Shedding Some Light

Over the last 10 months I have been complaining loudly about Outlook and how it has frustrated me because of a few issues with performance. Several of my friends have recommended to me to use Web mail to handle my email. Centrally processed, backed up on a remote server, and accessible from anywhere in the world. All valid and tempting reasons for sure, but there are several reasons why I won’t ever use Web mail:

1) All the email resides on a server and the server has limits of 10MB for my host. I can probably pay to get this bumped to a higher limit, but I have 10 years of historical emails in Outlook and my main PST file and archives totally more than 3.0GB.

2) I don’t control my own data. All my contacts, all my folders, all my emails. If the server is not backed up correctly it could all get deleted. Worse yet, what happens when I am not happy about the hosting provider, how would this information get moved to a new hosting company and server?

3) In general Web mail stinks. It is definitely not as rich as the Outlook interface and not as powerful with respect to rules to file email to folders. I do use Web mail when I am away from my computer or don’t have wireless Internet access except through my phone. Handling email via the phone is a task, but usable when I have too (like sitting in an airport, or stuck in a traction machine at the chiropractor, or waiting between appointments).

I don’t always read Robert Scoble these days as I find most of what he is talking about irrelevant to me, but occasionally I will scan his post topics to see if something interesting comes up. Some of his recent posts have been quite interesting about how he broke the terms of one of the social networking services and had everything erased from his account and was locked out. Photos, video, and things other people posted. Almost as if it came right out of a science fiction movie. Scary!

How much data is out there on the Web that is out of the control of the users? I am guessing a lot. Granted, having access to the information from any computer is cool and productive. My wife is the perfect example: she does not really have her own computer. So she rotates to any computer in the house that is open to check her email. I occasionally back up her contact list to CSV format and download a copy to the server. She would be unhappy if her email evaporated one day, but life would go on for the most part. Nothing mission critical.

There is no way in heck I would allow other companies to control my data. Not my business data, and not my personal data. This is exactly why I use a program on my computer to control my email, and why I have a word processor and spreadsheet program locally. I am not a future customer of Google Apps.

Even though my blog is handled through Blogger, all my posts are posted to my hosted Web site, and yes, I do back those up so they do not evaporate one day.

I will not rely on online backup services to protect my backups. I handle them myself. If there is anyone to blame for losing something, all I have to do is look in the mirror.

Data is too important to trust to someone else. I do not want to be the victim of erasure like Robert Scoble.

My ongoing battles with Outlook have eased a little since installing Office 2007 SP1 on New Year’s Day, but it is still slower at getting POP3 email than Outlook 2003. So I guess a small hurray is in order.

I was hoping for dramatic improvements since reading some of the fixes listed for the SP1 update. At least the “freeze” I experience when getting email is minimal after the update. I can scroll my list of folders with very little interference and I have only experience my typing lock up a couple of times for a couple of seconds when composing an email when a download pass is in process. The download of the email is faster, but not as fast as 2003. At least I don’t get the 30-60 second lockups, and the first pass of email in the morning can happen in a couple of minutes instead of the normal 15-20 minutes.

I am looking forward to testing this out on my Vista machine to see if the performance is any better. The other good news is I have not experienced any new bugs. At least so far. {g}

Each time a new version of VFP is released I look at all the new commands and functions to see how I might be able to incorporate them into my user applications and developer tools. Each time I have found some function or command that makes me scratch my head and wonder what the Fox Team had in mind. For VFP 9 this was MAKETRANSACTABLE().

At least this is how I felt about this command up to a month ago. I received a new mini-project from one of my clients who needed a basic import of some accounting data from an external program into their custom app. The external table was a free table created and/or updated by another program. The new records needed to be imported into another DBF contained in a database container. Once the records are imported I needed to stamp them as imported in the free table. Hmmm, sounds like something I would want to do inside a transaction, but I have this free table… ah, finally the perfect reason to use MAKETRANSACTABLE().

The funny thing about this is I have never tried the new command to see if it works {g}. It is rare for me to work with free tables in a production environment. Normally I work with SQL Server, or VFP contained tables.

So I tested it out and it does indeed work, and it works well. The odds of the import not working is very, very remote because I am only adding the new records to the database table (no updates of existing records), but I thought the extra security of doing it inside a transaction was worth the extra couple of commands to add to the code.

Here is some of the code so you can understand fundamentally what I did.

TRY  USE (toParameter.cFeedFile) IN 0 EXCLUSIVE ALIAS (toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)  SELECT (toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)  INDEX ON TimPe TAG TimPe   * Allow the free table to work in a transaction

  MAKETRANSACTABLE(toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)

 * Set buffering so entire table gets updated or can be reverted  CURSORSETPROP("Buffering", 5, toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)  **** Open other tables...

CATCH TO loException  toParameter.lOpenedAll = .F.  toParameter.cTableUpdatedFailureMsg = "Failed opening tables - " + ;                                    loException.Message ENDTRY

*** Handle processing of tables...

* Start a transaction so all changes can be backed out.

BEGIN TRANSACTION

toParameter.lDatabaseFileTableUpdatedResult = ;TABLEUPDATE(.T., .F., toParameter.cDataBaseFileAlias)

IF toParameter.lDatabaseFileTableUpdatedResult * Continue on with the feed table update  toParameter.lFeedFileTableUpdatedResult = ;  TABLEUPDATE(.T., .F., toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)   IF toParameter.lFeedFileTableUpdatedResult * All changes committed    END TRANSACTION  ELSE * Record why    AERROR(laError)    toParameter.cTableUpdatedFailureMsg = laError[2]  ENDIFELSE * Record why  AERROR(laError)  toParameter.cTableUpdatedFailureMsg = laError[2]ENDIF 

* Determine the way to finish up.IF toParameter.lDatabaseFileTableUpdatedResult AND ;  toParameter.lFeedFileTableUpdatedResult * All went well and is commitedELSE  * Problems and rollback  ROLLBACK   TABLEREVERT(.T., toParameter.cDataBaseFileAlias)  TABLEREVERT(.T., toParameter.cFeedFileAlias)  toParameter.nRecordsInserted = 0 ENDIF

RETURN

I think it is cool when there are others that have a vision to incorporate things into Visual FoxPro that hit me years later how I can use them.

