Shedding Some Light

I am waiting for Igor Vit to arrive here at Sea-Tac so I thought I would check out the AT&T; Wi-Fi. It works great and since I am an AT&T; customer for my DSL at home I get to use it just by logging in. Nice.

While in Seattle this weekend I will be going down to Portland to reduce the states to visit to two.
Igor and I are hoping to visit Mt. St. Helens and a quick drive by Mt. Rainer tomorrow if the roads are open. Fortunately I stopped by my local AAA office before coming out here or I would not have known the roads into both National Parks are often closed in the winter by the heavy snow. If we cannot get into the parks we will drive up the peninsula to see another part of the state neither of us have visited.

Then back to Seattle tomorrow night to join up with the rest of the VFP MVPs for a fun week with Microsoft. I doubt I will be blogging much about the MVP Summit, because I likely signed something saying I can’t.

Have a good week.

I swear this must be a full moon as my software frustrations with Palm and likely Microsoft continue today…

I get home this evening. I have a list of 24 things to do before I leave for the airport in the morning to head to Seattle. I check the mail and see a postcard from Palm telling me to immediately download a Daylight Savings Time (DST) patch for my one year old Treo 700W. Great, just what I need. Last weekend I spent an hour updating all my computers with the XP DST patch, now I have to get the phone updated with no time to do it.

I pop open the PC and download email and set up my phone to sync using ActiveSync 4.1, which is the version I got with the phone. I just installed it on my new machine several weeks ago. I get an email from Palm noting that I better update my Windows Mobile machine with the DST patch. This email was delivered at 7:07pm EST, after the workday on the day before the new Daylight Savings Time kicks in here in the USA. Less than 37 hours before the deadline. Who decided this was a good idea?!?!?

Reading through the steps I have to upgrade to ActiveSync v4.5. So I do. I follow the steps as I am instructed as a good user should. What does this get me? How about a whole new Active Sync profile. What does this mean? It means that the PC and the phone are being completely reintroduced to each other as if they never met before. What the heck?!?!? Shouldn’t one think it should perform an upgrade when you go from 4.1 to 4.5 and it would use the same settings? Thanks Microsoft, nice work.

So now I have to reset all my options and make sure I don’t lose anything. Never the case though as SplashID (tool I use to store all my passwords) dumped the database. I have to reconnect it to the phone, cross my fingers and pray the passwords stored on my phone sync back to the now empty database on my phone. Fortunately I recovered all the information and was able to recall a password I changed just before I left a client today.

Thanks for making my night Palm and Microsoft. What are you guys thinking? Just in Time compiles are one thing, but Just in Time Deployments (JITD) are INSANE. All I got to say is: this patch better work!!!! Can’t wait to see how all this works Sunday morning.

And don’t even get me started on the moron congress people who thought this was such a great idea. I doubt they had even a slight clue on the impact they had the day they voted for the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Before this little detour the only thing I did on my list was eat dinner. Twenty-three items to go. No problem, my flight is not until 9:30am. Argh.

Out of all the changes to Microsoft Office 2007, the big hit or the app most important to me is Outlook. I spend probably too much time in Outlook, so any improvements would be great. Unfortunately I have hit a few “features” that are real frustrating.

The first is the appearance of Outlook locking up during a Send/Receive pass. I have a dozen email addresses designed to get email to Outlook. All of them are POP3. When I used Outlook 2003 I would never even know a pass was in process unless the desktop alerts popped up. I could interactively use Outlook to get contact information, manage tasks, etc. while the pass was in process. Outlook 2007 is completely different. I cannot do anything until the pass is more than 50% complete. This is a huge frustration because I really live in Outlook.

The second frustration is how Microsoft changed the email flags. There are colorized email flags and there are contact categories, and calendar labels in Outlook 2003 and earlier. Now there are colorized categories, and flags represent due dates. Previously I set up email flags to mean things (red – hotlist, blue – developer tools, orange – home, and so on). I set up a couple of Search folders in my favorites list so I could easily track these things. Now all my flags are categories (which is okay, but I have to reset them to something meaningful), and my red flags have become due today items.

I also colorize my calendar items with the 2003 labels. I set up a handful of colors to mean different things. This really made finding events in the calendar simple and allowed me to balance my work and home life. Now the colors are tied to categories. So my blue developer tools color for email conflicts with my blue White Light Computing color in the calendar. Outlook 2007 sees the colors as one category. What a pain in the back end.

It will take some time (which I have very little of this month) to re-categorize all my emails, tasks, and calendar items. Along with the Daylight Savings Time correction, I am not sure Outlook and my Treo are ever going to synchronize. {g}

The last frustration is the themed appearance of the title bar. It does not follow the normal Windows title bar colors. To me it is hard to determine visually which window is active and which windows are not. In particular the problem is accentuated when I have an email window open on top of the main Outlook window. I am sure the usability studies tested this out, but I find it extremely frustrating when I accidentally click on the menu of the main window when I want to work with the email window. This is a time waster. I have not seen any settings in the Options dialog box, but I might have overlooked the setting.

