foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

It is almost two weeks already since 2005 got initialized but somehow I still can’t get over the holiday-be-a-bum-hang-over that has clouded me for weeks.

(Which feels good really…)

The vacation from work was fun… and qs already summarized one of its ‘highlights‘ in her blog.

I still can’t get myself into the coding zone. The programming mood still refuses to swing in. Probably, having to create a user guide as one the first things to do this year also contributes to that lack of spark.

Probably not…

Anyway… better buffered than purged, belated happy new initialized year, everyone.

May we accumulate enough productive results, stuff and whatever and even dangling references before nThisYear becomes nThisYear = nThisYear + 1.

This is the time of the year when database programmers/developers and borgs realized that they too have a life which partly explains the lack of online activities as of late.

‘Normal online activities’ will resume within the week.

Anyway… Merry Christmas everyone… Happy Holidays if you prefer it that way.

Blogging is about sharing… experiences… words and all. That is what Christmas season is all about. I know you know that part already.

Happy Birthday… BMM! [“,]

If self study doesn’t work, nothing will ever work!

Uhm. That I think is the first time I used ASCII 21 here in my blogs. (It’s 21 because I’m using hex. It would be 33 in Decimal and 41 in Octal.)

OK… if you still haven’t figured that out, it means it’s the first time I used the exclamation point (!) character.

Anyway, this line just barfed out when I was arguing with my lovely programming student this evening. For those who know me from the previous place and are wondering if I have dived into the teaching profession once again… no I did not.

(I wanted to, really… I miss torturing students, but right now I don’t have extra time.)

I’m just teaching someone to code… and if you’re following this blog, you know who she is.

Programming is not taught. It is practiced. You do a lot of RTFM-in’. (If you don’t know what RTFM is, RTFM.)

You should never expect the teacher to spoon feed things. Besides the spoon does not exist… nor the teacher. It is the drive, the passion that moves you to learn programming.

The curiousity that lies within the hacker’s soul is your tool.

(‘Hacker’… in the proper sense of the word… and not the term the media has misused, twisted, sensationalized and abused for years already.)

Like every quest in this world, passion is one of the main things that drives and ignites you to move forward.

In a way, learning how to program is like learning how to play basketball. You would never learn even if Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson would talk in front of you for 10 hours a day (for 12 months… for 100 years), teaching you the mechanics of things without you practicing it yourself, without you going out to hold the ball. You will never learn basketball if you just hold the ball, aim and be contented. You have to perfect things… perfect the crossover move… the lay-up and if you’re lucky enough, the slam dunk.

You must have passion… to do it every day… every hour if needed…

… until you can be proud of yourself, until you are effective.

Then you expand your court to the streets, meet new enemies and be clobbered, blocked and be humiliated in every sense. Sometimes you get kneed, elbowed and punched.

(Yes that’s how basketball is played sometimes.)

But you learn. You learn the hard way. The harder the better.

You practice again… you face the opponent, conquer and move on to a bigger world.

Bigger challenges.

Of course there’s a possibility that you get clobbered a thousand times before you can move on.

… which is good. Because you’ll never learn the game and be good at it if you play one on one with your neighbor’s cuddly teddy bear. You gain knowledge, you gain experience… you gain wisdom.

Wise enough to know that both a mighty dunk and simple shot scores two points in the statistics department. But wise enough too to know the difference between the two and when to use it.

But that my student would be another story for now.

I don’t think I have to spoon feed what MJ, the ball, the passion, the learning process, the dunk, the teddy bear and every component in that metaphor symbolizes here.

More on this later… (I need to chop things, it’s gettin long already.)

PageFrames are heaven-sent. It makes a programmer’s life easier. It also helps in achieving that ‘lesser-clicks-the-better’ principle of mine when designing interfaces and forms.

Declaring public variables is not that needed anymore… nor do I have to go through the process of passing parameters from form to form.

It makes things more organized. Easier for the user too… straight forward and smooth flowing.

Remember the user may not always be right… but you should treat her as a queen. Pamper her with a good, well-organized interface. That is why some software companies invest in the interface.

Probably one of the reasons why some less-stable/hole-infested/half-baked systems are more accepted than a more stable/secure one with an interface only a nerd with an IQ above Mt. Helens can understand.

