DevBlog

It's Thanksgiving here in the US. I'll be offline until Monday. Have a great holiday!

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. When Las Vegas was announced as the site for the next DevCon, there was hope that Advisor had finally listened and was holding the conference someplace affordable. But, it looks like that isn't the case. The JW Marriott Resort is just that...as resort...and has room rates in line with a resort. A standard room goes for $239 per night. That's a far cry from the $69 a night rooms you can find on the strip. I suspect a large number of attendees will not stay at the resort. If I go, I know I won't be there. I have a friend that lives just a couple of miles from the Marriott.

Eric Sink, the founder of Source Gear has a blog called Marketing for Geeks (subscribed). He recently wrote and MSDN article called Finance for Geeks.

Scoble has some great comments on what Microsoft needs to do better to help their customers. Here's another blog that has great ideas that you can put to use in your own company.

Yeah, that's a big buzz word that you hear ALOT these days, but being able to satisfy the customer is what separates great companies from good ones. 3M HIS has been pushing being more customer centric for a couple of years now. For some time I've been reading John Porcaro's blog. He has great insights on how to do this and from time to time recommends a good book.

I now have another customer focused site to read, Church of the Customer (thanks, Kase). Great information.

Now, you may be asking some questions. How can I be customer focued? I'm not in marketing or sales. I'm a techie writing code. I NEVER see the person that buys or uses my software.

On my office wall is a poster from Despair.com. It has a picture of the leaning tower of Pisa and says "Mediocrity. It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late." So, the first thing you do is refuse to be mediocre. Your code should be of the best quality. Make sure you have written it in such a way that it can be maintained. Make sure you've fully unit tested it. Make sure it follows your company's coding and UI guidelines. Also, do your work efficiently and on schedule. Delays hurt the customer and drive up the cost. Also, consider your customers to also be the testers and QA people.

So, whenever you hear about being customer centric, think about it from your position. There is always a way that you can please the customer.

I got this in an email today and thought is was just too good to not pass on. If you're planning to see the third LOTR, here are a few survival tips:

1. Stand up halfway through the movie and yell loudly, "Wait... where the hell is Harry Potter?"
   
2. Block the entrance to the theater while screaming: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" - After the movie, say "Lucas could have done it better."
   
3. At some point during the movie, stand up and shout: "I must go! Middle Earth needs me!" and run and try to jump into the screen. After bouncing off, return quietly to your seat.
   
4. Play a drinking game where you have to take a sip every time someone says: "The Ring."
   
5. Point and laugh whenever someone dies.
   
6. Ask the nearest ring-nut if he thinks Gandalf went to Hogwarts.
   
7. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mr. Anderson."
   
8. When Aragorn is crowned king, stand up and at the top of your lungs sing, "And I did it.... MY way...!"
   
9. At the end, complain that Gollum was offensive to Ethiopians.
   
10. Talk like Gollum all through the movie. At the end, bite off someone's finger and fall down the stairs.
    
11. When Shelob appears, pinch the guy in front of you on the back of the neck.
    
12. Dress up as old ladies and reenact "The Battle of Helms Deep" Monty Python style.
    
13. When Denethor lights the fire, shout "Barbecue!"
    
14. Ask people around you who they think is the next "Terminator" sent from the Middle Earth of the future to assassinate Frodo Baggins.
    
15. In TTT when the Ents decide to march to war, stand up and shout "RUN! REST, RUN!"
    
16. Every time someone kills an Orc, yell: "That's what I'm Tolkien about!" See how long it takes before you get kicked out of the theatre.
    
17. During a wide shot of a battle, inquire, "Where's Waldo?"
    
18. Talk loudly about how you heard that there is a single frame of a nude Elf hidden somewhere in the movie.
    
19. Start an Orc sing-a-long.
    
20. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly
    confused.

