foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

Before i dive into the ‘work.blogs’, let me give you Tamar E. Granor’s website. Tamar wrote that Hacker’s Guide to Visual Foxpro book which i have mentioned more than once in my past blogs. If you have read this book already, or even parts of this book… you’ll know why it is a ‘must have’. Ted Roche and Doug Hennig are also credited for that book.

More or less i have prepared already for tomorrow’s visit/installation. It’s 2AM and here i am just waiting for m.sleep(dreams) to catch up with me and thinking once again about that flushed-out-from-cyberspace thing (See blogs below, dude). Had that occured five years ago when i was still maintaining my first site, i would have fret, roared and called on bolemic celestial beings of cyberspace to drag my site back online. But that’s before… and now’s different. Totally different.

You don’t need visitors to have a good site. You need a good site to have visitors. Content that is directed to your target-ed viewers, is important. Even if it means blob-blob-blobs like this targeted to bored and/or stressed programmers who want some air or just happened to stumble upon this site.

Though i must admit i still have to concretely formulate the direction of this site. The menu in the right part is not even completed (Note to self: complete that this weekend) and i still have to renovate the ‘main site’, which will hold these blogs. For now let me just end this semi-senseless blobberin’ and point you to this link: Mike Lewis Consultants.

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.

It’s Sunday. Don’t expect work-related blogs from me. I’m just here organizing archived files, preparing them to be toasted and burned when i stumbled upon an old WEP chess game and memories with beloved Ziggurat were rekindled. When computers were ‘taught’ to play chess, it was a BIG DEAL already… well, at least for me. When they paired it with the great Kasparov, it was getting ambitious. Now these chess computers claim being on track to overtake humans in… guess what year… 2004. Now’s the time to start raising the terror alarm to RED.

At least old Ziggurat resigned during our game earlier. Now that’s an idea… superfast intelligent computers that can accurately predict if they’ll lose or win at the start of the game judging from the human opponent’s odor.

A fellow affiliate of the other site i created (pixelcatalyst.lair) and a co-member of depthcore, releases Shadowness V4 Eevo X. I know it’s not foxpro-related, but as i said earlier, it’s Sunday.

As time moves forward and humanity seems to get ‘older’ that wisdom is having a hard time catching up with humanity already… it seems that humans care less and less about humans but gives more focus on moral responsibility towards robotic dogs. Quite sad.

For almost a week now, i’ve been faced with this question about what to post/blog on this website. Should it be purely FoxPro-related news and utilities? What if i want something that deals with Apple Mac’s 64-bit computing… or how the Mars Spirit rover was repaired remotely and space..?

Or worse… about Microsoft’s leaked Windows 2000 code. Will it even make Microsoft withdraw their support of FoxPro even more? What if I want to share something about QRIO… one of the coolest creation invented on this planet?

Or… would i include personal related matters done through the JI process… or work related blogs perhaps? How about graphics related links like what pixelcatalyst.lair (my GFX site) is offering? These are the things i’m reflecting on right now… before i’ll release this site some time next month.

Let me hear your thoughts about this… thanks.