I’m a few minutes early, but not by much. Unfortunately, there won’t be a FF08, so that means that you *must* get to SWFox to satisfy your VFP addiction. I’m sure that the SWFox gang will put on another great show this year.

Sure enough, they won’t serve up video to Linux based computers.  I got the low down from The ERACC Web Log.

I wonder why they made that decision?  To block video based on the operating system?  Weird.

How many times have you visited a web site, and it’s down.  Then you begin to wonder if maybe it’s your connection?  or your DSN? or a fiber cable cut?  Sure, you can try pinging and tracerouting, but it sure would be nice to have another opinion.

Well, here’s a web site that does a quick check and will let you know if the site is really down:  http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/   It’s just another tool to keep in your hip pocket.

I’ve run this setup for a long time: Windows XP machine with dual monitors of 1 17″ LCD at 1280×1024 and a 19″ CRT at 1600×1200.  My  MEPIS Linux laptop was running off of it’s LCD monitor at 1440×800.

I’ve been doing more and more web design work and less Visual Foxpro work.  My favorite web tools are on Linux to be honest.  I love Quanta+ as an HTML and CSS editor.  I even like the FTP tools available on Linux where I use both Konqueror and gFTP to transfer files around.  So here I am, doing more work on my Linux laptop, craning my neck.  What am I going to do about it.

Today I had enough.  I removed my 19″ CRT monitor from my desktop and switched it back to single monitor.  My laptop won’t do dual monitor (stretching the desktop onto two monitors) but with the 4 desktops on my Linux, I don’t think I’ll miss it.   I had to edit my xorg.conf to add the 1600×1200 resolution to the file, and with a quick “CTRL+ALT+Backspace” to restart the graphical environment, the monitor fired up with tons of space on the desktop, plus three more just like it!  Happiness.

I’ve had to bump up the font size on a couple of screens but that’s hardly worth mentioning.  This monitor is also just slightly more blurry than an LCD screen is.  I’d love to get a couple of LCD monitors and the Matrox DualHead2Go appliance to get my modest laptop to be totally rocking.  Money is tight however.

My only real problem is that I look at this monitor and keep wanting to go to the wrong keyboard.  That should resolve itself in a day or two to retrain my brain.

When renaming files in DOS and Windows, you typed in REN *.txt *.bak. Easy.

In Linux, you would figure it would be just as easy. Nah. MV and RENAME don’t do it as easily. Sure you can write a script to do this, but come on!!!

I love me some Linux, but it’s true that some things are harder. (Many things are easier tho!)

I’ve been putting off this official announcement for a while now. It is my unpleasant task of announcing that I won’t be hosting FoxForward in 2008, and I don’t have plans for another one.

I am very proud of FoxForward, and I am awe struck by the talented speakers that presented at the conference. I also learned a lot from the attendees as well. They came from all walks of life, and with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Unfortunately the toll that the conference took on by business and personal life was too great. The conference took over one months full time effort. For a small business, and a father of two home schooled boys, I just couldn’t justify the loss of income for the effort.

Another aspect is that FoxForward 2007 wasn’t significantly larger than FoxForward 2006. I must admit it was a bit disappointing. I guess that the “diverse” technological topics aren’t of that much interest, as I thought it would be. Okay, enough reflection.

I am pleased to see some very positive announcements for the VFP community. FoxRockx has been announced and is shipping. I expect every one of you to subscribe. VFPx continues to impress! The people involved are cranking out some extremely impressive stuff. Check it out. And of course, SW Fox is bigger and better than evar!

So, even if there isn’t going to be a VFP 10, the Fox development team has enabled us to control our own future. If we work hard, support our community, and take ownership of Visual Foxpro and it’s future, we’ll be able to keep doing what we love to do long into the future!

There Will Be A VFP 10!

Very funny Doug!!!  LOL!

I woke up on time on Friday morning, the last day. I’ve got to get ready, pack up, and check out. My wife is Iming me over Skype with some technical support questions. She’s wanting to black out sensitive information in a contract before sending it to a client. She had loaded the PDF contract into The GIMP and she was blacking out her sensitive sections. Who knew you could load a PDF into The GIMP?!? Not me. Anyway, she was trying to save it back out as a PDF document but it wouldn’t let her of course, so I told her to save it as GIF and it should work.

