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SourceSafe History Redux: using VFP to generate VSS History Files

By on July 11, 2005 in SourceSafe

In the original post, I showed a simple Visual FoxPro program to generate a week’s worth of activity history from Visual SourceSafe. Andrew MacNeill observed that it would not work for him, as he was supporting more than one database. Here’s one solution: change the original program from shelling out with a single command. Instead, generate a batch file, and then execute it. Here’s a sample:


SET TEXTMERGE TO VSSHIST.BAT
SET TEXTMERGE ON NOSHOW
\ SET SSDIR=C:\MY DOCUMENTS\SOURCESAFE
\ SET VSSEXEDIR=C:\PROGRAM FILES\VSS\WIN32
\ %VSSEXEDIR%\ss history $/ -R -vd <<DTOC(DATE())>>~<<DTOC(DATE()-7)>>  -B -O@History.txt
SET TEXTMERGE OFF
SET TEXTMERGE TO
!VSSHIST.BAT
SET SSDIR=
SET VSSExeDir=

[UPDATED]: My blogging software made mincemeat out of the slashes, greater-than and less-than signs. Copy with care, and proof your result.

The SSDIR environment variable is recognized the the SS.EXE SourceSafe command-line executable: if set, it points to the SRCSAFE.INI file and the location of the data files SourceSafe is to operate on. The second environment variable, VSSExeDir is one I use to simplify the batch file, but putting the absolute path to the SourceSafe executables in one place, you can refer to it within the file, and only need to change it in one place should you change paths. Think #DEFINE in other languages.

Partners: Crunchy and good with ketchup

By on July 11, 2005 in Microsoft

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes Feeding the Voracious Microsoft Beast. “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may love Microsoft’s partners. But that doesn’t mean he has any trepidation about continuing to chip away at their markets.”

Microsoft has always loved their partners: they’re crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

It’s pretty well-known that announcing a “strategic partnership” with Microsoft means, if you’re lucky, the company will get swallowed whole and you might walk away with cash or, if you’re less lucky, Microsoft will suck the blood, sweat and tears out of the company and leave a cold dead husk. With maybe a shot at an intellectual property infringement suit and a billion-dollar out of court settlement. And maybe not.

Follow-up: weekly SourceSafe history reports

By on July 11, 2005 in SourceSafe

Andrew follows up on my 30 June post on Ted Roche – Building SourceSafe Activity Reports using VFP. “Ted hasn’t updated this yet but his code for generating weekly activity reports from Visual SourceSafe is going to help me out plenty… We had to make some adjustments for databases that are not stored in the root directory (mine are stored in another folder).”

Well, actually, the problem is that the code as written in the original post assumed that the SourceSafe client on the machine running the report was set up to point to the repository of SourceSafe data by default – an obscure registry setting. If not, use the trick in Andrew’s post to set the SSDIR environment variable to point to the SourceSafe repository of interest. Also, it’s a very good idea to run this on the local machine with the SourceSafe repository, as network traffic can slow the performance by orders of magnitude. Andrew goes on to note:

“By the way, Ted’s work is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License,… If you use it, great. If you fix it, pass the fixes along using the same license. A great approach for offering code. ” My thoughts exactly.

Using WebMin for Fun and Profit, a DLSLUG presentation with S5

By on July 8, 2005 in OpenSource

I had the privilege last night of speaking to the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, one of five chapters of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group on the installation, configuration and management of WebMin, a Perl-based, BSD-licensed tool for remote, secure, web-based management of many, many different modules in a Linux/Unix/HP-UX/Solaris system. This is a great tool, providing a simple, discoverable, explorable GUI for systems controlled by sometimes-obscure text configuration files. Text files are superior to an opaque “Registry” but having a GUI as well is the best of both worlds! My slides and notes are available for viewing from the tedroche.com whitepapers site, written in Eric Meyer’s great S5: Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System – a single HTML page, a couple of magic CSS files and a couple of images give you a slide show with keyboard shortcuts, a handout/slideshow view toggle and a popup menu (move your mouse to the lower right corner) to navigate to any slide. Slick stuff, elegantly simple to use.

Microsoft Longhorn Beta 1 to be released Summer 2005

By on July 8, 2005 in Microsoft

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft Reconfirms Longhorn Targets. “Beta 1 of Longhorn is still on track for this summer, Sanjay Parthasarathy reiterated that Longhorn Beta 1, which will not include the new user interface bits, is due this summer. Beta 2, which will showcase the new interface, is due out some time in the first part of 2006. The final Longhorn client release is still, as of now, due out in the latter half of 2006.”

