Twiki Blog Archive 2002-10

Thursday, October 31, 2002

Happy Halloween!

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Happy Birthday, Grace Slick, 63 today.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Started off my Tuesday morning visiting the dentist before breakfast and coffee. Maybe that's not such a good idea. Too groggy to carry on a conversation.

Unpacked my new laptop today, woohoo! What a nice machine! About time, as I've discovered the two older (3-years-old and 4-y-o) machines are on their last legs: no floppy in either one, fan going on one, and power supply cord on the other.

Monday, October 28, 2002

Busy Monday, getting back into work, burning CD-Rs, and starting the PDF for KiloFox.

Sunday, October 27, 2002

Sunday. Working on the house, fixing a couple of storm windows, cleaning up for winter.

This Contra Costa Times article talks about a technique of guerilla advertising. I have a suspicion that Slashdot was taken that way in this article gushing about the Tablet PC.

My desktop machine is in need of an overhaul. I yanked the dot-matrix printer we were using for a client project because I thought it was the source of my problems, but the problems continued. The machine will crash if nudged. I took it apart, cleaned the dust out, and attempted to reseat all the components, to no avail. Now, I am seeing Mozilla and Opera crash on a regular basis. It may be time for some major changes.

Saturday, October 26, 2002

Saturday, and time to finish my speaker's notes and send them along to Whil.

Friday, October 25, 2002

I found a handy utility for stripping the excessive "stuff" out of HTML files generated with Word at http://www.textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/

Thursday, October 24, 2002

Great presentation by Toni last night at the user group meeting.

AP is calling the New Hampshire's Senatorial race a dead heat. Yay!

Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Okay, enough of the "can you top this?" First, Monday's cold, then Tuesday's wickedly colder. Today I wake up to 3 inches of snow. Enough already!

Tonight, we'll hear Toni Feltman of F1 Technologies on new stuff in VFP8 and a demo of Fox Express, at the FoxPro User Group Boston.

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

I thought yesterday was cold. This morning when I walked the dog it was 25 degrees.

Monday, October 21, 2002

A month into fall. The birdbath was frozen this morning. Brrr.

Sunday, October 20, 2002

I spent yesterday working hard on the house, in hopes that I could spend today catching up on some computer-related stuff.

Found a few interesting articles. "The Secret Life of Markup" does a good job of explaing the various aspects. "Linux development tools" gave me some idea of what the alternatives are.

Saturday, October 19, 2002

Saturday. Spent most of the day working on the front picture window. After removing the storms this spring, we discovered that the main window frame had lost a lot of paint, and the wood strips that held the pane in place were not in good shape. As I couldnt' find an exact match for the wood strips, I improvised something out of quarter-round wood and got it painted and in place yesterday. There were no glazier points holding the pane in, and it had bowed out in the middle. The inner surface had been caulked, but the caulk had turned to debris. I dug out all the old stuff, gently pushed the window back into place and nailed in the new wood strip, and then filled the inside gap with silicon caulk. Fingers crossed - hope it works!

Friday, October 18, 2002

TGIF! Just picked up a new client - my publisher! I'm doing some work reformatting some of the PDFs, adding bookmarks and thumnails, setting up the proper page size and that sort of thing. He's been so hard-pressed for help on the production side, I'm glad I'm getting a chance to step in.

Thursday, October 17, 2002

Microsoft issued security bulletins 02-59, -60 and -61 last night, including the HTML Upload and Delete exploit in Windows XP, and the Word/Excel Hidden Fields exploit that Woody Leonhard has been ranting about for weeks.

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

I've been looking for development platforms for Linux. While it seems to have some pretty good tools for server-based applications, software development still all seems to be text-based. So I went looking for GUI IDEs. There are lots of them, of varied maturity and features.

Kylix is promising: C++ and Delphi/Pascal.

"Komodo is optimized for Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, and XSLT, and runs on Windows and Linux. " according to http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/index.plex.

Metroworks has ported their popular CodeWarrior to Linux: C++ and Java.

And there are some home-grown categories, too, such as Code Crusader.

Joe Barr had an interesting column about IDEs in June 1999 Linux Journal: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-06/lw-06-vcontrol_1.html

I'd really like to see VB/Access/VFP type GUIs, with toolbars, palettes, drag-drop and snippets, but that may still be a ways off.

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Orion has been reinstalled. Went slick, but not fast - most of Sunday afternoon while I cleaned the cellar.

Tim O'Reilly did some interesting analysis here of who and why folks are switching to Apple's OS X. The surprising conclusion may be that OS X is attracting more UNIX desktop switchers than Windows. A followup column is here.

