Skip to main content

I was bit by a 2.6 year old Fox(Pro)

Talk about old ghosts coming back to haunt you.

I was upgrading a customer's old Foxfire! installation from version 3.0 to 8.0. They were running Foxfire! 3.0 under FoxPro 2.6/Windows.

But they had this one report that kept on crashing under the 8.0 version that would run fine under their old version.

I tried to run Foxfire! 3.0 under a copy of Visual FoxPro and it crashed there as well.

Hmmm...what could it be? I looked at the SQL generated.

There was the problem that was causing the crash: one of the relationships was referring to a field that didn't even exist.

The field in the SQL referred to a field named PART_SEC_ID_I but the real field was called PART_SEC_I.

But why didn't it crash under the older version?

The reason? FoxPro 2.6 ignored the extra fields.

I opened up the table in FoxPro 2.6.

? part_sec_i
** returned a value
? part_sec_id_i
** returned the same value.

Sheesh...I can't believe we were actually able to build quality applications back then but then again, when our tool wouldn't even tell us we were wrong in our field names - who needed field validation?

Now the fun part - how to tell someone that even though their old application worked great, it was actually not reporting a problem it should have been.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .
4 comments
Read more

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...
8 comments
Read more