foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

VirCrash.Part.001.2006.0425

PARCEL… MY home PC got infected with ‘that-which-I-would-not-speak-of’ (/that-which-I-would-not-hyperlink) computer virus.

This would be the first MAJOR infection of one my drones since 1996. That was ten years ago. College days… just months after I was given a PC I could truly call mine.

Yes… that experience was terrible enough that it caused me to religiously install/run/update five tools for protection. Along with a truckload of common sense (You can buy a dozen at a discounted price at Waltermart), cybernetically-enhanced instincts and paranoia.

(Of course a pet tiger who could sniff computer viruses/worms when hungry. (And this one’s hungry all the time.))

A reliable anti-virus application, a paranoid ‘stand-alone’ firewall (no… not the one that comes bundled with SP2), an all around —ware immunizer/remover, and a couple of ‘top secret’ tools were there for me all these years.

(Except for the —ware tool since these SPY/MAL/ETCwares just went fashionable a couple or more years ago but vhoi their growth almost made me forget the existence of ‘old school’ computer viruses.)

What makes things more ironic is I got infected when I was downloading an update to one of my protection tools from a respectable site.

Just like ten years ago when I was infected upon bringing home a copy of an infected set of virus definitions from our computer lab.

(Edit… apparently judging from the trail of infected files after SEVEN HUGE hours of scanning, I got this days before… which makes the virus a ‘that-which-I-would-not-speak-or-even-think-of’. It might try infecting brainwave frequencies too.)

I don’t have an internet connection at home so I depend on downloadable manual updates. (And probably CATALYST (the office PC) is not infected after all since it updates automatically but I’ll find out once I’m there.)

It infects 32-bit .exe files. And I probably felt the symptoms before when it would automatically rename the files I am copying to lowercase. I did suspect but seeing the dates and byte sizes to be what they should, and the processes panel showing no hoodlum-looking process, and items being intact after MSCONFIG-in’… I chose to ignore.

As of now I’m not yet sure of what the root cause of this one is… let me waste my time and investigate further.

“Papa, let’s use the force na lang.”

That’s what my four year old told me when the bouncing ball we were playing with rolled underneath the chair and we were both too bummed out to move our butts to get it.

Andrew reacts and posted a link to this tool . (Software tools and applications, and software in general should be included in the list of humanity’s greatest inventions, don’t you think?)

A couple of client visits and a kiddie party after posting that blog, I can’t seem to recall very well the reasoning behind those thoughts. Probably I was also thinking fast instead of deep. (Using .or. instead of .and.)

Or probably I had encountered too many humans already who are too adept at using their thought faculties to think of excuses at the snap of a finger. The narrow minded ones with that this-can’t-be-done attitude. Firing up one too many excuse before even attempting.

[VFP.zealot.shield.enable = .T.]

Include the VFP-is-dead barkers, who without thinking lash out at VFP before trying it out or actually using it.

[VFP.zealot.shield.enable = .F.]

Anyway… will work first and blog later. I’ve been out of the office for two straight days already… [“,]

MY previous workplace/battleGROUND celebrates its Centennial Jubilee Celebration today.

Happy 100th year to the University of the Immaculate Conception.

I have quite a number of ‘BLOG-able’ work experiences from that place. One of these days, I’ll post some of them.

Restart now… restart later.

The existence of these two buttons have been talked about in countless blogs online.

Mostly rants.

Some of them even strongly believe that a good OS should not require a restart everytime an update has been done, or a new software has been installed.

(I disagree though. That’s why new OSes/applications require higher and faster specs… so you can reboot faster.)

Personally I don’t have anything against these two command buttons. The problem lies when they appear too often. There’s no problem seeing them once after a certain installation, but having them pop up every five minutes or so is a different story.

An entirely different story.

Why not add that checkbox that says ‘Do not notify me again for five Earth years.’?

I don’t have problems when I’m encoding documents or spreadsheets… no problems even if it interrupts my comic babes surfin‘… or when I’m coding.

I can’t imagine a programmer’s world with no interruptions, no phone rings, no distracting sounds, cubicles near your playing love songs or any form of interruptions.

