Many fans of FoxPro complain FoxPro doesn’t get enough press. Some even argue that any PR is good PR. Not in this case, I think:
VietNamNet – Over 50,000 PCs infected with data-destroying viruses “In mid July, we received many reports from financial and monetary institutions saying that their data files FoxPro and SQL were destroyed. The reason is virus W32.Ukuran.Worm,” said an official of BKIS.
Bummer.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire
chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the
first Monday of each month starting at 7 PM. Due to summer hours at the
NHTI Library, we will be meeting at the Sybase offices, 6 Loudon Road,
Suite 501, Concord, thanks to member (and Sybase employee) Larry Cook.
DIRECTIONS: From Interstate 93, take exit 14 and head east over the
Merrimack River. Immediately after the bridge, take the first right.
Drive straight back to the cornfield, then turn right and then right
again to get to the south end of the building. Walk around the building
to the right to come in the front (east) entrance. Take the elevator to
the fifth floor. Straight off the elevator is Sybase. Enter and turn
left. At the end of the hallway is the conference room.
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2rtc8k
Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
Roger Trussell will present a session on building Firefox extensions.
Firefox extensions are small zipped blocks of code that add new
functionality to Firefox, from a simple toolbar button to a completely
new feature. Extensions allow Firefox to stay small and unbloated.
Extensions give content providers another way to make certain features
more accessible to their end-users. We will see some quick examples of
how to build extensions for Firefox 2.x using XML and JavaScript. We
will also see a demonstration of some useful extensions available for
web content developers.
Roger Trussell is a programmer with over five years of experience in a
variety of support roles for health care, software, research, and
manufacturing environments. He has worked at many companies throughout
the Upper Valley such as DHMC, isee systems, inc. (formally known as
High Performance Systems, Inc.), and Timken Aerospace. Roger holds a
Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY. One of Roger’s main interests is
bridging the gap between programmers and end-users. He has worked on
software installer technology and he has worked in end-user support roles.
More details at about this meeting and the group are available at
http://www.centralug.org and http://www.gnhlug.org as I learn them!
Hope to see you there!
Rick Strahl blogs Nothing is Trivial:
I got a call from a customer last week who needed a small piece of work done that he defined as Trivial. Ok, trivial can be good – quickie in and out and youre done, but usually when I hear the word trivial I always cringe because it rarely is.
“How hard can it be?” or “we’ve got a straight-forward issue to resolve here” are also indications that the client with doesn’t understand the complexity of the problem, is trying to minimize his cost or is trying to avoid admitting they have no idea how to solve the problem. By the time most companies get around to calling in a consultant, they have probably tried every other alternative. I recall speaking with a fellow consultant about an assignment where he was just amazed at the complexity of the problem, the procedural mess the client had gotten themselves into, the political morass of any solution, the band-aids, baling wire and duct tape holding together the current solution. Why else would they be willing to pay his rates? If it was easy, they would have fixed it themselves.
Over at Ed Fosters Gripelog, No Shame Over Bogus Eli/New Hill Subscriptions takes on one of the worst operations I’ve ever had the misfortune to get tangled up with:
I’m occasionally accused of focusing too much on the minor sins of the technology giants instead of exposing more of the outright scams perpetrated by lesser-known companies. And there might be something to that criticism. But one reason I lean that way is that at least the Microsofts and HPs have enough of a sense of shame that they will try to fix some of the problems we air. That doesn’t tend to be true of the shadier outfits, such as the Eli Journals/New Hill Services publishing operation.
The FoxTalk journal was one of the best. I published my first FoxPro article with them, back in 1992, and subscribed for over a decade. It’s sad to see them go out in such an ugly manner.
Does anyone else think that “Bifidus Regularis™!” sounds like a spell Harry Potter should have been casting?
Bifidus Regularis is a trademark of Dannon for their Activia line of yogurts
In O’Reilly ONLamp Blog, Jeremy Jones blogs “Pretty much anything [Mac] has, Linux can do better.” Hogwash. Can we kill the zealotry? and points out: “Anything that Windows and Mac can do, Linux could do.”
Bill McGonigle announces the August meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall, Room L01 from 7 – 9 PM. The main presentation will be “Usable Web Applications with Rails and AJAX,” presented by William Henderson-Frost.
“Will will present Greenout!, a new web application that’s focused on usability and developed on the Ruby on Rails platform using AJAX techniques, the Prototype library, and plenty of custom code. He’ll describe the process of developing a web application with Ruby on Rails, the challenges of writing an AJAX application, and some of the tips and techniques he’s developed along the way.”
“Will is a Senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in Computer Science, and a Hanover native. He enjoys good programming languages, like Ruby.”
Sounds like an interesting meeting. Ruby is a pretty sleek language, and the Rails platform makes application development far easier.
David Goodger’s uploaded his “Code Like a Pythonista” presentation, shown at PyCon 2007 and OSCON and it is a great illustration of the philosophies and idioms that makes “pythonic” high praise of Python code.
A great saunter down memory lane is provided by CIO.com with “Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn’t Deserve to Die” I sure recognize a lot of those logos…
One of my current client projects requires me to VPN into their establishment. Rather than have a second machine running Windows, I thought I’d try running VMWare using a dual-boot (WinXPPro/Fedora Core 6) machine. A recent Linux Magazine article by Jason Perlow, “Run Your Windows with VMWare” pointed out that VMWare can read a Windows installation off disk and run it as if it were a virtual image, a feature I wasn’t aware of. You get the benefits of both having a VM and being able to dual-boot. Cool! So, I set about the process of installing such beast.
VMWare offers several versions for free (as in price, not as in speech) downloads. Their main install scripts (written in Perl) are pretty slick, detecting problems, coaching you for the correct actions, and advising about where more information can be found. Several cycles of script, run, error, re-configure, install, repeat got me to a working VMWare install. Extra clues were found in “How to Install VMWare Server on A Fedora Core 6 Desktop” and “Run Existing Windows Installation with VMWare Player.” Some obscure permission errors (VMWare reports that it can’t open the image or some related file) were fixed by adding my login to the ‘disk’ group so VMWare could read the raw disk, and giving the /dev/hda device group-read-write access (sudo chmod g+rw /dev/hda – there’s a way to do this permanently…). I confirmed VMWare was installed correctly by downloading and running one of the many VMs that can be found at the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace. After a few tweaks to the settings in the Windows-from-disk virtual machine configuration file windows.vmdk and generating a separate file for the MBR from the disk, booting into the VM produced by startup GRUB menu! Selecting a Linux partition started Linux, but selecting the Windows partition just hung after the message “chainloader +1”.
It’s progress. Now to Google around and see what the next tweak needs to be…