I’ve got to try editing a PDF in The GIMP sometime and see if it actually works. Who would have thunk it?!? My wife, that’s who.

I wanted to get downstairs early. During the breakfast period, there was going to be the first meeting of the Association of REALbasic Professionals (ARBP) and I wanted to see what’s up with that. Bob Keeney was presiding over the meeting and I think he set the right tone. I wouldn’t have been interested in any group thats purpose was in beating up REALsoftware, Inc. I truly believe that the founders of the group believe the purpose of the group is to increase the visibility of RB, and to work with RS. That I can get behind. I’ll keep an eye on the group and see what comes of it. If the atmosphere of the ARBP continues to be upbeat, friendly, and appears to be effective, I’d have very little hesitation to join the group. And yes, that means ponying up some cash.

The first presentation is one that I’m very interested in, especially since I missed the keynote presentation. “Web Development with Yuma” by Joe Strout and Brad Weber were up first. Yuma is a web framework that can work locally during development, and works with Apache in a more production environment via FastCGI. It looks impressive. Basically it is like PHP or ASP classic, where you can embed RB code in with the HTML of a page and the RB code gets evaluated and results presented back to the requestor. The developer edition is free, and the enterprise edition will cost $149. One hesitation that I have, is a hesitation that I’ve had with RB itself. To get it to work on a typical hosting account (GoDaddy, Lunarpages, etc.) you would need to go to a VM server level account to get the libstdc++.so.6 library. Most hosting accounts are behind the ball on this library. My hope is that the Yuma team will get a listing of RB friendly hosting accounts. This is a business opportunity for someone! The Yuma team is hiring. Even though I’m a RB newbie, perhaps I should drop them a line and see what will happen. The only thing that would hurt is my pride!

Second for the day was the “RBScript for Fun, Profit and Modular Applications” presentation by Andy Dent. I must say that I wished this presentation contained more example execution of script examples. It was primarily based on slides. Andy is a sharp guy, no doubt and knows his stuff.

Next up was “Expanding REALbasic via 3RD Party Developers” by Christian Miller. While this one was also a slide based presentation, it was a very effective presentation. I’m not that familiar with the commercial plugins available for RB and it was very compelling to see the wealth of products available. I’m one of the cheapest guys in the world, and I’m sold that I need to purchase some of these products and I’ll be able to crank out some work that will make me look really good!

Lunch! Sandwiches. Lunch was made good by the great company. Before I knew it, it was time to get back to the sessions.

First up after lunch was Nathan Regener. Nathan is relatively new to RS and is their build engineer. His presentation on “Build Engineering” was very interesting. I’ve never worked in a business environment that required a build engineer. Nathan showed the process they use for “Continuous integration” that is automated on check-in. On check-in of any files, a build process is kicked off and feedback is provided to the providers within minutes on whether builds are broken. This continuous feedback just has to be very effective in keeping the RS process humming along. If you find out within a half of an hour of checking in a file that something is broken, the changes are fresh in your brain and you can get back out there and make the fixes necessary … or roll back. Very interesting insight into the process. I’m hoping that Nathans efforts will help RS increase quality, but almost more importantly, keep RS effective at what they do best.

There were several slots left open at the end of the conference for repeat sessions. I ended up seeing a brand new presentation on “Search Engine Optimization” by RageSW. Very cool. I’ve studies a lot of SEO techniques but if you don’t “Live it”, you aren’t as effective as you should be. The presentation was very helpful to me and I see I can make some changes to my web site (and my clients too!) to help them with their rankings. Unfortunately, the RageSW tools they sell, are Mac only at this point. They may add Winblows versons, but I don’t think Linux apps are in their roadmap yet. I’ve got to check out their http://ragesw.com/seoguide though.

My time at REAL World is drawing to a close really quick. Too soon. REAL Software was holding a feedback session, supervised by Geoff Perlman and Dana Mason. I suggested that they lengthen the sessions to 1 hour 15 minutes, and have a 15 minute break between the sessions. This is the format that FoxForward held and it seemed to work out well, allowing the presenters to get more into the code.

I had to bug out, and get my bag from the concierge. My REAL World 2008 had come to a close. I’ll write up my closing thoughts of RW08 in another post.