That’s a boring world. It will lead to a robotic atmosphere creating bug-less softwares. (Bug-less?! The software industry would probably mature at the age of 2 and end at the age of 5 (Bugs are what keep us alive.))

Restart now. Restart later.

It is when I am fighting swarms of alien invasions, kicking some chimeran-ceramic-coated alien butts about to initialize some wormhole coordinates and jumpgate sequences in an undisclosed sector, that I don’t need those two buttons interrupting my quest to save the world.

It’s my human arse that gets kicked every time I pause just to click ‘Restart later.’

And these are intelligent lifeforms we are dealing with here. After a couple of interruptions, they can calculate already the amount of time in between pauses and initiate their attack process in that window.

So please, for the good of humanity… drop the timer or include that ‘Do not notify me again in five Earth years’ checkbox.

Thanks.

I was archiving the access logs of Pixelcatalyst.Lair and Foxpro.catalyst while The FoxPro Show 024 was playing once again in the background.

I did hint a while back that I’ll be posting something TFPS024 related. The FoxPro Show 25 came out, then 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31… a couple of Mondays podcasts were also released and after a month, I’m still here unable to scribble those buffered thoughts.

OzFoxRocks even went online a couple of weeks ago.

So I was thinking it was about time I ‘unbuffer‘ those buffered thoughts which a couple of minutes ago are being electrocuted by strange toon-porn infested neurons.

There’s a problem though with unbufferring a month old casing of thoughts. The mind-to-fingertips-to-keyboard coordination just won’t work smoothly.

Though I remember most things discussed in the show, I would like to double check on one detail.

Now there’s a difference too, when you’re working, archiving, reading some parts and listening at the same time through an P850.00 (1 US dollar = P55.00) speaker… I kept on skipping the part where that detail was being discussed.

It was an insfoxpirational show, so I didn’t mind listening again and again.

After the fifth replay though I noticed that ants and a couple of six legged entities were slowly swarming in.

Sixth replay and I’m seeing metal plated grasshoppers with tiny boxing gloves and soccer shoes.

Now… It was the fear of the eight-legged creatures weaving out that got me to stop the other works and concentrate on listening… and there on the 13:27 timestamp, I found what I was looking for.

I’m currently multitasking once again (I can’t seem to blog if I’m not doing some other stuff, and returning to this window every now and then to continue my chain of thought (and listening to some loud Moby stuff)), so I hope I get this right.

Ken Levy was giving out the 100:1 ratio in terms of Visual Studio/Visual FoxPro’s usage. Which he further places on a different perspective that based on that 100:1 stat, VS can gain in three days what VFP can sell for a year.

(That would make approximately 122:1 though, but still… we get the point.)

My first thought/reaction when I first heard this a month ago was why not re-include Visual FoxPro (without changing the VFP core) inside the Visual Studio package.

Ah there… I’m hearing the uproar of CLR purists (and yes I admit I’m not an expert at this marketing/branding stuff (besides Microsoft’s licensing and pricing is not that simple to start with)).

But let’s just do a little elementary math.

Approximately VFP’s price is 650 dollars.

Now… Visual Studio comes with different prices and I don’t have the actual statistics to show which edition/package sells better. But for the sake of this blogcussion, let’s pick the Professional Edition which is around 800 dollars.

Now let’s go back to that 100:1 ratio above. If VFP can sell 100 copies in 300 days, VS can sell the same number in three days.

(Let’s use 300 instead of 365 since this is ‘elementary math’ and I will refrain from using the ‘for the sake of discussion’ line from here forth)

Going further VS can sell 100 * (300/3) copies in 300 days. And that is 10,000.

Now for the sake of discussion (didn’t I mention that I would refrain from using that already…), let’s include VFP inside VS and just jack up the price of VS to 800 + N dollars (where N is less than VFP’s current price).

(I know VFP is worth MORE and if I have enough bucks I wouldn’t mind buying VFP even if it’s base price is more than 650. Legacy is priceless… but just FTSOD (For The Sake of Discussion)).

Now if N = 50 then, 850 * 10,000 is 8,500,000.

The additional 50 * 10,000 alone is 500,000. Much more than 650 * 100 which is equal to a 65,000.

