Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

James Altucher's recent podcast episode with Norm Dworman hits on a variety of topics but the essence of the episode is really in the last fifteen minutes where they discuss the tone of the world, censorship and what the next steps are. Just the other day, I was asked about choosing sides and it was a very difficult decision. Not because it's a right/left scenario but rather that there are no true right vs left sides anymore. It's all personal attacks and very little ideas. Politics is no longer a debate or discussion on ideas but more personal conflicts. Social media simply amplifies this and the more the amplification is reported on, the worse it gets. We live in a world where media businesses care about eyeballs and since most people want to watch a train wreck, so that's what they put on the air. They mix fact and fiction ("based on a true story, mostly ) and people believe it as fact. I have a rough time thinking of past leaders (Churchill, Thatcher, even R...

Maybe CNN should stop allowing their news reporters from starting their broadcast with an indictment of Trump BEFORE reporting the news. Watching Anderson Cooper start his Thursday night broadcast with five minutes of why Trump is un-presidential before reporting any news is simply instigating Trump's ire and strengthens his case about fake media. If someone's attention span is 5 minutes long (15 minutes in Britain?), then he just lost his audience and has right-leaning supporters switching the channel. Maybe there is validation to the reports that CNN just wants to be a left-leaning network, rather than fair and impartial. At least there's PBS and NPR. I expect this from non-news broadcasts, more opinion shows, like Don Lemon, MSNBC Morning Joe and even Fox & Friends, but when you're talking about major newscasts, you're missing the point. Imagine if Walter Kronkite came on before reporting the Kennedy assassination and said "well, you know, Kennedy...

I think I'm getting old....and it's a sign of the times that being old means you're looking for blog posts about conferences rather than looking for tweets  or Facebook videos. The main reason I mention it is that a full week after the conference and searching for "Southwest Fox VFP" turns up four links to swfox.org , two posts to Wikipedia and then a post by Craig Bailey on wishing he could be there. Even Doug's recap post wasn't easily found. I'm slightly offended that Google didn't even find my own posts about it (or the FoxShow ) but that is more of a sign that I need to either post-more or post somewhere else to increase visibility. (perhaps that speaks more that blogspot seems to be excluded by Google search results- funny considering it's a Google company - or maybe it's just lack of tweets) So, for those who attended, how WAS the conference? FoxPro VFP

In years gone by, whenever an application had a problem, you could always count on certain steps from tech support (the three Rs) 1. Reindex (if a database application) 2. Reboot 3. Reinstall But I've been spoiled in recent years by the iPhone where this seemed to be a thing of the past. This might be because most of the data is on the cloud and so it was only ever syncing. The phone was just a "vehicle" while all the data was online. Sadly, when I upgraded to the new iPhone XS this fall, I found a few apps that didn't work right.  Since a number of application developers haven't kept up with the latest iOS phones, I attributed much of it to apps not being up to snuff but some were newer apps and they didn't work at all. Security applications wouldn't register a login, apps would just quit for no reason but worse, my favourite Health tracking app, Pillow, seemed to have lost all of my older data.  It was still in Apple Health but Pillow ...

I can't count the number of times I've used this query at various sites. It started when I needed to use As with many things these days, I found it on StackOverflow  but I want to document it here in case it ever goes missing. While it makes use of the sys. tables (which numerous articles say may change in the future ) as opposed to INFORMATION_SCHEMA, the end result compares the size of tables while using the partitions and tables for calculating sizes. We use this often for identifying which tables need to be cleared out or reduced when creating QA or test environments that are limited in environments due to size. Our production system is well over 200GB and if I need to do quick development, copying a DB that size is just dumb. This query lets me see where I need to "trim the fat". SELECT t.NAME AS TableName, s.Name AS SchemaName, p.rows AS RowCounts, SUM(a.total_pages) * 8 AS TotalSpaceKB, CAST(ROUND(((SUM(a.total_pages) * 8) / 1024....

There's a new FoxShow available - episode 83 features a discussion with Doug, Tamar and Rick about Southwest Fox 2018. This year, we got into some broader topics such as open source vs "closed" source and what they've learned over the years of putting on the conference. It's a fun listen so check it out! It's hard to believe but the FoxShow has been published since 2005, although in recent years, it's primary focus has been on Southwest Fox. Let me know if you're still enjoying and if you have some topics you want to hear about! Enjoy! FoxPro VFP

A new FoxShow is about to be released related to Southwest Fox 2018 (later today) but I wanted to note that the Super Saver deadline for Southwest Fox is coming up on June 30th (the episode will be out before then) and that deadline is the conference's "go / no go" point. It sounds like there's a lot of cool topics to be shown at the conference but it's also a great opportunity to get involved in existing VFPX projects and see how other developers are continuing to use FoxPro today. Go to Southwest Fox  to register!