Archive | 2003

… and your stuff always expands infinitely to fill your space. A few years ago, when Steve and I assembled my last desktop tower development workstation (Athlon Thunderbird 800, 512 Mb RAM – woo-hoo!), we installed a 40 Gb boot disk and striped two 30 Gb drives on the built-in Highpoint RAID controller (KT7-RAID motherboard, for those of you into those things). So who’s ever going to need that much space?

After several years of faithful service, the machine is getting re-assigned as a file and intranet server. Re-deployed and re-tasked, as the PHB in me would like to say. And I have to clean up the mess. And what a mess it is. With an infinite amount of disk space, you hardly ever have to clean up after yourself :). I’m a faily well-organized guy, so lots of the software is just where it should be. My 4-CD collection of movie trailers and their backups, my Install directory, with all the files I’ve installed on the machines. Backups of those machines which have gone before us.

But some of the little junk is amazing. The Install directory was 11 gigabytes in size. Something’s wrong there. It turned out that I had full RTM ISOs of VFP 7, VFP 8, Mandrake 8.1, RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 and lots of other treasured little goodies lying around. Figuring out what to burn to CD for posterity and what to dump is going to take a while…

Up and running. Seems like I had to add the MSXML4 and SOAP SDK files in order to get the web service to run correctly. So, now I have the first VFP 8 driven RSS subscription. Pretty cool!

The documentation was abyssmal. The VFP 8 help file stated that “If your application accesses only existing XML Web services, you must include only the SOAP Client merge module.” There is no such module, or at least no module with a name or description even close to that. Much as I dislike installing unneeded glorp on a production server, I tried MSXML4, the SOAP Toolkit 3.0 redistributables and finally the MSXML4 MSM module from the InstallShield package that came with VFP8. The latter seems to have done it, although we all know that the former bits probably left parts of their “upgrade” behind, so I can’t be sure it will always work with just the last step. It seems like there should be a better way to identify and resolve these dependencies.

The RSS file for FoxCentral.net is available for those who like to subscribe at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html. Feedback would be welcomed!

NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today. The Web is ten years old. How much it’s changed, and how much it’s still the same. Interesting commentary as always at SlashDot

WorldCom to Write Down $79.8 Billion of Good Will. WorldCom said that it was writing down $79.8 billion of its good will and other assets in a move acknowledging that many areas of its vast telecommunications network are worthless. By Simon Romero. [New York Times: Technology]

… and falls back to VFP7. It seems that the Web Service support in VFP is not only accessed differently, it also works differently than its VFP7 counterpart. Plan on re-coding your Web Service calls: ffc\\_webservices.vcx is no more, and the new VFP 8 IntelliSense script uses ffc\\_ws3client.vcx. The good news is that you can use TRY… CATCH, the bad news is that you’ll have to, while you iron out the bugs. While alpha tests on a development workstation worked fine, deploying to the production machine failed, presumably because of a dependency with new Web Service DLLs. Out of time for testing tonight; hope to get back to this over the weekend.

Part of the process of rearranging the home office is moving a mini-tower system out to the server room (aka cellar) so that there are no more noisy machines in the office. Here’s a machine I’ll gladly check out: Hush ushers in silent PC [CNET News.com]

Chunking and scanning RSS feeds. “I’ve been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it’s a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that’s just a couple of clicks — modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it’s more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work.”
… [Jon’s Radio]