Shedding Some Light

I am very excited to announce Sybase iAnywhere is now a Gold sponsor of Southwest Fox 2007!

I was curious why a company like Sybase would like to sponsor our small and humble conference, but the folks at Sybase are very excited about coming and showing what they have to offer Visual FoxPro developers. They are expecting to make some big announcements at the conference. Cool.

You can check out the complete list of sponsors on the Southwest Fox 2007 sponsors page. Please help us show appreciation for all their support of the conference and Fox Community by visiting their pages, and checking out their offerings.

Two more days to get in on the early-bird registration, and 111 days until we meet in Mesa.

For those planning on going to FoxForward this year, you should consider registering by Saturday June 30th so you can save yourself a cool US$100. The price is only US$450 and is a terrific price considering the value you will get out of the conference. The clock is ticking…

Yesterday I was talking to a Lenovo/IBM Technician because I want to know what type of hard drive is in my laptop. I want to purchase a backup drive in case this one fails (part of my disaster recovery plan). The technician tells me I have a SATA drive. Great, MicroCenter is selling a Western Digital 200GB SATA laptop drive for US$60. I was floored by the price so I plan to buy two of them and increase the storage on my machine by 80GB. I need the room. {g}

Then she asks me why I want to know. I explain my requirements to have a back up drive. She goes off for a minute to do something and comes back with “the best drive we have is a 100GB 7200 rpm drive.”

No thanks IBM. She then tells me I have to purchase an IBM Drive because my Lenovo Z61P laptop only takes IBM components. What?!? Seriously?!? I ask her what the deal is, and what is it that possessed Lenovo to architect a laptop to only accept IBM components? Was she pulling my leg? I told her if this is true it is the last Lenovo laptop I am purchasing, period. She could not give me the exact details of why the laptop requires an IBM drive. In fact, I believe she does not know what she is talking about and is reading some script. Stoopid. She said the same thing about memory and I already put in third party memory into a Lenovo laptop.

Do you have a recent or not so recent ThinkPad, and have you upgraded your hard drive?

The fax line is taking a beating (compared to the usual one or two a month I get) and the emails are coming in quite often with the registrations for Southwest Fox 2007, the best Visual FoxPro conference being held in October this year! You can sense the early-bird deadline is approaching when we took in 5 registrations one day last week.

Just in case you have not heard, the early-bird discount is scheduled to expire on July 1st (this coming Sunday). Now is the time to save yourself US$75, get that freebie pre-conference session (US$99 savings and way more value considering the sessions available), AND possibly get a US$300 tuition scholarship for the conference from White Light Computing. Definitely a great deal. There are more surprises on the way too!

Your humble registration taker (me) appreciates all the attendees who already registered and did not wait until the last week because I really need to get *some* development done for my clients. Still, I am willing to work at all hours of the day to process the registrations as they arrive, so keep on sending them!

Doug, Tamar, and I are happy with the registrations so far, but we are expecting this to be a busy week with those who like to wait until the deadline to push the credit card process out as far as possible. We understand, but the clock is ticking and we hope you get in on the great deal we have on the table at the moment. We know VFP developers are familiar with deadlines and how to manage them. Mark your calendar, post the reminder in your calendar software, stick a note on the monitor, or even write on your hand if necessary, but get the registration form filled out and sent in.

While you are at it, invite a friend to come along. The more the merrier.

Don’t forget, if you need me to help you with the boss and getting her/him to send you to Southwest Fox, or any of the other VFP conferences – give me a call or send me an email. I will be happy to help you out.

I hope to see you in Mesa in 115 days!

For those who like to follow along with my current desktop image, I was able to update today to the latest configuration of the International Space Station (my summer place as I like to joke about).

I borrowed this beautiful picture on the NASA multimedia page.

As a side note: Atlantis is not landing today as planned because of bad weather. The plan is to try again tomorrow at Kennedy Space Center, and Edwards Airforce Base in California as a backup. They are doing a orbital burn to slow the shuttle orbiter down a bit to bring the landing in earlier when the weather is expected to be better.

It is interesting to listen to the interaction between the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. Checklists after checklists with step-by-step processes ensuring a successful flight. The thing I really notice is the number of “thanks” being passed around. I think the “thanks” part is really missing in business interaction these days, and something I have to remember to do more.

So thanks for reading my blog today {bg}.

After reading an email from Microsoft today about the two Window Vista logos I decided to ask Milind Lele if VFP 9 SP2 was going to be logoed with “Works with Windows Vista” or “Certified for Windows Vista.”

Milind said VFP 9 SP2 will get the “Works with Windows Vista” logo.

If you want more details on the logo you can head over to the Microsoft Vista Logo site.

Tonight I climbed up on the roof of my house with the intention of seeing the space shuttle Atlantis and International Space Station (ISS) fly over southeastern Michigan just before 11:00pm EDT. I missed them last night so I was bummed when I saw the horizon was cloud covered and the kids on the street behind us were blowing off some fireworks in the line of sight, but I was not disappointed!

The orbit took the two satellites from the northwest horizon to the southeast. They were only in the clear sky for a short time, maybe 10 seconds. It was an impressive site and well worth the effort. I probably could have seen the shuttle orbiter and space station from the ground, but the homes behind us are colonials and the orbit was 30 degrees off the horizon. I thought for sure the homes would block my view.

I am not sure which one was leading the other, but they are definitely on the same orbit and one was chasing the other. Atlantis is currently 10 nautical miles lower than ISS. It was definitely cool to see them. If you are interested in finding out when ISS is flying over your geographic location go to http://heavens-above.com/ and put in your location.

If you want the new Sedna DataExplorer to be the DataExplorer showing up in the Task Pane Manager you need to copy it from the Sedna Beta folder location to the VFP 9 root folder. You might want to rename the existing one before doing this in case you want the old one for some reason. For some reason I expected Microsoft to include the new DataExplorer in place of the old one, but the Sedna beta installs itself below the VFP root folder.

If you are tired of typing in a long path to run the DataExplorer in standalone mode you can do a couple of things to save you time:

1) Once you copy the DataExplorer.APP to the VFP 9 root folder you can type DX in the command window to run it in standalone mode.

2) You can edit the DX entry in FoxCode to run the DataExplorer.APP in the Sedna beta folder. To edit the script you need to bring up the IntelliSense Manager, go to the Custom page, find the DX entry and click on the Script button.

3) Type in the Command Window one of the two:
DO HOME() + “DataExplorer.app”
DO HOME() + “Sedna Beta\DataExplorer\DataExplorer.app”

Hopefully you are all testing the new Sedna extensions and VFP 9 SP2.