Microsoft fielded a "switch" page yesterday, too, but, well, there were a few problems with it. The picture was a fake. The article was a fake, paid for by Microsoft. And the copy was bad. More from John Gruber.

Monday, October 14, 2002

I find it fascinating that some of the best scholars, lawyers and judges can debate complex issues of intellectual property, copyright and digital rights based on the few words of guidance put down by a group of revolutionaries over two centuries ago, and extract such wisdom from the documents. The document is the U.S. Constitution, the court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft. Here are the http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_10.shtml#000531[thoughts] of Lawrence Lessig, attorney and Stanford law professor who argued for Eldred.

Microsoft Fails to Change Buying Habits talks about the end of the pilot program Microsoft rolled out for Office By Subscription. Few bought into the idea. RIP.

The Gaileo spacecraft continues to send back great information as it loops around Jupitor. Its next major event is a Flyby of Amalthea, a Jovian moon that puts out more energy than it receives.

Just in case you thought they were just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck, here's Microsoft's Roadmap for the next three releases of Visual Studio. Let's see how well they can stick to plan...

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Watched Blues Brothers 2000 last night. I missed the frenetic energy that John Belucci brought to the original, but I thought the movie was still fun. Cameo appearances by everyone in blues were fun.

Listed to Ira Glass' This American Life yesterday. As usual, an off-the-wall, unusual and rivetting experience, one where you will just stay sitting in your chair, just to hear how the story comes out. I loved the Rocketman song.

Tom's Hardware features a review of a Micro PC that looks like a great replacement for the big ugly boxes most people use.

NextDay Saturday, October 12, 2002

"Microsoft Announces Ads for BSOD" is this tongue-in-cheek article on BBSpot.

Friday, October 11, 2002

Andy Kelly's presentation at the NE SQL group last night was fact-filling and interesting, but long. That, combined with a horrible traffic backup for the last three miles of I-93 in Massachusetts lead to a very late night.

Pablo Roca posted pictures from DevCon? on Portal Fox: http://www.portalfox.com/modules.php?op=modload&;name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showgall&gid=14

The Advisor Folks have their album here: http://www.advisor.com/AdvAlbum.nsf/vEventID?Open&;RestrictToCategory=CMX0209

Alex Feldstein's are here: http://www.feldstein.net/VFP_Devcon2002/Page.html

Thursday, October 10, 2002

SQL Server User Group meeting tonight.

Still troubleshooting my main machine. Tried to add SpeedFan? (a nify little power-tray displaying temperature and fan speed app) and United Devices UD Agent (fighting cancer using idle cycles) back into the machine, and it locked up. Had to log in as Admin and remove them from the Startup folder, again. Very frustrating.

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Microsoft claims to eat its own dog food in this series of articles on .NET: http://www.microsoft.com/net/basics/msuses_default.asp

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

After 19 months of pretty solid operations (looks like about 12 crashes), my main development machine crashed hard (power reset) and often (random bluescreens 9 times) yesterday. Over the months, this has gotten to be the go-to machine, the dependable one, so, of course, there's software on there that's nowhere else. It was the VSS repository while the servers got re-arranged. It had the latest development source and email stores. Tried rolling back the latest security patch (applied yesterda), no joy. Ripped out the external SCSI ZIP drive and the parallel printer we've been testing a client app on. It works. Unlikely it's either cable; far more likely it's a loose something inside the case that got shifted when I moved it. Sheesh. I hate hardware.

Back up and running this morning means it's time for backups!

Thirty-two degrees this morning when I walked the dogs. Frost in the fields. Fall comes quickly after the equinox, bringing thoughts of the cycle of life, mortality and the passage of time. Fall has always been a melancholy experience for me.

The New England SQL Server User Group is back on line, and advertising their upcoming October 10th meeting.

Monday, October 07, 2002

Up late watching the Forsyte Saga last night. Great drama, but sadly, 11 PM is too late for us old fogeys.

Sunday, October 06, 2002

Sunday.

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Saturday at home, working on the house. Removed panes from Steve's bedroom window upper frame, breaking only one in the process. Boiled linseed oil didn't make the glaze dissolve as well as I had hoped.

Friday, October 04, 2002

Even on the same coast, travel takes all day. But no jet lag, and I'm home by 4:30. Exhausted.

Thursday, October 03, 2002

Even on the same coast, travel takes all day. But no jet lag, and I'm home by 4:30. Exhausted.

Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Last day of DevCon always comes too soon.

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

At DevCon. Too busy for blogging.