Twiki Blog Archive 2002-11

Saturday, November 30, 2002

Another bit of software silliness I ran into today. I needed to find out if it was practical to drive from home to Toledo, Ohio. The machine that had my mapping software on it has left the premises, so I had to choose a volunteer and install the software. Disk One, Disk Two. At the end, the software congratulates me (or itself?) and informs me that the software was installed successfully, presenting me with a button labeled 'Finish.'

Now, wait a minute. The problem was 'how long is it from home to Toledo?' The machine restated the problem as 'Can you successfully install this package?' and left me at the finish line.

It could have offered to start the package, don't you think? Isn't that probably why I installed it? Isn't that probably why many people isntall many software packages?

I click on the 'Start' button. This is a WinXPPro? box with full default Candyland theme. No package visible. If I am clever enough to float my mouse over the 'All programs' option, a little tooltip pops up to inform me 'New programs installed.' Isn't it possible I knew that? Who swapped the disks the computer asked for? And is that that sufficiently passive for you?

It's more like a game of hide-and-seek. "I know what you're looking for, and I've hidden it somewhere in the cascading menus over here. Bet you can't find me!"

Friday, November 29, 2002

Steve and I struggled Wednesday to downgrade an older PII-366 laptop from Win2K to Windows 98SE as a test platform for a client project. Since it's NTFS, we'll need to blow away the partitions. The MSDN CD for Windowsw 98 isn't bootable. Found a wonderful resource for bootdisks at - where else? - http://www.bootdisk.com. So, of course, the floppy disk doesn't work any more. Sheesh.

Today we'll buy a copy of partition magic and try to resize the partitions so we can dual boot Win98 and 2K.

Thursday, November 28, 2002

Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, and happy Thursday to the rest of the world.

I have much to be thankful for this year.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Installed and configured WinCVS? on my machine for source-code control of a new client's application. Lots of good documentation on http://www.computas.com/pub/wincvs-howto/ and http://ccvs.cvshome.org/servlets/ProjectHome and http://www.cvshome.org/docs/

Pretty neat package. I'm looking forward to working with it and seeing how it compares to VSS.

Monday, November 25, 2002

Monday was five hours of commuting and eight hours on-site with a new client. A very exciting new project. Glad to be working again.

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Sunday. I'm trying to catch up on a week unblogged and, gosh, I can't even remember what I did on Sunday.

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Succeeded in re-assembling Steve's double-hung window. Stripping and reglazing turned out to be far more challenging than we thought. Next time, we'll plan to take the window out after the first frost.

Friday, November 22, 2002

TGIF. Back to work, and getting up to speed at work.

Dave Birley posted a link to his pictures from Great Lakes. Nice job!

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Back home. Spending a slow day catching up on email, snail mail, newspapers and house chores.

Robert X. Cringely starts his column about Comdex and ends with his predictions about the IT economy for 2003 and 2004. We'll see.

Microsoft released Security Bulletin MS02-066 this week, about a number of security problems primarily with IE. It looks pretty bad. However, I saw something in the security message I got that I had never seen before - an MSKB number from the far end of the number range. Until this time, I've seen the numbers progress sequentially over time, from the 70 thousands, to the 100, 200 and 300 thousands. This message had a reference to an 800 thousand number, and clicking on it did indeed bring it up -- this wasn't a typo. I wonder what they are up to...

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

I hate to see the party end, but I'm not sure I could have taken much more. The closing session was great, and featured a professional magician. Very fun.

Had a nice quiet lunch with a few friends afterwards, and started the long trek home. We were hours and hours early to the airport, as I've been traumatized enough being late, and had no reserves to deal with it this time. Flight was uneventful, the Logan Express showed up promptly, and the drive home went quickly. But it was still a little after midnight before we pulled into the driveway. It will be a quiet day tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

I'm done. No more speaking for me. Yay! Got to attend some good sessions, and had a fun dinner out at the Water Street Brewery with Laura, Mac and Ceil, Tamar, Doug, Gary and Bonnie.

Monday, November 18, 2002

Monday morning started with an "Email without Outlook" session for me. Went pretty well, I think.

Sunday, November 17, 2002

At the GLGDW conference. I did a three-hour "Introduction to Visual FoxPro?" pre-conference session. Thought it was very well-received. Talked as fast as I could the entire time with only one ten-minute break.

Ken Levy did a great keynote, 45 minutes long. Way to go!

Had the afternoon free to attend sessions. Spent the last session and break working with Mac Rubel troubleshooting his Web Services configuration. Rick Strahl solved the problem almost instantaneously by having him switch from an ISAPI to an ASP listener. Doh! We wasted three hours, but Mac was gracious enough to treat for dinner after the late night session.