I am hoping to talk to someone at Microsoft next week while I am in Redmond for the almost- annual MVP Summit to see if there is a fix in the works for the send/receive pass lock-up and how I can easily work around my flags/categories issue.

Today we posted the open call for speakers for Southwest Fox…

Southwest Fox 2007 (October 18-21 in Mesa, AZ, www.swfox.net) is looking for speakers. The conference is focused on Visual FoxPro and sessions should fit into one of the following tracks:

• Working with Sedna and SP2: This track will cover the new features and changes introduced in Sedna and in VFP 9 Service Pack 2.
• Extending VFP (including VFPX, COM, etc.): The sessions in this track will cover technologies that extend VFP’s capabilities, such as those in VFPX.
  
• Reviewing VFP Fundamentals: This track will appeal to those newer to VFP, whether they are just moving up from earlier versions of FoxPro, or coming from other languages.
• Integrating VFP (with SQL Server, .NET, etc.): This track will look at using VFP together with other products, including back-end servers, Automation servers, and .NET.
• Managing the Software Business: This track will offer business advice to VFP developers, including managing clients, the software development process, and so forth.

If you’re interested, click on the Call for Speakers link at http://www.swfox.net/speakers.html. Please read the entire document before submitting session proposals. All proposals are due by March 26; speakers and topics will be announced May 1, 2007. Send any questions to speakers@swfox.net.

I got an email from Kevin Cully this morning and see on ProFox the FoxForward 2007 conference has been formally announced for September 7-9, 2007. The conference will be held in Alpharetta, Georgia. All the details for the conference including the call for speakers, hotel, and registration costs can be found on the conference Web site.

Congrats Kevin and as I mentioned in my email to you this morning, I hope FoxForward is a huge success!

I am sick as a dog today. The cold I had before going to Australia got a little better while I was attending OzFox, and now is worse. I am sure it has everything to do with the lack of sleep, the changing of time zones in rapid fashion, and various other levels of stress inflicted on my human body. So I finally broke down and visited a doctor this morning.

She was very nice to me, only drawing what seemed like a pint of blood and beating my chest with radiation for an x-ray. Nothing found, just a simple bad cold. She then proceeded to tell me traveling is not for the weak of heart and gave me twenty or so tips for long flights. Sure would have been nice if she could have emailed these to me two weeks ago.{g}

Anyway, one of the medications she gave me is cough medicine. I already have a cough so I figured this would be unnecessary. My wife corrected my thinking that this was anti-cough medicine. Strange, that is not what the bottle says. There is another huge mistake on the bottle. These are the direct instructions:

Take 1 or 2 teraspoonfuls every 6 hours

I ask my wife as she drives me home, what is a teraspoonful? Is that like a 1000 gigaspoonfuls? So I call the pharmacy and ask the pharmacist the same two questions. He laughs at my geek humor. I like this guy even though he is a drug pusher. {g}

Thought I would blog about this before I take the next dose. The last one triggered an all afternoon nap. During the nap I recall taking two customer calls, but don’t remember a thing we talked about. This is some powerful stuff. Heck, I may not even recall posting this blog entry.

Southwest Fox 2007

October 18-21, 2007
Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center in Mesa, Arizona
http://swfox.net

It is our pleasure to announce the fourth annual Southwest Fox Conference, presenting the latest in Microsoft Visual FoxPro development techniques, new changes in VFP 9.0 SP2, Sedna Components, and interop with other technologies with sessions from some of the best and the brightest VFP speakers.

This highly acclaimed and popular conference is the perfect venue for VFP developers interested in learning more about VFP, further refining their software development skills, learning how to better run a consulting firm or IT department, and being a better software craftsman. To this end, there will be sessions available in the following tracks:

1) Working with Sedna and SP2:
This track will cover the new features and changes introduced in Sedna and in VFP 9 Service Pack 2.

2) Extending VFP (including VFPX, COM, etc.):
Sessions in this track will cover technologies that extend VFP’s capabilities, such as those in VFPX.

3) Reviewing VFP Fundamentals:
This track will appeal to those newer to VFP, whether they are just moving up from earlier versions of FoxPro, or coming from other languages, or are new to a specific area of VFP.

4) Integrating VFP (with SQL Server, .NET, etc.):
Sessions in this track will look at using VFP together with other products, including back-end servers, Automation servers, and .NET.

5) Managing the Software Business:
This track will offer business advice to VFP developers, including managing clients, the software development process, and so forth.

The call for speakers will go out shortly and the initial speakers and their sessions will be published when registration opens on May 1st.

If you are interested in more details for the conference you can send them to info@swfox.net.

You will also notice that Southwest Fox is under new management. After three very successful years under Bob Kocher’s management, Southwest Fox is now being organized by Visual FoxPro MVPs Rick Schummer, Doug Hennig and Tamar E. Granor. We look forward to continuing the great traditions of Southwest Fox, and building on some new ones too.

More details can be found at www.swfox.net.

We look forward to seeing you in Arizona in October!