next one, I'm going to have to structure it a bit differently financially. I'm not out of pocket for any money luckily beyond my own admission cost. Yes, I got in under the “Early Bird” rate. {g} I probably lost out on three weeks of billable time however which adds up to thousands. This is all sounding very harsh to put this talk first. Lots of people have told me not to talk about the finances but I feel differently. I hope that the conference is very “open”, and that includes all discussion from technology to finances. My main purpose of the conference is to get technology people together where the people have similar goals and interests. This year, most of the presenters spoke on Foxpro. Next year, I'd like to see more diversity in subjects. I'd love to see more presentations on Linux servers. Perhaps a topic such as “Running Fox Apps where the data is on Linux servers”? How about just a topic on “PHP Web Development”? I'd love to get Ed Leafe down here again to talk Python/Dabo. Lots of attendees really had their eyes open wide on how cool Dabo is and that cross platform development is for real. More of that. It's still application development. It's still database talk. But to expand out a bit to include more technology. Dave Bernard spoke on MS English Query and Alan Stevens spoke on Team Foundation Server. More of that. Of course, presenters submit their own topics which is cool. The conference is self organizing. I don't really dictate the topics. It'll keep it interesting and varied. If the presenters are interested in it, the attendees probably will as well. Lets get back to the numbers for a bit. There were 55 total attendees which includes the presenters. There were 17 presenters and 38 paid attendees. 74% of the paid attendees took advantage of the “Early Bird” rate of $275. 10% paid under “Regular” registration at $400. 16% paid the “Late” registration of $500 including one that learned about the conference on Friday! The day of the conference. We, of course, had room and extra books and shirts to accommodate him. Happy to do it too! Our total expenses were $12,000. Of that amount, Food and Beverage was the largest line item at $5,080 which includes service charges (20%) plus tax (7%). The conference rooms only cost us $3,429 including service charges and tax. AV equipment is a huge expense as well but RoomWide covered 2/3 of that. Thanks Matt Clark! Other large line items were book printing and T-shirts. There were lots of other smaller line items in the minutia but they all add up. Whew! A $12,000 party! I'm glad that I don't have any girls where I would need to pay for their weddings! {g} One of the biggest hiccups was the screencasts. The company that was to capture the screencasts backed out on us last minute. Bo, Matt and I got our heads together to try to decide how to capture them. Bo and I were advocating that each presenter run screencast software but to write it out to an external hard drive that we supplied. Matt was advocating some sort of VNC and to capture the screencasts remotely. We should have listened to Matt. The VNC idea has the burden of having to set up a network between each presenters laptop but should offload most of the CPU burden. The screencast software approach allowed for the presenters to install and test the software before their presentation but proved to be too much of a burden on the CPU to make the presenter feel comfortable running their presentation plus the software. I've asked the speakers to screencast capture thier presentation at their home/work and I'd work with them in distributing the screencast. The attendees missed almost half of the presentation because there were two tracks and no repeated sessions. I know it was a tough choice between multiple sessions for many people, including me! Other point where we should have done better is on dinner locations. Alpharetta is growing so fast that it's hard to find a restaurant close by that could accommodate 20 +/- people for dinner on a Friday and Saturday night. We had some ideas but we should have checked them out before hand, and had maps printed and backup phone numbers for those out of town. There are lots of great restaurants across the street but most are small. We should have checked out the larger ones to see if they would have met our needs. Beer. Several people wanted us to serve more beer. I'm hesistant to do that because I can't tell if someone has a “problem” just by looking at them. Plus, the hotel charges over $6 per beer (including tax and service charge). I stated to several people that I couldn't bring in beer and alcohol, but that THEY could. We'll have to coordinate that better next time. (ITIANT) Lunches were so good! I couldn't believe it. This factor alone may bring the conference back there. It sure makes me want to return. I may go there for lunch during the week sometime. Yes, it was that good. Feeding that many people and having it be that good is an amazing feat. The long, thin presentation rooms were an annoyance to several of the people. We may have to look at that issue. If that's all that went wrong, that's not too bad. The conference evaluations were very kind. Many people really seemed to enjoy themselves. We'll have to see about moving the conference to another time of the year as well. Really though, most Fox developers go to zero conferences a year. How many really go to two or more? If anything, I might move it a couple weeks earlier to move it farther away from SWFox. If I were to move it to the spring, I'd