foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb.

Now that’s a good excuse to… well, a lot of things really.

(Thanks wraith for the link. It’s about time you start your own blog.)

Charles Petzold: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding. (via Avatar)

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.

… and one of those SUPER-HUGE SIGNS that indeed, the alien invasion is near. Too near.

(Thanks wraith for the link.)

Foxite sports a new look. It loads faster… more organized.

And the previous HTML links still work. Great job!

Ballistic Publishing releases Exotique. WHOO… be sure to check out the PAGE GALLERY section.

Craig Bailey: Microsoft supports VFP.

Indeed.

But just look at the FoxPro team. If a company handles a good team such as that for ten years… that’s part of the support. As long as the developers and managers (product/project) are there, relax and fire up some codes instead of worrying too much.

Hentzenwerke Publishing releases ‘Taming Visual Foxpro’s SQL‘.

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

Learning Visual FoxPro Videos. It’s about time.

I guess the world is not ending after all.

• Google earmarks nearly $1 billion for charities
• Apple unveils video iPod, deal with ABC
• Bloggers use Web sites as therapy
• Spirit rover sends back colorful vista
• Microsoft, Yahoo link instant message services
• Fox cancels ‘The Simple Life’
• Bill Gates Donates $40m To Old School

Earth 1 – Aliens 0.

… and I’m even tempted to include TheFoxPro Show 024. But I’ll reserve a different blog space for that.

Imagine this.

You’re working your arse off in a form with multiple tabs with each tab having their own reports with spider-like relationship settings in the reports’ data environments.

(You use RELATIONs instead of VIEWs because you feel like VIEWs are for lazy bummers and RELATIONs are cool because they’re ‘old school’)

Now after hours of creating, re-aligning, adjusting your reports holding more than 10 normalized tables each. You found out that after going to Tab-02 and previewing the report, going to Tab-07 fires up this error:

Target table is already engaged in a relation.

You already have SET RELATION TO in place but still the error shows.

And SET RELATION OFF won’t work. I wonder why it is even included in the help file.

You ‘google-d’ the ‘net. Taking you to places that list errors but with no definite answers because probably this was an easy problem and was solved years before.

You found a couple of links that are unrelated and refer to problems occuring only in version 4. Now you wonder if there was really a version 4 out there hidden from the minds of the humans which will be used in the up coming alien invasion.

The closest you can get is a link to Microsoft’s MSDN site which you can also find in your help file.

You got irked and you tried to CLOSE DATABASES and fire up your DatabaseInitialization() routine every time you execute the print command.

But then that’s too lame. Although VFP’s speed is legendary and the delay is negligible… you don’t want to tarnish FoxPro’s name with a lame code patch manuever.

Now in case in the future someone stumbles upon this problem, decides to search the ‘net, wants to join the old-school-frat (when database development tools were dedicated to speed and the proper use of resources and backward compatibility) and is allergic to views, I hope the following steps could be of help.

Fire up LIST STATUS. If it scrolls too fast, dump it in a text file.

list status to file SEXYDUMP.txt

Survey the tables with RELATIONs. Do a search on the word ‘RELATION’. Note each table name and do a SET RELATION TO in every table in your noted list.

select Table01
set relation to
select Table02
set relation to

Once I can find a faster way, I’ll post. Or if you have one, feel free to e-mail me… and I’ll be glad to update this.

Of course… better you learn VIEWs. It’s an alien technology to begin with.

What’s New in Nine: Visual FoxPro’s Latest Hits. A copy of the book is now online.

I was discussing this 30GB e-mail service, when Beakman pointed me to this-why-settle-for-30GIGS-when-you-can-have-1000GB..?

Should I now start updating my Signs of The Apocalypse notebook?

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

VFP9 SP1 (Beta)

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.

Next to Luis Royo artbooks, these titles from Ballistic Publishing are some things I’m drooling over.