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Ted's Radio Weblog Mission: Interoperable. Competition breeds Innovation. Monopolies breed stagnation. Working Well with Others is Good. |
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Twiki Blog Archive 2002-05 Friday, 31 May, 2002 30 days hath September,... May is one of those months I can never remember... Thursday, 30 May, 2002 Just another working day. Wrote code. Did analysis. Ate lunch. Ho. Hum. Oh, and got invited to speak at Great Lakes Great Database Workshop 2002. That's a high point.Wednesday, 29 May, 2002 Got the mail notification working for the TWiki working after a couple of flubbed attempts. The example "someone@your.company" kept throwing errors, and even a < n o p > didn't keep it from being parsed. Finally withdrew them from all of the Webs. Forgot the Blog, of course, since it didn't show up on the list in the upper right. I'll go fix that now... Found the key items in the installation FAQs I needed for moving this Twiki to a new machine:
Solved the Outlook drag-n-drop problem as soon as I stepped back to look at it. The drag-n-drop is the event to fire the code, but ignore the data. Go back to Outlook and ask for the currently selected records. There's your data! Grocery shopping tonight, as yestday was a holiday. Jim Duffy recommends this book, ISBN:1861004486 for learning SQL Server. Monday, 27 May, 2002 Happy Memorial Day.Sunday, 26 May, 2002 An interesting story of using small claims court to try to collect on overdue writer's payments: http://www.mediabistro.com/content/archives/02/01/10/ Spent the day cleaning out the cellar. An ugly job, but rewarding is the outcome. SlashDot sent me off on an interesting trail through the web starting at http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&;file=article&sid=227. Worthy of more study. Short form: Lessig good, MPAA/RIAA/Adkinson bad. But, we knew that. Many. many very worthwhile links from this page, though, including http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/piracy.html. Fascinating commentary, with some really interesting conclusions, like:cost in a market with piracy will always be less than in a market without piracy Lessig's links are surely impressive as well: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/future/. His thesis in The Future of Ideas, ISBN:0375505784, is that there is a coming Dark Ages of the Information Era, as AOL Time-Warner, Sony-Paramount, Microsoft and the other big media conglomerates take over the web is a pretty chilling conclusion. Saturday, 25 May, 2002 Happy Memorial Day weekend. FoxPro? got one of those all-too-rare mentions on the Microsoft site, in MSDN's Dr. GUI column. Check it out here. This site has a great article on creating Cascading Style Sheets that will adequately print the onscreen text. Good stuff. And check out the links from there... Friday, 24 May, 2002Tortured poor Apollo this morning. I had it all set up as a web server, less content, but not yet exposed to the internet. However, I was also setting it up as a SourceOffSite server, but I do not yet have enough licenses for the entire staff. So, I turned it back into a file server, allowing sharing of the SourceSafe data directories (around 2 Gb at this point). It was a little tricky, as there were several places within the interfaces I had to change:
Thursday, 23 May, 2002 Working away. Got to skim another chapter of The Wiki Way, work on client projects, and follow up on some of the neat stuff going on in the early-evening meetings at the Greater Boston FoxPro User Group. The late meeting, btw, was one of my topics, where I showed Net Resources: The Answers Are Out There. Wednesday, 22 May, 2002 On the road today, client work, a little shopping, and a Fox user group meeting tonight. Got "The Wiki Way" and read a chapter along the way, too. Good book. Tuesday, 21 May, 2002 Studying .Net, and Steven Platt's Book, Introducing .NET Framework, is one of my guides. His home page is at http://www.rollthunder.com/index.asp. Jon Udell talks of The Wiki Way as it relates to email threads in discussion groups and publishing. The Wiki Way ISBN:0-201-71499-X by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, is an insightful book into the ways of the Wiki. Rand has an interesting study of Space Weapons Windows/.NET magazine is one place I am considering submitting an article on VSS Maintenance. IISAnswers has a step-by-step guide to installing Perl on IIS, including a link to an MSKB test script, MSKB:Q245225 "Configuring and Testing a PERL Script with IIS 4.0 and 5.0" Monday, 20 May, 2002 Started off the day by posting the Boston Area FoxPro User Group meeting to the http://www.FoxCentral.net site, using Visual FoxPro, PFE and Web Services. Very nice. Got bored with creating the calendars by hand (March, April and May) so I wrote a little program to generate the monthly calendar in Twiki table format. Probably uses twice as many variables and twice as much logic as it needs to, but it gets the job done. Let's see how many months before I find a bug ;). Analog and Report Magic produce some pretty elegant stuff, pretty easily. Look for me to automate this stuff over the coming weeks.Sunday, 19 May, 2002 Good to see that Jerry Pournelle is busy at Chaos Manor. His group of daynotes includes others connecting to what we now call blogs. Been around for a while. Analog appears to be a way cool log reporter. Saturday, 18 May, 2002 Visited the CIAC -- Computer Incident Advisory Capability -- to review some hoaxes. Great site for information. New PDF document on Connecting to the Internet Securely: Windows 2000. A must read. Greg Gum of Blue Hat Software provides some resources for using Quick Books new XML interface with Visual FoxPro?. Friday, 17 May, 2002 Nutso day. First thing in the morning, picked up the ex's three cocker spaniels - my old friends Smudge and Freckles (see http://home.attbi.com/~tedroche/Photos/dogz.htm ) and a new acquaintance, Khol. Needless to say, my three at home were not overly enthusiastic ;). Survived the day, but didn't do much else. Thursday, 16 May, 2002 Still fired up from solving the "twisted