need to wait a year and a half to do so. A 7 month turn around is too quick for a not-for-profit conference. That's it for me. I'm still tired and I haven't fully recovered yet. I've got to get some boxes put away, stuff straightened up and out of the way. It was my pleasure hosting the conference, and I'm certainly considering doing it again. I just need some time to think it over. {g}http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=165Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:27:55 -0400FoxForward is past ... and yet the work goes on. {g} It's the morning after the conference and I'm doing some cleanup work after the conference. Today, I'll blog about yesterday, the third and final day of the conference as I did the first two days. Tomorrow I'm hoping to write about my overall thoughts on how the conference went. I'll hopefully have compiled all of the conference evaluations and have a better idea of what some of the attendees thought as well. I went to bed earlier Saturday night than I did on Friday night but the toll of the conference was being felt. In a good way though. I didn't want a full breakfast so I was going to run to the corner and get an orange juice and a muffin or something. Of course, other Fox people were already up at 7:15am. Alan Stevens and Lee Raulerson were already enjoying the hand made breakfasts at the hotel, and I stopped over to wish them good morning. Darned if that didn't look like a good breakfast. They claimed to be tired but they looked pretty chipper to me at this early time of day. I wanted to get my breakfast before my father, Bill, arrived to help me up. Well, Cully's are habitually on time and this morning my father was early ... again. I had him drive me down to the corner to pick up my breakfast. We got back with sustenance in hand and began to set up for the day. LCD projectors, video cameras, wireless microphones, evaluation boxes, etc. David Greenberg was up first with the “VFP Grid Control”. Irv Adams was presenting “Containing Foxpro”. As usual, for the first sessions I was running around and trying to take care of some of the details of things. Kim, my wife, arrived earlier than I though she would have which really helped. Larry, the banquet director said that he'd put out coffee early as it seemed like some of the attendees needed it. {g} I was floating around trying to get some pictures taken as well. I need to put that on my “todo” list to get those pictures posted this afternoon. Somehow the sessions flew by and it was time for the first break and I almost completely missed both presentations other than when I was in there taking pictures. Next up was Kevin Ragsdale with “Outlook-Style Desktop Alerts”. I caught part of this, and from the hallway talk, it was an excellent presentation that I think really inspired some of the attendees. While I was in the presentation, Kevin made an announcement about a new web site that I am really excited about. I think I mentioned it to everyone I met for the rest of the day. I don't want to steal his thunder though. I'll check with him to see if I can start spreading the word or whether we should wait for the grand opening. Alan Stevens was presenting on the “Team Foundation Server”. I know nothing about this and I really wanted to attend. Again, working with the staff in preparing for lunch and some other details kept me from the presentation. I'm going to pour over the session notes. The sessions got out and we directed everyone upstairs for lunch. I was gathering up the give-aways including embroidered hats and embroidered shirts donated by Jim Eddins at FoxToolBox.com, books donated by Kevin Ragsdale, a copy of VFP9 and a signed copy of VFP8 which Ken Levy sent to me. Upstairs, there were many winners. Stacy Starks was the winner of the signed copy of VFP8. Lunch, again was incredible. Chicken Parmisian and Lasagna. Excellent. I can't believe how good the food was. This factor alone might inspire my to have another FoxForward. After lunch, Craig Boyd was presenting on “Securing VFP Data”. Well attended and from the hallway talk, well received. It sounds like many attendees are already taking advantage of Craig's encryption libraries. John Harvey was presenting in the other space on “Foxpro and Wireless Data”. This session was also well attended and it sounded like a lot of people were very impressed with how a wide variety of technologies were brought together to form a singular solution. Around this time, many people were beginning to inquire about when they should be leaving for the airport to catch their flights. Some flights were early, some later. It was good to hear that some people were staying overnight and flying out the next morning. Atlanta can have some terrible traffic but I had Kim pull up Georgia-navigator.com and there weren't any major accidents. The Falcons were playing at home and we monitored the game on when it would get out. The Braves were playing away so that wasn't a factor. We can also monitor the length of the security line at the airport on line. This fluctuated between 10 minutes and 40 minutes. Not terrible. If it had been 2 hours long, we would have had to set off the alarm for some of the traveling attendees. We posted a paper showing some of the times and factors on the board and Kim kept monitoring the sites for the rest of the afternoon. Bo Durban was presenting next with “GDI+” and Paul James was presenting on “Two Factor Security For Remote VFP Apps”. Bo's session was well attended as I knew it would