For some… the interface is even considered the application.

The interface _is_ the application.

The users don’t care much about the leet-haxored computation process you made behind things. As long as the correct results are there.

Presented well inside a well ‘formatted’ interface.

It is already 2:07AM in the morning. I think I need to crash. I would like to continue coding but the ref’s empty… food supply shortage. I don’t like it when my hunger overtakes the sleepy mode.

Speaking of Mt. Helens…

Helen’s getting prettier everyday. No not the mountain.

No… not the Helen of Troy… nor the actress that played her.

I’m referring to Helen, the Elastigirl.

Sexy!

I really need some sleep.

The lesser clicks… the better.

That’s how I see things when designing interfaces/forms.

Right now I think I’m squeezing too much command buttons and processes in one of my KWMS forms. I printed a screenshot already so that I can analyze things away from the monitor.

Sometimes things are more efficient that way.

Especially when I’m beginning to interpret KISS as ‘Keep It Sexy, Sweetheart’.

Infoworld: The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid.

Michael Ventre: U2 creates perfect soundtrack for life

Sometimes a rock band can worm its way into your cranium and remain there throughout all the significant moments of your adult life. Most people have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering in one ear, each vying for attention. With me, U2 has always been the group playing in the background while that battle for my soul raged.

Link

There was this one time when I was willing to give up coding inorder to be a rock star.

I’m glad I’m over it.

Since late high school days when I was starting that ‘Journey Inwards’ thing, I have ‘partially’ mastered how to convert anger into something productive.

Anger is not often the enemy. In fact, it can be used as a tool for productivity.

That is of course if you know how to channel things into something productive without letting anger cloud your judgment… without it conquering your vision, without allowing a hint of revenge pairing up side by side with your goals.

This I cannot say the same when depression and frustration barges in. It really brings me down.

Like viruses, trojan-powered processes and lately spy+ad:wares… that brings down to their knees a 2.4GHz powered processors.

Even without the virus… run several applications and your computer slows down. That part I know you know already.

Even my little girl knows that fact… though I’m not sure if she understands it.

(I tend to explain computer-related facts to my three year old (including how to count in binary numbers), hoping that subliminally it will ‘come back’ later at the right time… when needed.)

More processes… threads… slow down how the CPU can process requests.

But what if… just what if… someone in the future could architect a processor that speeds up its processing speed when you add more threads to process.

Think about it… the more applications you run, the more ‘powerful’ it becomes using a mechanism that somehow can use the processing usage as a fuel to finish/process more tasks.

I’d like to give examples that involve fire or friction but somehow this mind of mine, as of the moment, is always being detoured to indecent thoughts.

So I’ll stop for now before this post turns out into something erotic.

We humans have spent billions discovering the possibilities of life in other planets and even more billions destroying life here on Earth.

I don’t even need to include a hyperlink in the second part of that statement.

I have the urge though to link this old semi-related blog.

Do you feel like riding my scramjet, baby?

November is my birth month. One of these days, one numeric character in my age will change. Everytime that day arrives it has been my tradition to do or try something that somehow ‘ups my level’. Something challenging.

It’s also the month I do some reflecting… about life, work, direction and all.

I remember during college days I skipped class twice when that day arrived. During the third year, I created a screensaver/TSR-type program in Clipper 5.2 using some low level routines.

My first encryption algorithm was also created on November when I was still in college. Until now I’m still using it in some of my programs.

And until now I am still unable to decrypt it. The ‘exact reverse’ of that encryption algorithm would only decrypt 7 out of 8 characters due to a certain method I included… and the only way I am able to compare things in the encrypted data in the database is to re-encrypt the password entered and compare it with the encrypted value.

Function decrypt just won’t work.

It was on that birth date too last 1998 when I released my first site online. That site was Coollections… which, holds some of my artworks before I decided to create a separate site for it now known as the Pixelcatalyst.Lair.

The conversion from Pixelworkz (pre-pixelcatalyst) to Pixelcatalyst.Lair was made on November 2000.

It was also November when Pixelcatalyst.Lair version 5.00 was released… that was in 2001. The very same year I transferred that site from our old office Pentium 200MHz Linux powered server to the digital fortress of the Plastiqueweb Networks.

