On September 22nd, Google is updating their requirements for the feed they accept for their Merchant accounts. We were successfully uploading over 6,000 items into their feeds previously and I needed to check that our feed would be accepted.

Luckily for me, Google recently added the ability to ‘test’ the data feed. I tried our old feed: 0 (zero) items imported. After taking a closer look at the new requirements, basically there was a re-arranging of the deck chairs. I created a new data feed, with new captions and a couple of their new required fields. Still 0 (zero) items imported.

After scaling down my test from 6,000+ items to 10, I was able to quickly turn test iterations around and found the simple solution to get the import to work. The past data feed required double quotes around strings in their TAB delimited format. This new format requires that there not be any double quotes at all. Basically the TAB character does all delineation between fields. Make sure that none of your fields include a TAB character in any of the strings or you’ll lose that record on the import.

Simple solution but it took me a small bit to figure out the difference from the old feed to the new one. I hope this post saves you a few minutes as well.

No graphics show in Real Studio IDE on Ubuntu 11.04

A small problem however. No graphic images show up in the Real Studio interface. I switched Ubuntu back to GNOME classic thinking it may have been the Unity interface causing the problem. No good. The images in the IDE still were not showing up. Perhaps it was because I did an “Upgrade” from 10.10 to 11.04.

This upgrade takes a LOOOONG time because of the download time to get all of those files. I recommend doing a fresh install of Ubuntu. By downloading using a torrent, the ISO comes down in minutes. Install onto a flash drive and an install takes about 30 minutes total. With the upgrade route, you’re looking at a couple of hours.

I did a fresh install of 11.04 and still no good. I did a fresh install of 10.10 and … the images were there. I liked GNOME better than the current Unity interface anyway.

Please don’t think I’m bad mouthing Real Studio. William Yu responded quickly to my posting on the forum and they’ll be looking into it and will probably have it corrected for Real Studio 2011 release 2. Especially if I help them test in the next beta cycle. Yup, I can be of help for the issues that affect me. This is a situation where the rapid release cycle, and an open beta-testing program really helps.

This issues, I’m sure are a small one. Probably having to do somehow with the internal representation of pathing to the graphics that appear in the IDE. Straighten that out and Real Studio is back in business. In the mean time, hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 if you do development in Linux until the next release.

I received an email from them describing the World Archives Memory Project.

The World Memory Project uses software and processes developed by the Ancestry World Archives Project, an established community that has spent years helping to preserve historical documents and make them available online for free.
It starts with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum creating digital images of historical documents. Then, using special software developed by Ancestry.com, contributors like you help make these documents searchable online by typing or “keying” information from the digital images into a database.

Cool. I love to give back. I’d love to be able to help others research their forefathers, especially when it will be made available for free. I’m a good typist and I can code tags or whatever is needed. I’m ready to sign up and get more information on what I need to do…

The software is Windows only. Dang. Really? This is 2011. They describe that Mac users need to run this in a Virtual Machine. I’m a big Linux user and I could do the same thing but … dang. I know they’ve just lost a *LOT* of their contributors right there! A good number of their potential customers won’t know what a virtual machine is, even though Parallels is pretty easy.

I was hoping to be able to type in the information in OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then paste it into a web form, or even use some sort of AJAXy web application to enter the information. If I’ve got to start up a Virtual Machine, and probably one just to install this software on, and *then* hope it submits correctly to their service, well, that’s too much work.

I’m disappointed. I was hoping to be able to help some people out but I’m thinking this is too much work now. I’ve got a business to run, and I already volunteer a lot of my time to charity. I’m sorry customers of World Archives Project! It’s a darn shame.

notify-send -t 10 "Header" "Body"

After Googling around for a while, I ran across a message board confirming what I was suspecting. Evidently this has been the behavior since 2009 at least and people are asking for a change in the documentation.

I would agree that the documentation should be changed to reflect the current state of the command. I’m a bit sad that this change has been needed for several years now and someone hasn’t been able to get the change in the documentation, or better yet, change the command so the notification timeout is honored.

I hope this helps someone else confirm this behavior more quickly than I was able.

I’ll be speaking on “REAL Studio for the VFP Developer”. As all of you know, I love me some Visual Foxpro. The Visual Foxpro development team has done an incredible job with that product over the many many years of it’s active development. Thank you Fox Software! And yes, a big ‘Thank You’ to MicroSoft for version 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and (especially) 9 of Visual Foxpro! Many, many sincere gratitudes go out to all of the VFPX developers as well keeping the progress of the open-sourced parts of Foxpro going! The hard labors of genius developers are moving Foxpro forward.

So, what you won’t hear at my presentation in May is that I want you to abandon Visual Foxpro for REAL Studio.

What you will hear, is that I do think you should add REAL Studio to your development toolbox. I found that my Visual Foxpro skills and Visual Foxpro mindset is a natural fit for the REAL Studio development environment. I find that joy in development that I have doing Visual Foxpro, I can also have in REAL Studio.

What I’ll be going over in the presentation:

• How VFP and REAL Studio compare
• What are the strengths of REAL Studio
• What are the weaknesses of REAL Studio
• Development ‘gotchas’ in REAL Studio
• How to build a desktop application from scratch
• How to call one window from another
• How to access databases
• How to create and run a report
• How to build for target Linux, Mac and Windows platforms
• A small bit about building Web Applications with REAL Studio
• More!

If you are in the Detroit area, on Thursday May 12th, please stop in and say ‘hello’!

