foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

If there’s one thing i miss these days that i usually do before… that would be teaching. The joys of teaching, its fulfillment and all, is something a soul can crave. Include the sudden rush of cruelty-enhanced neurons that calculates the possible permutations allowed for one to ‘torture’ and push computer science students not only to their limits but beyond their limits. It’s not about crossing the line this time… but moving the line (and the bars) that in a way limits learning. True learning.

Quite sad that one of my college buddy who happens to be the computer science dean of that school where i left, doesn’t share the same principles with me. I’m not saying though that my ‘style’ is correct… and it should be followed. It would be just fine i think, that in a pool of kind and lovin’/nurturing/spoon-feeding college teachers and professors, there is one or two that poses more challenge than what smiles and kindness can offer sans the commercialism that infests the educationaly system in our country today.

Good articles worth your time.

Why Good Ideas Fail
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Foxpro-warp: Craig Bernston and his FoxBlog.

It’s 2:43AM already and i’m still working on the new version of that richardbase.com website. I have done 90% of the template last friday and i was able to chop things, add tables and rollover images already tonight (post.replace[‘tonight’, ‘morning’]). I’ll be using iFrame this time to minimize an extensive vertical scrolling for the main section. It has been months since i have last touched Dreamweaver, PaintShop Pro and Adobe Photoshop… so i’m having quite a hard time familiarizing things once again. I can’t even find the SNAP TO GRID item earlier.

I tend to give importance to the details when i’m working on GFX-related matters. I would even scrap a two hour work and start from scratch if i’m not satisfied with it. I’ve done that earlier this evening when i am faced with the dilemma of optimizing the image size using JPEGs compressed by 15 or 30 percent over a GIF format which reduces the overall quality of the image.

I end up using a rollover image with both a not-so-compressed JPEG as the main image and a GIF file for the ‘roller’. I don’t want to sacrifice quality this time… and since i’m using an iFrame, the loading of most images will only occur once. All other loading of files and images will be inside that iFrame which is not that ‘heavy’.

Once the main portfolio site is done… expect the foxpro.catalyst website to emulate that interface too. Hmm… do you really think this site will hold this text only type of look that long?

Searching Microsoft’s Knowledge Base is a good start to find solutions to certain problems. But if you’re just looking for random VFP topics, you can view some KnowledgeBase articles by Garrett Fitzgerald and Mike Stewart.

There’s a good bunch of database-related white papers (and links) at PCMAG.com WhitePapers section.

Technology Takes on Tradition in Animation. Wesner Moise has also an interesing insight about that topic in his 3D versus 2D Animation blog.

The Ten Rules of Performance.

[snip]
“… you’re tempted to believe that you understand how your application works. Well, you don’t. You understand how it’s supposed to work. Unfortunately, performance work deals with how things actually work, which in many cases is completely different.”
[/snip]

It’s a very interesting read for programmers, system developers and humans who value work and output as well.

Building a Web Data Service with Visual FoxPro (from Rick Strahl of West Wind Technologies)

You’ve read Microsoft’s plan on SPAM earlier… now hear a more ‘radical approach’ as Michael J. Miller interviews the CEO of Symantec.

Hmm… interested in downloading a 512MB Network Game source code? Releasing the source code comes from the company you least expect to do such move… Microsoft. ALLEGIANCE… is the name of the game. I’m still figuring out how i can use GetRight with this download.

I have an alternate e-mail account on one of the free servers one can find in the ‘net. For the past three months it was rendered useless by SPAM, which just celebrated it’s 10th year birthday a couple of days ago. It was only yesterday when out of nowhere the cyber-Gods started whispering in my ears pointing me to the SPAM filtering option that i am able to breath life into that sufferrin’ account once more. SPAM, or unsolicited commercial emails, are getting worse these past few months (if not years). Even Microsoft is mapping out their plans to tackle this problem. Some theories would even tell that the proliferation of worms have something to do with a deeper SPAM-related creeping attacks, that e-mail addresses gathered are being sold for a big amount of money, and SPAM is being used by aliens who have plans of colonizing our solar system. A number of mentally-spammed entities can even make SPAM unstoppable.

Which is bad… we all know there are a lot of valid e-mails that are trashed because of this… not to mention the time, resources and bandwidth that are wasted. Hopefully in the near future, the combination of technological software advancements, laws and ‘maturity of humanity’ can help solved this problem. Or better yet… use SPAM as a tool along with fireflies in finding alien lifeforms.

You might be interested in downloading this FoxTalk Sample Issue which contains the following articles: Get more productive with VFP, Part 4 (Richard Schummer) � Ahoy! Anchoring Made Easy (Doug Hennig) � Playing with GUI in Visual Foxpro 8: The Expander Control (Predrag Bosnic) � Using Delegation to Change Your Application’s Architecture (Mike Helland) � The Kit Box: VFP 8.0 Intelli-non-Sense! (Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins)

And another interesting read: Building a Tool to Secure Messages by Alex Feldstein. More information about FoxTalk can be found at Pinnacle: Solutions for Developers.

