foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

For the record I don’t believe OpenSource can kill jobs. Just look at Steve, he’s still pretty much alive.

Seriously… I believe in a world where OpenSource and commercial software can co-exist peacefully without one trying to outmanuever/outlast the other.

Neither do I believe in monopoly. It is something that needs to be castrated… not by an idea that is only free… but better.

That is the real battlefield for competition.

When I started going online years ago, one of my favorite site was HackerNews.com which after some years became SNN1.com which was also a part of AtStake.com Inc., a security-related company.

I remembered this when Leo Laporte included a link in his blogs pointing to the Fifth HOPE Conference which is sponsored by 2600.com. HOPE, which stands for Hackers of Planet Earth, has an interesting line up of speakers this year… Emmanuel Goldstein (the man behind 2600.com), Kevin Mitnick (well if you don’t know this man you have to be living underground for the past decade), Weld Pond (the man who replaced the first writer behind HackerNews.com), Phar, StankDawg, Binary, Count Zero and even John Draper and Steve Wozniak (Yes that Apple dude… no, that’s not the other Steve).

The topics are very interesting too: Automative Networks, Social Engineering, Building Hacker Spaces, Building the Anti-Brother, Bypassing Corporate Restrictions from the Inside, Cheshire’s Rant Session (it maybe a rant but it moves arses), The CryptoPhone sessions to name a few. There’s even a session about Bloggers at the DNC.

Sometimes I do wonder where Space Rogue, the publisher behind the ‘original’ Hackernews.com and a member of L0pht Heavy Industries, is these days. Here’s a little background info I found while looking for the archive I had in an old hard disk.

Everyone in the hacking and computer security world knows Space Rogue. In 1998, while a member of the L0pht Heavy Industries, a hacker think tank based in Boston, he testified before the U.S. Senate on the state of government computer security. He is the publisher of Hacker News Network, a resource as dear to the cyber-cognescenti as Merriam-Webster’s is to writers. Recently, Space Rogue, along with the rest of L0pht, joined @Stake, a newly formed Internet security company funded by the hot venture capital firm Battery Ventures. –Adam L. Penenberg

So why in heaven’s name am I talking about hacking-related stuff on a blog site that is supposed to be devoted on Foxpro and programming?

Hacking, in the right essence of the word and the virtues behind it, when applied on the softwares you develop, would make the software world a better, more secure and more reliable place to dwell in.

If you still have doubts on the above statement, then you don’t really know what ‘hacking’ means.

You need enlightenment.

[UPDATE]
I did a little googlin’ and I found Space Rogue.

Somehow… a copy of Van Helsing: The London Assignment landed on my hands yesterday. I haven’t seen Van Helsing (the movie yet) and I’m still waiting for its DVD release. These days I prefer seeing things on DVD rather than watching it on a bigger screen. When I’m inside a movie house I get this feeling that that big screen would morph into a huge fang-filled drooling mouth and devour the viewers in one quick bite faster than one can reach the third syllable of the word ‘No!’ (Yes the word has three syllables although you probably are hearing a single syllable only which proves how fast it is by default).

Although it is just a 30-minute animated film, it is filled with good animation and ‘3D-like visual effect’ which ‘power-ups’ the animation these days. I first saw that style when I was watching Blood (a Japanese vampire-slaying anime) last year… or was it last last year.

Months ago, TechTV even featured a graphics software that makes 3D objects appear as if they’re 2D in steroids.

What caught my attention more are two of the Special Features that is included in that DVD: Van Helsing: Behind the Screams (a look of the things that goes behind the scenes, a ‘the-making-of-the-movie’ sort of) and a preview of the Van Helsing Game.

It also includes an Animatic to Animation feature which places both the storyboard illustrations and the actual animation itself. Cool feature if you ask me.

No… we’ll not discuss here how the movie fared and its numbers. We don’t care about those things unless if the gross income when divided with its budget results to the derivation of the golden number (But that would be good for another blog post for now).