be. I was disappointed in that more people didn't attend Pauls session. Security is one of my weak areas of knowledge and Paul has come up with a solution that takes advantage of the strengths of VFP, Web Connection (but it could use any web technology), Terminal Services and a cheap USB key to make it all work. Way cool! Highly recommended. I am happy to report that I was able to attend most of this presentation and it was so worth it. Please review Paul's white paper. The last set of session were Steve Ellenoff presenting on “Integrating US Postal Service Webtools into VFP” and Dave Bernard's “Developing AJAX, VFP-Style”. Dave puts on a great show and I had seen this presentation so I did my best to attend Steve's presentation. Steve began from point zero and built and built upon the tool set to arrive at the interfaces to the USPS International Rate Calculator and the Domestic Rate Calculator. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the entire presentation as I was thanking some of the attendees that had to leave early to catch their flights or being their long drive home. Let the cleanup begin. Matt Clark, from RoomWide began packing up the LCD projectors, screens, and audio systems. Bo Durban and I were dividing up all of the power strips and extension cords. It's a good thing that we wrote our names on them at the beginning of the conference to help know whose is whose. I'm hoping that the hotel staff will take the unopened cokes and water off of the bill. At $2.50 a pop, that adds up to a lot of money that I can redirect back to the presenters. It's a weird feeling moving the last boxes out of the hotel, with the halls empty and quiet after being so “alive” all weekend. It's time to go home, pet the dog, grab a bite to eat, and get the kids ready for bed. They've got school the next morning. Kim and talk over what went well, and what could have been improved. That is the subject for tomorrow's blog entry. {g} http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=164Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:41:20 -0400It was painful to hear the alarm going off this morning. Yes, painful. I rolled out of bed, got ready and headed down for a quick breakfast. Tons of Fox folk were already eating. They must not have stayed up way past their bed time like I did. Down went the breakfast and I went down to get things set up for the conference. Several people couldn't make it on Friday so there were a couple of people to get their packet of information for the conference, in between getting the LCD projectors and video cameras set back up. Before I knew it, it was time for the first sessions to start. Darrell Gardner was one of the first sessions. It became clear that I wasn't going to be able to see all of the sessions for all of the little details of getting set up but I kept peeking in on this session. It seems that Darrell was giving a great presentation on how to be efficient and focused with your time. I've definitely have to get the session notes from this one. Michael Babcock was also presenting in the first slot on N-tier development. I didn't catch too much of this presentation but it was well attended and it seemed like several people really solidified the N-tier development concepts. I forgot to mention that one of the things keeping me from attending the sessions is that I was floating around taking pictures of the people attending the sessions. I promise to publish the pictures on Monday or Tuesday of this next week once I catch a break. (and some sleep.) Next up was Stein Goering with WWWC 5.0, and also David Greenberg with the SEE Geographic Information system. Stein looked like he had full attention from all attendees. The SEE program looked like a way mature UI for geographic information. Again, as “Cruise director”, I don't get to sit down too much for the presentations. I would have loved to see more of each of these presentations. I received an email from Jim Eddins at about 10am saying that he sent over a box full of embroidered SWAG and that it'd be at the front desk. Jim, unfortunately, couldn't attend the conference. Wow. That is so cool of him! Jim, as you may know, runs DBXTechnologies, and FoxToolBox. Thank you for the donations Jim! Kevin Ragsdale also provided us some books from Hentzenwerke to give away along with a copy of OneNote by Microsoft. We put them into good hands by giving away half of the swag at lunch. I like giving stuff away! Thank you again Kevin and Jim. The give-aways were well appreciated. More to give away tomorrow including a copy of VFP9 and a signed box of VFP8! The lunch was yummy! There was a chicken marsala, but the hit was the sliced flank steak with mushroom sauce. I swear it was melting in my mouth. Mmmm. Evidently there was a cheesecake served up for desert but I never saw it. {g} It was gone before I even started my lunch. Who knew that Fox developers love cheesecake so much?!? Fear not. There were other chocolate cakes available to finish up a great lunch. I gained weight just by looking at the cake. I'll have to do more aerobic keyboard and mouse workouts to work off the extra calories. After lunch was David Stevenson presenting on the CursorAdapter. I had seen this presentation previously at that Atlanta Foxpro Users Group meeting, so I tried to do my best to sit in on Bill Anderson's Software Design Patterns session. Kevin Ragsdale told me that he was struggling through the topic for a while until he reached one of those “Aha!” moments half way through