Non-foxpro related but still interesting articles to read:

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Garbage Collection Myth is Real
Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers
.NET Framework Resource Management

What is a Color?
Colors Undocumented
Never knew that handling colors programmatically is this fun… in a ‘geeky’ sense of way.

Visited a client today whose computers are infested with viruses and worms. There was even this one PC that has both NAV and McAfee VirusScan installed plus a DOS based version of PCCillin, but was still badly infected. Funny it was that simple MSCONFIG solution that eradicated the problem. Also it is good to note that sometimes if you’re running computers on win95/98/98SE/ME and you don’t have much resources (CPU and memory), it would be better if you install the older version of NAV which doesn’t hog that much memory and just update the drivers, modules and virus definitions afterwards using LiveUpdate. More on this process and that client visit later.

Foxpro-warps: March 2004 Letter from the Editor from Microsoft Visual Foxpro Developer Center. Now the VS DATA Team blogs as well.

Before i dive into the ‘work.blogs’, let me give you Tamar E. Granor’s website. Tamar wrote that Hacker’s Guide to Visual Foxpro book which i have mentioned more than once in my past blogs. If you have read this book already, or even parts of this book… you’ll know why it is a ‘must have’. Ted Roche and Doug Hennig are also credited for that book.

More or less i have prepared already for tomorrow’s visit/installation. It’s 2AM and here i am just waiting for m.sleep(dreams) to catch up with me and thinking once again about that flushed-out-from-cyberspace thing (See blogs below, dude). Had that occured five years ago when i was still maintaining my first site, i would have fret, roared and called on bolemic celestial beings of cyberspace to drag my site back online. But that’s before… and now’s different. Totally different.

You don’t need visitors to have a good site. You need a good site to have visitors. Content that is directed to your target-ed viewers, is important. Even if it means blob-blob-blobs like this targeted to bored and/or stressed programmers who want some air or just happened to stumble upon this site.

Though i must admit i still have to concretely formulate the direction of this site. The menu in the right part is not even completed (Note to self: complete that this weekend) and i still have to renovate the ‘main site’, which will hold these blogs. For now let me just end this semi-senseless blobberin’ and point you to this link: Mike Lewis Consultants.

Foxpro.catalyst… is now back online. We were flushed out from cyberspace for almost 24 hours after a glitch occured when we renewed the domain. Thanks for the help, weightlessGFX. More foxpro-related links later. I’m still finishing up some things for tomorrow’s client visit/installation.

Have you ever heard of the A. M. Turing Award? Just stumbled upon it once again after reading an article about Bill Gates. It’s an interesing one… here Bill Gates tells us about his move to attract computer science students in colleges, why computer science courses are dwindling, his views on offshore-outsourcing and a lot more.

I downloaded OPENOffice.org 1.1.1 last night. Make that a couple of nights ago since it is already two in the morning. Installed it fifteen hours ago in the computer in the office i call as the ‘Battle PC’. Experimented on it for awhile, click a few buttons here and there and opened some previously created files. I don’t have any java runtime environment installed on my computers so i have to choose to run it sans the Java. All things are working fine so far but i’ll do a research on that Java part. Even the setup window i must admit is quite refreshing… and i do like that eplastic effect on graphics which i first saw at PHONG.com years ago and is often used in current interfaces these days. It’s good to see artistic interfaces being used but not abused. This one falls in the ‘well used’ category.

Back to Open Office… like Microsoft Office it has applications for text and documents, spreadsheets, presentations and even for HTML creation and editing. A quick tinkering and dropping down of menus showed that they are almost similar feature-wise. Which is scary… but at the same time, a big help especially in this part of the world were piracy is rampant, licensed softwares are too expensive as compared with the basic needs and currency is plummeting down so fast. A BIG help it would really be. (Of course you can view it differently)

Feature-wise, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 even has an export to PDF feature which i can’t find on my MS Office XP, but i must admit i haven’t explored MS Word that much. With respect to MicroSoft, i believe that Office is one of their best products to date. Word and even Excel, along with their easter eggs, have done a lot since those old WordStar 4 and Lotus for DOS days. Yup i’ve used that before but i’m not that old yet. Oh no… i’m not… not yet.

What i can’t fully understand, is why one creates a good package such as this and call it with a name which is not far from an existing ‘dominant’ product already? I can understand some similarities in lay-out and item placing and such, probably to make things easier for the user to adapt and familiarize, but why not name it to a different word. Why ‘office’? The word ‘open’ is not much help even it means a lot. I guess this is just the ‘trend’ in the ‘IT world’, eh?. There’s WordStar… then WordPerfect then MSWord and countless others having this affinity for the word ‘word’. Partly i know and understand the reason… but still, part of me was hoping that the open source community would give more importance of having a sort of unique identity for their products. Yes, I do have a great respect for the open source principles and the minds behind such force, but that my friend, is another story for now.

Well i guess i’ll just settle with figuring out how to make Visual Foxpro ‘automate’ with these new found treasures. Or should i also expect an Open Foxpro in the days to come? Uh… something to look forward to.