The end of a year of mourning. It’s been a tough year. Tough for a lot of New Yorkers. Tough for the friends, relatives and loved ones of those lost in NYC, Washington and Pennsylvania. Tough for the Afghans. Tough for al-Qaida, but not nearly tough enough. A year of major governmental changes, changes I hope do not appear too severe in the long run. Impositions on civil and personal rights that worry me. A war on terrorism that threatens personal liberties, intellectual property and the true freedom to innovate.
The web site for http://www.zeoslib.org Zeoslib is an add-on for Delphi and Kylix that adds data handling capabilities to the low-end versions that ship without it. Instructions for packages like this are scary, as they tell you to download packages, ignore the attached installation instructions, and extract and compile stuff by hand. They don’t seem to consider that those instructions are a brick wall for a new user.
SlashDot did a nice remembrance page here and turned off banner ads for the day.
Profox list members insist that Torry’s List is a great source for information on Delphi and Kylix.
In this article, David K. Every explains what he thinks went on with Apple and NeXT?. I found it interesting reading. http://www.igeek.com/browse.php?id=1078
“Open Link in New Tab” was the option I hadn’t seen in Mozilla before. This allows Moz to have an MDI interface where you can toggle between multiple documents (like clicking a link to download while continuing to read a page). This is the feature I love about Opera, where I often have a dozen windows open – articles I want to go back and read, standard search engine pages, news pages, etc.
Jeffrey Zeldman gets great respect in some corners. His feature article, an excerpt from his book, was featured on Slashdot, where he was promptly stoned to death for claiming that the entire web is “obsolete” and that the One True Way is to use CSS to render all web features. I think he’s a little heavy-handed, and the response more so.
“Tyranny, Terror and Technology” are the theme’s of Ray Ozzie’s Weblog entry. The Netwars references sound interesting. Is the network a new form of cooperation?
Dan Bricklin, Mr. Spreadsheet, looks at the numbers the RIAA is claiming, and says they just don’t make sense in “The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg.” His conclusion: shutting down napster is hurting CD sales.
Peter Coffee hits the nail on the head with this column that says that we are not using the power of the computer to it’s advantage, but rather to bury ourselves in e-mail.
Wasn’t it Three D Graphics that created FoxGraph?? They still seem to be around and thriving.
— TWikiGuest – 11 Sep 2002
My 9/11 story. I was a speaker at the 12th Microsoft Visual FoxPro? Developer’s Conference (“DevCon”). I went downstairs from my hotel room at the San Diego Harbor Hyatt to discover the horror of the terrorist acts. Large TVs had been rolled into each room. I watched as the towers fell. As the 8 AM sessions of DevCon were about to begin, I went to the speaker’s lounge to see how my fellow speakers were holding up. There was a discussion over whether we should continue. My statement was simple enough: “If we don’t keep going on, we let the bastards win.” A few days later, at a gathering, I overheard an attendee thanking a speaker for having kept their session going. He said that to do otherwise would have been “to let the bastards win.”
I like to think that I helped.
Framework is still supported, according to this website. Still DOS-based. Still powerful enough for most people.
If you’re looking to buy me a nice shirt, this one would be nice in a large.
This article reports on “Microsoft’s Next Must-Have Operating System” – not Microsoft .NET Server 2003, due out sometime soon, but the next one after that!
— TWikiGuest – 10 Sep 2002
— TWikiGuest – 09 Sep 2002
WinMerge looks like a cool standalone tool to do merging and diffing of source.
The Microsoft TechNet Script Center has lots of scripts you can execute to perform lots of pretty cool functions in Windows. I’m looking at a couple of these to finish off the VSS Maintenance processes I’ve started. I need to know if a particular string exists in a log, and if so, how to branch to different actions. Right now, I’m just looking at putting a flag file in the directory – OK.txt, Problem.txt or Crisis.txt and then testing for file existance to initiate the other actions – email, page or other alarms.
A recent survey finds IT spending still pretty flat.
A disadvantage of “forum” style interactions has been older items scrolling off, losing knowledge. Since blogs are usually archived and support permalinking, this is no londer a disadvantage.
RSS seems to be a way to publish and advertise content and changes, like the Recent Changes features of wikis.