foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

E=mc⁴.

Avatar posted this cool flash work in the forum, Imagination at Work! More like ‘wasting time at work’… but a cool way indeed to waste time. I’m still in the process of convincing him to create a techblog of his own.

Craig Berntson compares VFP with Utah State and the NCAA Basketball Tournament while John Koziol talks about VFP and some Windows XP SP2 related issues.

Now who wants to talk about the new ‘planet’ discovered beyond Pluto? Or Kevin Mitnick’s call for hackers to submit their ‘sexiest hack’..? Hmmm… Project Mono perhaps?

Like certain xx-chromosome-filled human I know, development tools do show an ILLogical behavior sometimes. There are even times when you find yourself deeply thinking if you’re logic circuit boards are getting rusty already.

Please don’t get me wrong… I do have great respect for women. The Peerless leader is included in that respect list of mine… and a hundred more. Women even live longer.

I’ll compensate that ‘quite-too-techie’ post below with these links… now pick what is more interesting to you: a 3 headed frog or Life inside Microsoft Research. I know you’d pick that frog thing… :]

A compilation of new .NET Design Guidelines.

Well… aside from ThinkGEEK, there’s Engadget too for your gadget-related cravings. Don’t you just love those XML/RSS feeds?

I have seen a lot of cool ‘mod’-ed cases before, but this BORG PC by far is the coolest. A little less cooler than Visual FoxPro though.

So what if there’s water in Mars..? Will it make life on Earth easier..?

Hmm… it goes back to that old point that even we have landed on the moon, seen the farthest galaxies and conceptualized a space elevator, we humans are still unable to do the journey inwards, to know ourselves more… and explore the core essence of this planet.

Rest… and late night programming after this.

Good articles worth your time.

Why Good Ideas Fail
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

The Ten Rules of Performance.

[snip]
“… you’re tempted to believe that you understand how your application works. Well, you don’t. You understand how it’s supposed to work. Unfortunately, performance work deals with how things actually work, which in many cases is completely different.”
[/snip]

It’s a very interesting read for programmers, system developers and humans who value work and output as well.

You’ve read Microsoft’s plan on SPAM earlier… now hear a more ‘radical approach’ as Michael J. Miller interviews the CEO of Symantec.

I have an alternate e-mail account on one of the free servers one can find in the ‘net. For the past three months it was rendered useless by SPAM, which just celebrated it’s 10th year birthday a couple of days ago. It was only yesterday when out of nowhere the cyber-Gods started whispering in my ears pointing me to the SPAM filtering option that i am able to breath life into that sufferrin’ account once more. SPAM, or unsolicited commercial emails, are getting worse these past few months (if not years). Even Microsoft is mapping out their plans to tackle this problem. Some theories would even tell that the proliferation of worms have something to do with a deeper SPAM-related creeping attacks, that e-mail addresses gathered are being sold for a big amount of money, and SPAM is being used by aliens who have plans of colonizing our solar system. A number of mentally-spammed entities can even make SPAM unstoppable.

Which is bad… we all know there are a lot of valid e-mails that are trashed because of this… not to mention the time, resources and bandwidth that are wasted. Hopefully in the near future, the combination of technological software advancements, laws and ‘maturity of humanity’ can help solved this problem. Or better yet… use SPAM as a tool along with fireflies in finding alien lifeforms.

Have you ever heard of the A. M. Turing Award? Just stumbled upon it once again after reading an article about Bill Gates. It’s an interesing one… here Bill Gates tells us about his move to attract computer science students in colleges, why computer science courses are dwindling, his views on offshore-outsourcing and a lot more.

I downloaded OPENOffice.org 1.1.1 last night. Make that a couple of nights ago since it is already two in the morning. Installed it fifteen hours ago in the computer in the office i call as the ‘Battle PC’. Experimented on it for awhile, click a few buttons here and there and opened some previously created files. I don’t have any java runtime environment installed on my computers so i have to choose to run it sans the Java. All things are working fine so far but i’ll do a research on that Java part. Even the setup window i must admit is quite refreshing… and i do like that eplastic effect on graphics which i first saw at PHONG.com years ago and is often used in current interfaces these days. It’s good to see artistic interfaces being used but not abused. This one falls in the ‘well used’ category.

Back to Open Office… like Microsoft Office it has applications for text and documents, spreadsheets, presentations and even for HTML creation and editing. A quick tinkering and dropping down of menus showed that they are almost similar feature-wise. Which is scary… but at the same time, a big help especially in this part of the world were piracy is rampant, licensed softwares are too expensive as compared with the basic needs and currency is plummeting down so fast. A BIG help it would really be. (Of course you can view it differently)

Feature-wise, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 even has an export to PDF feature which i can’t find on my MS Office XP, but i must admit i haven’t explored MS Word that much. With respect to MicroSoft, i believe that Office is one of their best products to date. Word and even Excel, along with their easter eggs, have done a lot since those old WordStar 4 and Lotus for DOS days. Yup i’ve used that before but i’m not that old yet. Oh no… i’m not… not yet.

What i can’t fully understand, is why one creates a good package such as this and call it with a name which is not far from an existing ‘dominant’ product already? I can understand some similarities in lay-out and item placing and such, probably to make things easier for the user to adapt and familiarize, but why not name it to a different word. Why ‘office’? The word ‘open’ is not much help even it means a lot. I guess this is just the ‘trend’ in the ‘IT world’, eh?. There’s WordStar… then WordPerfect then MSWord and countless others having this affinity for the word ‘word’. Partly i know and understand the reason… but still, part of me was hoping that the open source community would give more importance of having a sort of unique identity for their products. Yes, I do have a great respect for the open source principles and the minds behind such force, but that my friend, is another story for now.

Well i guess i’ll just settle with figuring out how to make Visual Foxpro ‘automate’ with these new found treasures. Or should i also expect an Open Foxpro in the days to come? Uh… something to look forward to.

FoxPro website of the day: Neil’s FoxPro Resources.

Don’t you just love it when websites have PDF versions of their articles? I’m such a sucker for PDF these days. We’ll just hope that Ars Technica will give out FREE PDF articles too. If you still prefer the HTML version, since the PDF is a 3++ MB file download, just move your mouse-pointer-butts here: Does Microsoft .Net measure up?

One more thing, though I know this is ancient news already, Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 is now available. I have just upgraded mine from version 5 to version 6 last night.

I’ll be starting this work week by trying out this freeware from Richard Hamm: Project Build Toolbar.

Speaking of tools, you might want to give HTTrack Website Copier a test run… read, read, experiment and learn. I’ll give the explanations afterwards – that’s the way we were taught in college. We were not even using the ‘net then for researches. These days, college students have vast resources, cheaper internet connection, well-written documentations/books, and whirlwinds of distraction that overrides the first three things mentioned.

I will explain later HTTrack‘s connection with learning VisualFoxpro. But i guess you have figured that out already.

UHM… yes, software can do this. And this was what… twenty years ago. Just imagine what it can do these days.

Wired Magazine’s The Complete Guide to Googlemania! Anything Google related is interesting… and in some ways, inspirational.

I can fill this space with words about Steve Jobs but that won’t be necessary. I’ll just scribble the words Apple, PowerMac G5, PowerBooks, iBooks, Pixar, iPod, iTunes and this interview from Rolling Stone.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates predicts that the traditional password-based protection is headed for extinction because it cannot ‘meet the challenge’ of security. Hmmm… is he’s really referring to the password-based security or Windows OS? I wonder what teaming up with AMD can really do. But i do agree, human-related factors are indeed a weakness, well at least in terms of security.

Looks like Microsoft is indeed serious about security these days.