And even if N = 10, 10 * 10,000 is still 100,000… 935,000 more than 650 * 100.

Yes I know I know… the pricing of these shrinkwrap softwares are more complicated than elementary math and there are tons of factors involved.

And for the nth time, the things posted above are FTSOD. Though there are possible benefits for both products (VS and VFP) and the community as well, if MS packs back VFP inside the Visual Studio package.

And there are disadvantages too, which are in the first place the reasons why VFP was not included inside that .NET package. (As discussed inside the Fox.wikis site, the Universal Thread forums and countless other fox sites.)

(Also notable are the advantages of shipping Visual FoxPro as an independent product.)

A clientbase of 100,000 (though I think VFP’s actual client base is more than that) is still NOT negligible.

And if you can remember around 2,000 years ago, a shepherd left 99 sheep to find one missing sheep. Though the FoxPro community is far from being lost sheep, we deserve the same kind of lovin’.

Right..?

Zkarkakaorooom. More like Z… k… a… r… k… a… r… m. That is the sound of my fourth rssreader/tool conking out after months of accumulating feeds. And it’s not even overfed. Every now and then I ‘safestore’ the feeds into its .mht format to be stored in a directory somewhere. Yes, I do this part semi manually with the help of the ever-reliable Norton Commander designed for Windows 95.

Out of respect for their developers, I won’t mention their product names.

Most of these rss-readers bonk out when they accumulate tons of data. And I do expect more from them.

This fourth one, holds a lot of important features, well the features that a pack rat like me prefers, and in fairness it did survive longer than the previous three. (Well actually more than three, but I’m only counting those tools which I used for more than three months)

And now it crashes every now and then, hangs and pretends to be seeing drunk mouth-watering aliens almost too often.

(One or a few more crashes are forgiveable, a couple more is believable especially if aliens are indeed involved, but more than that… I’ll be blaming either a lame developer or a lame tool (or both))

Which gets me thinking. Are we really entrusting the storage of data, and the data format itself to the proper tools and formats?

Please don’t make me mention the three letter acronym.

(OK… most of the technologies involved in this have three letter acronyms… so take your pick.)

One can always download these rss feeds, convert them to a format that can be stored inside VisualFoxPro’s native database engine (or even use an SQL Server (though that would be an overkill in terms of what I really need for now))…

… use VisualFoxPro to sort and browse data and I don’t believe even in running this for a year, VFP would conk out because it was overwhelmed with more information than it can process.

Unless of course, the… ok… for once, let’s refrain from involving aliens.

Don’t even mention that 2GB limit this time. There are tons of workarounds for that excluding the use of nanotech and parallel universes.

Can these new tools at least make themselves reliable first before masking and donning that ‘the-future/the-next-big-thing’ cape.

… and Beakman wonders why I try and use old technologies.

They’re not old… they are reliable.

Yes… reliable.

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Here’s an offshoot of that chat I had with Beakman yesterday (Happy Trip by the way, Mark.)

WF: I’m porting some of my old VFP6/VFP8 projects to VFP9 already, Mark. Blah blah blah… and more detailed blahs.
Beakman: Is it compatible..?
WF: Dude, Visual FoxPro is 20 years backward compatible.

Darn… I did use ‘dude’ in that statement.

Better to sleep all day than to wake up hours after sunrise and spend the rest of the day… unproductive. -SIGH-

Sometimes, in order to solve some problems, you, dear friend, have to recreate it first.

How did rocks from Mars end up here on Earth?

One word: ALIENS.

Probably now is the right time to start digging.

Here are more signs of alien presence: Human brains enjoy ongoing evolution | 2005 Leap Second | Thinking Machine 5 | Camera phones will be high-precision scanners.

Hefty hardware requirements for Windows Vista.

I’ll react later. One rant a day is more than enough for me.

Just a quick quasi-rant.

Oh creative-and-innovative minds and fingers-pounding-the-keyboard influencing the human world… do place e.BackwardCompatibility beside e.Speed every time you re-design, recreate and develop things.

Always.

Ignoring it means two things (two for now… I’ll mention the others later). One you’re insulting the previous creators/developers/inventors and designers.

Not only that, you’re also insulting the user.

