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Showing posts from November, 2003

Mapping Sites

For those of you who do "globe-trotting", this site ( www.multimap.com ) has to be one of the best there is. I originally found it when looking for some friends in England in a small town and it actually found the street name. Yes, I know this information is available in many places but this site actually lets you go down to street (and with aerial photos) levels for multiple countries around the work, including many former eastern-block countries.   Very cool!  

FoxFinalVersion - Do you believe this?

I can't believe this discussion. I mean cripes - did everyone jump up when Win Me was identified as the last version of 16 bit windows? If you choose your development environment based on it being the "very latest", then your applications must be on some very shaky ground. To this extent, I agree with Whil Henzten - Fox apps will be around for quite a few more years. FoxFinalVersion - FoxProWiki

Even in today's age, in times of sadness, Trekker info still rules

Today, I came across a story on MSNBC that Kellie Waymire had died recently. No idea who she was (based on the name) - so I did a search online. Even in today's age when information access is everywhere, the BEST tributes to her were from Star Trek fans. ( http://scifipulse.net/Trek%20Archive/November03/Waymire_Dead.html , http://www.trektoday.com/news/161103_04.shtml , http://www.greatlink.org/dcisV2.asp?url=http://www.greatlink.org/shownewsitem.asp?item=2802 )   This is not to slight the main web site ( http://www.kelliewaymire.com/ ) where obviously a statement was made but rather by how she was recognized.   She was a actress who starred on various Star Trek episodes, Friends and as well Six Feet Under. So no, by major "awareness" factors, she was not a major star. At the age of 36, her loss of life is a terrible thing and my thoughts go out for her family and friends.   However, what I find interesting (which is why I post it

Mind Manager

Wow! Just tried this tool and was really surprised at how well it works. After just writing down some ideas on a project I was on, I exported it to PowerPoint and wham! all done. For only $199 for the Business Edition (non Tablet-PC but comes with a version for Pocket PC), I'm almost sold! Gonna keep on trying it for the 21 day demo but check it out! http://www.mindjet.com/us/products/tablet_pc/tablet_pc.php The Scobleizer Weblog

Wallop Screen Shots Snoozer

http://www.eweek.com/slideshow/0,3018,a=111812,00.asp   The social network map looks like something TedRoche ( www.tedroche.com ) showed me in June but done via web sites or blogs,( http://www.touchgraph.com ), albeit with a nicer GUI but still essentially the same. I don't expect this will go anywhere except maybe in a new FrontPage analysis tool.

Where are the MS Fox Blogs?

OK - MS has jumped big-time on the Blogging bandwagon - so my question is: where are the MS Fox Blogs?   I can appreciate that Calvin and a few others may be too busy to discuss but seriously, Ken, Randy and Yag should all have blogs going at this stage.    

SQL TOP N - Watch Out in VFP 8 and earlier

The TOP N clause in VFP 8 doesn't work reliably unless you put in more than one sort order. ( and even then it's a bit funky)   Consider the CUSTOMER table. USE HOME(2)+"NORTHWIND\customers" SELECT TOP 5 * from customers ORDER BY 1 This gives you only the first 5 records.   But if you add another table into it. USE HOME(2)+"NORTHWIND\orders" IN 0 SELECT TOP 5 * from customers, orders WHERE customers.customerid=orders.customerid ORDER BY 2 This returns 6 entries.   As soon as you combine two tables and pull data from both, then the TOP n doesn't return only the top 5 entries.   Confused? Yeah - it's a PITA.   It's an aberration that you can't really work with. As a result TOP N isn't something you can always rely on.   SELECT TOP 5 customers.customerid,orderid,orders.freight,customers.customerid,customers.contactname from customers, orders WHERE customers.customerid=orders

MS Researching Blogs

I posted this as a comment to Teds but wanted to put it here as well: What's interesting about Wallop is the comments I read after they presented it at PDC. Someone referred to it as a "bliki", a cross between a Blog and a Wiki. A Blog really is just like a personal Wiki, although arranged by date (or recent topics). The Wiki obviously brings much more to it. When comparing them to learning management systems and the like, a Wiki is almost always the better choice, because of the automatic links.Instead of having to "blog-roll" Ted, I could simply type TedRoche and it would automatically link me. Once again, I think Microsoft will be attempting to leap-frog the technology. You can read more about what that entire Social Computing group is doing here: http://research.microsoft.com/scg/ Some of the stuff has already been done but others look very cool! Ted's Radio Weblog

Gator Feature: Custom Newspages

I found this out from the forum but I thought I would share it here because there are some gotchas with this.   So you've switched from FeedDemon to NewsGator but find yourself missing the Newspaper view (like I did). Fear not - you can do the same thing with NewsGator , at least to some effect.   First: group your feeds into logical folders. For example, all my Fox community blogs are in a folder called FoxFeeds, all my MS feeds are in another folder called MS Blogs, etc, etc)   Then right-click on the group folder (FoxFeeds, MS Blogs) and choose Properties.   Click to the Home Page folder and set the home page to be "file:c:\progra~1\newsga~1\NewsPgSF.htm"   Be sure to check the option to Make it your default view for the folder then sit back and enjoy!   True, it doesn't do columns and sections like FeedDemon but it's still VERY slick and all within Outlook!

Be careful of IE Security

Just something I discovered. I had reset my IE security to high for some reason or another and then tried to log into various sites and found they wouldn't work.   Here's why: IE Security Settings on High DISABLE support for META REFRESH , a feature that many web sites use while processing data. Check this under your IE Advanced Security settings if you find pages simply appear blank instead of being correct.

DevCon Announced

Thanks to Craig for monitoring for this. Advisor has announced the next VFP DevCon to be held Sept. 29 - Oct 2 in Las Vegas. No announcement of the hotel. I think Vegas is a great location. I can drive there in about six hours. The hotels are cheap, food is cheap, rooms are cheap, airfare for others is cheap. Kudos to Advisor! On a related note, Ken Levy has publically hinted that DevCon will be the official launch for VFP9. Let's look at the calendar and see how accurate this could be for release dates. VFP 8 was released in February. Typically, VFP has been on an 18 month schedule. That would put release at sometime around July. Ken also recently stated on the Universal Thread that the Fox team added three months to the schedule to allow for additional testing and QA. Now we're looking at October. The dates look about right to me for release about the same time as DevCon. FoxBlog

Tom's corner - Lessons learned @ PDC 2003

A little old but I was very interested in Tom's last comment: The Microsoft guys in Redmond are _really_ listening and are determined in bringing the best product for their users. I had several chats with Microsoft people and everyone was having the same attitude: "please provide feedback, please tell us what you think". No one had the attitude of "we do it right, you're wrong if you don't agree", which is very nice. They were all helpful. Tom's corner - Lessons learned @ PDC 2003