{"id":541,"date":"2005-11-03T16:39:01","date_gmt":"2005-11-03T08:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/?p=541"},"modified":"2007-10-10T00:52:19","modified_gmt":"2007-10-09T16:52:19","slug":"are-we-really-investing-on-the-right-data-handling-tools-and-formats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/archives\/541","title":{"rendered":"Are we really investing on the right data handling tools and formats..?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/td>\nZkarkakaorooom. More like Z… k… a… r… k… a… r… m. <\/p>\n

That is the sound of my fourth rssreader\/tool conking out after months of accumulating feeds.<\/p>\n

And it’s not even overfed. Every now and then I ‘safestore’ the feeds into its .mht format to be stored in a directory somewhere. Yes, I do this part semi manually with the help of the ever-reliable Norton Commander designed for Windows 95<\/font>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

\nOut of respect for their developers, I won’t mention their product names.<\/p>\n

Most of these rss-readers bonk out when they accumulate tons of data. And I do expect more from them.<\/p>\n

This fourth one, holds a lot of important features, well the features that a pack rat like me prefers, and in fairness it did survive longer than the previous three. (Well actually more than three, but I’m only counting those tools which I used for more than three months) <\/p>\n

And now it crashes every now and then, hangs and pretends to be seeing drunk mouth-watering aliens almost too often.<\/p>\n

(One or a few more crashes are forgiveable, a couple more is believable especially if aliens are indeed involved, but more than that… I’ll be blaming either a lame developer or a lame tool (or both)) <\/p>\n

Which gets me thinking. Are we really entrusting the storage of data, and the data format itself to the proper tools and formats?<\/p>\n

Please don’t make me mention the three letter acronym.<\/p>\n

(OK… most of the technologies involved in this have three letter acronyms… so take your pick.)<\/p>\n

One can always download these rss feeds, convert them to a format that can be stored inside VisualFoxPro’s native database engine (or even use an SQL Server (though that would be an overkill in terms of what I really need for now))…<\/p>\n

… use VisualFoxPro to sort and browse data and I don’t believe even in running this for a year, VFP would conk out because it was overwhelmed with more information than it can process.<\/p>\n

Unless of course, the… ok… for once, let’s refrain from involving aliens.<\/p>\n

Don’t even mention that 2GB limit this time. There are tons of workarounds for that excluding the use of nanotech and parallel universes.<\/p>\n

Can these new tools at least make themselves reliable first before masking and donning that ‘the-future\/the-next-big-thing’ cape. <\/p>\n

… and Beakman wonders why I try and use old technologies. <\/p>\n

They’re not old… they are reliable.<\/p>\n

Yes… reliable.<\/p>\n

\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd<\/p>\n

Here’s an offshoot of that chat I had with Beakman yesterday (Happy Trip by the way, Mark.) <\/p>\n

WF<\/b>: I’m porting some of my old VFP6\/VFP8 projects to VFP9 already, Mark. Blah blah blah… and more detailed blahs.
\nBeakman<\/b>: Is it compatible..?
\nWF<\/b>: Dude, Visual FoxPro is 20 years backward compatible.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nDarn… I did use ‘dude’ in that statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zkarkakaorooom. More like Z… k… a… r… k… a… r… m. That is the sound of my fourth rssreader\/tool conking out after months of accumulating feeds. And it’s not even overfed. Every now and then I ‘safestore’ the feeds into its .mht format to be stored in a directory somewhere. Yes, I do this part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-randomscribbles","category-visual-foxpro","category-workblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foxpro.ntsl119.com\/scr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}