Twiki Blog Archive 2002-04

Tuesday, 30 April, 2002

Good to be back home again. A frantic day of catching up with stuff -- excessive emails, lists of things promised to people in KC, proposals. And too much coffee, which is why I am still up. Sheesh.

Monday, 29 April, 2002 Eight Am session and I am done. The gange did a picture at . Allen Cooper had some interesting stuff to say at the keynote last night.

It's time to travel. Can't wait to get home.

Sunday, 28 April, 2002

Essential Fox Rocks. Great conference so far.

Happy Birthday, Dad. 69 Years Young today. An awesome guy.

Wednesday, 24 April, 2002 Mad preparations for Essential Fox Conference.

Tuesday, 23 April, 2002

Spent the day with brother Joe. He's mending nicely. Nice house he and Donna have.

Two tidbits, both from SlashDot. One is and interesting article on Open Standards and Web Services, and the other, an entertaining piece of fiction.

Monday, 22 April, 2002

Weather took a really severe turn for the worse - it SNOWED! Not sticking enough to shovel, but we'll see what the morning brings. More tidbits:

Jon Udell wrote this piece a couple of years ago: A Perl Hacker in the Land of Python, but I enjoyed it. Also, an interesting piece with a business case for open source: Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!.

Finally a little contribution to the world:

"Don't even try to run Visual NET on your Office development machine until you've installed this baby."

Would that I had know that a little bit sooner. Apparently, there's a right way and a wrong way to install these things, and I'm about 14 hours into trying variations of the wrong way in hopes of tripping on the right way.

I've got a test laptop I thought I'd install all the latest MSDN Galactic toys on, to have a machine I could afford to risk crashing-and-burning, so I could evaluate the latest goodies for my company and clients. Little did I know...

I installed Windows XP and all of the requisite services packs and security patches, courtesy of Windows Update. Next was Visual Studio .NET, Visual FoxPro? 7 and Visual SourceSafe? 6.0c. Then came Office XP and it's service packs. All seemed good, until I tried to access Visual Studio .NET. No joy. The error message "The application cannot start" lead me to MSKB 306905, which tells me there could be any one of three problems, and no clue how to tell which. So, I start at the beginning, patching MSMXL2, 3 and 4, unregistering DLLS and registering keys in the Registry, tracing down paths of obscure DLLS, doing a "Repair" installation of Office XP (hours pass...) and finally registering an OLB that seems to solve the problem. The IDE starts.

And the help doesn't work.

So, back to the drawing board, I uninstall Visual Studio .NET and attempt a reinstall. Browsing through the voluminous README, I do come across the section that mentions that NET ought to be installed after Office XP.

Bingo! Right combination! Everything works.

Only twenty hours of toying with it down the drain. Sheesh.

Sunday, 21 April, 2002

Wht a glorious day! Thirty-five degrees this morning when I went out to walk the dogs, but warming up nicely. Spent a busy day paying bills, watching "Lord of the Rings" again, this time with Steve and Laura, mowing the lawn, and email 92 user group leaders the HackFox7? press release. That's it.

Saturday, 20 April, 2002

What a day! Laura and I spent the morning hacking down overgrown shrubbery. Exhausting for two desk jockeys to spend hours on their feet with arms raised. Pretty sad lot we are.

A couple of CoolLinks: http://www.opencontent.org/ offers an open source copyright license for written works, and http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ campaigns for a "Viewable with Any Browser" policy, both of which I admire.

Friday, 19 April, 2002

TGIF.

Thursday, 18 April, 2002

Yet another busy day. Glorious weather - sun and temperatures in the 90's - record-breaking heat for this part of the world.

Billable work, cleaning up the successful launch this week. Tomorrow, I need to update the documentation on what I've created.

Yesterday involved huge moving around of office equipment. Today was letting the dust settle and finding all of the piles of stuff. Figured out the terminal services problem - I was trying to use the "friendly" name for the machine - Apollo - and it was resolving to Apollo.attbi.com on my ISP rather than locally. Once I specified the IP address directly, I was in.

