foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

You can’t expect one to work on a Sunday. Much more on an Easter Sunday. Nor can you expect work-related blogs from him. With that said here are some IT-related news, articles and interesting stuff:

The Once and Future King Now The Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide by Robert X. Cringely talks about the SUN and MicroSoft ‘peace agreement’ on a different perspective and other legal matters that revolves around Microsoft.

Businessweek.com: How Microsoft Is Clipping Longhorn is also an interesting read. And here are some thoughts from Microsoft’s Scoble about this matter. LONGHORNBLOGS.com also points out interesting factors on the risk of scaling back LONGHORN. A discussion on Channel9 about this matter is going on too.

What else? Ah yes… Mr. MainFrame celebrates it’s 40th birthday. Happy birthday, dude.

The wittiest and most intelligent woman I’ve known discovers blogging.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Just as I was pondering if I should include a backdoor on SOPHEIAI to prevent lockdowns, I found out that CISCO products have backdoors too. Ah well.

You’ll learn a lot by visiting a site such as SourceForge.net, PDFCreator is one useful tool I found there… best it’s free. (via DeviantArt)

I’m spending the past two days catching up with my sleeping quota that I’ve been missing for the past three weeks. I’m even having weird dreams as of late. One of those include a GIANT jigsaw puzzle that forms like dark clouds in the sky. Uber-surreal if you’d ask me.

This day I woke up at around 1:30PM already and the first thing I did was to log online and check my RSS Reader.

The first feed I check was from migs, a fellow Filipino who’s into Java and OpenSource. I’m also looking for more Filipino techbloggers with RSS feeds… and so far I only have two on my list. The other one is not updating that much these days and I’m still in this quest of convincing other Filipinos who are into IT to post some tech-related blogs online. (And that includes Avatar!)

Anyway, back to migs’ post, he posted a link to an April 04 article at INQ7.net about Mr. NameDeleted()’s views that Open source has ‘no future’ in our country. It was quite opposite to what my former student, Beakman pointed to me yesterday which was an article about IBM backing Filipino software startup against Microsoft. Ironic that they are even posted on the same news site apart by just approximately 27 hours. (I’m too lazy this day to run my CalcTime algorithm)

I don’t have any ideas on what side of the bed Mr. NameDeleted() woke up that day but labeling something as having ‘no future’ is something I would least expect from a ‘software expert’… especially if one is referring to a thing fueled with worldwide visions, collaboration and passion. One’s future is never equated with financial matters. Yes, we can see innovative companies closing and evaporating… but the works, inspiration and the legacy they bring will always continue.

OpenSource _HAS_ a future in this country. In fact its potential is even greater. OpenSource advocates and evangelists just have to start/re-start somewhere.

One good place to start is with the students… the computer science/IT-related students hold the future. Introduce OpenSource to them, introduce the passion for OpenSource, the advantages of OpenSource, the cooperation and participation it needs without including that inherent hate for MS products that most humans that are into OpenSource possess.

Philippines is a fertile ground for OpenSource and the principles underlying it. The problem lies though on some of the attitude Filipinos have. Attitudes such as disunity, mistrust and that famous ‘aho-aho/ija-ija’ attitude… include lack of passion… lack of drive and laziness. I’m not generalizing here… but I see this kind of attitude everyday. Of course there are persons with passion… with drive that they become BIG and successful. But then they start calling others as having ‘no future’, discouraging them instead of inspiring them.

Then there’s this crab mentality too.

But these things I believe can never hinder OpenSource. Not in this country. Not in this time.

Two more interesting articles: The secret source of GOOGLE Power and Linus Torvalds: SCO Is ‘Just Too Wrong’.

Just as I have fully absorbed that GMail‘s 1000MB e-mail quota was not really an April fool’s day joke, here comes SPYMac. SPYMac which was released a couple of days ago is now available while GMail which was announced last April 1, is still in its beta phase. (Although someone posted screenshots of GMail already)

While a number of individuals, especially those whose e-mail accounts were rendered useless by SPAM, leaped in joy… there are also individuals that are concerned with privacy related issues. Google did express their respect for privacy and I believed them. Besides, their continuous quest against evil is much respected. Needless to say, SPAM is indeed evil.

But there’s a subtle problem I see in this. The very same problem that bugs computer users with large capacity hard disks… the more resources they have the more inefficient they become in terms of file management. There was a time when 100MB storage was expensive, users were more organized and file management was file management. These days I see a lot of users storing and piling up useless crap in their systems and don’t even bother to uninstall applications that did not survive the seven day software rule.