… nor the movie reviews.

Honestly I don’t give a damn about reviews. Besides you know a good movie when you see one not when you read about it. And personally I would refrain from giving out bad feedbacks to something if I cannot make a better version of that thing. If great minds like that of Spielberg or Lucas gives out ‘bad’ reviews about a certain movie, probably I would listen to them. But have you heard them doing that? No. That is because they know the effort done when creating one… even if it fails to please a lesser part of the population whose IQ is below the three digit mark but still rants and rants about the pitfalls of a certain movie.

OK… the reviews are disturbing. Really… but who cares.

But this is not what this post is all about.

Let’s just say even the movie didn’t received that much good reviews, the Behind the Scenes which includes the process of how the whole movie was created was fun to watch.

In a way that’s what TechBlogs are for. We want to see and share (on the techblogger’s part) the things that go on behind a certain project. How things are conceptualized… how things are tackled. You’d be surprise how healthy this activity is for the digitized soul.

If you jump around the ‘net these days, you’ll find out that there are a lot of tech-related companies out there that’s doing good with this process of sharing. Redmond is one. And there are more out there.

We humans that deal with these bits of things that emerged out of the marriage of mathematics and machines are interested with what the other humans who’s into a related quest are doing. The process and problems and that human as well.

So move your arse and start those tech blogs of yours. It doesn’t need to be software/database development related. It can be about Photoshop or HTML-related tricks you’ve uncovered, the details on how you slaughtered a thirteenth century version of that Michelangelo virus, teleportation, brain transplants or anything. Safe sex with the CPU perhaps?

Even Leonardo da Vinci was blogging things during his time. Although of course the medium was different. And 500 years later, Bill Gates purchased one of those journals for a whoopin’ 30 million dollars.

Who knows what the future holds for your blogs.

Oh… for heaven’s sake don’t blog things for the money, sport. Do it to share things.

What’s that again, Yoda?

Yoda: A good motivation… money is not.

Quite a ‘brave’ move by Apple. (It depends really on what ‘brave’ means to you)

A wait… looks like someone’s calling Apple the copycat. So who’s copying who really?

Just a quick note… if you’re reading your emails using web-based applications and someone out of nowhere gives you a link, I suggest you copy and paste those links on a browser instead of directly clicking on that link. That is if you can’t resist the temptation of visiting those links.

There are web-based email applications that give away your account when tracked on referrers (or worse if their websites include sinister scripts). In the past two days alone, I have found two samples already. I’m now carefully writing a draft to inform the creators of these web products about this vulnerability and if I won’t get lazy later, I probably would send this information to them.

Perhaps I will. Perhaps I won’t. You know the world, when vulnerable, is much more exciting place to dwell in, cyberspace as well.

But for now, you can check your web based emails if they are vulnerable to this kind of exploit. You don’t want them seeing those porn-related spam mails of yours and that scantily-clad pictures of Diane Krueger embracing and smooching Shrek, right?

When I started doing this blog of mine and discovering RSS (I was a little late with this RSS thing), one of my early favorite blog site was from Sriram Kishnan.

If my memory serves me well, Sriram is a student from India, an intelligent one that is talking about IT-related stuff, giving out Internet Explorer and Matrix reviews and a good post entitled User Interface != Usable Interface to name a few. It was the latter link that pulled me to his site when I saw Foxpro guru, Craig Berntson, linking to it.

Which makes me think… how come I don’t see Filipino IT-related students blogging about the things they learn from school these days? Back when I was teaching GFX/HTML-related stuff a couple of years ago I did introduced GreyMatter and blogging to one batch of students. It was graphics-related then… I wanted to see something programming related.

Any chance we can do something about this, old-friend-Areman?

If any Philippine-based IT schools are starting this too, please fire me up some links. I am interested reading those blogs.

I spent the free hours of the previous three days reading something which its content would no doubt make it one of the bestselling novels since last year.