It was then when the number of its visitors increased by a factor of 20.

Shift Dimension was created last 2001 and Quendoline Dreams was created last year.

I have one artwork which I started November of last year too, which up to now, is still a work in progress. The main .psd file for that artwork now reaches 30MB and a sub .psd file is around 19MB.

It was November of 2002 when I had my first ‘major’ freelance project. I had a number of freelance projects since college but that November 2002 project was different… and it was that client that referred me to eight more clients.

There were some non-database/graphics-related personal ‘breakthroughs’ too but I won’t be sharing them for now.

This year I’m still considering what I’ll be doing.

Probably a new artwork or finish up the artwork which was started last year. The SeventhSense 2004… or the reorganization of the Pixelcatalyst.Lair website. I’m also thinking of coding that copyright protection-related mechanism I’ve been planning for months already.

Or perhaps I’ll spend the day just bumming around and thinking and doing nothing… for in this year filled with database projects… just doing nothing (and not thinking of code-related things) can be considered a personal breakthrough.

A six and a half hour (11PM to 5:30AM) block-out prevented me from doing the regular late hour key-pounding last night. It’s a sort of way ‘the force’ is telling me to get some rest.

And don’t give me that ‘I-don’t-want-to-believe-that-someone-is-in-control-of-my-life’ line from Neo.

Somewhere… somehow a greater force is in control of you and you can do nothing about it but rely on another force to battle that force.

Until digital-based/silicon-powered-computers, one of man’s greatest achievements, learn how to dwell sans the electrons and protons (which are governed by forces too (attractive and repulsive (and electricity in the first place is one of the four fundamental forces)))… I am sticking on this mindset.

… and until it will get beyond the ‘just clocks and lights’ impression it has on Detective Spooner.

Beakman was wondering why I was not posting for the past three days before yesterday.

And just recently, I received a related inquiry from someone in India.

Aside from the fact that I refrain from posting those I’ll-be-out-in-N-days/weeks-no-blogs-blah-blah(who-cares-who-fsckin’-cares) type of scribbles in here, I am also finishing up modules for two of my projects… HRAEI and SJH.

(HRAEI is an employee-related databanking system (201) for education-type institutions and companies while SJH involves medical history and records.)

HRAEI, in the future will probably be used in some places in this country separated by islands, so making things ‘archipelago-ready’ is something I am planning in advance. I’ll discuss that one later.

For those three days, I’ve been extending the working hours to 4:45AM instead of the usual 3AM limit… which was really 5:30AM since it was only yesterday that I discovered that the clock in this computer is 45 minutes late.

No wonder I’m beginning to see things.

But I created and posted a one-time blog at TheSpoke.NET. The reasons are there so I won’t bother re-posting things in here. If I’ll do that, we’ll have this spaghetti-type of codes already.

Blogs are like Procedures and Functions you know. Well at least that’s how I see it sometimes. Instead of answering queries again and again, I fire up this blog, post some info and link the one questioning to a certain part of this blog that answers his questions.

OK… it is 3:33AM already… I need to crash.

But before that, allow me to leave you one snippet of the dawn:

   do while not eof() 

      for i = 1 to nCount

         cSTAT = 'PERSPOGR.STATUS' + NUMTOSTR(i, 2)

         cSTAL = 'PERSPOGR.STATUS_' + NUMTOSTR(i, 2)

         aSTAT(i) = &cSTAT

         lStat = iif(aSTAT(i) != '00000', .T., .F.)

         replace &cSTAL with lStat

      endfor 

      skip

   enddo

One of those little macro hacks of the night. (Storing the values in the array has some purpose which is not included anymore in the above snippet.)

I’m just showing here how an nCount*N lines of code can be squeezed into a factor of nCount by using macro substitution and by having good naming conventions in your field names, object names and variables.

WildFire here… over and out.

So it was Andrew Tanenbaum behind it all… mighty wicked!

Ha-hah!

I wasn’t able to resist the force… the mask of light… the Rahkshi… whatever.

In case you’re wondering what that nasty-object-that-seem-to-have-spawned-out-of-Giger’s-imagination is, it’s a Lego Bionicle The Mask of Light: Vorahk ‘toy’.