session. I love it when that happens. I know exactly what he's talking about. Next up was David Stevenson again, this time talking about the XML Adapter. David is a pro on this subject. David can make the XMLAdapter sing. I bet he considers the XMLAdapter a musical instrument! Ed Leafe was also presenting his “Python for Fox Folk”. I think I was sensing some more “Aha!” moments in the crowd during this session as well. Python is definitely very cool. We then had a single session planned. Ed Leafe was up again to present on “Introduction to Dabo”. If you haven't seen Dabo lately, it's definitely matured a lot. Ed and Paul McNette have progressed the Framework/Development environment a huge amount in the last year. Catch some of their screencasts at DaboDev.com. The last session was John Koziol's “VFP Inside-Out”. Koziol is a riot. Not only is he as sharp as a tack, he's got some great stories from the inside. I made a point to catch all of this one (minus a few minutes for a couple of pictures). One thing to note is that the speakers, in general, have decided not to do a screencast capture of their presentations here at the conference. Several have pledged to do screencasts of their presentation once they get back home but it appears as if the screencast software does somewhat impact the speed of their machines. I'm cool with that. Whatever the speakers would like to do, I'll roll with it. We've still got to work out distribution and methodology issues with each speaker individually. Does the speaker want to distribute anything? Do they want to distribute the presentation themselves? Should it go only to attendees? Should it be made available to the world? If they distribute the screencast, will it be for download? or to be burned on DVD? There are lots of issues to consider and it's not trivial. I think I'll be working on this for a long time to come. In the mean time, we're video taping the sessions. It'll show the “spirit” of the presentation but not the display details. Basically, you won't be able to read the screen. We'll be working with the presenters on what to do with this video as well. Perhaps nothing, perhaps it'll be available to all. The speakers have the final say on this, each one individually. After some planning, options, and false starts, a group of FoxForwidians (sp?) decided to go to a local pub called The Ale House. They served up steak, which Craig Boyd was craving, plus cheap beer which Bo Durban was craving. Unfortunately the place was packed with Florida Gator alumni watching the Florida/Tennessee football game. It was a bit hard talking geek over a bunch of screaming Florida fans. Couldn't they see that Foxpro developers were talking technology here?!? Gosh! {/Napoleon Dynamite} We left at a reasonable time tonight (unlike last night). Here I am at 12:40am on Sunday morning. How did it get so late? I better hit the hay. One more day of FF is ahead of me. http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=163Sat, 16 Sep 2006 02:21:10 -0400Do you want a behind the scenes impression of Fox Forward? If yes, then keep reading. If no, then it's time to bail out. {grin} After a years worth of planning, Fox Forward became a reality today. I'm excited, exhausted, but overall pleased with how it has been turning out. How could it not be a cool experience though? I basically set this thing in motion and its now my job to just get out of the way. The speakers are so great. The attendees are just so cool and nice. It is up to me to not spoil that mix and just stay the heck out of the way. Anyway, it's about 1am on Saturday morning. I've just gotten back from Taco Mac (they don't sell tacos at all. Go figure!) after spending hours talking Fox, technology, jobs, clients, employers, finances, the future, wives, and kids with some of the nicest people you could ever meet. Thats just a normal par for the course for a Fox conference, eh? The day began at 6am. I won't even talk about all of the packing, planning, printing and assembling that took place yesterday. I rolled out of bed and began taking care of last minute stuff, merged in with taking care of the normal tasks such as getting the dog some food, then getting me some breakfast too. Disassembling the printer, finding hubs, power strips, USB hard drives, and everything else that I'd be needing for the conference. I was hoping to to leave the house at 9am but didn't leave until 9:45. The van was creaking under the weight of all of the attendee packets. The van always creaks. What am I talking about? Larry is the banquet director and he is here to take care of me. I told him "I know you get to see the professional conference planners all of the time. Today, you get to see how the amateurs do it!" Larry is the best and really did his job to a "T" and I didn't have to worry one bit about the food or drink aspect of the conference. I am so grateful. Heck if I know how many gallons of sweet tea that programmers will drink in the afternoon, compared to how many bottled waters, compared to cokes, compared to beer. I just guessed when I ordered all of this stuff. Believe it or not, there were some beer left over. This shocked me. I'm not a drinker but I figured all of these people would plow through the beer. See. I've gotten ahead of myself. Back the truck up. Or, back the van up. To the front of the hotel, that is. I unloaded tons of boxes and bags. My father lives close by and he volunteered his time to help me with the conference operation. We were unloaded in no time and were well on