Looks like more trouble for open source operating systems. The Debian System servers have been hacked. [NewsForge]

Utah has won an award for the best state government web portal in the nation. Still, it could be improved. I always have difficultly finding the state laws, who my legislators are, and when new bills are pending in the state legislature. Hopefully these items will be improved soon. Much of the credit for web access can go to former Governor Mike Levitt (now EPA Adminitrator).

More information from inside on what it takes to get an application out the door. [Kase's Blog]

At the airport Wednesday I picked up a copy of Newsweek because Bill Gates was interviewed about the future of computing (read it online). He has a very bright and excited picture of what the future will bring and thinks there is still lots of innovation to be made that will cause people to upgrade or buy new machines. I also found out there is an online Ask Bill forum. There is more to the issue than just Bill. Lots of good information about viruses, technology, the future, etc. Highly recommended.

I never felt less prepared for a user group meeting than I did Tuesday night. I wasn't ready at all for my presentation. The overview of Longhorn went well. The best received stuff was information on Europa. I'm excited about all the great new features and the wonderful new reporting engine.

Scoble attended some user group meetings earlier this week (Including the Fox group), then asks why you don't attend a group and what you can do to make it better. Rob Zelt has some great suggestions. Since I run the Fox user group here in Salt Lake City, I have to agree with Rob. User groups work best when there is active participation. I can't do all the presentations. I can't come up with all the ideas for meetings. I can't do it all myself. Get out there and help with your group. You'll appreciate it more and get more out of the meetings.

This has to be the lamest thing I've ever seen. I wonder if you can be a professional rock, paper, scissors player. You could get sponsors and put stickers on a glove. You'd look like Nascar. [Scobleizer]

Utah may soon become the leading state for the number of people being served by fiber optic communications systems. The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) will connect every home in Salt Lake City and 18 other Utah cities. [Salt Lake Tribune]

It's going to be a busy week and will keep me offline for much of it. Today through Wednesday, I'll be in Build Manager training for CM Synergy. I'll be leaving class early on Wednesday for a quick trip to 3M HQ in St. Paul, then back home Thursday night. Friday looks to be a catch-up day.

Back on Nov. 5, I speculated that the Europa release would come about the same time as DevCon 2004. Ken pretty much confirms this in his November letter:

Mark your calendar for the Advisor Visual FoxPro DevCon 2004 conference, which is scheduled to be held October 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada. More details will be coming shortly for this conference. The Visual FoxPro team is very busy working on the next version of Visual FoxPro, code-named Europa. Because DevCon 2004 is planned near the time we hope to release Europa, DevCon 2004 is where the Visual FoxPro team will formally launch Europa.

Ken also outlines several exciting new features coming in Europa. It sounds like it will be a fabulous release with major changes to the report writer. This is something that people have been requesting for 10 years. Kudos to the VFP team!

I just found out Cindy Winegarden is blogging. She doesn't have RSS feeds or comments. I'll need to talk to her about this. This makes six VFP people with blogs.

For many years Whil Hentzen has been a huge proponent of FoxPro. He still is. He's just become a huge proponent of open source in the past couple of years. But in his November 9 blog, he states something that is evidence to me that the pro-open source arguements just don't hold water. Whil says,

"There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers--with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what you want it to do. And it gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life."

I have to question this. How would a choice to use OpenOffice be any different than a choice to use Microsoft Office? In either case, I as the end user of the products, can only do what the designers and coders have put into the product. How does using OpenOffice allow me to do what I want to do any more than Microsoft Office? How does using Microsoft Office prohibit me from cooperating with anyone? And is Whil implying that because I use Microsoft Office that I don't lead an upright life?

Now, to be fair, I think there is good and bad in both the open source and proprietary source models. But, it's time for some real thinking and arguements that make sense.

I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but this is too funny. [Scobleizer]

This has to be the best web site I've seen in a long, long time. [Scobleizer]

Great comic. Thanks, Scoble.

Microsoft Research is doing some interesting things with blogs, wikis, RSS, and other similar tools in a project called Wallop [eWeek]. It looks rather interesting. Imagine if you could combine all these things into a social network, where people can interact with each other. This would be another step toward better virtual communities. Add instant messaging into the mix and it gets even more interesting.