tree" algorithm yesterday. Now, on to the next part of the solution, which is to identify the shared files between projects and determine how to resolve them... ... and got my butt kicked. The problem is more complex than it might appear at first, and I think I took the wrong angle of attack. Tomorrow, a better solution. Brian Jepson's name caught my attention, as I think he used to work for one of the companies in the Fox World - Drew Speedie or MEI, I can't recall. His name caught my eye in the list of bloggers on the O'Reilly site while reading a blog about an Emerging Technology conference from a link at Slashdot. The links are starting to work...Wednesday, 15 May, 2002 The high point of Wednesday morning is the trash guy coming, and taking the dogs to the groomer. Luckily, the day got more exciting from there. Solved the problem of performing an Analysis on a 3 Gb SourceSafe? database - the analysis code I supplied with "Essential SourceSafe?" was giving me a total of 7 Gb of files when I broke down the database by the top-level projects. Turns out the client is enthusiastic over sharing files, and I needed to debit the size of shared files if I ran into them more than once in the project. Ought to finish the code and turn it into an EXE that folks could download from the HWP web site. Tuesday, 14 May, 2002 Grocery shopping was the highlight of the day. The iServe announcement was the highlight of many others, including Doc Searl's Blog. I bought the combo deal of pdfFactoryPro and FinePrint from the same named company yesterday, and had them installed, registered and running in less than 15 minutes. Produced my PDF and sent it off to the client. This is how software is supposed to work! Monday, 13 May, 2002 Monday morning. Grey and rainy. The grass and trees are a vibrant green that comes from fast-growing fresh leaves. I love spring! Edward Lowry explains Misdirections in Information Technology to a group of Senators examining the IRS fiasco in 1998. -- TWikiGuest - 13 May 2002 Sunday, 12 May, 2002 Some interesting surfing over the weekend.
A busy day of work. Closed up the books on my sugar daddy client for the first four months. Time to get back to scratching for work. Spent the evening at Home Depot, buying DIY supplies for the weekend. What a wild bunch - the fun never stops! -- TWikiGuest - 10 May 2002 Thursday, 09 May, 2002 Spent some time tweaking on the SourceSafe web. Also worked on the Outlook book. Wednesday, 08 May, 2002 Wrote a little ditty last night to to try compile each element of a VFP project, displaying a WAIT WINDOW for each. This would allow a developer to detect which file is the problem when receiving the annoying "Cannot update the cursor" error message.
Tuesday, and more stuff going on. http://80211b.weblogger.com/2002/05/06 is an interesting site with news on wireless networking. A good use of blogging, too, I think. Project Manager X: Rebuilding the FoxPro? Project Manager from InsideThe Project Manager built into FoxPro? solves about 99% of the needs o f most developers, but the remainder can be frustratingly hard to reach. This project is designed to create several layers of programmable, extensible interfaces that will allow developers to create and share the add-ons that they need for their projects.Basic Design GuidelinesThe challenge with the design is that we cannot be sure what needs the next developer will have, so we want to make a set of interfaces most easy to access, difficult to break, and good at cooperatively having multiple extensions share access. Project Manager accessed as a hidden controllerThe project manager itself needs to be instantiated as an invisible object, visible only through the PMX programming interfaces. This will prevent inadvertant interference.Support for multiple user interfacesOne of the key features will be support for multiple user interfaces. A "Classic" user interface can duplicate much of the functionality of the original Project Manager. An "Explorer" interface can present a treeview and file list interface. A "Favorites" tab can be added. Perhaps the ability to dynamically define organizational schemes is needed by some. A toolbar interface to add additional tools might be needed. The design key here is that the user inteface need not dictate the underlying inteface of the PMX. Separation of UI from business logic.Support for multiple project hooksToni Feltman has a great design in ProjectHookX? that allows chaining of multiple well-behaved project hooks. This needs to be supported.Monday, 06 May, 2002 Monday morning, and time to get back to work. Sunday, 05 May, 2002 Had a great break in the middle of the day - took the dogs on a mile-long hike through the Hopkinton State Fair Grounds. Other than that, worked on IIS 5.0, securing the new Windows server. Links of interest: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/iis/deploy/depovg/securiis.asp http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2ftechnet%2ftreeview%2fdefault.asp%3furl%3d%2fTechNet%2fprodtechnol%2fiis%2fdeploy%2fdepovg%2fsecuriis.asp http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/iis/deploy/depovg/securiis.asp MSKB:Q316347 Saturday, 04 May, 2002 Another glorious Saturday, mostly spent working in the yard. Forsythia's are still in bloom, phlox is coming along, pear trees are beautiful, and strawberries are just starting out. I love spring! A PDF resource site well worth checking out, at PDF Planet. One of those graphs, worthy of Edward Tufte, can me found in the latest issue of American Scientist, here. Friday, 03 May, 2002 A review of the new ViewSonic Tablet PC: Celeron-800, 128 Mb RAM, 10 Gb hd, USB, 801-11b, portrait/landscape switchable, 4hr 5400 AHr battery, 5 pounds. These things are coming along. The Klez worm is filling my inbox. Pretty annoying. Thursday, 02 May, 2002 http://www.pixelscapes.com/unrealestate/ has some amusing writing on it. And http://www.proudlyserving.com is an intriguing site, too. Wednesday, 01 May, 2002 http://www.answersthatwork.com/ has a site that provides answers to some tough questions, and some handy utilities to use with Windows.
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