Isn’t that curious. Microsoft has previously used “Beta” like much of the rest of the software industry for a feature-complete product with testing required but all major features in place. In particular, Microsoft’s “Marketing Betas” to the public were primarily used by the MS Marketing teams to determine how to pitch the product and how to respond the the FAQs. This beta is more likely what most would consider an alpha, with features yet to be completed, making evaluation of the product more difficult. This comes across to me as primarily a PR effort to show that Microsoft is still in the game. With the dropping/delay of major features (WinFS), release of others separate from the Longhorn OS (Avalon and Monad) and the addition of others (RSS), Longhorn still feels like too much of a moving target and not a product with a fixed feature list. It will be interesting to read how the industry press reviews this “beta.”

Is listening to your neighbor’s radio piracy?

By on July 7, 2005 in OpenSource

Ars Technica notes Florida man charged with felony for wardriving. “Be careful accessing those unprotected WAPs, especially if you live in Florida. A man was recently arrested for accessing an open access point in an apartment complex.” By eric@arstechnica.com (Eric Bangeman).

So, receiving radio waves that someone else broadcasts is illegal? No. Responding to them? No. Using a device designed for connection that’s not encrypted? No. This isn’t the same as barging onto your neighbor’s property and plugging your appliance into his electrical socket. If the interceptor was attempting to break into a computer or perform some illegal act, well, maybe. It’s hard to even see this as a theft of services when they are being broadcast and the supplier isn’t paying any more for its use by others.

It will be interesting to see if this case goes anywhere…

Phones by Gizmo?

By on July 7, 2005 in OpenSource

Slashdot posts Project Gizmo Challenges Skype. valmont writes “The Register is offering an interesting introduction to Project Gizmo, a new player in the Voice over IP field, poised to challenge Skype with its ability to interoperate with others thanks to the SIP protocol it complies to. Whereas Skype has selectively licensed usage of an API that offers limited insight into a closed protocol, a closed ecosystem solely controlled by one organization, the SIP protocol is open. Free open-source proxy/server implementations are sprouting up, and many developers are actively working on SIP clients. The Gizmo Project is the first to bring a truly-usable, user-friendly, cross-platform SIP client (Mac, Windows, Linux coming soon) to market. Meanwhile, theappleblog.com is already offering a Gizmo Project Wish-List to promote better interoperability between current and upcoming SIP providers, to make it more practical for users of disparate SIP clients to communicate with one another.”

VOIP is hot and up-and-coming. Vonnage, Skype and Gizmo show some exciting promise to break the system of what ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe called the “teloply” – the phone company model of 30-year investment cycles on the huge telephone infrastructure. The telco’s lack of agility in deploying new functionality have slowed the rollout of technology in the US, leaving us behind Korea and Finland and others. The telcos have twisted pair copper wire into every home in America. Why aren’t they providing 100 Mbps Ethernet to the home at $20/mo?

VOIP isn’t an end-all and be-all just yet: be aware that 911 services are rarely available. Maintaining at least one landline to the home is wise. But moving your second or third phone line or SOHO business to VOIP is a no-brainer.

Microsoft ships Tablet PC patch

By on July 6, 2005 in Microsoft

OSNews reports Microsoft Posts Tablet PC Fix. “On Tuesday, Microsoft posted a patch to its web site designed to prevent the problem, known as a memory leak. This error has plagued Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system for a long time. In addition, the software giant has promised not to charge for security fixes, but will charge for virus protection.”

EU Says No To Software Patents

By on July 6, 2005 in Personal, Technology

Slashdot reports EU Says No To Software Patents. “Moggie68 writes “European parliament has struck down the proposal for a directive that would have brought US-style software patents into EU.”

This sounds good. From my layman’s point of view, I think patents are not healthy in the software industry. Others disagree, and I’ll try to dig up some links to post here, comments I’ve seen that patents may in fact be to the advantage of Open Source. At the least, this is a rejection of a proposal that the European Parliament legal subcommittee had rejected, and was mired in parliamentary moves to resurrect. Let’s hope that the EU can find a rational and legitimate way to choose patents or not, and not a means as slipshod as that used here.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.