foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

A little something something.

It’s already 2:40AM, I’m done with a couple of Reports and I’m still online trying to annoy a VB6-lovin’-former classmate of mine.

To give you an overview of this late-night-to-early-morning little quest of mine, I’ll start with the target task. The objective is to add those TimeTotal and FeeTotal amounts in the reports that deals on the usage of the internet/computer.

So it’s something like this:

This is just part of the data and at 2AM I’m not sure if they’re the right numbers so tone down that meticulous geek in you, I just want to present an overview.

Generating nTotalFee is easy using VisualFoxpro’s Report Tool/Designer. You simply create a variable, let’s say oTotalFee, store the value of the database field (USAGE.FeeTotal), set the initial value to 0 and click the SUM part on the Calculate frame. You can set the variable to reset at the end of the page or at the end of the report. Just that and hardworkin’ VFP will do the things automatically for you in the background while your report is being generated.

The trickier part is the cTotalTime since it is a character (well I made it that way months ago probably to make things harder for me in the future). ‘01:00:00‘ + ‘00:00:25‘ is equal to ‘01:00:0000:00:25‘ and not ‘01:00:25‘. I tried another couple of barfed-out-rushed patch solutions which in the end didn’t work.

That was when I remembered that there’s a CTOT() function. But CTOT() needs additional characters such as CTOT(“2000-10-24T13:30:00“) and the other time/date-related functions I found were of no use, well at least in this situation. Besides I was secretly praying that none of these reserved functions would work so that I can have an excuse to do things the ‘old school’ way.

But before that I was even considering the lame approach of simply dividing nTotalFee with the RatePerHour and a little TimeConversion() algorithm to derive cTotalTime… a sort of a short circuit cheat. But that my friend, is not the way things are done especially when I’m in the mood to punish myself.

So choosing the ‘right’ path, I entered the following manipulation inside the variable part:

(val(substr(usage.timetotal, 1, 2))*3600) +
(val(substr(usage.timetotal, 4, 2))*60) +
(val(substr(usage.timetotal, 7, 2)))

In the report, a field control is added to store this code:

NUMTOSTR(alltrim(str(int(oTotalTime/3600))), 2) + ‘:’ +
NUMTOSTR(alltrim(str(int((oTotalTime%3600)/60))), 2) + ‘:’ +
NUMTOSTR(alltrim(str((oTotalTime%3600)%60)), 2)

NumToStr is a function I use to convert a number to a character field with additional ‘pads’. Something like NumToStr(97, 5) would yield ‘00097‘. It is quite useful too in IDNumber/Code formatting and other related functions.

So with that… the quest was completed.

Perhaps there are better solutions for this but for now this will do, donkey. It gives you a little taste of how things are done the ‘good-old-school’ way. Ah well at least a step above the older assembly/machine code approach.

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.

Gates: OpenSource Kills Jobs and the crowd at SlashDot goes wild.

At first glance I thought he was referring to Steve Jobs, who just gave away a 17-inch Powerbook, a 40GB iPod, and a 10,000 song gift certificate to Kevin Britten after downloading the 100 millionth song from the iTunes music store.

FoxTalk 2.0 July 2004 released.

Almost every VisualFoxpro developer who has a ‘net connection visits FoxproAdvisor.com, but if you’re one of those I-dwell-in-my-own-world type of coder, it’s about time to… well, at least uncloak yourself for a moment move your arse and absorb some materials on that site. Some articles may be weeks or even more-than-three-months-old already but they’re very much applicable still. That’s what FoxPro is all about… time certified.

Here are direct links to some articles inside FoxproAdvisor:

• Why Foxpro still matters
• Raise Awareness of Visual FoxPro
• DBCs or Free Tables: The Pros and Cons

There are also non-Foxpro but ‘programming attitude’ related articles as well:

• Find Inspiration Where You Can
• Communication Counts

There are even .NET-related articles too such as:

• Beginning VB.NET: Debugging and Error Handling
• Professional VB.NET: Object Syntax Introduction
• Securing ASP.NET Applications, Part 1 and Part 2
• Moving to .NET

There’s even more but some of the articles are subscription-based which I don’t have as of the moment.

Dear FoxproAdvisor Staff:

I know the articles defy time and all, but how about adding a date under the author’s name just to indicate when those articles were written or published? Or was I just too sleepy last night to find where those dates are being placed?

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.

If I have some extra money to burn I would probably like to acquire something like this ASP Aquarium. (via Gizmodo.com) I’ve been wanting to include an image here on this site for quite some time now but this would be the first time i actually placed one.

Hopefully 13K is not much of a bother especially to those who are reading this inside their RSS Readers.

UPDATE: Edited some table dimensions from percent to pixels to make things look better inside some RSS Readers.

Arising from an early-evening-to-the-midnight nap after visiting my fourth project client this day. A client which is slowly becoming a favorite of mine lately.

So what makes a client a good client? Or probably we should we use ‘favorite’ since ‘good’ is such an elusive term.