At that session, a number of the speakers featured their favorite VFP 8.0 feature. They had two speakers up at once, switching the video connection on the fly, Very smoothly and quickly done. Good session.

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Early entry: travel to Glakes and speaker activities until ungodly hours. 8 AM session tomorrow, "Intro to VFP." Pray for me.

Friday, November 15, 2002

Last minute preps for GLGDW.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Late in the evening last night, I got the mailto handler to behave properly in XP. Took rooting around in the registry to clean it all up. I suspect I compounded the problem along the way, but the bottom line is that Mozilla installed incorrectly, too.

Microsoft "scraps" the plans for "Longhorn," the follow-up server to the .NET Server now tentatively expected in 2003, and instead asks clients to wait for "Blackcomb" which will feature the oft-touted "Yukon" technology. Confused, yet?

William Safire says "You are a Suspect," if the Homeland Security Bill passes as is. Chilling.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Preparation for WhilFest move up a notch into the frantic category as I discover that the native mailto handler for Windows XP is unlike those in earlier versions. Problems getting Netscape mail to properly handle the parameters passed from IE, although they work fine from Mozilla.

Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Tuesday, and a short week thanks to the Veteran's Day holiday yesterday.

Microsoft's in hot water again, this time over a leaked memo describing their progress in their battle against Linux. Linux World's Take and sister paper Info World echo similar sentiments.

Monday, November 11, 2002

Wild weather. They are predicting 70 degrees Fahrenheit and possibly thunderstorms this afternoon. A week after we shoveled snow off the driveway, this is unseasonable to say the least.

Sunday, November 10, 2002

Marvelous essay on Interface Cruft and the pain it causes us all.

Saturday, November 09, 2002

For those trying to expand their skill sets with MySQL or PostgresSQL, there's a new visual tool for managing the database called http://www.dbtools.com.br/EN/dbmanager.php?

Following up on the mention of Gymnast yesterday, this looks like a text-only to postscript converter. OTOH, Bob Lee has extensive instructions on his site for using GhostScript? and the ps2pdf utilities to create PDFs.

Friday, November 08, 2002

A rather disturbing story here that the US is using remote-controlled airplanes to kill people in third-world countries. What ever happened to "bringing people to justice?"

eWeek (p)reviews Office 11: "Next Generation Office Shows Promise" Peter Coffee retorts with Microsoft Office 11: Ready, Aim ... Fizzle?

Also in eWeek "Windows 9x is inherently insecure," Sloan Crayton, a member of the Microsoft Office beta support team, told testers last week. Gee, I don't remember them mentioning that when they were pushing Win9X... how long until Microsoft, selling Windows Z, admits that XP was a sham?

Folks on one of the developer lists I hang out on mention Gymnast as a free solution to generate PDF documents.

Thursday, November 07, 2002

A day of consulting on the road, visiting South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

A busy day on the road. Dropped off shoes for repair, got a haircut, an oil change, new tires, Dunkers, no books at B&N, but got to attend the monthly Boston Area FoxPro? User Group meeting.

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Peter Coffee of eWeek: "Microsoft Gets Away With One"

Another opinion piece on Microsoft, "It has pissed off thousands of developers."

Monday, November 04, 2002

LawMeme has an article titled "One Coder's Opinion of the Microsoft Opinion"

All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

APNews has an article on the continuing erosion of the freedom of the PC in "New PCs Likely to Cede Some Control"

Sunday, November 03, 2002

Sunday.

Saturday, November 02, 2002

Scott Rosenberg: "Money talks, Microsoft Walks"

Dave Winer: "There's no justice in today's decision."

Boston Globe: "In Silicon Valley, resignation and skepticism"

Charles Cooper: "Machiavelli wrote that a prince may never lack legitimate reasons to break his promises"

In an interesting "Where are they now?" piece, News.com reports "Key players of antitrust trial: Where did they go?"

From the New York Times article: "There was a fabulous opportunity to free up innovation and choice in the PC and online world," Mr. Bresnahan [a Stanford professor who served as chief economist in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration] said. "We got about 1 percent or so of that value."

Friday, November 01, 2002

Happy November 1st. Time to update the main blog page, generate last month's comments, and stuff like that.

Friday, November 01, 2002

Happy November 1st.

Time to update the main blog page, generate last month's comments, and stuff like that. Piece o' cake. Done in less than 10 minutes. Pretty nifty routines, too. I have a VFP Web Service installed on the web server. I use a vfp program locally to query the web server and update the entries for the dates of interest, which are then stored into a local table. A small program, MakeCal?.PRG, generates the meta-markup language used to generate a new month, and then I use yet another VFP program to extract the information for an entire month and generate it as text files. I copy each separately to the clipboard and paste them into the appropriate web page. Voila!