If I’m not mistaken, this model was released May of last year. I did find some species of this kind a year ago but I was still in that can’t-justify-the-purchase mode. By the time I was convinced I should buy one… the shop where I found it closed already.

Last Saturday, while looking for a trick or treat basket for Angel’s Halloween party, I was lucky to find some of these acquiring dust in one of the Gift Gate stores here in SM.

I’ve been doing some things with this since then which qs has promised me not to blog about.

I used to play LEGO when I was a boy. It has always been a great source of inspiration and fun. Now I’m hoping that something like this on my desktop could help pump up the coding and creativity neurons. (Of course that’s a good excuse… I just want to play with it in between coding)

My two little kids seemed to have developed an affinity for this too. Little Angel even watches the .mov clips (in a mini-CD) that comes with the canister… and I have to practice a little negotiating skills everytime they hostage this Vorahk.

Anyway, here’s a good Rahkshi Vorahk Review at BZPower Community.

Some parts of us just refuse to grow old… and if you’d ask me, I think it’s good.

It feels good.

I can’t understand how some humans can read with pumped up music playing against their ears.

Some humans can’t understand too how I can manage to work with Nine Inch Nails noise or Paul Oakenfold’s trance beat whirring against my ears.

Honestly I can’t understand why they can’t understand.

You see… programming is one of the ultimate battles between man and machine. (Hell yeah!)

You and your ‘logic neurons’ tapping the computer while it patiently and keenly watches in the background barfing out mocking words of encouragement once in a while in the form of error messages disguised in 07200000xHEFX statements, which most of the time the programmer pretends to understand.

Well in fact, they don’t.

It’s like being in a room with two rude aliens from x::country talking in their x-ian dialect smiling at you. They smile at you, you smile back at them not knowing that they’re talking about your protruding nose hair already.

So why again the loud music?

One reason is that every battle scene needs a soundtrack. The bloodbath is nothing if you can’t feel the swish and cuts through the music… the beat… the chant.

It’s a battle everytime you’re infront of the PC, problem is… everything is owned by the machine. The hypnotic monitor in front of you, the sinister keyboard that strains you and the harmless looking mouse which in truth poisons your libido.

They’re all part of the big domination plan orchestrated by 00086-entities.

In fact if you’re pointing out the previous programmers and software engineers that created those nifty down to the core codes and thinking that it’s a man versus man battle actually… you’re wrong.

Terribly wrong.

Around 42% of these humans have defected already to the side of the machine. 28% are cyborgs in disguise created by the machines itself and the rest are unknown entities. Perhaps included in that classified and unleaked information.

You see when machines mark something as a secret or make that lSecret(ComponentName, 1000) == .T., it is really set to .T. and it will remain that way unless the machine itself overrides it’s 1024 layered 2048-bit encrypted password protection.

With humans… secrets are well, secret which is a good object of discussion as long as the other human refrains from telling it to another human without him/her making a blind promise of not telling it to five more humans in one day.

But this secret topic deserves a different post. Let’s go back to loud music.

Everything is owned by the machine except the music.

The language of the soul… music and the soul… two things you can never digitize. Well at least no classified information pertaining to that process is ‘in the open’.

Music helps you beat the machine… pumps up your neurons and distracts the machine. In fact running WinAmp would add a thread to a CPUs work.

But the machine is more powerful than that. In fact the crashes you often see is just one way of pretending that an error occurs. When a certain application ‘shoots’ and fires up events that corrupt the memory, or let’s say a lame driver poisons the kernel-mode heap, the computer core knows that.

In fact it can prevent it but since he’s too busy playing poker during the ‘normal office human hours’, he fires up screens that manifests the problem. Besides if he fixes everything the world will produce more ‘bad’ programmers… and trust me when I say the world has enough of this already to supply 10 evolutions of humankind.

Now you’re wondering why it is colored blue.

VOTERGASM: “Our goal is to have 100,000 young voters catalyse 250,000 orgasms by November 3.”

Humans are weird.

If ever a certain programmer/mathematician (aka real problem solver) is brave enough to enter politics, he or she will have my 512-bit support.

That is if logic does not prevent him from diving in.

Let me post the title again: Sex pledges to boost US vote turnout.

Come on… what’s the problem here?

Possible low voting turnout. (or ‘turn on’ if you prefer seeing it that way).

