foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

There are some things in here that I do not like. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t respect it.

I seldom give comments on things I haven’t tried, but I must say that I don’t like the notion of creating database-related programming language solutions that tends to mold ‘lazy database programmers’ in the guise of ‘personal productivity’ which claims ‘to help developers overcome their most pressing challenges in minimal time’.

For you to overcome ‘pressing challenges’ in minimal time, you must have experience. And experience you will gain in the hard and longer way of writing ‘codes’.

Before I’ll continue allow me to state that I do have great respect behind the minds and developers of this so-called ‘approach of the future’. In this era where time is considered ‘gold-ier’ than before, it is indeed a great achievement to be able to trim down the development period of whatever project. I am also referring to database related things here which I believe is different when you’re developing a different type of application say a word processor, a spreadsheet or a software that calculates(nDistance, DetermineNearest(human(HealthCondition(X, Y, Z)), lReferencePoint=You)) has to be if You(lDecision = !visit(bathroom), nDays) for that said Human not to kiss the floor.

The baby-sitting type of approach to program development I believe is needed but in some ways I feel that it is the responsibility of the database programmer and not the PL itself. I want to extend the outmost limits of the control I have on the code I create. It is my code; get your hands off it� now! Yes… you, MissPL-with-the-white-shirt.

I also cringe at the idea of that ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ type of programming. Decades ago parameters were invented and even in these days, this is one of the greatest things a programmer can include in his arsenal. That would be next to OOP and one level behind neuron-pumping-trance/technotronic beats WinAmp plays while you’re coding/’developing’.

If one has to trudge that path of fill-in-the-blanks-because-I’m-too-lazy, let the programmer himself create his own user define function that fills in the blank.

This is probably one of the many reasons I left VisualBasic for VisualFoxpro five years ago. I want to have more control of the flow, the code, the logic, and to see more clearly what each line does instead of allowing a line or two of reserved words produce things for me. Call me ‘old school, call me ‘traditional’� call me whatever you want� but for now this is where I stand.

But do continue in this innovation of yours, great minds. Who knows in the future I might be convinced to jump on this jelly-looking bandwagon of yours. Besides, humans always have choices.

But for now I’ll dwell in this thrill and the art of pounding the keys, whispering longer eloquent words that only a digital loving silicon can fully understand.

Chris Anderson’s The Blinking Lights Division.

When we began the “Avalon” project (code name for the presentation platform for the next version of Microsoft Windows, code-named “Longhorn”), there was the clear desire to modernize the entire graphics stack inside of Windows. We have this amazingly powerful video card that is sitting idle the entire time you are running Windows (unless you happen to be playing Quake in windowed mode) and even with the idleness of the video card, we still manage to blue screen the machine in the much maligned video drivers.

The details behind Avalon is one of the interesting things about Longhorn.

This afternoon, I purchased a copy of Charles GoldFarb and Paul Prescod’s XML Hand Book, Third Edition (You can find a newer fifth edition at Amazon.com). This is the first computer book I purchased since college days for I was relying on downloaded e-books, various online reference materials and Google for more than five years already. But the book for its price is something I find so hard to resist. Located in between another XML book worth P2335.00 and an HTML related book for P1240, the said book is only P175.

I have to blink my eyes a couple more times to check if there’s damage, a typo or a blot in the price tag. I was calling out Evoschuke’s name while I was in the counter hoping that the price will remain that way even after the swipe. Evoschuke is the goddess of barcodes, price tags and red lasers by the way.

Two CDs, which include 170+ XML tools and stuff, are even included in the book.

Europa, the next version of Visual Foxpro, promises a better support for XML. The demand for XML support even exceeded expectations for a better and improved Report Designer. This, and other countless things, makes XML a good thing to tinker, exploit and abuse.

How about giving this a spin?

Active Foxpro Pages. Step aside ASP and JSP.

On our way home after a client visit this day, I was too tired from two weeks of almost virtually having no sleep creating Project Sopheia, that I was able to sleep in the bus. In the middle of the travel, I have this realistic dream that I was passing this part of the road where we usually pass on our way home. We’ve been passing that part for almost a year now and I was not quite surprised that the image projected in my dreams was so realistic and not the usual fuzzy, distorted and dragon-filled weird type of dream.

I woke up just minutes before reaching that part and ironically, the bus driver decided to use a different route… for reasons unknown to me… for the first time. I wasn’t even aware this alternate route exists until that moment.