Those CIA lines are probably right. ‘Nothing is what it seems.’

But this book is more than the CIA. In fact it runs 2000 years back.

While it may have shaken a bit a foundation of what seems to be a century old views and tradition and the conservative minds would go against the things presented in that book, I and countless others don’t view it as a threat to something you believed in.

And life is an unending quest for truth… and enlightenment.

Of course I can give you a direct link to what I’m referring here… but the book indirectly states that finders of such quest best keep it a secret. -GRIN-

And no, I won’t be giving out blues clues and brown divinity-related codes and spiral puzzles and anagrams. It’s up for you to find it on your own.

Ah wait… probably I just did.

From ArsTechnica: Microsoft patents a method to transmit data and power over the human body.

I would refrain from posting insights for now. Let’s just say that humans have this tendency to fear what they cannot fully understand.

So here we are again… online after two weeks of being knocked off the ‘net.

Before I’ll post the events that occurred during that span of time… let us tackle first things, first.

What in Valhalla’s name brought us down?

Actually we’re still down. The RichardBase.com is still suspended and judging from the way things are going, it would remain that way.

Post.Deleted(Paragraph)

I did type a couple of paragraphs which I deleted considering that I don’t like to delve into the gory details. To summarize it one sentence… the friend who’s sponsoring my free hosting on that server using a domain I registered on its second year (was free during the first) had problems with his hosting reselling business that he decided to discontinue things.

But no negative chakras here. I’m still thankful for the hosting sponsorship for more than a year. It was a big help indeed.

Besides, I was planning to register a new one early this year to make things more non-person-centric. That’s the problem with domains using birth names. There are certain factors that limits the things that I wanted to do. You can now access the Portfolio 2004 using this link: RichardBase.NTSL119.com.

Time to move on… on a new server with hosting and domain paid using an income generated from our projects. (You see since the first day I posted something online and made the ‘online presence’, I was relying on freebies… up to this point Pixelcatalyst.Lair is still made possible through the kindness of a fellow artist at DeviantArt, Niko)

I did spent some time and effort behind that old Foxpro.catalyst but as I was saying to some friends last week, I will rebuild things from scratch if I have to. Besides greatness is measured on how you built good things that crumble from splinters again… and again.

That’s one thing you should teach a child… standing up every time they fall. Let’s just say I was taught well on that department.

Not FoxPro-related and almost a couple of weeks old already… but I just can’t resist: Area 51 hackers dig up trouble.

Time moves fast these days… too fast sometimes.

I remember there was this time when I was handling the SPL (Structure of Programming Languages) subject where I would constantly torture students mentally with machine problems and projects making them learn things the hard way. One of the principles behind it was considering that it is a war out there in the real world, you don’t baby students to prepare them for war, for the realities of IT-related jobs, you polish them. You arm them with weapons.

We were taught and trained this way as well.

In that university where I taught and tortured students for breakfast and lunch, I practiced this constantly for four years. Along with some classmates who worked in that school as well, we even introduced ‘pressure programming’ (which I’ll discuss more in the next blogs to come) and I pushed that pressure to another level.

But outside those ‘war rooms’ known also as computer laboratories, we were friends. Well of course, computer-related questions are still not allowed to be answered until they have researched and spent sleepless nights for seven days.

Seven days is such a short time, seven years as well.

Seven years after I first taught, one of those students is in a way teaching me means of making my programming related problems easier to solve. That student is Beakman.

Beakman introduced me to using Views, which I know exists but didn’t care much about until last night. You see I have these ‘old-school-ic’ principles. If it can’t be programmatically coded then forget about it. The hell with wizards and one click menus.

There was even a time when my codes when copied and pasted to a .prg file would run smoothly when compiled with Clipper 5.2. In fact back then, I had Clipper versions of my program that whenever I’m bored I’d make run along with a VisualFoxpro 5.0 module making them pass data as if they’re playing football inside the CPU. The VFP module was not even using timers, just old school for loops.