Is that the real problem? If it is… then why?

Because of lack of sex?

Beep.

Let me re-phrase that:

   If ConvertToLogical(nAmountofSex) == lRare

        NUMTOSTREQ(nVoterTurnout) = 'Low'

   EndIf

That line of code sounds very illogical to me.

Why can’t humans identify the ‘real’ problem, find the ‘real’ root/cause of the ‘real’ problem and give ‘real’ solutions?

But then again… what if… considering that human beings, being the epitome of irony, have always preferred the approach that defies logic… realize that:

   IsNOTAlways(REALSolutions == EffectiveSolutions) == .T.

Then we’ll be having more goals and solutions similar to the first line above.

In the local scene, Filipino [tech]bloggers are being featured here, here and here.

Last week I also stumbled on one cs-related academe blog. In her ‘Blogs I Read’ section you’ll find some links to cs students blogging too. I guess indirectly, some calls are answered.

(CS stands for ComSci not CounterStrike nor CyberSex, Bit-wit)

She’s blogging about project presentations and defenses currently. I’m beginning to miss those teaching days of mine even more… and the food too.

Areman (who just transferred his blogs to blogspot (who I worked with before I transferred here in Manila (who happens to be a classmate of mine also when I was still in college))) also posted some defense-related blogs on his site.

This is one of the many things I like about Areman, his angst which is reflected in his ‘valiant’ use of the f-word.

But don’t let the f-words cloud you. That is an intelligent mind… you don’t graduate cum laude in AdDU for nothing. (And this was six years ago, when education in our country was not that ‘commercialized’ yet.)

Back to defenses and presentations, one of my favorite ‘torturing processes‘ before was making Student-01 delete five blocks of code for Student-02 to fix while I’m asking Student-03 some project-related questions. All of these things are done in front of the class.

I’ve also done that process every time I was invited as a panel in other schools.

It never fails to amuse me.

Some of us are just born sadists you know.

1:10AM code-break.

I’m leaving the IDE window for awhile to ransack the fridge… recharge the mind with some coke-in-cans and some [classified infood-mation]. (Har har!)

During the client visit this morning, it was qs who ran the show. She installed the updates of five different ILS modules, while the database-fox-jedi was there beside her enjoying two palaboks, two pepsi cola in cans and one Fudgee Barr.

She finished the second chapter of QUE’s Using Visual Foxpro book last Saturday. Did the installation this morning and in the afternoon scribbled out the database structures/normalization and blue prints for the FDDF project (a new client/database project of ours).

Yes… qs ‘major’-ed PolSci, but code-mentoring someone who is included in the top three of the ACET n years ago (where n < 10) is... honestly both hard and easy. She’s quite stubborn sometimes (Replace(This.Line, ‘sometimes’, ‘most of the time’)) and claims she was on a different line when God was giving out the lPatience(.T.) and lOrganized(.T) values. Yeah. That hard… and we’re still scraping the ‘easier and wholesome parts’. But then again, I believe for one to really learn how to ‘code’, comsci-related skills are secondary to what I’d call ‘comsci discipline’. Feel free to fire up your blogs and agree/disagree with that belief of mine.

Your daily dose of VisualFoxpro articles:

• Using GDI+ in VFP 9.0 with the FFC Library, Part 1
• The Kit Box: You ‘Auto’ Complete Your Editboxes
• How To Set the Default Window’s Printer Using OLE Automation
• How To Use ON ERROR To Debug Applications
• How To View Documents with FoxPro OLE Controls without MS Office

Beakman and I once in a while talk on Y!IM about programming concepts, nationalis-tech principles, alien abductions, VB versus VFP stuff, old school programming versus programming approaches of the future, changing RP through techblogs, computer science education and a lot more.

Tonight we were discussing about programming moods. Particularly about me not being ‘in the zone’.

You know those type of days where you can’t pull your arse to code. The not-in-the-mood-to-code moments. And I was asking Beakman how he handles these kinds of situations.

Of course being the athletic person that he is, he recommended jogging, playing basketball… even badminton… getting some rest and gym (ewrk!)

Yes he is more disciplined than I am.

The talk was enlightening until he scribbled out these words:

‘Try to act as a normal person.’

Damn. That must have been the best advice I had in months.

You | Post a comment