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Sunday, 07 April, 2002

By on April 7, 2002 in Home Page

Spring forward!

Installed UltraEdit on my main development machine. What a program! Incredible capabilities, small memory footprint, everything you want in a programmer’s editor, and $35.00 shareware. Hard to beat. Unless, of course, you try out the Programmer’s File Editor I mentioned two weeks ago, for free. But I don’t begrudge a fellow developer $35, especially for a worthwhile program.

Downloaded the Session Plug In and Tiger Skin skin for the twiki, and have them half-working (and half not). Could be cool if I can get a better look going for the twiki here. Before I go public with this thing, there’s three items I want to work through:

  1. a new machine – probably the Dell Workstation 400 dual PII-333
  2. a better look – the default TWiki is pretty amateurish
  3. logon capabilities – There’s no way NOT to be TWikiGuest right now.

Mike Lewis is an active participant in the FoxPro forums on CompuServe. His home page is (updated) http://www.ml-consult.co.uk/foxstuff.htm

Post dated 2002-04-06 00:00:00

By on April 6, 2002 in Home Page

Saturday, 06 April, 2002

Spent a half hour trying to help Whil understand the joy of Outlook distribution lists. It’s not a pretty story. Sue Mosher’s SlipStick.com is considered one of the best sources: http://www.slipstick.com/contacts/dl.htm

The guys and gals at Memory Man, http://www.memory-man.com (don’t forget the hyphen!) have a great online system for identifying the kind of memory you need, and an efficient order processing system. I’ve bought from them successfully a number of times. Just upgraded the Dell Latitude CPiA to 256 Mb RAM this morning, effortlessly. I like it when stuff works the way it is supposed to!

Replaced the rechargable battery in the Microsoft Phone, earned for writing cerification questions in Palm Springs, for the first time. Almost $20, and a special order. But the phone is working again.

Spent the day shopping for new office furniture. Had fun. Nothing bought, yet.

Saw “Toy Story” tonight – yeah, I know I’m a few years late. Excellent flick.

Post dated 2002-04-05 00:00:00

By on April 5, 2002 in Home Page

Friday, 05 April, 2002

MSDN Universal and Microsoft’s anti-piracy product key activation software stinks. I’ve got a new subscription (hard to gripe – it’s free, compliments of the MVP Program) and the Passport ID I’ve used to get on to MSDN in the past no longer works, telling my my sub is no longer active. I know that – let me enter a new one! I tried to create a new Passport ID and use that one to register the new subscription ID, and it complains that that subscription doesn’t exist.

This all wouldn’t be more than a minor annoyance, except that it is happening during a workstation crash. My Omnibook 7100 crashed, following the installation of a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse, and all attempts at repair were fruitless. Rebooting from CD and choosing repair got me as far as the Product Key string and – foolish me! My bad! – I hadn’t written it down somewhere. No Key, no run. 24 hours of frustration. Microsoft finally got back to me, 20 hours after I send in a technical support request email… and asked for my address. They promise they can “escalate” it with that. Another day lost…

Experiments with Twiki templates and skins were less than stellar. Managed to change the background blue. Messing with the page headers resulted in awful results. More study needed.

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

By on April 4, 2002 in Home Page

Thursday, 04 April, 2002

Last night was the Windows 2000 User Group. Joe Stagner, Technical Evangelist for the Waltham Office presented an unofficial, sometimes irreverant “sneak peek” at the next version of Windows Server, tentatively named NET Server. Interesting stuff.

Some of the links he mentioned:

http://uddi.microsoft.com
http://www.gotdotnet.com

Tough day. Working on the test laptop (HP Omnibook 7100, PII-266, 8 Gb, 160 Mb RAM), and installed a Microsoft USB Optical Intellimouse. Ran the tutorial, visited the web site to try to get the latest drivers, chose to ‘repair’ the installation. That was the end of that operating system. WinXP? died an ungraceful death. Last Known Good Configuration wasn’t good. Turns out the floppy drive is bad. Attempted a re-install. No Product Key. Microsoft won’t let me on to their MSDN Universal downloads so I can get another one. Doesn’t matter what I tell them – no access. So this is what good Microsoft’s anti-piracy does for them. I’ll install Win2K instead. Or maybe Linux.

Learning more about Twiki. That, at least, works.

Post dated 2002-04-03 00:00:00

By on April 3, 2002 in Home Page

Wednesday, 03 April, 2002

Remote control of the web site via Terminal Services is really tough, because the terminal services client crashes quite often, sometimes within seconds of logging on, sometimes only after a while. I suspect it is a weakness in the TS Server on the web server – it is, after all, only an AST P166, with built-in ATI Rage video on the motherboard. I have had a lot of problems with ATIs over the years, and suspect something in the driver is confusing the TS Server. Of course, it could be one of hundreds of other components, too, and there are few high-level troubleshooting tools to work with. On the clients, I have a Dr. Watson log that lists running processes and registers. On the server, no trace of an error. Grr.

Steve and I put together the second CPU for the Dell Workstation 400 machine, and are going to burn that in for a week and see how it works. If it’s running okay, we’ll put in both at once and have our first multi-processor machine up and running. That, eventually, will become the new web server.

Woody Leonhard has an advertisement in one of his newsletters for an alternative remote control software, something I might consider for the short-term, instead of crashing out of Terminal Services. It is http://www.crossteccorp.com/WOW.htm

Post dated 2002-04-02 00:00:00

By on April 2, 2002 in Home Page

Tuesday, 02 April, 2002


Previous

Well, April Fool’s Day felt like it was at my expense. Code running since January stopped working. New code has weird behaviors. Merging three different code bases is difficult. Two weeks until ship date. It’s Death March time.

Took a little time off to whip up a table on the WebHome page. Tables are easy! Really lets you compact more info into a smaller space.

Also updated the company Home Page. First time I’ve had the right month in a while… although I do want to add some mention of wireless to it.

Today rocked. Slayed several problems, caught up on other issues. Code flowed. Women fainted. Grown men cried. I laughed. And this was work.

http://www.farces.com/stories/storyReader$414 with some interesting views on “Big Business” stealing our rights to fair use of copywritten material.

Post dated 2002-04-01 00:00:00

By on April 1, 2002 in Home Page

Monday, 01 April, 2002

Easter was grand. Good friends, good food. Crazed housekeeping in the morning, followed by a leisurely afternoon with guests in our nice clean house. Can’t ask for much more. Bliss.

Back to work!

Dave Winer tracks down old friend Adam Green in this episode of Scripting News. Adam is one of my heroes, the first person to give me formal instruction in FoxPro back in the early 90’s. My name and endorsement of his teaching abilities was on the front cover of the brochure he sent out when he started his PowerBuilder seminars. Small world.

Teoma is a new search engine hoping to compete with Google. Check it out. They’re in beta test now.

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