Greetings from the Waltham offices of Microsoft, where I am demonstrating this for the Boston Area FoxPro Users Group.
Tag Archives | FoxPro
Intranet Twiki up and running!
Finally, after a few weeks of occasional hacking, I’ve got a Twiki running on the Linux intranet server, running Fedora, Apache 2.0 and Perl 5.8.0. The intranet Twiki at Ted Roche & Associates is for note-taking, internal project tracking and experimentation.
If you haven’t worked with a wiki, you owe it to yourself to try it out. A wiki is a simple interface: a web site with an “Edit” button on each page. Any web user (or a secure, limited, logged-in user) can edit the page, and change whatever they are allowed by the webmaster. Voila! Community-maintained web sites! Most wikis I have worked with are set up as knowledgebases, although their use is only limited by your imagination. A superb example (though in FoxPro, not a Twiki) is the FoxForum wiki at http://fox.wikis.com.
Twiki is one of my favorites wikis: it is cross-platform (Windows and most Perl-supported web servers, Linux, OS X, IIS, Apache, etc.); the code is Open Source and fairly readable Perl. I have Twiki deployed on the internet on a W2k IIS configuration (using RedHat’s CygWin) for a private client wiki, and also deployed a temporary one on a Linux laptop for a small conference last year in Toledo.
The sticking point in getting this instance running was a name resolution problem and matching configuration. The Twiki web site provides copious documentation (in a Twiki, of course!), but because they support so many configurations (BSD, Linux, RedHat, Mandrake, Windows, IIS, Apache 1.3 and 2.0), that it can be tricky to separate out the current suggestions from other people’s troubleshooting issues from older issues. My “solution” was telling the twiki it was running on neresus.tedroche.com and then adding the IP address of the Neresus box to the HOSTS file of the client. This is a kludge, of course, that I should be able to remedy with a DNS in-house. I’ll add that project to the list… maybe on the Twiki!
Onward and upward! The next project for the intranet is a CVS configuration, and I’ll also be trying to convert the Twiki from interpreted, CGI-driven to a module mod_Perl (faster) configuration.
New RSS Feed: Ted Roche & Associates, LLC web site changes
RSS doesn’t have to just be about news, or blogs. It can also serve as a good source of information on what’s new on a web site. At http://www.tedroche.com/trweb.rdf, I’ve just started an RSS feed where I will post changes to the web site as they are made. There are a substantial number of white papers and sample code snippets on the site, but many are not well-organized or presented. I hope to punch each sample up, and as I do I’ll post it to the RSS feed.
The feed is maintained with some simple Visual FoxPro code I demonstrated at the 2003 Great Lakes Great Database Workshop, and I’ll be glad to pass it on to any Fox developer interested in doing the same to his or her site.
Advisor FoxPro DevCon: JW Marriott Resort, Las Vegas
Once again, Advisor hosts their conference at an expensive facility that doubles the cost of attending DevCon vs. the other conferences. I think Advisor is still marketing to a corporate, expense account clientele that don’t patronize DevCon any more. Conference Attendance over the years shows a pretty clear trend. Well, this should have a postive effect on the Essential Fox and Great Lakes Great Database Workshop conferences.
VFP DevCon Hotel. “I just got my December FoxPro Advisor. DevCon will be at the JW Marriott Las Vegas Resort & Spa. Again, the dates are Sept. 29-Oct 2, 2004.” From Craig Berntson’s FoxBlog
Ken Levy’s Monthly Letter
As all the other FoxPro bloggers have noted, Ken Levy posted his monthly “Letter from the Editor” on Microsoft’s MSDN page for Visual FoxPro. The feature list matches pretty closely with that reported from Alan Griver’s keynote session at the Frankfurt conference last week, and expands on the information previously released.
FoxForum Wiki RSS Feeds: 2.0 okay, 1.0 broken
Due to differences in the way the RSS feeds are implemented, the FoxForum Wiki RSS 1.0 feed is broken until the wiki web is able to support Web Services again. Unfortunately, the site suffered a hardware meltdown and is being rebuilt, but it will take a while… Meanwhile, subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed for up-to-date wiki topics. There’s quite an entertaining mix of information and opinion, one of the best sites on the web for things FoxPro.
FoxPro Conference in Frankfurt, Germany
Check out the coverage of the Frankfurt, Germany confence by Hans-Otto Lochman and Armin Neudert posted here.
FoxPro DevCon 2004 – 29Sept – 2Oct in Las Vegas, NV
DevCon Announced. From FoxBlog via [Andrew MacNeill – AKSEL Solutions]
Thanks to Craig for monitoring for this.
Advisor has announced the next VFP DevCon to be held Sept. 29 – Oct 2 in Las Vegas. No announcement of the hotel. I think Vegas is a great location. I can drive there in about six hours. The hotels are cheap, food is cheap, rooms are cheap, airfare for others is cheap. Kudos to Advisor!
On a related note, Ken Levy has publically hinted that DevCon will be the official launch for VFP9. Let’s look at the calendar and see how accurate this could be for release dates. VFP 8 was released in February. Typically, VFP has been on an 18 month schedule. That would put release at sometime around July. Ken also recently stated on the Universal Thread that the Fox team added three months to the schedule to allow for additional testing and QA. Now we’re looking at October. The dates look about right to me for release about the same time as DevCon.”
I would have posted Craig’s original posting, but the links to his blog are still broken in his RSS feed, and I couldn’t figure out a way to permalink to his posting.
Looks like if you’re planning to go to the FoxPro DevCon, you could go a few days earlier and see what Novell is up to at Advisor’s Novell DevCon, too.
FoxForum Wiki is back!
After an extended downtime due to misbehaving hardware and software, the FoxForum Wiki is back up and running. The FoxForum wiki is the place I go first when looking for an in-depth answer to a technical question on FoxPro.
NYT: Amazon Offer Worries Authors (but not all for the same reason)
Amazon Offer Worries Authors. From David K. Kirkpatrick of New York Times: Technology: “Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in a database of the texts of 120,000 books, drawing skepticism from an authors’ group. ”
Amazon has offered to remove books whose authors do not want to participate. That’s even worse. Search on “Visual FoxPro SourceSafe” and you get a list of 48 books on Visual Basic, Visual InterDev, SQL Server, MSDE and even Dreamweaver. Hello? How about a book on SourceSafe? There are three, including my own, and mine has several pages on Visual FoxPro.
I suspect that Amazon hasn’t indexed the Hentzenwerke Publishing book, and hence we are sidelined. Indexing 120,000 books means marginalizing the great variety formerly available from Amazon. I am disappointed.