If you own Visual FoxPro 8, you can solve some of your installation problems by upgrading the Limited Edition Installshield Express to the full version Installshield Express until Dec. 31, 2003. [Fox Wiki]

As an MSDN Universal Subscriber, I ordered my PDC Longhorn disks. They arrived late last week, but given the hefty hardware requirements, it looks like it will be a while before I attempt an install. In the meantime, I'm reading Paul Thurrott's tips.

When most people search the web, they head for Google. Now, you can do it from your task bar with Google Deskbar. Personally, I never use Google and I certainly don't need more desktop taken up by the search tool. (My task bar is full of shorcuts). For web searching, I prefer to use Copernic. Steven Black first showed me this amazing search tool. It runs local on your PC, can be hooked up to be the default IE search engine, and stores your search results for you. This means that you can begin your search today, tag the sites you've visited, then go back and finish things tomorrow without reissuing the search. The basic version is free. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

When setting a new appointment, you can just type in the time in real words. Things like "New Year", "8 hours", etc [Kase's Blog]. I gotta remember this one.

Way back in the dark ages when we were all doing cross platform development with FoxPro, Andrew MacNeill wrote a spiffy utility called GenMenuX that allowed you to do some great things to menus in your program. Well, a coworker stubmled upon a bug this week and we couldn't figure it out, so I picked up the phone and called Andrew. He fixed it while we were talking and had an update to me within a couple of minutes. Thanks Andrew!!

There ya go Ted!

In case you missed it, WinFS is the new SQL Server-based file system in Longhorn. Serge van der Oever has a list of what's cool. (Sorry about the bad link. It's fixed now.)

Microsoft has revealed more about Europa, the next version of Visual FoxPro. Some of the revelations include details on the report writer enhancements (up to 20 detail bands, zoom to 500%, more events, new property sheets and more). You can read more details on the German DevCon report on the Universal Thread. You'll need to scroll down to the section "Keynote #2 - Europa Preview"

It's an old joke. The answer was always "None. Bill Gates declares darkness a new standard." But, the real answer is LOTS. Eric Lippert tells us who they are.

The Federal Appeals court has reopened the Microsoft anti-trust case. Ugh! Enough already. I'm not in any way condoning what Microsoft did, nor am I saying the agreement with the DOJ is fair and correct, but the anti-Microsoft side just doesn't get it. An eWeek article states, A six-judge en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard two cases today, brought by Massachusetts and by two trade associations of rival technology companies. Both are seeking to overturn the federal agreement entered one year ago to remedy the unlawful conduct Microsoft was found to have engaged in vis-ŕ-vis Netscape Navigator and Java. What these people don't get is that while Microsoft did help with the demise of Netscape, Netscape also shot themselves in the foot. They simply had inferior technology. Even after they were purchased by AOL, the IE browser was still being used in the AOL client software. Look back at the history of the PC industry and you'll see lots of the same examples of companies (for example, Digital Research, WordPerfect, Novell) fighting Microsoft only to make stupid moves themselves that ultimately hurt them. If you don't believe me, go read In Search of Stupidity. Microsoft can't be solely blamed for what happened to these companies, but the anti-Microsoft side would like you to think it is.

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.

Red Hat has announced that they will no longer create or distribute a free version of Linux. You can get Red Hat Linux, but you'll have to pay for it.

From Scobleizer Longhorn Blog:

a) a new User Interface. (code-named Aero). Nicer looking, more productive.
b) a new file storage system. (code-named WinFS) Easier to search for files. Allows for new views on files, people, and data. Lets you build “associations” between data and people.
c) A new set of APIs. (code-named Avalon, now called WinFX). Much more productive for programmers. Offers new user interface capabilities.
d) A new way for software/computers to talk to each other (code-named Indigo). The next version of SOAP and Web services.
e) A new way to communicate (code named RTC). The next version of collaboration and IM functionality.