Gawd, is that my alarm? I get up. There I did it. Headed down for some breakfast. Scrambled egg tacos. Yummy. The OJ was super tasty too. I don’t know why but it really was.

I must once again comment on how cool RW attendees are. They’re such a diverse crowd from all different professional backgrounds and experiences. Yes, there’s a huge Mac crowd but I think the Linux experimenters are increasing in number from last year. I love meeting new friends and hearing their stories. Often times, the best things about conferences are the discussions between and after the sessions.

The first session of the day was Christian Schmitz on “The Monkeybread Software Plugin”. It was a bit of a sales pitch, but there’s no doubting the power of the entirety of this work. Christian’s passion and commitment to RB and his product is readily evident. He announced a new graphing toolset now available. It must have had hundreds of graph types ready to go.

Next up was Jordan Morris with “Developing and Implementing an Input Validation Firewall for Applications”. Jordan did a great job of getting past the slides and getting to a real world (sorry for the pun!) demonstration of code. I love real world examples. He talked about different approaches to input validations, from nothing (been there, done that; I’m sorry to say!) to black lists, to white listing inputs (Doing this, I’m proud to say!). This reminds me of one of my favorite comics of all time: Little Bobby Tables. Great job Jordan.

I received a call from one of my clients.  Their server is blue screening.  I called him back on Skype and the call quality sucked.  What sounded like an emergency, evidently, could wait for a week from tomorrow when he’s back in town.  I can’t ever figure out my clients.  It sounds like an emergency so I treat it like an emergency, and then it becomes a non-emergency.  I don’t know why.  Humans!  Gah!

Third for the day was Guyren Howe with “Write Better Programs Using Object Oriented Programming”. It was a pretty theoretical presentation, I’m afraid. Not a lot of code. Good content, but I would have preferred example approaches of good OOP and bad OOP. Hard to do in 50 minutes.

Lunch! Chicken, roast beast, other goodies … peach cobbler! Again, a great discussion at the table; RB, PostgreSQL, Linux, politics, and the beauty written into the Bill of Rights. Gotta love that.

First after lunch was Aaron Ballman with “Accessibility”. I didn’t get to see Aaron speak last year and I wanted to make sure that I caught at least one of his presentations this year. It was really cool to see a guy who is deep in the guts of RB day in and day out, talking about how to write better programs to be better accessible for people who have visual, tactile, and hearing disabilities. Two thumbs up. Not bad for a guy who is half focused on getting hitched in a couple of days. Run Aaron!!! (j/k!!!)

I then was off to Marco Bambini’s presenation on “What’s New in the Upcoming REAL SQL Server 2008r2″. What’s cool about this is that it was a lot of what I missed when I missed Geoff’s keynote presentation. Very impressive stuff is on the way. I think it’s really cool that REAL Software is a two product company. I can see RS making a boat load of money off licensing for REAL SQL Server, as they should! They’re doing tons of work in this area and you can tell they’ve got more plans up their sleeve for the future.

Next up was Jonathan Monroe talking about “Advanced Database Programming with ODBC”.  Jonathan works for Actual Technologies that develops and maintains ODBC drivers for various databases.  I almost called out ot see if Jonathan could help me get RB to talk to VFP tables on Linux using ODBC because I’m totally flummoxed.  Perhaps later if I can corner him.

I skipped the next session because I was able to trick Paul Lefebvre of LogicalVue into spending some time answering my asinine questions.  He was very patient with me and very helpful but every so often a “why would you do that?!?” or a “you wouldn’t ever do that with RB!” would slip out.  It helped me a lot though to prepare my brain for the transition over to RB.  Thanks Paul!

I made a quick call on Skype to my wife before dinner.  The call quality was pretty good this call.  She had to run to take the kids to Archery Club practice.

I hooked up with Paul and Christian Miller and a table full other great guys in the conference ballroom for the RW banquet.  Great food, great company.  I actually won a RB shirt in the trivia contest.  My question was “What 50’s rock icon did the rock band Weezer honor in their 19somethingorother song?”  (Answer at the bottom!)  Andrew Bredow helped me out with the answer.  I should have known it, but I drew a blank.  Thanks Andrew.

