foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

Philweavers.net 3.0 went live a couple of days ago. An old interview/feature of The PixelCatalyst was re-uploaded in this new version.

This is an old feature already… some links discussed are non existent anymore… some views are not as ‘cool’ as they were, but still, some things never change.

There’s no more pixelcatalyst.com by the way, I decided a couple years back to stick with the http://pixelcatalyst.plastiqueweb.com url.

New Visual FoxPro 9 case studies. (via Ken Levy)

Calvin Hsia: Create thumbnails of all your digital photos in a single table… with Visual FoxPro and GDIPlus Foundation Class.

Speaking of GDIs, here’s something to look forward to.

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.

Take your time out of the coding screen and have your eyes feast on this.

A four part (Part 1A | Part 1B | Part 1C | Part 1D) blog post on sending e-mail from inside your VFP application from the SPS WEBLOG.

Chaos in computer performance. If microprocessors don’t have any appeal to you… then how about teleportation..?

Andrew MacNeill mentions this VFP9 book. Exactly what the VFP community needs (And the whole ‘real world database programming’ communities as well).

I’ve been seeing too much books on the shelves in most bookstores here in our place that makes me do that ‘come-on-VFP-is-much-better-than-this’ grumble.

Now if only we can see more of these despite the fact that writing computer-related manuals/books is not that financially rewarding.

But not everything in this world is about money.

Some nifty WMI+VFP-related codes you can find at Stuart Dunkeld’s BLOG.

Got hooked with the stuff produced from this for the past few days.

Whither .NET (Andy Kramek).

Here’s a related post from Craig Bailey… .NET Return on Complexity (ROC).

Good luck… John Koziol.

One of the million reasons why Hubble should not be forsaken… she spots the Great Eye of Sauron. Earth should now start preparing. Gather your swords and pitchforks.

… and be keen on the signs… such as this one.

New calculator makes solving tricky sums easy. It’s about time. While you’re at it why not make it a voice-activated and/or mind-controlled interface..?

The Best Product Design of 2005.

And you think being a superhero comes cheap. Think again (Being Batman HTML slideshow (which if you ask me is quite annoying (I mean the html auto refresh slideshow and not the content)).

Interesting.

(Most links of the day acquired from GeekPress.)

Still obsessed with ‘mod’-ing your PC’s cooling system? Try this. (via Mondays)

Darn… I can’t find the link to that Hydrogen-cooled CPU.

No.

Yes… ‘no’.

No… I don’t consider myself clinging to an ‘old technology’ while others are slowly jumping into .new bandwagons that is coming out every now and then.

It’s not an ‘old technology’ in the first place. I see it as a reliable, time-tested and stable solution forged by years of experience, wisdom and lines and lines of codes.

Add speed, efficiency, resource friendliness and backward compatibility.

Plus it respects the developer, and users as well. (Software/application development tools should be… ‘tools’ or ‘slaves’ and not the other way around (software tools enslaving the developer… (but that would be a different story for now))).

But don’t get me wrong.

I’m not claiming that you become a zealot, close your doors and windows when a new technology comes popping up.

This .NET in theory is good. (Same can be said about the other web-and-all-around targeted tools that came before and after this.)

In fact in practice, a lot of good .NET-based applications can be seen already.

Plus there’s this insatiable quest for learning almost every coder encounters. Every now and then that thirst should be satisfied. Even if installing VS.NET 2002 slows down my decent PC while Visual Foxpro 8 runs so well and so swiftly on my other AMD 500MHz machine.

Even if upgrading TheFramework renders the applications developed in the old framework useless and broken.

But the essence of developers and programmers and whatever you call yourself are solutions. The best solutions if possible.

If you’re going to a friend who’s just five kilometers away from you, with no bodies of water separating you and you’re not living in a floating glacier or something… then using an airplane as a means of transportation is an overkill, if not crazy.

You can even ride a dog, a horse or my pet tiger, a bike or a medieval cannon and convert yourself into a cannonball.

Of course you can always take an airplane… but then you have to build a runway first, which will take, let’s say just for the sake of discussion, around 2 kilometers and another 2 kilometers in your friend’s place. And if you build these two runways where it is located between point A (Your place) and point B (Your friend’s place) that would leave just 1 kilometer of travel span and no way can an airplane travel that distance.

Even if you’ll find a way, to build the runway and the airplane in such a way that you can still travel for five kilometers… it still is a major overkill.

We’re not even considering the resources spent, the red tapes you’ll get into… the time wasted and all.

Unless you’re still sticking to defending the airplane path and decide on waiting for that hovercraft driven by a scantily clad cyborg that looks like Cleopatra with vertical landing and take off features to come out in the market.

We can argue endlessly but still, the best path/solution to use in this situation is either to use a car, a bike, a scooter or you can opt to walk instead of clinging statically to the high tech resource-hoggin’ ideas and solutions.

(And btw airplane+skydive is out of the equation.)

Point is… past, present and even future, there will always be a place for Visual FoxPro.

And some things are best solved using the simplest, most reliable, time-tested, fast and resource-friendly tools.

If not all.

Sustainable energy source could solve Bermuda Triangle riddle.

Go ahead awaken the aliens in slumber.

I’d rather spend some time with Bathsheba Grossman’s Sculpting Geometry.

My ‘And-here-I-am-thinking-that-Visual-Foxpro-is-the-last-XBase-standing’ generated some feedback and I’d like to share one from Zaldy Co:

Visual FoxPro isn’t the last Xbase standing. There are still lotsa variants of Xbase–Delphi with Advantage, xbase++, opensource Harbour Project, dBase Plus (dbase.com) and FiveWin of Antonio Linares.

Hotel software powerhouse Fidelio was ported from Clipper to Delphi. Ditto with ICode Everest.

Advantage Database Server is an XBase server whose distro could fit in 2 diskettes. Some years ago when EULAs still did not bar published benchmarks, ADS was benchmarked 124x faster than SQL Server 6.5.

Months ago I also mentioned other open source XBase products including Dabo, created by Ed Leafe and Paul McNett.

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.

Avatar is back with his Neural Brew.

Forget the ‘ForgetMeNot Panties‘ with Sensatech Technology and Embedded Global Positioning System to protect the women of your life, bro… THIS _is_ the real thing.

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))

‘Shedding Some Light’ is the name for Rick Schummer’s blog, and shedding some light is what he’s doing indeed: VFP Roadmap provides direction.