Talking to Avatar this morning resonated that possible need to retire parts of my old-school attitude. In fact talking to both Beakman and Avatar make me feel like I’m prehistoric already.

So armed with these Windows 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000 installers, a couple of 20GB hard disks, my old Compaq 500MHz PC, a screw driver, a cup of coke and U2‘s music playing on the background, I’m setting sail for a new quest.

But it doesn’t mean I’ll be completely leaving behind the cape of old school. There’s something extremely mind-thirst-quenching when using it.

VFP Revolution has been floating around for a week or more and this evening I was reading Craig Berntson’s opinion about it on his FoxBlog. Though his opinions may sound pessimistic to some (especially to those live/die-hard Foxpro coders out there), it is in a way a practical approach on how to view things.

I also have some thoughts about this matter since the first day I’ve read those ‘we-feel-abandoned’ type of articles in the ‘net, but up to this moment I’m still struggling to organize those thoughts.

Just recently I was talking online to a former college classmate of mine who is working on a company whose boss is requiring them to convert their VisualFoxpro systems into a VisualBasic one. My pet tiger and I cringed at hearing that news.

Anyway… if you’ll look closely at Microsoft.com’s Product Lifecycle Dates : Developer Tools Family, you’ll see that the Extended Support for Visual Foxpro 8.0 ends on the 31st of March 2010 and probably VFP9 which will be released late this year will have three to four more years… probably around 2014, and that’s ten years from now.

Ten years is such a long time in the world of computers and the internet era. With that span of time you can still develop countless database-driven systems that will last five times that span of time.

Hmm… should VisualFoxpro developers worry about the operating systems and platforms more..?

Just a part of the random thoughts I have on this matter that I’m still trying to organize.

Since that day of the elections, which was 15 days ago, block outs occur almost regularly. It maybe caused by two things. One is storm (and/or weather related factors), the other is election-related ‘magic tricks’. ‘Magic tricks’ that are too advanced that creating a computer algorithm for it is two eras away from it.

This was unlike the previous block-outs which lasts only for five to fifteen minutes, not that long unless it’s in the middle of the night and out of silence, your little kid wakes up and howls non-stop. I tell you 10 seconds of child howls and cries is that powerful that even the US military scientists are planning to include this in their ‘artillery of the future’.

Back to the block out, since it was longer and we don’t have any generators here, and even if one exists, I don’t think I can code with that grinding sound even a few floors away from me, I decided to stay at the roof top sitting in the bench under the one-o’clock afternoon sun.

And I remembered the last time I was on a bench under the heat of the sun… that was 10 years ago perhaps when I was still in high school. Those days when, we, with our friends do nothing but park our butts in that bench, play basketball afterwards, talk about mindless things that I can’t even remember after an hour, punch and kick one another, play basketball again and play basketball again three blocks away.

Almost half of the time we emerge winners of the game. The other half we test if we are faster than a stone hurled towards us while the others test sines, cosines and projectiles, if we choose not to pay the bets. All of the time though, we are lucky to be alive to tell the tale. Sometimes even brave enough to return to that place where they are already posting in chalks the amount of debts we have to pay.

Ah… life was simple then. I don’t have to worry about SQLs, DBFs and corrupted CDX files. There were no compile errors. No brain-damaging API calls, no network-locking problems and such… only adventures, mischief and pure fun.

Memories like these make you question your direction in life. Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to do that? Why do I have to stay and work up to the wee hours of the morning? What for..? Why..? Why can’t I just bark and park my arse and play ball all day?

Of course I have answers to these questions but sometimes I often think if these answers are really that valid. And even if they are, another array of questions always emerge.

If this 3D monitor remains true to what the article talks about, then it is about to break barriers and revolutionize a lot of things. A concept before which can only be seen in movies (see Paycheck) is now here… well, at least that’s how that news article projects it. I prefer though seeing, touching and smelling it before I’ll start doing that tribal-jump-for-happiness dance routine.