In my part, food is one factor. Make that the first factor. Ah the influence of the previous boss still has this effect on me. Yes food. If one could make a version of the mongo beans in such a way that makes it so yummy, bitter and sweet at the same time… that’s something. Include adobo in the table (Yes you’re reading things right adobo not Adobe and what the heck would Adobe be doing in the dinner table in the first place… and in case you have ingested too much silicon-based stuff lately, adobo is not ADODB), some crunchy, crispy, juicy and a little chili-tasting home made fried chicken, some fried fish plus two cans of coke and of course rice and that’s enough to add a few pounds on you while you’re updating the system you have created on site. If you’re living somewhere in this world and haven’t tried Filipino food yet, I suggest you try some and I’m sure you’ll be asking for more.

Another factor too would be that willingness to innovate. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a company with 270+ computers or in a company who has only one Pentium II in the midst. As long as the willingness and the mind for innovation is there, other things will follow. There is a quite phi-raised-to-the-power-of-e (in other words ‘huge’) difference too if you’re in a finance-rich first world country and when you’re in a rich-in-other-things archipelago whose economy has been struggling for the past couple of decades. I, without regrets, belong to the latter.

Third factor would be that certain invisible push that a certain client gives to make you strive to become a better programmer… a better developer… a better system analyst… a better person. That same invisible force that drives passion to your work and possibly squash the lady bugs that have been infesting in your system lately. That I think is one of the strongest factor in determining a favorite client on my part. Well next to food of course.

There are more factors I know. Probably you can discuss those here.

On a different frequency, I get to test in the open too the Support Forum I created and was reconfiguring the previous few days. If you’re into IT-related projects, you know by now that no matter how you test things inside your room or your cubicle, there will always be a number of differences in things when you’re out there with your clients. Plus there’s surely a BIG difference when you’re the one testing your works as compared to when your clients are the ones actually using it. When you’re the one holding the keyboard, pounding things away with ease and when you’re behind your client watching her having a hard time figuring out how to use the scrollbars in the drop down combo box.

Something I’d like to discuss in a different post… in a different time.

Marketeers Can’t Count.

Fox.wikis.com listed a good amount of VisualFoxpro related whitepapers. Fox.wikis.com updated their RSS feed too in case you haven’t noticed it yet. That’s the XML… here’s the Wiki RSS Documentation for more ‘flavors’.

I’ve been bitten by a Lazy Bug that has infected my system for almost three weeks already. So what’s a Lazy Bug you ask me? I’ll tell you more later.

Ted Roche updates the Conference Materials section of his site which contains articles, speaker’s notes and white papers.

Foxpro-related reads:

• Visual Foxpro Software Development
• Choose the right Microsoft database for your development needs

I’m at home working on the Support Forum I am creating for my freelance projects. The re-configuring started last night and I’m still finalizing and analyzing some parts.

I’ve decided to use the Invision Power Board, over YaBB which I’ve been using for almost five years already in a different forum. I get to evaluate PHPBB too. Each has their own strengths but in the end I have chosen Invision since currently it has more features compared to YaBB and PHPBB. Plus Invision is just one click installation in my current webhost and I find the Pre-register feature quite helpful on my part. (Of course after that there will be countless clicks when you’re re-configuring/customizing things.)

Maintenance-wise, especially if you’re doing the behind the scene manual hacks on the threads, things are easier done with YaBB. I’ve proven this countless times in the past when I’m moving threads saved on a hard disk to another server and combining each of them with the newly created ones. Of course the process still is cumbersome.

The directory structure of Invision is quite scary to look at compared to the way YaBB organizes its files. Although, YaBB has this tendency to save all threads on one directory, which if you’re in a slow internet connection like me, would take quite a while before the listing of files are displayed inside the FTP client application. Multiply that delay of the loading time with the N processes you’re doing on that directory.

Now after five hours and a half, I am faced with certain issues and concerns. One… would I allow CATEGORY_001.Forum_001 for Client_001 to be accessible for Client_002 who has CATEGORY_001.Forum_002? Consider too that there are issues that are affecting both clients. I made a sort of General Client Forum for some matters to somehow ‘patch’ this issue but I’m still looking for other alternatives.

Second issue would involve if I allow the guests or the other non-client members to view the Clients Section. Probably it would be good for potential clients but will it be beneficial to the existing clients. Nonetheless the client forums are protected by passwords.

Which will probably an issue too since some non-techie clients in my experience would prefer lesser clicks and lesser hindrances to what they want to do, something Microsoft gave weight before which probably lead to some security-related problems in some of their previous OSes.

Probably it would be good too if I organized the forums by product but since I would like to implement transparency on the program progress and would like to post progress reports on certain clients it would make things complicated in the long run.

Ah… probably I’ll rest and empty my mind first so that I’ll get a clearer view on how to tackle these issues.

This is one of the advantage of working at home… you’re near your bed in times your mind needs defragging and recalibrating.

VFPConversion.com | I’m hoping though that the said site won’t make you move away from VisualFoxpro but rather enhance your projects and/or make them operate with .NET and other development applications.

But really… almost everything depends on the nature of the project. Each development tool has its strengths and weaknesses. Once you get an overview of the project, you’ll know what tool to use.

Ah well of course… it depends sometimes on the clients too.

What is the point of blogging? | How to Start a Weblog – Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Say Whatever the Hell I Felt like Saying to a Bunch of People I Never Met.

Version Control with Subversion: Basic Concepts

Avatar posted a bunch of ‘Must Have Tools’ for GMail.

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.