Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

If you haven't been trying out the VFPX project FoxCharts , or you tried but were a little frightened by how to implement it, here's some code that I wrote up quickly to build a nice little pie chart. I call it GenPie and it gets called with any table and it will summarize it for you. DO GenPie with "issues","cstatus","1","","Count of Issues" or DO genpie WITH HOME()+"SAMPLES\DATA\ORDERS","to_country","order_amt","","Orders" The code essentially creates a form, drops FoxCharts on it and then uses a built-in cursor to create the chart. You can also pass it a Filter (before the title) and the starting color (in RGB). DO genpie WITH HOME()+"SAMPLES\DATA\ORDERS","to_country","order_amt","","Orders",RGB(255,150,255) Here's a sample: LPARAMETERS tcTable,tcDirField,tcSizeField,tcFilter,tcTitle,tnStartColor PUBLIC ox ox = CREATEOBJECT

While many sites have compared the search results between Google, MSN and Yahoo, noting that generally they are all the same. I started using Scour recently which puts search results for all three into a single item (yes, it's a Point-based search which is interesting in and of itself but reminds me of most "point-based" systems - you'll never get enough points to make it of use without trying to game it). (you do get to "rate" each search response which may / may not have its own benefits - it's too early to tell). Yes - the results of all three are generally the same BUT the relevance is interesting. Here's a sample (inspired from a tweet by Marina Martin ): The Pragmatic Programmer - Scour Search Here are the results: Notice anything? 1. While Amazon shows as the number one, MSN placed it as the number 1 result while Google/Yahoo placed it as number two. Just because I'm searching for a phrase that matches a book doesn't mean I want the

From Ted Roche

Great post by Dare, Scalability: I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Does following up on a post from Scott Loganbill at Google about their choice of "scalable" services. Scalability is a funny question. Every application is designed to handle a certain type of architecture - it's usually one of those fundamental sales analysis questions "and how many orders do you typically process a day? How many people do you have working for you". While scalability problems can be due to both technology and design, it's typically design that is the major culprit. (ok, yes, the guy that said he can run a 15,000 transaction a day system in Access - he likely chose the WRONG technology). But everytime I think of scalability, I always think of 37 Signal's approach to scalability - in short, "Do you really need 12 servers now if you can run on two for a year?" - note read the comments from David Hansson " ... Not worrying too much about sca

That's a juicy rumor. There's been a lot of posts about SQL 2008. It's the last of the next big dev things for 2008 from Microsoft based on the Heroes Happen Here and it's the one piece that I've been waiting for before doing any real production testing.  SQL Server 2008 to ship next week? > > SQL Server Blog by Jason Massie Looking forward to it - and if the rumor is true, Congrats SQL Team!

OK - so it says Firefox crash - but it's still a great photo. Thanks to Olaf for pointing to it!

Twitter / OlafDoschke on Twitter, is doing an amazing job blogging the Prague Devcon conference. He's doing it through Twitter at amazing speed which makes it very interactive. He just finished doing Christof's Guineu session and Mike Feltman's Collection Classes. I love it when people Live Blog conferences but never thought of using Twitter for it. I'm glad he did.