But still, once that barrier is breached, expect Room.Improvements(22*17 meters, lLimit=.T.) becomes a Field.Improvements(nInfinite, lLimit = .F.). The technology behind this, like on any other field, will just keep on improving and improving.

And of course patents will still be there to hinder some parts and clog some tunnels of innovation every now and then.

Sometimes, if not always, it is so hard to talk someone about systems and problem solving especially if that someone is lSensitive, lEmotional and cPersonality = STRONG. To make things even harder, these are the persons that are often close to us, persons we hold dear. Closeness is oftentimes quantified by emotions but the use of such in this discussion, stops there.

A great deal of our life lessons, we learn through our work. And in database-related programming, software development and system analysis humans can learn a lot. In fact the approach use in the whole software development process if applied to real life situations could make this greed-infested/disorganized/unsystematic world a better place to ‘interface’ and connect with.

One can view life as a big problem (but not necessarily negative) that needs to be solved or ‘lived’ if you prefer such word. In every step of your life, directly or indirectly, you create means to solve a problem, but first and the most important aspect of all; you must know what the problem _really_ is. This is where you question existence, the why’s of things and in such thing as complicated as life these questions can stretch far beyond places Hubble’s sight can even reach in 7 cybernetic lifetimes.

Most often, a big problem is composed of little problems branching out to another set of nodes and child problems.

Now, one’s approach to solving such things would depend on how you, with your experience, view things. You can view it as ‘cut-the-root-of-the-problem’ and the nodes will be flushed as well .OR. you can do little node and leaves at a time until slowly and slowly you are tackling and conquering the problem subset before marching to the next level/node. That or the other or the combination of both or A then B or B then A, the combination is endless, can bring you to the doors of the solution. The process in itself can be views as a means of solution to start with.

Now let’s go back to that arguing/talk with someone we first tackled on Paragraph-01. You can’t expect to solve a problem if you’re attitude is like this: while discussing Problem v1.117.1256725, and you feel like you with your intelligence cannot ‘fight through’ the parameters of that problem starts randomly accessing bits of information that will pull Problem v1.291.1837125, Problem v2.129.28341245 and countless others.

Solve problems ONE by ONE, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing it the LIFO or the FILO way, or the stack or queue approach. Even CPUs tackle each program line by line. Even Superman to be efficient follows this principle. Spiderman too, he rescued his girl first then maneuvered towards the dangling train. And I don’t believe hyperthreading on a 512-bit computer with 7777500GHz could defy this principle.

Talking to someone who tends to bring all problems forward instead of dealing with it one by one frustrates me. Add more nFrustrationCounts if that someone gets too emotional, looks for other holes instead of concentrating on the problem at hand and too close minded enough to see things. We’re talking about oOBJECTS here so things must be dealt with objectively and lEmotion should be set to .F.

Add the nCount(ProblemOccurence) too. If the problem keeps repeating and repeating all over again nFrustrationCount increases. There must be something wrong with the system that needs to be addressed instead of being to emotional and close minded to even discuss the problem.

And in every thing/activity/process they do, humans should learn to evaluate and reflect on things.

But that my friend is another story for now and I still have to work on how to prevent database corruption during power fluctuations.

In case you want to know what the problem is about… we’ll I tell you it’s about spoon and forks.

Yes really. No kidding this time. Such a ‘near-to-null’ related matter, right?

Last Saturday, after two consecutive days of another batch of client visits, I found myself in a crowded mall with a three feet plant in my right hand. While others are carrying their shopping bags, new shirts, shoes or whatever thing they have decided to waste their money on, I was carrying a plant.

The feeling is weird and surreal that not even Tim Burton taking a hallucination steroid can portray it.

