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News..com on RSS

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

News.com on RSS traction. “News.com ran this piece about growth in the use of RSS as a non-news format.  This is a theme many of us are tracking.  What will be the first truly broad killer app to use this?” from Jeremy Allaire’s Radio

The news.com piece makes the good point that RSS has nothing to do with blogs. It is a generic mechanism for pushing notices onto the web in a publish-and-subscribe metaphor. With a standardized format (okay, four), sites can easily be written to gather and process many of these RSS notices. There’s an opportunity there, folks. Wish I could work it out.

What makes a good software book?

By on March 20, 2003 in Technology

Software industry trade books are in a difficult position. (I am the author of one book, co-author of three, and contributor/editor to many more.) The industry changes versions too fast for books to be written by authors with significant experience in the products. Doc suggests (http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/03/19#bookSupport) that publishers or manufacturers pay you to maintain a blog, but where’s the money in it for a publisher, and what’s to control the influence of a manufacturer. Most of my books are about Microsoft products; I am not going to give them editorial control of my blog! Many publishers only understand the economics of dead-tree books and have little to no support for e-books. My current publisher, Hentzenwerke, http://www.hentzenwerke.com, is selling e-books and white papers that are electronic only, but just starting that one. O’Reilly has Safari – is that a success for them? Pirillo has GnomeTomes.

VFP Eight-Oh is on the truck!

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

A picture named VFP8Box.jpegJust got word from http://www.foxtoolbox.com that they have shipping confirmation that Visual FoxPro boxes are on their way. FTB seems like a good company, run by a couple of FoxPro guys I’ve met, and they are offering very competitive prices on VFP upgrades and full versions. In addition, they promise to contribute 3% of their sales to VFP user groups. If you haven’t placed your order yet, jump on it! This is an upgrade worth getting.

Cisco buys LinkSys

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

According to the Boston Globe, Cisco is acquiring Linksys for a cool half-billion dollars. Our home office and home is black-and-purple LinkSys routers, wireless Access Points, and network cards. I hope this doesn’t negatively impact the quality of hardware and support. I’ve been very happy with LinkSys, and Cisco is new to the consumer market.

LinkSys is a remarkable company: privately-held, with 308 employees, and sales of $429 million last year, according to the article. That’s pretty impressive $/people.

Wine supports file locking!

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

In what could be considered a major compatibility milestone for the Wine project, support for file locking was introduced into the product. File locking is essential for ISAM-style database applications like Access, Visual FoxPro, dBASE and Paradox, and is also used in products like Microsoft Office. This vastly increases the utility of those tools on the Wine platform. Exciting progress!

Digitizing your life

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

If you’re like me, you probably have a box of 12″ vinyl LPs around somewhere, even though you may not have the ability to play with them – for me, the cover art and memories are worth the space they take up. One of these days, I promise myself, I’ll get around to digitizing them. And the photo albums. And the cassettes. And the video tapes, VHS and 8 mm. Ya, right. Well, onto that list you can now add The Ars Technica Guide to Video Capturing (from Ars Technica)

Snarf!, an IE news aggregator

By on March 20, 2003 in Home Page

Garrett’s found a news aggregator that integrates into IE in this blog entry: “The Simple News Aggregator for RSS Feeds opens up a news aggregator on the left of your screen, borrowing the Search Companion sidebar in IE. Cool idea. Got some problems, but I’m sure they’ll go away as snarf’s author develops it.”

Whil’s on the road

By on March 19, 2003 in Home Page

DAFUG – March 2003 Meeting. The Detroit Area Fox User Group (DAFUG) is proud to announce that Whil Hentzen of Hentzenwerke Publishing, will be presenting “New tools that will provide additional business opportunities for Fox developers” on Thursday March 20, 2003. This will be Whil’s third stop during his “Fox Is Everywhere” user group tour. Afterwards we will be discussing other FoxPro and developer topics at a local eatery. Directions, maps, email contacts, future meeting dates and topics, and other details can be found on our website www.dafug.org. [FoxCentral.Net]

Hand-code or use a power tool?

By on March 19, 2003 in Home Page

Jon Udell says the Secrets of the XML Gods are that they are cobbling together XML by hand. He cites Sean McGrath’s blog and Tim Bray’s XML Is Too Hard for Programmers essays. Dave Winer retorts that his tool of choice has a good XML compiler built in.

I’m stuck with a similar conundrum, only I am just starting out. Up until this point, I’ve cobbled together XML using the CursorToXML() function built in to Visual FoxPro, but that’s only suitable for flat, repetitious XML. With the FoxCentral RSS File, I just manually wrapped header and footer elements around transformed XML. But with some other projects, like SMBMeta, I need to create truly hierarchical, multiple one-to-zero-or-many structures, and CursorToXML isn’t built for that. I’m looking for a simple “Hello, World” example of creating a document with XMLDOM or another tool, adding attributes, elements and nodes to it. Anyone got one handy?

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