Second, which can be connected or not to the first one, is… you’ve released a product that is not well planned, well organized and is not able anticipate future changes.

In this field of binaries, bits and data, one should design/create applications that are designed to last for decades, if not years. Something that should stand the test of time.

(And time is one cruel alpha/beta/omega/post-release tester.)

Now… I know there are always situations that are exceptions… and humans tend to move if not cross the line. This is where efficient and cumbersome conversion tools must come in.

Now the proponents of profit are shouting out the opposite of what I’m saying here.

Money-infested-and-blinded humans, I will talk to you later… that I will.

After this week… hopefully… hopefully… I could transfer some buffered thoughts in my brain into a digital format stored in this blog.

A couple of hardware upgrades (and you think upgrades would make you more productive, eh..?) and a string of client visits are consuming a lot of my time for the past few weeks.

Ah… I’m not usually online during weekends, so I’ll take this time to greet the beloved essence of my life, who will be celebrating her birthday this Sunday.

Happy birthday, twuddles… : ]

Yeah… her blog is quite idle since the time she dived into Visual FoxPro database-related development.

The Altec Lansing FX6021 speakers that reside near Fahrenheit (that’s how she calls her PC), along with an Audigy 2 soundcard and a 160GB hard disk upgrade are parts of the fruits of her first project.

Right now she’s developing three more… but I’ll leave that to her to blog about.

‘Only the strongest will survive…’

One of the loudest lines from the second track inside the Halo 2 soundtrack. I haven’t played the game though (nor am I into computer games for that matter) but I have a copy of the music that comes with that game.

And I must say it blends well with a coding environment. The type of music that fires up and ignites syntax and semantics formation and other countless music-fueled-sound-intoxicated-coding-related tasks. (see Music… war and neurons)

I’m adding this to my collection of coding soundtracks which include, but is not limited to… Nine Inch Nails/Puddle of Mudd/The Crow soundtracks/Industrial themes, the Swordfish soundtrack (one of the best power-up-your-coding-tracks), Paul Oakenfold beats and trance, Enigma and of course U2 (with that Go Home Slaine Castle concert).

‘Only the strongest will survive…’

When it comes to PLs, my bet is on C++, Delphi, Python… and of course, by this time you’ve guessed it already… Visual FoxPro.

(I’ll probably include CSharp once it hits version 3.00 when parts of the legendary FoxPro technology is injected into it.)

But just because I did not mention your choice of PL, doesn’t mean it is weak and I have disrespected your soul. VB is still one of the most widely used PLS around and Java, which two of my friends consider a ‘very elegant language’, has reached Mars already.

… and from what I’ve heard, 128-bit .asm programs are aiming for the sun.

In the other hand, the aliens invented CGI and PERL, that’s why they looks cryptic but are still reliable… and undeniably PHP is fast (which is probably because the faction of aliens who created the specs for that language runs on slower CPUs (do the math and logic.))

But aliens aside, strength, dear friends, comes from within. It doesn’t need sky-rocketing budgets for marketing.

Good PLs do not show off. (Though I have heard that ‘Nothing demos like the Fox’ line from Ken Levy (and from other VFP gurus as well) countless of times already.)

You have to look inside it, test it, feel it and use it to see its strengths.

And bring it to the ‘real world’… not just within the confines of your room, bragging about it online, sharing it with other online friends, who by the way, are also dwelling in their own world.

Bring it out to the real user… a real world task.

When it comes to the real world, real life to life database-related applications, Visual Foxpro by far is the strongest.

Heck… it even survived ten years and a month and more of pondering inside an ‘are we dead yet?’ mindset.

Four days of not having checked my email and I’m bombarded with ‘man’-enhancing-related spam, pirated-oem-software-buy-me-buy-me-lists and netsky-infected zip files this morning.

Behind that file of crap, I did find a link to this article (XBase Myths Debunked) from the ProFoxTech list.

The article is maybe almost a year old, but give it two more years and what it is saying will still probably be true. Allow me to extract some snippets.

Contrary to what we are all led to believe by the computing press, hype and the mighty marketing dollars of the large software companies it is ‘Applications’ that drive the use of IT in companies of all sizes. Yes ‘Applications’, not languages, operating systems, development tools or database systems. It is these applications that can make or break a company. The ability of the application to perform or respond to user requests quickly and reliably is of paramount importance to the survival of any organization.

