foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

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?

Visionaries… back to the drawing board.

Almost two weeks ago, I mentioned about how VisualFoxpro is ‘powering up’ the back end of some online sites. Today, Chan Kot Kiet points out more FoxPro WebRAD Tools.

Craig Berntson uploaded two articles from his Southwest Fox sessions: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming and Using the Windows Event Log from Visual FoxPro (pdf format).

Kevin McNeish enters the blogosphere. The ‘Did You Know’ section looks informative.

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.

Seventh Sense 2004… something to watch out for. I’m also re-compiling the contact information of those artists involved in the 2002 release. The site will be released once the old HTML codes are updated and a batch of new artworks are included.

Stay tuned. I’ll be posting the updates and some creation process related information here too. This project is a break from the usual database-related tasks I am doing.

Mondo gratitude goes out to Kevin Stacey (a co-Depthcore member) of Shiver7 for the hosting.

Happy birthday, Kim.

For the past two days I’ve been viewing cinematics and trailers that involves a great deal of hardcore visual effects and render power.

It started when Takz (a Filipino friend of mine in Netherlands), gave me that World of Warcraft cinematic trailer. Released last November 05, 2004… this one’s different from the previous World of Warcraft teaser cinematic I saw years ago.

(Awrk… as of 1:43AM WorldofWarcraft.com is currently down.)

Blizzard is consistenly pumping these uber cinematics since the third installment of Warcraft.

Starcraft trailers were good during their era but quite far from the quality of Warcraft III cinematics.

I would love to elaborate and paint this blog with words but my supply of coca cola in cans ran out and when that happens I’m usually not in the mood to do things.

I’ll give you one observation though, why their cinematics rock.

It’s not just the attention to the most intricate details (and damn the attention to details would wipe out both Pixar’s Finding Nemo and the Final Fantasy movie out of this world and beyond).

Aside from the technical aspects, Warcraft cinematics are truly moving.

It moves you.

Before I start getting mushy in here let me give you the other 3D clips that were also given to me… a Double A (or is AA) bond paper commercial. That’s the 15 second clip, here’s a different 30 second clip of the same theme.

Star Wars III: Revenge of The Sith teaser also popped out sometime last weekend.

And then of course there’s The Incredibles trailers and one teaser (if you haven’t watched the movie yet), Robots (this time from the makers of Ice Age) and Cars (also from Pixar).

I am not quite impressed with the renders Polar Express is showing so no links for now.

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Now that you’re done buffering those cinematics in your download queue… I’d like you to meet Jenny.

Citadel of Sector 10:Zeus

Released last month for Depthcore’s Habitat pack. I mentioned this here also a month ago but somehow I wasn’t able to post the artwork. My first individual artwork since October of 2003. There were collaborations with fellow Depthcore members along the way but it was last year when I released an artwork created individually.

Of course there was that LOS2004 artwork which was released last March but it was a remix of an old LOS2002 piece.

I’d like to give you more information in words but at three in the morning, I have this feeling that my fingers are pounding the keyboards on their own.

I’ll give you some numbers and stats related to this work instead:

• Duration: 05/25/2004 – 10/05/2004
• GFX applications used: Poser 4 / PaintShop Pro 5.02 / Adobe Photoshop 7.01 / 3DSMax 4 / Bryce 4
• PSD Files: 2 (6.1MB + 21.8MB)
• PSD Layers: 72 layers
• Hi-res dimensions: 1600x656x32bit | JPEG | 625,427 bytes
• Coca-cola in cans consumed: 32

Watch out for Depthcore’s next pack… next month.

F1 Technologies, creators of Visual FoxExpress (here’s a what’s new in VFE8 overview (remember that coder with a fox tail image..?)) supports Active Foxpro Pages.

Here’s the press release.

F1 Technologies also sponsored Code Focus Magazine which highlights the new features/enhancements in Visual Foxpro 9. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, or you are a non-Foxpro user, this free PDF download is a good read for you to discover a little or so about Visual Foxpro.

Using File Mapping to enumerate files opened by Visual FoxPro from News2news.com/VFP. If you’re planning to use Win32 APIs on your application, this is the site to go. (via Alex Feldstein)

More Win32 API on VFP information. (Source: Fox.wikis)

From the creator of TaskPane Central, OpenTech Forums, ProFox Mailing List and the co-creator of DaboDev comes the ReportListener HQ from Ed Leafe.

West Wind Web Connection 4.60 released… and a Web Configuration Utility that comes along with it.