Eight days until I fly off for Essential Fox. Looking forward to the conference. Still got to get things together on the laptop, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Wednesday, 17 April, 2002

Is nothing safe? Now it looks like the Back button (or backspace) can be used to exploit your computer. Is Nothing safe?

At the prodding of Ken Levy to fix the stuff I messed up yesterday, I got to play with the Web Services interface of http://www.foxcentral.com. Pretty slick and simple and elegant.

Ten-thirty AM, and the web server is up and running in the basement, er, the server room :). Not bad. Three-thirty PM, with a break for lunch, and Steve and I have the Dell Workstation set up with a clean installation of Windows 2000 Server, with SP2, SP2SPR1, and dozens of other security patches. Can't get Terminal Services to work, but everything else is running. More tomorrow.

Microsoft isn't the only one doing underhanded things to boost revenue. Oracle looks like it took the state of California in grand style, and Microsoft is shaking down the state of Texas for 5-year-old licenses. .att%KBAlertz is a new service on the web that will send you email about changes or additions to the Microsoft Knowledge Base on the topics you select, for free. Good deal!

Tuesday, 16 April, 2002

Bruce Perens has an interesting article here on Microsoft's continued antagonism towards the open source community: http://news.com.com/2010-1075-882846.html.

With the aid of TR&A's new Network Administrator, Steve, we set up a rack in the cellar and moved the Dell Workstation 400 onto the rack. Running Cat-5e to the basement was not a pretty sight, but it's up and running. The web server moves tomorrow.

Monday, 15 April, 2002

Happy Tax Day. Twelve hours of billing yesterday left little time for blogging. Today was cleanup and errands and also little time.

Ken Levy sends a "Memo from Microsoft" with good news for Visual FoxPro? enthusiasts.

Microsoft claims HailStorm? wasn't killed, the stragegy just changed, in this piece. Spin doctoring.

Funniest MSKB:Q313166 article of the day stated:

"Known Issues"

NT domain authentication does not work on computers running Windows XP Home Edition

When working with the Workflow Designer for SQL Server or the Workflow Manager for SQL Server on a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, you will not be able to obtain NT domain authentication. To avoid this issue, do not use the Workflow Designer for SQL Server or the Workflow Manager for SQL Server on a computer that is running Windows XP Home Edition."

Sounds like the old vaudeville routine:

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this" "So, don't do that"

Microsoft cancels the PDC: no big surprise, they talked out all they could at TechEd?. They might need to actually back it up if they had any more conferences :). A report on that and the reaction from the DevX? editor to a quiet TechEd?.

A Washington Post column reviews a promising, simple ThinkFree Office.

Sunday, 14 April, 2002

Happy Tax Day Eve.

Saturday, 13 April, 2002

"IBM, Microsoft plot Net takeover" is the alarm-bells-ringing title of this article on ZDNet's Tech Update site. In the meantime, the Java Developer's Journal thinks that Java has 5 years left, tops, thanks to Microsoft's C#.

Too busy with client work to get much updating of the Wiki done. Eager to try out cookies, but need a few hours free. Hopefully next week...

Friday, 12 April, 2002

Groggy morning, following a user group meeting last night - SQL Server Users Group.

Continued troubleshooting issues with VFP development, Outlook and Exchange Automation. And continued, and continued... whew.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30972&;threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=111&mode=thread&pid=3329065#3329156 has an interesting discussion on adding mailto links to a page without having them easily screen-scraped by spam bots, but still easy to use. I wonder if all of the effort is worth it... Read the source here for one of the solutions...

tedroche@tedroche.com

Thursday, 11 April, 2002

Son Stephen is twenty years old today. Happy birthday, old man!

Microsoft announces that Hailstorm is dead, according to this article, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/technology/11NET.html. Perhaps resistance to assimilation is not futile.

Wednesday, 10 April, 2002

Another day spent hard at work, troubleshooting a large Visual SourceSafe installation, and working some VFP code to automate incoming mail processing as part of a sales force automation system.

Had a great dinner out with my girlfriend and my son, who turns 20 tomorrow. Twenty years old!

Here's a little essay I'm working on...