Exactly my sentiments. And here I am thinking that Visual Foxpro is the last XBase standing. That it is the last one which understands how to handle data and records and speed and efficiency and all.

Here’s more. (Beakman hear this out)

The IT landscape has been fed with many “Bait and switch” tools, languages, and other technologies for as long as I can remember. If we as developers were to jump on each and every bandwagon that was raved about in the press and on the web, we would never complete any projects. Ever!

Reminds me of a small portion of Joel Spolsky’s Fire and Motion article:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.

Innovation is good. But if profits play a major role in its push, and reliability and productivity are sacrificed then it is bound to mate with some green germs down the drain.

No offense meant to the green germs.

Do you remember IKIA..?

Yesterday he was playing with his lightsaber version 08.00.0000.2521 when Prometheus came to our lair.

(Yes this is the same Prometheus who stole fire and gave it away. These days he’s into selling lightsabers, cheering ‘Use-the-force-use-the-force!’ in almost everything he sees, tinkering with online sharing technologies, and studying quantum physics and nanotechnology at the same time.)

(Well… he also is one of those humans who clicks annoying banners and reads spam devotedly.)

Anyway back to IKIA, he received this lightsaber version 09.00.0000.2412 from Prometheus. LS V8.00 was a great product to start with. It can zap an entire ant colony and transport them to a parallel dimension before you can even hear the second ‘a’ in ‘Aaah!’. It can slice walls, slice cars and even cakes but not humans (a safety feature of course).

And it can slice things fast. True to its years of tradition in terms of speed and reliability. Plus it is backward compatible so you can add the accessories you have added to your previous versions of lightsabers.

(It can even interact and operate with open source powered light sabers before the entities in Olympus started freaking out, gathering their colony of lawyers (Yes, even in Olympus, lawyers do exist.), and started releasing EULAs, wizard threats and dangerous magic potions. (But again that would be another story for now.))

IKIA can do almost any practical thing with his current lightsaber (or even the previous ones). The most important tasks, that is.

But when IKIA was holding LS V9.00 and Prometheus told him about a box that contains the future of the LS product, he got excited. He chanted and danced and hugged my pet tiger.

This was a complete turnaround though when he opened the box and saw the words ‘SEDNA’ instead of version 10. That’s when he started whining and whining ‘Oh-no-there’s-no-more-version-10-this-is-the-end-of-it-all!’ and started screaming, running around and bolting doors.

In a way this comes surprising since LS V9.00 has just been released. It is a great product. A very good one indeed. Most of the important tasks can be addressed with LS V8.00 to start with.

IKIA, a great programmer/developer hasn’t used, abused and extended the capabilities of the current product, yet he’s asking for more. He hasn’t even developed an application yet with this product.

Partly surprising that he’s yelling that Prometheus does not support the technology and is neglecting it, when in fact it has been releasing great features for almost 10 years (and even beyond) despite the rumors about the end of this product.

I want to go on and on but this is the part where I’ll realize I have to finish up something code-related, and place a sort of ‘I-will-continue-this-later’ variation and click the post button.

(Another one added to this endlessly-buffered-still-uncontinued blogs of mine. (But then again I know you get my drift already))

Humans who work with me (including wifey), probably is already annoyed with my accuracy-related principles. Accuracy… accuracy… accuracy.

(In the other hand, I am so annoyed everytime I hear/see/smell a variation of that ‘puede-na-yan’ attitude (Translation below and samples too many to mention)).

But this quest is far far way too far and beyond my standards.

‘Puede-na-yan’, for those who can’t undersand means… ah… now I’m having a hard time translating for if I end up doing an inaccurate transalation, this post would backfire on me. But anyway, it’s close to ‘This-would-be-ok-since-I’m-too-lazy-to-push-myself-too-far-and-I-am-lazy-anyway-I-can-still-breath-and-live-even-if-I-would-not-improve-this’ line.

Reasons != Excuses. Humans should remember that. Even if he dwells in this world polluted by ((Reason = Excuse) .and. (Output < 0)) Mentality.