Same holds true with software applications. Some programmers and developers don’t care to optimize their codes and rely much on the excess of higher end hardware that is getting cheaper. Bill Gates was even bold enough to predict that in the future hardware will be free.

So what we have are bloated software applications that do not manage memory well. Garbage collection has become a thing of the past. So what if my program will run slow on a lower end machine, it’s the user’s responsibility to upgrade. That has been one of the bad practices I see these days.

Let’s just hope that online services such as GMail and SPYMac, will not be devoured with what humans usually do best… abuse and misuse things in this world.

I purchased a copy of Heavy Metal’s December 2003 issue yesterday. Bought it for a third of its original price (Is this starting to be a trend already?). The cover artwork is done by Boris Vallejo but inside a find out that Luis Royo, the fantasy artist that inspires me the most, released Conceptions II already. So I fired up Google to look for a gallery online.

I arrived a minute later at the front door of Fantaysia.com Forums.

I also stumbled upon an online gallery of Prohibited Books III in that site (though I later found out that it was uploaded already a couple of months ago at Therionweb.de, the site where I usually download fantasy-related artworks).

Needless to say, I spent the whole night until almost sunrise viewing, pondering, right-clicking and saving these images to my bloating hard drive. I have been collecting JPEG versions of the Luis Royo’s artworks since the day I found his Malefic series in the ‘net (Funny I was really looking for Anime that day).

It would need 19 pages or more if I have to describe the works a genius like Luis Royo creates. His artworks inspired the first website I published- collections.com and for those of you who first found this site before pixelcatalyst.lair, I also create digital artworks in my free time to release the tensions and pressures that database programming bring. One of my artworks, The Bar of Persuasion was inspired by Luis Royo’s Cross of Pleasure. Be warned though that most of his artworks contain materials and elements that might be ‘offensive’ especially to the conservative ones.

So what does this have to do with Visual FoxPro and database programming? Nothing really… though two of Luis Royo’s artworks, Light of Panic and Wings of Reflection, are always posted on the wall of the room or cubicle where I work since eight years ago.

One of those things you can find on my desk/cube that keeps the creative juices flowing and fires up the neurons.

···

More Luis Royo-related links:
LuisRoyo.com [Official website]
http://members.xoom.it/volker1 [Luis Royo Galleries]
TherionWeb.de [More amazing fantasy artworks]
Luis Royo artbooks at Amazon.com

Random news:
Channel9… is now online. Microsoft Releases Source Code on SourceForge. That’s the news, the real deal is here.

Calvin Hsia posted the optimized code for that programming challenge initiated by The1 last week. If you haven’t read it yet, it is interesting to see The1’s own solution to this problem. Note that the comments about the Foxpro algorithm on this part refers to the first un-optimized approach.

For the record I was rooting for the FoxPro solution since day one. Give the code to a twelve year old who knows algebra and a little programming, I’ll bet he’ll understand the clarity of FoxPro’s syntax better. Run them altogether, two bucks FoxPro will come up with the complete output first.

More on Avalon as Scoble explains the usual misconceptions about the plight of WinForms.

Chris Anderson’s The Blinking Lights Division.

When we began the “Avalon” project (code name for the presentation platform for the next version of Microsoft Windows, code-named “Longhorn”), there was the clear desire to modernize the entire graphics stack inside of Windows. We have this amazingly powerful video card that is sitting idle the entire time you are running Windows (unless you happen to be playing Quake in windowed mode) and even with the idleness of the video card, we still manage to blue screen the machine in the much maligned video drivers.

The details behind Avalon is one of the interesting things about Longhorn.

How about giving this a spin?

Forget your ‘HTML-coding kung fu’… move your arse to Flash err… Flex.

Nah, not until I can get hold of that E-Paper. Remember Minority Report? The changing front page newspapers..? Yup… that’s the E-Paper I’m talking about.

Fascinating how movies influence technology. And vice versa. Here’s another article about Star Trek ‘powered’ gadgets being used in daily life. Give credits to the conceptual artists too… like Ryan Church. In a way their minds are behind these innovations.