Anyway, the plant’s not mine though I don’t mind owning it after carrying it in that mall. I made a different purchase that day, which includes a brand new spankin’ 80GB 7200 Seagate hard disk and one 128MB DDRAM which I am currently using in this PC.

I have moved my old WindowsME into the primary slave slot and installed WindowsXP on this new drive. While others might cringe and scream when they hear the word WindowsME, I on the other hand have only good things to say about it. It has been with me for almost two years and 20+ database projects. So it stays there as a primary slave disk so that I can simply switch drive slots in case, God forbid, something goes wrong with this WindowsXP of mine.

I haven’t had a major crash while WindowsME was holding the steering wheel. The WindowsXPerience so far has been good though. Hope it remains that way until Microsoft releases the second service pack for Longhorn.

Random quickie-mind blobs.

• If you can’t afford to buy your dream house, create them in photoshop. Better… make them look edible.
• PixelPalooza winners from Icon Factory. I have this ‘thing’ for desktop icons. I strongly believed they are ewoks or some other cuddly character from Star Wars before they were reborn in this era.
• Who needs Albert Einstein and education when you can measure the speed of light using marshmallows..? Oh you can even eat the marshmallows after the experiment.
• With Google Inc.’s S1 filing comes a lot of things. I won’t even include a hyperlink this time. The news is everywhere in the ‘net for the past few days. From news to analysis to estimates on how many machines Google is running to their quirks that makes you love Google even more.

Geek humor: If you take a close look at the form Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the exact value of its planned offering is $2,718,281,828 dollars, which some would immediately recognize as the mathematical constant e.

E, for those not blessed with a Ph.D. and a job at Google, is Euler’s number, which is used as the base for natural logarithms.

• Fibonacci is everywhere. It’s even in the pattern of Elmo’s underwear.
• The latest from mind control technology, eh? MY relationship with my pet pterodactyl uses a technology two steps ahead of this one. But I don’t have any plans of sharing it for now. Besides I’m not sure if it is error-proof already. I haven’t seen my pterodactyl for three months already. If you see one with a barcode in it’s neck that reads ‘0987253251129‘ please be kind enough to inform me. Just be careful not to touch the mouth part… the pterodactyl’s saliva is equivalent to superglue.
• May 2004 issue of MSDN is out. It even has a downloadable .chm version.
• Ever wondered why Microsoft settled with Sun? Well that at least is according to Tom Yager.

Hmmm… seriously, anyone have any ideas how to track that pterodactyl of mine?

I think I need a pause button too.

In a different note, I was thinking about matters related to competition this afternoon. Something that deals about not being afraid of one, but instead using it as a means to improve yourself and your craft. I’ll elaborate later. Right now I’m amazed at what coffee can do these days. There’s even a can that could ‘self chill‘.

I’m looking forward to a drink that would teach my imaginary pet tiger to code in between meals.

After visiting a client yesterday and installing some program upgrades and at the same time fixing some corrupted index files, I met my former boss (although I still consider him as my boss up to this day). Since this country is composed of 7000++ islands apart, it took more than a year and five more planned meetings that didn’t pushed through before yesterday.

You see… my former officemates in the ComCen department (and even the students of the same school) considers our Boss an influential and motivational person in terms of molding your 512-bit skills, making you a better programmer/IT-individual. Not only skills are developed but visions and philosophies in life, as well.

We discussed a lot of things, from IT-related projects and developments in our country to his 1000 grams of vitamins C. Topics which includes humorous grudges to our previous employers (they’re funny now but they were not that funny before) were also the spice of the day. From software development to pricing the project to his clothing problem. Like me when traveling, The Boss also refrains from washing clothes and packs things enough to last. Problem arrives when vacations and travels are extended. I usually ‘recycle’… Boss prefers buying new clothes.

There are a lot more insightful things discussed in that short meeting which would take longer than the release of Longhorn if I’ll discuss them all here but overall it was very nice meeting him again.

Hopefully he had solved his clothing-related problems by now.