Archive | March, 2003

Boston Area FoxPro User Group Rocks!

A great meeting last night! Guy Pardoe wrapped up the year-long early session discussions on “Application Development Strategies.” If you didn’t attend, you missed a great series, which we will be repeating, with variation. The idea behing the early evening sessions (6 – 7 PM) was to discuss all of the aspects of application development, from initial contact with the client, through contract negotiations, specifications, choices of tools, assembly, construction, project management, quality assurance, final acceptance, and on-going maintenance. Whew! Needless to say, volumes have been written on the subject, and we could only gloss the surface in one-hour sessions, but there was a lively give-and-take and sharing of ideas at each of the sessions. Notes of what went on at each session are kept in a Yahoo! group for the BAFUG. Should we make these publicly available? We’ll have to consider if there are other issues that might prevent it.

Next month we consider where to take the early evening meetings from here. A brainstorming session on what the members of the group want next. Should be a hopping session!

Speaking of WebConnection…

… I’m looking at using Rick Strahl’s free wwXML classes as the basis for the next revision of RSS feeds for FoxCentral.net. Rick’s classes are clean and offer simple high-level interfaces for doing a lot of the processing I have been doing the hard way. Looking forward to seeing the results!

Off to Boston Area FoxPro User Group…

… meeting tonight. Details at http://www.bostonusergroups.com/vfpboston. Guy Pardoe will be continuing his excellent “Application Development Strategies” roundtable discussions from 6 to 7 PM. AppDevStrat discussions are highly interactive, well-moderated, and produce a lot of interesting information. We’re archiving the discussion transcripts on the web, using the http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bafug group collaboration software. Apply for membership there if you’re interested.

Guy also takes the podium for the main meeting, where he will demonstrate moving FoxPro data over the web using WebConnection.

Should be an informative and entertaining evening.

Another new FoxPro RSS Feed!

Ed Leafe has opened up the OpenTech forum so that new posts appear in an RSS file located here: http://leafe.com/opentech.xml. Let’s see if we can avoid drowning in FoxPro forum posts…

Office Depot arm-twists vendors into Win XP logo compliance

That’s the last dime Office Depot gets from me. Forcing their vendors to raise their costs by signing up for a logo certification! It’s not only outrageous, I suspect that it’s collusion, too. Well, Staples and Best Buy will get more of my business from here on out. Lets’ see…. we’ve got six machines in the home office, and only one runs XP. Hmmm.

Why Not to Shop at Office Depot. The Inquirer: Microsoft logo scheme means Office Depot won’t sell non-compliant XP products. Only products that conform to Microsoft’s Designed… [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

Radio Text Editing Cheat Sheet

Like our word processors, our stereos, our video cameras, there are so many features of Radio that I doubt I use 10% of them. Here’s a helpful link to access a few more: “One year ago today, a text editing cheat sheet for Radio.” from Scripting News

Wine Update, Part III: Wine Locks Okay, Samba doesn’t

Extensive testing by Paul McNett seems to indicate that:


  • VFP running under Wine locks tables and records properly,
  • Multiple instances of VFP or other applications under the same instance of Wine respect each other’s locks,
  • VFP clients on Windows can properly lock records and files on a Samba share or a native Windows share,
  • VFP clients under Wine do respect locking when sharing files via NFS,
  • VFP clients running under Wine will not see locks on SMB (Samba or Windows) shares because the outgoing SMBClient does not understand locks.

So, all is not lost, nor is it won, just yet. Wine is doing it’s thing properly. Samba needs to learn the Windows Way of locking. So, if you are looking at transitioning existing Windows systems to Linux:

  1. Consider moving to client-server, which eliminates all the locking issues, and gives you increased scalability, reliability and other – ilities, OR:
  2. Put the DBF files on a Samba share, and access them via SMB (the native networking) from Windows clients, and via NFS from the Linux clients.

With the rich assortment of data servers available for Linux, I’m inclined to strategy #1 for new systems, but strategy #2 for existing DBF-based systems, to simplify the transition. Once the existing systems were working without a hitch under plan #2, I’d propose plan #1 for the next major upgrade of the system.

Microsoft Operating System Roadmap – Are We There Yet?

Ars Technica features a discussion that Microsoft server release schedule uncertain (from Ars Technica). I attended a Windows User Group meeting last month where Steve Carbone, a local Microsoft rep, explained that Windows server OSes needed to change on a longer cycle to accomodate admins in large shops with muilt-year rollout plans, while client OSes could change more rapidly. With Win NT, they rolled them out separately, and people complained they got one without the other. With Win2K, they released them together, and people complained there was too much to change at once, Win XP, they released the workstation separate from Windows Server 2003, and people complained. What’s the constant here? You’re not going to satisfy all of the people all of the time.

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