This is slightly off topic, so if you don’t want to read a rant about Michigan and the idiots who run this state: move along to the next blog. If you want to understand how hard it is to run a software development business or get a better understanding of what your employer faces from time-to-time, read on.

Running a high tech business in the state of Michigan is hard enough without being impacted by people in government who most likely never ran a business. Companies are closing up all over Michigan and a lot of the reason is Michigan is suffering through a one state recession. While the leadership in Lansing cannot be blamed for the decisions of companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler for laying off more than 100,000 people, I do blame them for the decisions made that are further hurting the state economy. Here is a fine example.

White Light Computing has been in business for nearly four years. During this time the company has paid unemployment insurance at various rates based on the length of time the company has been in business. The first two years the rate was 2.7% for the first US$11,200 of salary, and last year it dropped to 1% based on the fact my company has not pushed a single person on the unemployment line. As a reward for this, as White Light enters its fifth year (according to the state 2008 is year five) the company gets a 50% increase on unemployment insurance. This means an extra US$56 per person on the payroll. While the impact is minor to White Light Computing, imagine being a restaurant owner with lots of lower wage employees and getting a 50% increase just for surviving the first four years in the nations worst economy. How about automotive supplier who already has the slimmest of profit margins to work with and a huge staff on the assembly line?

The people who run this state are complete morons. I called the agency in charge of increasing my rate and their only defense was “it is only a half percent increase, not a 50% increase.” And people say they will never use the math they learned in school. Sheesh.

http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com

Mindboggling.

The publishing industry in general has faced some troubling times in the last couple of years. This can be witnessed in spades in the Fox Community as we have all watched both FoxTalk and The Advisor Guide to Microsoft Visual FoxPro literally go away. FoxTalk is still published, but is continuing printing the “best of” articles. Advisor collapsed the majority of their technical magazines into Databased Advisor and nearly tripled the price. Both of these situations are sad. I still have active subscriptions to both publications, but I do not intend to renew either of them.

So this leaves a huge gap in the community. There are authors who are getting jittery with extra time on their hands each month and no outlet to get articles published. They could resort to blogging, but long blog entries are not fun to read (at least to me), and often hard to take with you to the reading room, or on a plane or train. More importantly they are not necessarily permanent. Bloggers change services, RSS feeds only hold so many posts, and the authors have the right to pull their posts. Magazines (paper or electronic) are delivered to me and I can keep them as long as they are useful.

It would be nice if there was a publication that would focus on FoxPro. A great magazine the entire Fox Community could subscribe to for state-of-the-art and timely information, and techniques for our favorite development tool and language. I would subscribe in a heartbeat.

Rainer Becker, the newest Lifetime Achievement awardee is stepping up and creating a new magazine called FoxRockX (pronounced Fox Rocks). He has convinced some of the regulars you have come to enjoy reading to produce some new content for this magazine. He has lined up some excellent regular topics on the Sedna extensions, VFP 9 SP2, VFPX, business topics, deep dives into development, Vista, extending with .NET, new tools, tips and tricks, Guineu, and is resurrecting the KitBox column. I am sure there are going to be many more topics as time goes on.

I am very excited by this development in the Fox Community and am glad I am able to help out with getting this magazine started. I have already sent in one article on VFPX and plan on doing more articles that deep dive into the various VFPX projects and tools being developed by developers in our community.

I am glad Rainer has been working on this because I was starting to plan again how to start my own venture in publishing I knew I did not have the amount of time and energy it was going to take and still keep White Light Computing running properly.

FoxRockX will have subscriptions in electronic and print (print is naturally more). All the details will be posted soon and the magazine will start in early 2008. Thanks to Rainer for heading this up and to all the individuals who are pouring their creative and administrative energies into this new venture. I hope everyone in the Fox Community can support this magazine. It will only be successful if people back it by subscribing to it as soon as they can. I hope Rainer can count on your support.

Sorry for the long absence from the blogosphere.

I am digging out of a huge backlog of customer work, recovering from a neck full of unaligned vertebrates (literally a pain in the neck) from a slip on the ice, working on some long avoided home improvements because of neglect, assorted hardware problems, wrapping up some to-do items for Southwest Fox 2007, working with conference center for next year, tiding up the office, and the inevitable onslaught of the holidays.

Heck, I have not even had time to setup the new Vista laptop that arrived a few weeks back. I did however connect my new Dell 24 inch LCD monitor (yes it is very sweet and highly recommended if you need extra light in the office {bg})!

I am also working on some cool new things for the Fox Community (more coming in the next blog post).

Happy New Year to all. I wish each of you a very healthy, extraordinary, and extremely prosperous 2008 with your favorite developer tools and environment, what ever platform you have chosen. Fox Rocks!

It is not bad enough that most Dilbert strips represent some past life experience I have had (or maybe something for my future), but now the guy is looking into my closet and blogging about it.

Read: Free T-Shirts

Today I am wearing a TechSmith SnagIt T-Shirt under my Southwest Fox Speaker sweatshirt. I am pretty confident that every t-shirt in my closet has some geek company or conference logo, and everyone of them were free.