Christian Miller won a 50% off certificate for answering “What stuff is mixed with matter to make warp travel possible in Star Trek?”  Easy!!!  I told Christian that I would write something mean about him to make sure that he’s reading my blog entry so, here goes: Christian thought the answer to “Who is Harald Bluetooth that the Bluetooth technology is named after?” was “He was a pirate!”  Silly Christian!!!  Everyone knows (except for me) that he was named after the King of Denmark.

Anyway, the questions were really hard but everyone seemed to have a great time.  Thanks to everyone from RS for a great evening.

Time for some sleep.  I won’t be getting much tomorrow.  I’ve got to check out, go to RW for the last day of sessions, then immediately leave for the airport at 4pm.  I think I’ll get to my house at 1am on Saturday morning, and then dream of REAL basic all night.

Later!

So, I check in and drop my bag off in my room.  The bed calls my name beckoning me with a call … “Sleep, sleep, sleep.”  I will not be seduced.  I have technology also calling me and the promise of learning something is stronger than the short term satisfaction of REM sleep.

I go down to the registration station and pick up my “goodies bag”.  No shirt this year.  Darn.  Gravity has not been kind to my mid-rift. There’s some sweet stuff in there including a 1G USB Key with all of the presentation slides.

I head in for some of the keynote presentations.  Evidently I’ve missed a lot.  More on that later.  My friend Paul Lefebvre spoke on keeping “Software Made Simple”.  Very good advice when first starting out a project. Give pause and think first.  It can save you down the road.

Dave Mancuso was up next to discuss Kodiac, a program that does all sorts of school administration tasks.  Dave gave some great advice how to turn a previous program failure into a new resurected program success using REALbasic.

Jay was up next.  One thing that has impressed me in the past, and is impressing me this year as well, is the entrepreneur spirit of the RB programmers.  Jay, among other business ventures, creates software products for sale.  This is something that is really missing in my Visual Foxpro community.  Very cool advice.  Very practical overview of some of the factors on developing a piece of software, getting it out the door, selling it, and backing up the software with a guarantee.

Lunch!  Yummy fajitas with other mexican goodness.

The first full session of the conference was Jon Johnson talking on “Team Development and Version Control”.  RB has done a good job of enabling projects to be used with version control.  Jon spoke primarily on Subversion.  Great stuff.  Good examples; both graphical and from the command line.

Next up was Andrew Bredow with “Internet Classes”.  RB really impresses with it’s built in classes to handle sending and receiving email, posting and getting values across the web, as well as consuming WSDL documents.

Third up was Andrew Fahey and Carlos Carrillo with “Computer Forensics, E-discovery and Insider Threat Monitoring”.  I met Andrew and Carlos last year when they were just getting started with RB, and what progress they’ve made!  So much so, their presentation was really scary.  I was checking my firewall settings during their  presentation.  They take their jobs deadly seriously.  It’s good to know that these guys are out there helping our government catch the bad guys.

Last presentation of the day was Brad Rhine with “Cross-Platform Interface Tips and Tricks”.  Good information definitely especially as I don’t have a Mac, (Linux and Winblows environments here, and yes in that order!) but it might have been good to see examples in different VMs to see the results of the differing techniques.

There was a break before dinner.  I called my wife and kids on my Skype Pro service using my new headset.  My 8 year old was barfing last night and I wanted to make sure the little fella was okay.  He’s skinny as a rail so he doesn’t have the fat stores to lose like his dear-ole-dad.  He’s doing much better.  Skype is really cool.  I just wish they would fix the caller ID and the call forwarding features here in the USA.

Before we headed out to dinner, I had a nice conversation with Jeff Quan who is presenting Thursday on “Getting Started in 3D Graphics”.  What a cool guy.  It was very nice talking with him and picking his brain.  I might have to sit in on his presentation even though I have almost no interest with 3D graphics.

We headed out to the Alamo Drafthouse for a viewing of the movie “Back to the Future”.  But this is no ordinary movie showing.  There were comedians joking to the movie.  Think MST3K.  Hilarious.  While the movie was being shown, we were served food and drink.  I had a yummy burger and a Coke.  I was laughing almost the whole time.

After returning to the hotel, I was picking Paul’s brain on the state of technology and we covered all sorts of disciplines.   We’re both interested in more information on Yuma by  Joe Strout and Brad Weber.  I think they’re presenting on this at 10am on Friday.  I’m gonna have to catch that one!

Damn.  How did it get so late?  I’m hitting the hay.  More fun tomorrow!