I’m very unsatisfied with my answer. In the end, the “I don’t know” and “We’ll never know” is the ultimate answer but lets take a closer look at why that is the case.

Let me start off by saying that I have only ever purchased one copy of Visual Foxpro. One. Ever. So I get counted as “1“. To make matters worse, I believe that version was Visual Foxpro 9.0 when it was first released and I got some sort of huge discount at the time. I admit that I have been a professional Foxpro and Visual Foxpro developer since about 1992 and I have only purchased one version of Visual Foxpro and it was one of the last versions that Microsoft has published. I will posit that I have been a legal Foxpro owner all along.

The ultimate reason is how Foxpro and Visual Foxpro was sold. In the early days Foxpro was sold stand alone. All of those years, each company that I was employed with purchased a copy of Foxpro per developer. I wasn’t the independent consultant at that time. At that time, counts of Foxpro developers were possible.

Once Visual Foxpro 5.0 came along, it was bundled with Visual Studio. Yes, you could purchase Visual Foxpro stand-alone but it made best financial sense to just purchase all of Visual Studio. By Microsoft’s own admission, they didn’t count a sale of Visual Studio as a ‘user’ of Foxpro. However, if I recall correctly they *did* count them as users of Visual Basic.

Soon, Microsoft came out with their MSDN subscription which basically was a mountain of CDs of every OS, development tool, and piece of software produced by Microsoft. To have a years worth of updates for Windows, SQL Server along with Foxpro was very appealing. Again, many many developers and companies purchased the MSDN subscription and the Foxpro developers went uncounted.

By the time I went on my own as an independent consultant, Microsoft has the ‘Empower’ program. It was basically the MSDN program but for small business owners and software developers intent on creating and selling software products. I subscribed to that for many years and was never counted as a Foxpro developer.

Lets take a look for a moment at Foxpro itself. Foxpro doesn’t require registration with Microsoft. It doesn’t phone home. There is a way to report errors back to Microsoft, but that’s optional. Most of the time, I don’t report my Foxpro crashes/errors back to Microsoft. Bottom line, is that Foxpro can be pirated without Microsoft knowing. China is a huge user of Foxpro based on some indicators but their sales of Foxpro is almost non-existant. Not too many sales of Microsoft products in China either. There are a lot of Foxpro developers in Russia and the Eastern European countries.

Heck, there’s a lot of Foxpro developers all over the world. The database power, and low system requirements of VFP make it a great low, middle, and high power development tool.

Being a member of the Atlanta Foxpro Users Group, I know there are hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of Foxpro developers in Georgia alone … but we never see them. We’ll see people who have lost their job, they come to one meeting, get a new job even programming with Foxpro, and we never see them again. Frustrating. Don’t programmers want to work on developing their skills in their ‘art’?!?!

I digress.

Is there a way to count Foxpro developers? I don’t think so. We’re many but we’ll never know how many. Any other ideas on how to get a true count of Visual Foxpro developers?

End Function

You can see that there are many parameters passed to the CellTextPaint method of the ListBox object. In my example, I was adding a “” as a flag to the RowTag of the listbox. If the rowtag had that flag, it was a refund and we set the graphics object to have a forecolor of a dark red, and set the Italics to be true.

What originally threw me is that I have to think of g (Graphics object) as the “row”. A bit misleading but you can see it is very easy to adjust the font on a listbox. I hope this helps someone out! Even if it’s a future version of me!

While setting it up, one of the tools I have to install is REAL Studio (REALbasic). Well, the DEB file says it won’t install because it isn’t 32bit Linux. I’ve installed it on 64bit Linux before but I hadn’t published the notes so this is a great opportunity to get caught up. Here are the simple steps I followed:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs


If you are going to be using the HTML Viewer in your application, make sure to run:
sudo apt-get install libwebkit*


Then download the latest REAL Studio TGZ file to your local hard drive. Then from the command prompt launch Nautilus as administrator:
gksudo nautilus

My file was downloaded to /home/kcully/Downloads, so I navigated there and double clicked on the REAL Studio TGZ file. This opened up the “Archive Manager”. I clicked the “Extract” button and extracted the files into the /opt/ folder. This is where REAL Studio is normally installed to when using the DEB files so I figure it’s good to keep consistent with the normal installation. Once extracted, the REAL Studio application was already marked as an executable. I just created a launcher for my toolbar and I’m ready to rock! REAL Studio launched, I entered my license information and I’m good to go.

I hope this helps out fellow REAL Studio Linux developers!

ctEggTimer v1.6 for Winders
ctEggTimer v1.6 for Linux

Today was different, however. I am working on an application that needs to validate a domain name. I should note that this is just for US based domain names so I haven’t coded it for Unicode. That’s for another day. Take a look how easy it is to do in Real Studio:

DIM cDomainName AS String = "Reg+#(Ex Is Hard, and you!can'tClean$This*@*(#String"
DIM cNewDomain AS String = ""
DIM oRegEx AS NEW RegEx
oRegEx.SearchPattern = "[^A-Za-z0-9-.]" // Basically allow any alphanumeric characters plus a dash and a dot
oRegEx.ReplacementPattern = ""
oRegEx.Options.ReplaceAllMatches = True
cNewDomain = oRegEx.Replace( cDomainName )


There. I’m a RegEx expert! Right?!?! Perhaps not. But this is a great simple introduction to RegEx for us mere-mortals.