Such a simple little word. Rather an ugly word to look at, but wonderful in meaning.

My brother, eight years my junior, called me two weeks ago to let me know that, as part of a medical workup for an unrelated problem, they found a mass where one shouldn't be. In the smooth muscle tissues, not far from the kidneys, and perilously close to the vena cava, there was a dense mass they could not identify. Initial blood tests had eliminated many possibilities, but the one that remained was not good. Leiomyosarcoma is rare, but inevitably fatal, not responding well to chemical, surgical or radiation treatments. Survival is under 50% in 5 years.

Surgery was Monday, and the word came late afternoon. "Benign." It was not the sarcoma they dreaded, but another, less dangerous growth.

Joe's recovering in Surgical ICA at Mass General (in the ward he works in, strangely enough - he's an RN).

And I've had a fresh reminder on the fragility of life and the importance of family.

Tuesday, 09 April, 2002

http://www.basicguru.com/ has some interesting information on the BASIC language, including links to free or cheap implementations. The most interesting link, to me, on the page was to http://www.cmdtools.com/, for command-line tools. Having a set of tools available from the command line has tremendous advantages: writing scripts for routine functions, quick and dirty operations, ease of use, easy access over slow links or telnet.

Spent most of the day hard at work, trying to get Outlook automation to behave properly.

Added InterWikis links so that I could add MSKB and ISBN links easily into documents. Can also have links from here to my favorite Wiki, FoxWiki:FoxForumWiki.

Working on installation of the Twiki:Plugins.UserCookiePlugin so that I might be able to support authoring on the site with proper credit to the authors.

Monday, 08 April, 2002 Three weeks and the Twiki's still running!

http://www.scumware.com/ is an interesting link discussing all of the blinking, pop-under, stealth-download garbage that advertisers are trying to cram down our throats as we try to get our job done. Advertising itself is a necessary thing; that's how we find out about new things that might actually make our lives easier. But the stuff that comes with it is unacceptable!

Sunday, 07 April, 2002

Spring forward!

Installed UltraEdit on my main development machine. What a program! Incredible capabilities, small memory footprint, everything you want in a programmer's editor, and $35.00 shareware. Hard to beat. Unless, of course, you try out the Programmer's File Editor I mentioned two weeks ago, for free. But I dont' begrudge a fellow developer $35, especially for a worthwhile program.

Downloaded the Session Plug In and Tiger Skin skin for the twiki, and have them half-working (and half not). Could be cool if I can get a better look going for the twiki here. Before I go public with this thing, there's three items I want to work through:

• a new machine - probably the Dell Workstation 400 dual PII-333
• a better look - the default TWiki is pretty amateurish

• logon capabilities - There's no way NOT to be TWikiGuest right now.

Mike Lewis is an active participant in the FoxPro forums on CompuServe. His home page is http://www.ml-consult.demon.co.uk/foxstuff.htm

Saturday, 06 April, 2002

Spent a half hour trying to help Whil understand the joy of Outlook distribution lists. It's not a pretty story. Sue Mosher's SlipStick.com is considered one of the best sources: http://www.slipstick.com/contacts/dl.htm

The guys and gals at Memory Man, http://www.memory-man.com (don't forget the hyphen!) have a great online system for identifying the kind of memory you need, and an efficient order processing system. I've bought from them successfully a number of times. Just upgraded the Dell Latitude CPiA to 256 Mb RAM this morning, effortlessly. I like it when stuff works the way it is supposed to!

Replaced the rechargable battery in the Microsoft Phone, earned for writing cerification questions in Palm Springs, for the first time. Almost $20, and a special order. But the phone is working again.

Spent the day shopping for new office furniture. Had fun. Nothing bought, yet.

Saw "Toy Story" tonight - yeah, I know I'm a few years late. Excellent flick.

Friday, 05 April, 2002

MSDN Universal and Microsoft's anti-piracy product key activation software stinks. I've got a new subscription (hard to gripe - it's free, compliments of the MVP Program) and the Passport ID I've used to get on to MSDN in the past no longer works, telling my my sub is no longer active. I know that - let me enter a new one! I tried to create a new Passport ID and use that one to register the new subscription ID, and it complains that that subscription doesn't exist.