Just as I was wrapping up the client/server features of Project Sopheiai, I found this VFP Port Listener wiki thread. Ah well… I guess I’ll stick with my database approach for now since I am ‘passing’ large amount of data and from what I’ve heard, ports are being used by binary-loving-K-Paxians and other two bit alien lifeforms as a means of teleportation these days.

I’m still finishing up the iOpenLogic section of that project but to give you an overview, the server part clicks on a certain client list inside a grid which will return the programs running on a ‘client computer’ and the sites being browsed as well. In other words SERVER is monitoring if clients are browsing porn related materials or just chatting.

On a different note, Amazon and RSS _is_ a sexy combination.

We humans have sent rovers to Mars, invented hypersonic planes, wikis and made jokes out of war.

We have placed a GIANT matter on space to look for hidden worlds and take snapshots of the universe.

We defied gravity, discovered blueberries and water on Mars and claimed responsibility that life on Mars came from Earth.

We invented WinAmp and carved it on our desktop, saw a company that started in a garage become a kingdom and spiced up mobile phones (which I still strongly believe stifled our mental telepathic skills).

We brought to life fantasies that were once confined/but not limited to books, made best use of our idle hands and invented robots that rescue humans (though they have to get this “rescue robot driver�s license” first).

BUT still… we use primitive means to fight fire. In the world of touch screens, fast cars and T1 connections it still takes hours to stop this gift from Prometheus.

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Uhrm. Enough of this mumbo-jumbos. There was a fire, a huge one that occured a firewall-away from my ‘regular-job’ office. It took 27 firetrucks, countless firefighters and four hours to completely eradicate it. I haven’t visited that office for two weeks already (I’m on a leave remember?), but I did visit it last night during the fire incident. Good thing the wind and luck favored us. The school was intact but homeless individuals there will be surrounding that place. Sympathies.

Shanara, Compaq and GODofLIGHT were safe though… and the other computers that dwell in that place.

UHM… so now a bunch of scientists are trying to disprove that meteor theory on dinosaur’s extinction. So who will we blame now… Osama? Greedy dinosaurs fighting over a FlipStart?

Foxpro-warp: Visual Foxpro User Group. While the lay-out of the site is… uhm… ‘not that good’, it contains a LOT of good (and i mean GOOD) and ‘phat’ foxpro-related materials inside. So let’s concentrate on the content since content is indeed KING. The heck with the lay-out… [“,].

Semi-randomness spurt:

• Six Sigma to the rescue?
• Firefox fills the IE void
• Firefox May be Better, But Internet Explorer is Entrenched
• OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Wanted to Know About Switching to Open Office.org
• Monti to Microsoft: Guilty as charged

Hmmm…

I have always been fascinated with random numbers. There’s this mysterious and sensual, if i might add, beauty that lies deep inside ‘them’. The EncryptionSL() algorithm that I made last week uses a simple random number generation technique.

This article, Why software still stinks, written by Scott Rosenberg points out a number of interesting things. Here are some insights from that article uttered by some of the pioneers of the software industry.

• “I looked at the programmer as an individual on a quest to create something new that would change the world.” (Susan Lammers)
• “Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law isn’t a match for our bad coding.” (Jaron Lanier – pioneer of virtual reality)
• “Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty.” (Charles Simonyi, from Xerox PARC and Microsoft code guru behind Microsoft’s Office suite)
• “Most successful programmers are at heart can-do engineers who are optimistic that every problem has a solution.”
• “There are two meanings to software design. One is, designing the artifact we’re trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles — the subject matter expert and the software engineer.” (Charles Simonyi)
• “A lot of stuff in the Mac and Windows world was supposed to be temporary and got wedged into place,” he said. “Making programming fundamentally better might be the single most important challenge we face — and the most difficult one.” Today’s software world is simply too “brittle” — one tiny error and everything grinds to a halt: “We’re constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe.” Nature and biological systems are much more flexible, adaptable and forgiving, and we should look to them for new answers. “The path forward is being biomimetic.”

And I wasn’t able to stop myself from laughing when i read these two lines:

• “There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world. So what do they make — another version of Unix?” (Jaron Lanier)
• “And what do they put on top of it? Another Windows!” (Jef Raskin)

And one more from young Bill Gates:

• “The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.” (Bill Gates)

That article pointed out a lot of good links too. To name a few: The Father of Macintosh, The computer is an amplifier for your brain and Are microchips too fast for mere mortals?

Hmmm… is OPEN SOURCE really a danger to the software economy? What differentiates Linux from Windows?