our way of getting the registration process done. Around 11am, Matt Clark (Fox developer and owner of RoomWide) who is providing our AV equipment showed up and we helped set up the screens, projectors, and audio equipment. Did someone say wireless microphones? Sweet! It's starting to look like I know what I'm doing. My wife, Kim, has arrived at this point and the registration preparation is quickly straightened out. We're ready for the customers now. A couple of Fox developers would wander by every once and a while and we'd talk for a bit. It's nice to meet each person and put a name with the face. Dave Bernard arrived and wanted to run through his presentation which relies on speech recognition. He wanted to check out the acoustics of the room. I guess he didn't want to pull a Microsoft on this one, eh? {bg} Bo Durban has also arrived at this point and he's working on some last minute polishing of his presentation. Bo and I have each brought a video camera that we're setting up in the back of the room to video tape the presentation. We're hoping that some of the presenters will also do the screencast capture of their presentation as well, onto external hard drives that we've brought. I forgot my digital camera at home. I quick emailed Russell Campbell to see if I could catch him before he headed out. I did and he brought his camera. I'll have Kim bring ours for Saturday and Sunday. At 4pm things have really kicked into gear and the "Meet and Greet" is well underway already. It's a beautiful thing when there's a room full of Fox developers and there are smiles on their faces talking technology. Just before 5pm, I make a little speech from the stairs in the common area, welcoming all of the attendees. I can't thank enough the sponsors (RoomWide, Moxie Data, The Intellection Group, Conarc, and System Software & Design) for their support. Without their support, the conference literally wouldn't have been possible. I then thank the speakers. They are sacrificing so much to come down to the conference with little or no compensation. Amazing. Thank you to the speakers. What would happen if you threw a conference and no one showed up? No conference, that's what. I thanked each and every attendee. It's all got to come together to make a successful conference: sponsors, speakers, attendees, and organizers. Pretty exciting stuff to see it come to life after a year of talking about it. So the attendees then got a last fill of cookies, fruit, and cheese and headed down to see the first presentations. Dave Bernard and Bo Durban were first up. I was running around during the presentations taking care of some administrative tasks but I made sure to sneak into both presentations. Dave presented on "English Query With VFP". I've seen this presentation at the AFUG meeting and a warmup meeting. Each time you see this presentation, your head swims with the possibilities of it. It allows people with no technical abilities whatsoever, to be able to retrieve meaningful results from a backend database. Astounding. Bo Durban presented on "Custom report controls". Not only was it well attended, but it was well received as well. I know lots of the people, by the way they were talking, were thinking of new ways of working with reports in their applications. Well done! After a short break, it was time for the "VFP World Domination" presentation by Craig Boyd. This was the sole presentation for that slot. Craig has presented this session at several FUG meetings in the past but it is the first time that I had seen it. This presentation wasn't fluff or a rah rah session. It was very much a "be proud of what you do"/"Don't see limitations, break the barriers of what you thought were possible with Fox". There were some tips on how to present Fox as your chosen primary development platform but there were many technical (practical) examples as well. The lesson to be learned is that if you thought that there is a limitation to what Fox can do, you're probably mistaken. More than ever the barriers are being stripped away for the Fox community. Our ability to absorb and expose the best of complimentary technology is incredible. The possibilities of what we (as a community) to build in Fox alone is astonishing. So, where do we go from here? Well, Fox developers need to be their own best friend. Get off the pot. Start blogging, start talking up your favorite tool. Share your code snippets. Share your tools if you can. It's up to us now. It has always been up to us. Always has and always will be. That was the last session of the night. I made a suggestion that if people are interested in going out (common occurrence at Fox conferences) that we go to Taco Mac. They have outdoor seating, indoor seating, good food, and of course, a bar. I did a quick clean up. Took the video cameras, LCD projectors and some stuff up to the room for safe keeping and headed out. It was good to get to know many of my comrades in arms. In the end it turned out to be Craig Boyd, Bo Durban, Kevin Ragsale, Dave Bernard and John Lesesne in the end though. So here I am at 2am typing up my thoughts. I wonder if they'll make sense in the morning? One thing that will disappoint non-attendees is that, so far, the presenters haven't opted to do the screencast capture. There just hasn't been a lot of time for them to be able to test the screen capturing software to see what kind of load it places on their laptops as they are presenting their subject. As an example, Dave Bernard is running Windows, plus IIS, plus SQLServer, plus