It didn’t bother me that much, we’re at home now and as usual I’m still in front of the computer at two in the morning. I was even about to sleep when I realized what if I was not dreaming? What if there�s this certain portal that took a part of me (or worse the whole part of me) and it was a parallel world journey that was manifested in that dream.

What if dreams are a sort of ‘bug’ in that system of body snatching, swapping and bouncing beyond parallel dimensions. What if it is this very bug that causes dreams? What makes me sure that this is really me? That I am really what I am. Besides, what makes you so sure that you are really you?

What if some species in time are able to grab memory already, compress, decompress and store it on a different body. How will that body recognize? What if all this soul searching, journeying inwards is caused by this swapping of entities or whatever you call the human body and soul? You tend to look for the ‘original’ you… beyond time, beyond space. That’s the whole quest of out lives� forever looking for that part of us, that very self that was snatched while we are abducted from one dimension to another.

How will I know? How will you know?

Forget your ‘HTML-coding kung fu’… move your arse to Flash err… Flex.

Nah, not until I can get hold of that E-Paper. Remember Minority Report? The changing front page newspapers..? Yup… that’s the E-Paper I’m talking about.

Fascinating how movies influence technology. And vice versa. Here’s another article about Star Trek ‘powered’ gadgets being used in daily life. Give credits to the conceptual artists too… like Ryan Church. In a way their minds are behind these innovations.

So true.

It’s already 3AM… I’m up re-writing two forms/modules after realizing that a certain function, which will remain nameless for now, won’t work anymore after it was compiled into an .exe file. I overlooked that part BIG TIME and discovered the flaw just when I was about to start ‘burning’ files into a CD-R and selecting which type of dream channel I’d be visiting tonight.

Anyway… the freon’s back eventhough I have to stop coding every 320.198725 seconds just to do this little chant so that the fuse would remain intact.

Well… just another day in the life of a Foxpro programmer.

Just as I was wrapping up the client/server features of Project Sopheiai, I found this VFP Port Listener wiki thread. Ah well… I guess I’ll stick with my database approach for now since I am ‘passing’ large amount of data and from what I’ve heard, ports are being used by binary-loving-K-Paxians and other two bit alien lifeforms as a means of teleportation these days.

I’m still finishing up the iOpenLogic section of that project but to give you an overview, the server part clicks on a certain client list inside a grid which will return the programs running on a ‘client computer’ and the sites being browsed as well. In other words SERVER is monitoring if clients are browsing porn related materials or just chatting.

On a different note, Amazon and RSS _is_ a sexy combination.

I was googlin’ around looking for other Foxpro bloggers when I found that Scoble did post something about Foxpro almost four months ago. There are a lot of good things one can say about the man behind Scobleizer and the practice/idea of seeing the minds behind the development of a product talk/blog about what they are really doing… but I think that would be a subject of another blog for now.

For now let’s just boost a Foxpro programmer’s ego with Scoble’s words:

Heh, the FoxPro community is debating on whether the next version of FoxPro will be the “last.” Dang, this argument has been going on ever since Microsoft bought Fox. That happened shortly after I started at Fawcette, what, a decade ago?

Today FoxPro retains one of the strongest user communities of any Microsoft product. It still has some of the best database technology known to mankind. It was just a decade ahead of the rest, that’s all.

Will FoxPro be rewritten for Longhorn? As a Longhorn evangelist, I will work to try to convince FoxPro’s execs that the business opportunities opened up by the Longhorn wave will give them enough new sales of FoxPro to make it worth the investment. Will the Longhorn team win that argument? We can’t win them all. But clearly we’re at one of those inflection points in the industry’s history where product teams need to decide whether they will support the new platform or not. In every platform shift, there’ve been teams who’ve decided not to make the shift.

Just reading those words is enough to fire me up for today’s late-night-to-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning-Foxpro-related work. And the echo will still resonate even longer.

Ever heard of RptEngin? One of its nifty feature is creating FRXs out of Grids. Here’s an additional MSKB article: INFO: Where to Find the Wizard Applications’ Source Files.

XSource.zip is located inside \Tools\XSource of your Visual Foxpro directory.

VFP Design Pattern Catalog holds list of documented Visual Foxpro design patterns.

We humans have sent rovers to Mars, invented hypersonic planes, wikis and made jokes out of war.

We have placed a GIANT matter on space to look for hidden worlds and take snapshots of the universe.

We defied gravity, discovered blueberries and water on Mars and claimed responsibility that life on Mars came from Earth.

We invented WinAmp and carved it on our desktop, saw a company that started in a garage become a kingdom and spiced up mobile phones (which I still strongly believe stifled our mental telepathic skills).