This all wouldn't be more than a minor annoyance, except that it is happening during a workstation crash. My Omnibook 7100 crashed, following the installation of a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse, and all attempts at repair were fruitless. Rebooting from CD and choosing repair got me as far as the Product Key string and - foolish me! My bad! - I hadn't written it down somewhere. No Key, no run. 24 hours of frustration. Microsoft finally got back to me, 20 hours after I send in a technical support request email... and asked for my address. They promise they can "escalate" it with that. Another day lost...

Experiments with Twiki templates and skins were less than stellar. Managed to change the background blue. Messing with the page headers resulted in awful results. More study needed.

Thursday, 04 April, 2002

Last night was the Windows 2000 User Group. Joe Stagner, Technical Evangelist for the Waltham Office presented an unofficial, sometimes irreverant "sneak peek" at the next version of Windows Server, tentatively named NET Server. Interesting stuff.

Some of the links he mentioned:

http://uddi.microsoft.com http://www.gotdotnet.com

Tough day. Working on the test laptop (HP Omnibook 7100, PII-266, 8 Gb, 160 Mb RAM), and installed a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse. Ran the tutorial, visited the web site to try to get the latest drivers, chose to 'repair' the installation. That was the end of that operating system. WinXP? died an ungraceful death. Last Known Good Configuration wasn't good. Turns out the floppy drive is bad. Attempted a re-install. No Product Key. Microsoft won't let me on to their MSDN Universal downloads so I can get another one. Doesn't matter what I tell them - no access. So this is what good Microsoft's anti-piracy does for them. I'll install Win2K instead. Or maybe Linux.

Learning more about Twiki. That, at least, works.

Wednesday, 03 April, 2002

Remote control of the web site via Terminal Services is really tough, because the terminal services client crashes quite often, sometimes within seconds of logging on, sometimes only after a while. I suspect it is a weakness in the TS Server on the web server - it is, after all, only an AST P166, with built-in ATI Rage video on the motherboard. I have had a lot of problems with ATIs over the years, and suspect something in the driver is confusing the TS Server. Of course, it could be one of hundreds of other components, too, and there are few high-level troubleshooting tools to work with. On the clients, I have a Dr. Watson log that lists running processes and registers. On the server, no trace of an error. Grr.

Steve and I put together the second CPU for the Dell Workstation 400 machine, and are going to burn that in for a week and see how it works. If it's running okay, we'll put in both at once and have our first multi-processor machine up and running. That, eventually, will become the new web server.

Woody Leonhard has an advertisement in one of his newsletters for an alternative remote control software, something I might consider for the short-term, instead of crashing out of Terminal Services. It is http://www.crossteccorp.com/WOW.htm

Tuesday, 02 April, 2002 Previous

Well, April Fool's Day felt like it was at my expense. Code running since January stopped working. New code has weird behaviors. Merging three different code bases is difficult. Two weeks until ship date. It's Death March time.

Took a little time off to whip up a table on the WebHome page. Tables are easy! Really lets you compact more info into a smaller space.

Also updated the company Home Page. First time I've had the right month in a while... although I do want to add some mention of wireless to it.

Today rocked. Slayed several problems, caught up on other issues. Code flowed. Women fainted. Grown men cried. I laughed. And this was work.

http://www.farces.com/stories/storyReader$414 with some interesting views on "Big Business" stealing our rights to fair use of copywritten material.

Monday, 01 April, 2002

Easter was grand. Good friends, good food. Crazed housekeeping in the morning, followed by a leisurely afternoon with guests in our nice clean house. Can't ask for much more. Bliss.

Back to work!

Dave Winer tracks down old friend Adam Green in this episode of Scripting News. Adam is one of my heroes, the first person to give me formal instruction in FoxPro back in the early 90's. My name and endorsement of his teaching abilities was on the front cover of the brochure he sent out when he started his PowerBuilder seminars. Small world.

Teoma is a new search engine hoping to compete with Google. Check it out. They're in beta test now.