the natural language stuff, plus Foxpro, plus IE all on his laptop. To add screencast software on top of that load is a risk. I'm not sure if I'd take that risk in front of a live audience either. We'll have to see how tomorrow goes. Perhaps it would be better to have set up a quick network and VNC into their computer to capture the screencasts. Even with that as a solution, we would have introduced an unknown into their sessions. There's got to be a better solution to screencast capture. Anyway, it's past my bedtime ... times 10. I'm going to grab some Zs before it's time to get set up again in the morning. I can't wait. Wish you were here. http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=162Sun, 20 Aug 2006 16:12:06 -0400What if you wanted to create a parent and child table, with 100,000 records in the parent table, 1 to 5 child records per parent record, populated with some (slightly) meaninful information, and then to display them where as you move through the parent records that the appropriate child records would be displayed. All from scratch. How long would that take? In Visual Foxpro, it takes under three minutes. I even left in some syntax errors and the fixing of those errors. Here's my screencast on Visual Foxpro : Data From Scratch http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=161Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:23:26 -0400I host my site through HostMySite.com and they've been extremely reliable over the six years that I've been with them. This morning however, at 8:30am a street crew trenched right through one of their fiber trunks. My web site isn't at that facility, but the server where my mail is hosted, is hosted there. Thus, I'm without email all day. My appologies if you're trying to email me. I'll respond as soon as they have the situation remedied. If you want to see the slide show of the fiber cut, take a look at: http://hostmysite.com/emergencyhttp://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=160Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:14:09 -0400Foxpro developers and Foxpro companies need to do a better job of marketing themselves and their successes. Michael Hogan and Vassilis Aggelakos have started just such a web site. If you have your own story to tell, consider submitting something to them. We're the best kept secret in the IT world. We need to help ourselves out by being more visible. Something we're not normally used to doing. Check out http://foxprosuccess.com/http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=159Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:07:19 -0400REAL Software Ships REALbasic 2006 Release 3 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. http://realsoftware.com/ http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=158Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:30:14 -0400I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Andrew MacNeill on Friday about our plans for the Fox Forward Conference. According to Andrew: The conference looks really good with a wide variety of sessions covering basic development techniques, Ajax and FoxPro, GDI+ along with some real "case study" type sessions on FoxPro and Wireless from John Harvey at the Shelby Co. Sheriff's office and Bill Sanders filling everyone in on how CollegeCon is going ( the VFP Intern project). Check out The FoxShow at http://www.thefoxproshow.comhttp://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=157Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:22:53 -0400A first look at MEPIS's new Ubuntu-based Linux by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols offers a great look into what makes MEPIS one of many great Linux variants to run.http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=156Sat, 20 May 2006 09:43:05 -0400In VFP, it's easy to display a simple image on a form and VFP will take care of scaling the image based on the "Stretch" setting. "0" will clip the image; "1" will stretch the image isometrically; "2" will do a full stretch of the image based on the size of the image control. In REALbasic, it leaves this up to the developer. This kind of surprised me as I thought that it would have had more built in tools. It also surprised me on how much digging I needed to do to find my ultimate solution. Hopefully, this will help someone else out. I created a new project with a single window. I added one canvas (Canvas1), a pushbutton to "Retrieve Image", and two text boxes. One text box was to display the full path to the image, and the second shows the path to the executable that is currently running. I'm going to want to calculate the relative path to the image and this is what I will want to store into my database of images when I add this functionality into my real life application. Anyway, lets get to the code. I've also added two methods to the window. "mGetImage" and "mShowImage". Forgive my modified Hungarian notation. I find that it really helps me understand what I'm working with whether it's a method, an object, a string, or whatever. Protected Sub mGetImage() Dim ImageTypes As New FileType Dim cImage As String Dim oFolderItem As folderItem Dim oPicture As Picture Dim oGraphics As Graphics ImageTypes.Name = "Image Files" ImageTypes.Extensions = ".bmp;.jpg;.gif" // Prompt for picture if you want to get it from the user. // Commented out but it's here if you want this option. //oFolderItem = getOpenFolderItem(ImageTypes) // Hard coded image. This value could have come from a database. cImage = "C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\My Pictures\P7130117.jpg" oFolderItem = GetFolderItem(cImage) If oFolderItem Nil Then oPicture = oFolderItem.OpenAsPicture // Showing the full path to the image. txtImagePath.Text = oFolderItem.AbsolutePath // Showing the full path to the executable that we're running. txtPath.Text = GetFolderItem("").AbsolutePath // A call to the method that displays the scaled picture. mShowImage(oPicture) Else MsgBox "Problem: Folder Item was nil" End If End Sub Protected Sub mShowImage(oPicture AS Picture) DIM nWidthScale, nHeightScale AS Double DIM nNewWidth, nNewHeight AS Integer nWidthScale = Canvas1.Width / oPicture.Width nHeightScale = Canvas1.Height / oPicture.Height nHeightScale = MIN(nWidthScale, nHeightScale) nNewWidth = ROUND(oPicture.Width * nHeightScale) nNewHeight = ROUND(oPicture.Height * nHeightScale) Canvas1.graphics.drawPicture oPicture, 0,0,nNewWidth,nNewHeight, 0,0,oPicture.width, oPicture.height End Sub My only complaint is that if the Window/Form is resized that the image doesn't automatically repaint even if it was to stay the same size. Easy enough to fix and from the "resize" event of the Window/Form, I just recall my methods. I hope this helps someone out there!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=155Thu, 04 May 2006 09:09:08 -0400A friend of mine has always wanted a feature in Visual FoxPro that would allow you to click a "Back" or "Forward" button in the IDE that would take you back (or forward) to the last code snippet that you were editing, no matter where it resided. Kinda like a web browser. I'm working in REALbasic yesterday, and what's this staring me in face? The "Back" and "Forward" buttons right there in the main toolbar. It was so obvious that I didn't even realize it was there. Very cool. I imagine that with the SednaX project in Visual FoxPro, that some sharp Visual FoxPro developer would be able to come up with such a feature. I think it'd be beyond my abilities. Maybe not but I'm not sure where I'd start. {grin}http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=154Wed, 03 May 2006 09:20:30 -0400This story doesn't really involve code, or applications, or forms, or data. It involves a telephone call and two people talking. Yesterday my phone rang several times from telemarketers. Many of them were automated calls from computers telling me that I've qualified for a small business loan. I wonder how I get those to stop? But that's not what I'm wanting to convey to you. At about 10am I received a call and the caller ID said "REAL SFTWR INC". I had only just blogged about my first real impressions of REALbasic just a couple of hours earlier. I was intrigued. The caller said that his name was Geoff and that he was calling from REAL Software. Someone had spotted my blog entry and passed it along to him and he decided to call. Now that's what I call being pro-active! We talked for over two hours. We spoke of my background as a FoxPro developer. What I thought about learning REALbasic. How REALbasic compared to VFP. What the strengths were of FoxPro, and what the plans were for REALbasic for the future. We spoke for a long time about how FoxPro's strengths is in data and our xBase “cursor” concept as compared to the recordset concept that VB and RB has. Geoff was also very interested in the Fox Forward conference that I'm hosting as well as the Atlanta FoxPro Users Group meetings we hold. Geoff told me some about their plans on an integrated report writer, and their efforts to make REALbasic accessible via Apache CGI or as a dedicated web server. REALbasic's threading model makes this more feasible compared to VFP web hosting Like I said, we spoke for quite a while. We even spoke of Apple's change over to the Intel processors. Good geek talk. So why blog about a telephone call? Because when was the last time someone called you about a product that you've purchased just to make sure that you're happy? Or someone actively asking you your thoughts on how to improve the product? This is true customer service! Oh, and by the way as I didn't know this at the time we were talking, Geoff Perlman is the president and CEO of REAL Software. I'm not sorry at all that I plunked down my $399 for RB for Linux with this kind of attention! http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=153Tue, 02 May 2006 08:19:03 -0400I've started a new project that is to run on Linux and I decided to give REALbasic a try. I'm impressed. A completely integrated working environment along with a debugger. Of course, as with anything, there is the good, the bad and the ugly: The good: Cross platform development. I can reach 99% of all platforms. Full graphical IDE It's platform aware so I can conditionally write code that executes on one or more of the platforms as needed. Strong typed language. This is different from Fox where many of the "type" errors won't be caught on compilation. I may grow to like this feature more or I may grow to resent it. We'll see. Controls! HTML Viewers, sliders, and more. It's nice to see new options for building a UI. OO. I can subclass as I see fit. NOT VB6 clone. While it shares lots of similarities to VB, this is its own animal. Of course I'm not an expert on VB so it is hard for me to tell where there are similarities and differences. No dependencies. I can build an application and just deploy that application with no DLLs. No 1.1G .NET library necessary. Very cool. I can create the need for dependencies but it's not at all necessary. The bad: I'm doing most of my development on a Linux laptop. On occasion, the application development environment will just dissappear. The Linux version hasn't been out for a long time and I expect this to improve as newer versions come out. The ugly: Slow IDE on Linux. I think RB's bread and butter is the Mac platform, closely followed by the Windows platform. But I think the intellisense really drags my development machine down. It's only a P3 600Mhz laptop so that might be more of the culprit than anything. No report writer. It appears as if most people roll their own reports using a variety of techniques. This gives great flexibility but creates a burden on developers. Perhaps some day the team will include one. I spoke above about the lack of dependencies. In fact, yesterday I created an application that connected to my MySQL server. Debugged it and then I build it for Linux and Windows platform. I ran the application on Linux and it connected! 2.2M application. I then ran the EXE version on a windows machine and it connected! 2.2M exe. Astounding! Obviously I'm still floundering in development. I've got to start asking questions on the message forum(s). Some of the development is very different from VFP so I've got to wrap my head around it. I'm wanting to build a global data access object but I'm not quite sure how to go about it. Ah, learning curves. To see more fundamental information on REALbasic, check out The Wikipedia article on REALbasic. Stay tuned!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=152Tue, 11 Apr 2006 10:03:23 -0400I've been searching for some eclectic topics on the Internet lately. Of course with the Google toolbar, I started by searching with Google first and went through several pages of results and I didn't really find what I was looking for. I then turned to several of the other search engines. Yahoo, A9, Ask, Lycos, and MSN. By far, MSN returned the most relevant results. Don't take my word for it! Try it yourself. It will take less than 5 minutes. Pick a word, or better yet, a word set. Then search on several of the search engines. Which gave you the best results? I'm thinking that Google is a victim of its own success. I think too many people are targeting Google and trying to trick it into getting top position. Because of this, I'm thinking that Google is going to great lengths to level the playing field as far as results go. What this means is that their search results is much more "gray". It's harder to find the gems in the gray water. I think MSN is going to be my search engine of choice for a while. The results speak for themselves.http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=151Thu, 06 Apr 2006 08:45:40 -0400NetCom Information Technology offers a four day training course in Visual FoxPro. They are even coming to the Atlanta area. Unfortunately they don't list what their prices are for the course. They require their Object-Oriented Programming Introduction course. Give them a call if you need to upgrade your skills to the latest in VFP technology!http://cullytechnologies.com/ctblog.php?key=150Wed, 05 Apr 2006 08:55:59 -0400I was playing with REALbasic 2006 release 1 yesterday on my MEPIS Linux laptop yesterday and I must say that I'm impressed. The IDE is rich, and easy to get to know. I'm currently running the free Standard edition. I was productive right from the beginning. Being a FoxPro developer at heart, I was excited about getting started with displaying and manipulating data and databases. It seems as if there aren't too many examples on the web just yet that deal with manipulating of the built in database features however. If there are, I haven't found them. I was able to download and build and run an example application that was originally written for the Mac OSx. This example was for using a list box to display an array of names. The names could be added to the array on the fly and then saved out to text file. Pretty simple stuff. Exactly what I should be starting with. After changing the build settings, telling it only to build for the Linux environment, it build the application into a single file that was 2M. A simple application that was 2M. While some of you may be thinking that 2M for a simple application with one form is large, this is the only binary file that is needed to get the application running. No DLLs, no dependancies. Way cool. In fact I was able too run the application off of the network server on a Linux machine that has never had REALbasic installed on it. I found two issues so far that I'm going to keep an eye on with REALbasic. First, is that the IDE was running VERY slow. This may be because I'm running this on a very old laptop, that REALbasic isn't optimized for Linux yet, or that it's just slow. The second problem that I'm seeing is that in the IDE, the text labels are sized appropriately. When running the application however, the text is chopped off at the bottom. No biggie in that I just size my buttons a bit larger than I normally would. This is most likely a problem with my KDE environment in Linux. There's probably a fonts setting that needs tweaking somewhere. To sum this all up, I'm just sticking my toes into the REALbasic world and I'm finding the waters nice and warm so far. I may take the plunge and purchase REALbasic Professional for the $400 promo that's going on right now. I'd love to get proficient at this, be able to earn a living, and be able to develop database applications on Linux, Mac, and Windows environments. It's definitely worth a look!