We brought to life fantasies that were once confined/but not limited to books, made best use of our idle hands and invented robots that rescue humans (though they have to get this “rescue robot driver�s license” first).

BUT still… we use primitive means to fight fire. In the world of touch screens, fast cars and T1 connections it still takes hours to stop this gift from Prometheus.

���

Uhrm. Enough of this mumbo-jumbos. There was a fire, a huge one that occured a firewall-away from my ‘regular-job’ office. It took 27 firetrucks, countless firefighters and four hours to completely eradicate it. I haven’t visited that office for two weeks already (I’m on a leave remember?), but I did visit it last night during the fire incident. Good thing the wind and luck favored us. The school was intact but homeless individuals there will be surrounding that place. Sympathies.

Shanara, Compaq and GODofLIGHT were safe though… and the other computers that dwell in that place.

WinAPI in FoxPro is sometimes frustrating… if not always. I know that it did helped me last week while I’m solving some things. I know that it is challenging (Really it is!). I know that it handles memory more efficiently. What I don’t like is the idea that I can’t seem to do a thing without a reference or without ‘Googling’. Worse I’m slowly being transformed into a copy-and-paste declare-lovin’ pink-eyed monster with three fangs.

Is it even possible to be able to know (and memorize) all those parameters without a book?

Converting things from downloadable VB/C/Delphi snippets is not that easy too. Probably it is easier for VB/C/Delphi programmers but we’re talking about Foxpro here… we’re talking about getting used to a PL with clear, eloquent and straightforward syntax and semantics. I even have to lookup each WinAPI code used inside another WinAPI code, do that lame trial and error approach isolating each variable while calling on the guardians of the seas and skies just to add a shadow on a certain box. So frustrating that I’m beginning to hear Photoshop voices mocking me using the last seven letters of the alphabet.

But I’ll get back to charm you, Miss WinAPI. One of these days. It’s quite hard tackling you after sleeping at 4AM for almost 12 consecutive days.

On the lighter side of things, Foxpro.catalyst is now available in RSS Feeds with the help of GMM-RS, an add-on for the Greymatter scripts this site is using. Installation is straightforward but if you’ll hit a roadblock, just download this RSS.pm file, upload in a directory named XML inside your cgi-bin folder and type the words ‘Format C: /u /s’ on your DOS window.

UHM… so now a bunch of scientists are trying to disprove that meteor theory on dinosaur’s extinction. So who will we blame now… Osama? Greedy dinosaurs fighting over a FlipStart?

These numbers are scary. The approach towards prevention is disappointing. These are just some of the reasons why software quality matters. It is about time programmers and developers exercise their code of honor and allegiance to ‘the man’.

Foxpro-warp: Visual Foxpro User Group. While the lay-out of the site is… uhm… ‘not that good’, it contains a LOT of good (and i mean GOOD) and ‘phat’ foxpro-related materials inside. So let’s concentrate on the content since content is indeed KING. The heck with the lay-out… [“,].

Semi-randomness spurt:

• Six Sigma to the rescue?
• Firefox fills the IE void
• Firefox May be Better, But Internet Explorer is Entrenched
• OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Wanted to Know About Switching to Open Office.org
• Monti to Microsoft: Guilty as charged

Hmmm…

Foxite‘s Dale Dedoroy, a fellow Filipino FoxPro programmer pointed to me yesterday that in VF8, one does not need the VB6 DLL anymore (I have discussed FoxTray.ocx ealier last week). And I did overlooked the fact that I haven’t copied/’Regsvr32-ed’ that VB6 dll when I visited a client last Friday. Goodie… now I can re-activate this FlameVB mode.

Do check Dale’s articles at Foxite: An alternative to Kodak image edit scrollbars � Thumbnails, anyone? (and Part 2) � Tame the string and Teach the Fox hunt pictures better.

Have you considered opening your own fox/work-related blogs too, Dale?

More Foxite articles for you, fox-lovin’-insomniac.

Foxpro download for the day: STRUCT.zip | If there’s an error in the link, just go to foxite.com, log-in (create an account if you need to… it’s worth it if you’re serious about learning Visual Foxpro), go to the download section and use the filter feature with any of these settings: DownloadID: 3 or Keyword: Struct.

This class library file written by Christof Lange and Mark Wilden, comes with an informative source code, a good documentation on WinAPI and ActiveX related stuff and sugar pies. The screen resolution changer module included in that download, is what I was studying last night.