Archive | March 20, 2003

What’s New in VFP 8 ships

What's New in VFP8 book linkThe “What’s New in VFP8 book is following right behind the product, with an expected shipping date of March 24th. Friends and collaborators Doug Henning and Tamar Granor have written this one. Looking forward to it!

News..com on RSS

News.com on RSS traction. “News.com ran this piece about growth in the use of RSS as a non-news format.  This is a theme many of us are tracking.  What will be the first truly broad killer app to use this?” from Jeremy Allaire’s Radio

The news.com piece makes the good point that RSS has nothing to do with blogs. It is a generic mechanism for pushing notices onto the web in a publish-and-subscribe metaphor. With a standardized format (okay, four), sites can easily be written to gather and process many of these RSS notices. There’s an opportunity there, folks. Wish I could work it out.

What makes a good software book?

Software industry trade books are in a difficult position. (I am the author of one book, co-author of three, and contributor/editor to many more.) The industry changes versions too fast for books to be written by authors with significant experience in the products. Doc suggests (http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/03/19#bookSupport) that publishers or manufacturers pay you to maintain a blog, but where’s the money in it for a publisher, and what’s to control the influence of a manufacturer. Most of my books are about Microsoft products; I am not going to give them editorial control of my blog! Many publishers only understand the economics of dead-tree books and have little to no support for e-books. My current publisher, Hentzenwerke, http://www.hentzenwerke.com, is selling e-books and white papers that are electronic only, but just starting that one. O’Reilly has Safari – is that a success for them? Pirillo has GnomeTomes.

VFP Eight-Oh is on the truck!

A picture named VFP8Box.jpegJust got word from http://www.foxtoolbox.com that they have shipping confirmation that Visual FoxPro boxes are on their way. FTB seems like a good company, run by a couple of FoxPro guys I’ve met, and they are offering very competitive prices on VFP upgrades and full versions. In addition, they promise to contribute 3% of their sales to VFP user groups. If you haven’t placed your order yet, jump on it! This is an upgrade worth getting.

Cisco buys LinkSys

According to the Boston Globe, Cisco is acquiring Linksys for a cool half-billion dollars. Our home office and home is black-and-purple LinkSys routers, wireless Access Points, and network cards. I hope this doesn’t negatively impact the quality of hardware and support. I’ve been very happy with LinkSys, and Cisco is new to the consumer market.

LinkSys is a remarkable company: privately-held, with 308 employees, and sales of $429 million last year, according to the article. That’s pretty impressive $/people.

Wine supports file locking!

In what could be considered a major compatibility milestone for the Wine project, support for file locking was introduced into the product. File locking is essential for ISAM-style database applications like Access, Visual FoxPro, dBASE and Paradox, and is also used in products like Microsoft Office. This vastly increases the utility of those tools on the Wine platform. Exciting progress!

Digitizing your life

If you’re like me, you probably have a box of 12″ vinyl LPs around somewhere, even though you may not have the ability to play with them – for me, the cover art and memories are worth the space they take up. One of these days, I promise myself, I’ll get around to digitizing them. And the photo albums. And the cassettes. And the video tapes, VHS and 8 mm. Ya, right. Well, onto that list you can now add The Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing (from Ars Technica)

Snarf!, an IE news aggregator

Garrett’s found a news aggregator that integrates into IE in this blog entry: “The Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds opens up a news aggregator on the left of your screen, borrowing the Search Companion sidebar in IE. Cool idea. Got some problems, but I’m sure they’ll go away as snarf’s author develops it.”

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