Recursion in VFP, Low Level File Functions, How the SECONDS() function works and more Visual FoxPro Links.

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!

Here’s a funny Mac video. (Sorry Apple-lovers (via Rod Paddock’s Blogs))

Calvin Hsia: Creating, Parsing, Graphing Web Hit Log Files or Other Temporal Data.

Yes… VisualFoxpro can do web-related stuff. Foxite.com, UniversalThread.com, West-wind.com and Calvin Hsia‘s site are a few examples that use VFP as part of their backends.

Also, from the limited test I made, the fox-powered sites are even faster than those sites powered by ASP.NET (Again, stress on the ‘limited test’).

Plus there’s Active Foxpro Pages too.

I must admit though… some PHP-powered sites and forum I’ve been to, load faster than their .asp and even .cgi/perl counterparts. But then again there are a lot of factors to consider here.

Best Software Essays of 2004.

I should’ve posted about this last week, but somehow I kept on forgetting things. What you’re seeing in the left is the current splash cover of Pixelcatalyst.Lair V6.10, created by Vincent Lai (aka NiteAngel), a friend and a co-Depthcore member. You can view NiteAngel’s artwork in his official site: AW8.net and inside his DeviantArt account. The larger version of this artwork, entitled Empower can be downloaded in this link. (It looks a thousand times better when full viewed.)

Sometime last year, when I was more active on the PixelCatalyst.Lair project, we were able to interview and feature NiteAngel. Here’s the link to that interview.

I did promised myself to devote some time every weekend on that pet site of mine which will turn four years old this November (Yes FOUR YEARS, baby! (Actually six years if you would include the pre-pixelcatalyst.lair mother-sites that gave birth to it))… but somehow database-related stuff has its own way of seducing my time away from GFX.

The least I could do for now is post some GFX-related blogs.

Which reminds me… I know FireFox in a number of ways outperforms IE6. OpenOffice.org pars with MS Office… but I still have to see a product from the OpenSource world that could battle commercial graphics application such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel’s products, 3DSMax, AutoCAD, Lightwave, Maya and the list goes on…

… or am I missing something?

(But please don’t mention GIMP here… Photoshop (even if you slice the current version by two) is still light years ahead of GIMP.)

Time travels so fast.

It was exactly at this time when we arrived here yesterday from a tough client visit where I have to re-program two database applications on site.

Something that I rarely do.

Usually, every little detail is checked and compiled before I do the visits. If I re-program things on site it means somewhere along the line, I screwed up.

Imagine this… you’ve worked your arse out on one module for two weeks… sometimes even sleeping at around three in the morning. Polished, tweaked, tested and done everything on that module. Then at the site, when you’re about to present things you realize that you haven’t created a link to that module from the main menu.

I was calculating the number of ways and the angle of projection in case I opted to throw the monitor from the third floor of that building.

Good thing I was able to bring along the necessary files to fix and recompile things. Apparently it was linked but I forgot to set the form’s ShowWindow properties to ‘Show in Top Level Form’ which prevented it from displaying that module properly.

That was problem number one.

The second problem encountered was from a different application which shows a little error that doesn’t really affect the program but is still annoying which was apparently caused by a blank value in the program database configuration file.

Quite nifty since the error was able to pass two of my error handling mechanisms. I have to fire up the VisualFoxpro tool once again on site just to check the real cause of the problem.

The third problem was the trickiest.

(Sometimes I wish I could just choose treat and hand out chocolates every time some cybernetic super forces are doing this to me.)

The GITS database application (which was the first program I made for that client (which has been working smoothly for three academic years already)) started ‘acting up’.

That application contains five table reports on one of its parts. Tables I, II, III and V works fine but the report on Table IV fails.

What makes the problem unusual is the Print Preview works fine. It shows all the records/statistics that is needed but when it starts to print things already, it shows only five records.

Sometimes six.

It even shows the report legend which partially rules out printer hardware-related problems.

I spent around an hour or so mapping out the steps I’ve been doing and the results. (And let’s not even enumerate the permutation done on that part)

After a number of tries and failures and chants, it worked. It turns out that some blank statistics on the table screws up the printing part. Which is still quite mysterious since everything is good in the Print Preview part.

A copy of an older version of the program which I usually store in the server in case some problems come up, did help solve some problems.

But if you’d asked me, I still think the chant did solve the problem.

Ah… one of those days.

Marketing for Geeks. (from the same person who wrote the Product Pricing Primer article (a must++ read)).