The Xerox Alto, precursor to modern PCs, turns 30 this month. How Digital Pioneers Put the ‘Personal’ in PC’s. PALO ALTO, Calif. By John Markoff, on the New York Times: Technology site:
THE modern personal computer came to life three decades ago this month when a group of Xerox engineers projected an image of Cookie Monster from “Sesame Street” onto the screen of an unfinished machine known as the Alto.
Unfortunately, I do not speak Spanish, but for those lucky folks who do, the Portal Fox web site has an RSS Feed for their FoxPro news and discussion site. Excellent!
When Steven is on his game, there is no one better. An excellent article on a sophisticated object-oriented design pattern that really shows off the power of OOP and the power of Visual FoxPro to produce incredible solutions:
New article: The Hooks And Anchors Design Pattern. The Hooks and Anchors Design Pattern is an abstract controlling architecture for flexible configurable systems. All object-oriented VFP frameworks can be described as skeletal structures designed for extension. Over time, developers grow their root framework(s) into one or more applications, refining and extending (evolving) their toolset over an extended period of time. In the Hooks and Anchors design pattern, the hook is implemented with a hook object society, which is designed at the outset to fully encapsulate work of the hook method. The hook method, therefore, reduces to a hook operation that delegates program flow to the society of hook objects. The crux is this: since we’re talking about VFP here, the Hooks and Anchors society is, of course, natively engineered to be metadata-driven in both composition and execution. [FoxCentral.Net]
Imagine that! Microsoft adds RSS feeds for its Microsoft Developer Network. Only one development language noticably missing from the list: Visual FoxPro. Hope they address that one soon!
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/tewald/default.aspx#nn2003-04-01T06:03:44Z
Got the link from Dan Gillmor who was linked to Dave Winer. Dave also mentions new RSS feeds from Cisco, Fast Company, and Apple. Why, if I wasn’t mistaken, I’d say we’re seeing a movement!
An article by Fabio Vazquez in the current Universal Thread magazine, “Presenting XML Content in .NET,” mentions the FoxPro blogs of yours truly, Craig Bernston, and Garrett Fitzgerald. All the more press, the better!
A disturbing report that Rumsfeld is repeating the mistakes of other Defense Secretaries (McNamara comes to mind) in thinking that they understand the incredibly complex mechanics of the war machine better than the professions who have been doing it for decades.
Jon also reports on his first close-up examination of InfoPath, Microsoft’s Office 11 tool for manipulating XML. This is a vast step forward for Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where this tool leads. It looks like you can do better and easier XML manipulation in Office than in Visual Studio.NET. What does that say?
Ends and Means is all the buzz, as Cluetrain was a few years ago. But is is buzz or is it substance?
Jon Udell reports on Adam Boswell’s presentation at the CTO Forum in Boston yesterday. Is a Service-Oriented Architecture the Next Big Thing?
… where I will be the guest MC tonight as chairman Rick Zach is off in Redmond, Washington, getting wined and dined by some software company.
Tonight, we’ll have a presentation by Microsoft on “Collaborative Servies in Windows Server 2003.” More details, directions to the meeting, etc, are available on the group web site at http://www.windowsboston.com/.