Archive | April, 2002

Post dated 2002-04-30 00:00:00

Tuesday, 30 April, 2002

Good to be back home again. A frantic day of catching up with stuff — excessive emails, lists of things promised to people in KC, proposals. And too much coffee, which is why I am still up. Sheesh.

Monday, 29 April, 2002

Eight Am session and I am done. The gang did a group picture. Allen Cooper had some interesting stuff to say at the keynote last night.

It’s time to travel. Can’t wait to get home.

Post dated 2002-04-23 00:00:00

Tuesday, 23 April, 2002

Spent the day with brother Joe. He’s mending nicely. Nice house he and Donna have.

Two tidbits, both from SlashDot. One is and interesting article on Open Standards and Web Services, and the other, an entertaining piece of fiction.

Monday, 22 April, 2002

Weather took a really severe turn for the worse – it SNOWED! Not sticking enough to shovel, but we’ll see what the morning brings. More tidbits:

Jon Udell wrote this piece a couple of years ago: A Perl Hacker in the Land of Python, but I enjoyed it. Also, an interesting piece with a business case for open source: Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!.

Finally a little contribution to the world:

In issue #7.06 of Woody’s Office Watch, Woody said about Service Pack 1 to Office XP:

“Don’t even try to run Visual NET on your Office development machine until you’ve installed this baby.”

Would that I had know that a little bit sooner. Apparently, there’s a right way and a wrong way to install these things, and I’m about 14 hours into trying variations of the wrong way in hopes of tripping on the right way.

I’ve got a test laptop I thought I’d install all the latest MSDN Galactic toys on, to have a machine I could afford to risk crashing-and-burning, so I could evaluate the latest goodies for my company and clients. Little did I know…

I installed Windows XP and all of the requisite services packs and security patches, courtesy of Windows Update. Next was Visual Studio .NET, Visual FoxPro? 7 and Visual SourceSafe? 6.0c. Then came Office XP and it’s service packs. All seemed good, until I tried to access Visual Studio .NET. No joy. The error message “The application cannot start” lead me to MSKB 306905, which tells me there could be any one of three problems, and no clue how to tell which. So, I start at the beginning, patching MSMXL2, 3 and 4, unregistering DLLS and registering keys in the Registry, tracing down paths of obscure DLLS, doing a “Repair” installation of Office XP (hours pass…) and finally registering an OLB that seems to solve the problem. The IDE starts.

 

And the help doesn’t work.

 

So, back to the drawing board, I uninstall Visual Studio .NET and attempt a reinstall. Browsing through the voluminous README, I do come across the section that mentions that NET ought to be installed after Office XP.

 

Bingo! Right combination! Everything works.

 

Only twenty hours of toying with it down the drain. Sheesh.

 


 

 

Sunday, 21 April, 2002

What a glorious day! Thirty-five degrees this morning when I went out to walk the dogs, but warming up nicely. Spent a busy day paying bills, watching “Lord of the Rings” again, this time with Steve and Laura, mowing the lawn, and email 92 user group leaders the HackFox7 press release. That’s it.

Post dated 2002-04-18 00:00:00

Thursday, 18 April, 2002

Yet another busy day. Glorious weather – sun and temperatures in the 90’s – record-breaking heat for this part of the world.

Billable work, cleaning up the successful launch this week. Tomorrow, I need to update the documentation on what I’ve created.

Yesterday involved huge moving around of office equipment. Today was letting the dust settle and finding all of the piles of stuff. Figured out the terminal services problem – I was trying to use the “friendly” name for the machine – Apollo – and it was resolving to Apollo.attbi.com on my ISP rather than locally. Once I specified the IP address directly, I was in.

Eight days until I fly off for Essential Fox. Looking forward to the conference. Still got to get things together on the laptop, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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