Shedding Some Light

I want to start out by stating the German DevCon has already lived up to the hype I was given before I arrived. The sessions have been exceptional, and the food – well this could be a blog all by itself {g}.

I started out the day sitting in on Doug Hennig’s Mining for Gold in XSource. I learned several new things, but the topic that stands out is the exposure he provided on the Builder framework included in XSource. I recall hearing about this before, but it was simply explained during this session and Doug showed how you can build a simple, yet powerful builder in less than five minutes. Now I have to update my Builders Made Easy session, which I am giving on Saturday.

Ken Levy provided the keynote at the conference. I skipped this since I have seen Ken do the keynote at several conferences this year. There was a lot of positive feedback after the session during lunch so I can only assume it was good.

My first session went okay. Deployment is a dry material session and it was scheduled right after a big lunch. Tough to do on the best of days. One of the things I learned during my session is to never give a session that depends on interaction with the attendees in the audience in Germany. After I submitted this session for consideration I learned the German speaking attendees typically do not ask questions during English speaking sessions. The session went fine, but did not meet my high standards. Fortunately, the other three sessions I am giving do not depend as heavily on the interaction.

The next session I attended was Dan Jurden’s Introduction to SQL Server Reporting Services. I have wanted to get an introduction to this product for a long time. Dan did a good job of introducing this topic and giving me the jumpstart to get this installed when I return home. The product looks promising and works with all kinds of data including SQL Server and VFP DBFs. Dan demonstrated several examples of creating reports via the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, but also ran the reports in a VFP form.

The last regular session of the day was Lisa Slater Nicholls’ Advanced VFP Reporting. It was a typical Lisa session. Enough said.

Well, off to dinner and probably adding another Kilo to the waistline and learning more about developing in VFP. More later…

Monday we headed to Cologne (Koln) and walked into the Cologne Cathedral. Wow. Wow. Wow. Last year I was in New York City and we walked into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which was impressive. But the gothic design, pure size, and number of relics inside the Cologne Cathedral just knocked me over. We also toured the treasury below the cathedral and I can say I never have seen so much gold and raw church history in one place in my life. The rest of the day was spent walking around the city and driving for the first time on the Autobahn (no new land speed records for me). I also got to experience the thick pea soup weather of western Germany.

Tuesday we headed to Trier and experienced the Trier Cathedral and Trier Basilica. They were both very impressive. We also walked around and under the oldest building in Europe (2000 years old). Now living in the United States, the oldest standing structure is probably the adobe houses out west and they are nowhere near 2000 years old. We are talking about a structure built around the time Jesus walked the Earth. How cool is that? We also visited an amphitheatre and a stadium where animals chased around people for entertainment purposes. I doubt that would have been much fun, but the stadium was interesting. I have taken more than 150 pictures since arriving here Saturday.

Oh, and another first, my first trip to Luxembourg (country number six). We needed to refuel the rocket, I mean the car, so we headed over to Luxembourg where diesel fuel is 20-30 cents cheaper per liter. I also purchased a Coke for good measure.

In case you are curious, Doug set his own personal land speed record driving 200 kph (on a long turn no less). Heck, I am almost getting use to the driving over here. {g}

Tuesday evening we stopped in to visit a couple of Jeff’s relatives who are going to put on a nativity scene show. We are talking about hundreds of nativity scenes from around the world on display in a tent which use to be a indoor tennis court. All the profits from this five week show will go to a children’s cancer hospital. They have been working on this since July and use their six weeks of vacation to put this all together. Amazing.

Today we are going to take some pictures of the town we have stayed in for the last few days, then head out for some quick souvenir shopping. Once we say our good-byes to our generous hosts we head back to Frankfurt to get ready for German DevCon 2005. What a week this has been.

So yesterday (Sunday) was our first day of sightseeing here in Germany. Jeff’s aunt and cousin (Jeff works for Doug Hennig) drove us all around the Mosel valley in western Germany. We ate at great places (potato pancakes were fantastic), the weather beautiful (sunny all day), listened to a German band in a beer tent (not the best according to the locals), and the sites were spectacular (drove along the river and toured a castle in Cochem).

On the way home we drove on the Autobahn as we had earlier in the day. I was not driving. Actually I think it will take some time to get use to the style of driving here in Germany. The drivers here make the most aggressive drivers in Michigan look tame. Anyway, as I mentioned someone else was driving, but we hit 210 kilometers per hour (this is 130.4879504 mile/hour (mph) according to OnlineConversion.com). This is definitely the fastest I have ever traveled on the ground in this lifetime. So among other firsts (first time in Europe, first time in Germany, first trans-Atlantic flight, first time I have seen London from the air) on this trip I have a new personal land speed record, and I lived to tell about it. Fun day.

I flew to Germany Friday for German DevCon. This is my very first trip to Europe and so far it has been very enjoyable. I am already adjusted to the new time zone by default of not sleeping on the flight and only a one hour nap yesterday. The flight was fantastic and the view over the British Isles spectacular in the early morning. I will be spending the first half of the trip sightseeing with a couple of friends in western Germany, then heading to Frankfurt next Wednesday for the start of the conference. I am hoping to blog about the conference while I am here, but I just might be a bit busy with my four sessions and plenty more I want to attend. I will defnitely provide a summary upon my return. From what I have heard, this is suppose to be one of the best FoxPro conferences in the world. Have a good week.

Looks like basketball fans in Detroit are in for another good year of Pistons’ basketball . Terrific game to start off the new season. Already underrated by so many alleged experts. We have the rest of the league exactly where we want them. I am predicting a 60 win season if they stay relatively injury free. Sweeeeet.

Like Rick Borup, I am finding myself a bit overwhelmed with the influx of information from all the bloggers and RSS news feeds I am consuming in FeedDemon. Last week I realized my Scobleizer feed had not registered in a couple of weeks. Then I remembered Robert was moving his site.

It dawned on me that a couple weeks went by and I had not really missed this feed. Interesting. Should I remove the feed from my regular pulls? Nah, Robert posts gems once and a while and often points me to new blogs which are valuable. I also enjoy the risks he takes each day poking fun at the company he works for (Microsoft). I often find myself agreeing with the things he thinks they should be doing to better the company.

Today is a fine example: he points me to a blog I might have missed, The Dilbert Blog. Thanks to Scott Adams who adds humor to my life – subscribed!

Podcasters are creating some fantastic material and I really like to listen and learn from it, and to be entertained by it. The one common problem I have found with every single podcast is the sound level. The interviews and the discussion is usually at one level, and then there is the sound/music between segments. It feels like the decibel level jumps from 20 to 120 ( I know I am exaggerating just a little). I swear my eardrums are still hurting after listening to a couple of excellent shows done by Andrew MacNeill (FoxShow – with David Stevenson) and the new OzFoxRocks by Craig Bailey and Scott Scovell in the last couple of hours. It is not just the two Fox Podcasts with this problem, it is other ones I have listened to over the last few months. Today I just found some time to jot a post down on the blog.

This is a little gripe, and definitely not something that stops me from downloading and listening to the shows. I don’t want to discourage you from listening to the recordings. In fact, if you are not listening to these two podcasts you are missing out on great information.

I don’t know how you capture and listen to podcasts, but I download them to my PC using FeedStation (module of FeedDemon), copy them to a SD memory card, and then plug them into my SanDisk MP3 Player. I then listen to them while I drive around to clients or when I am traveling. So when one of these podcasts raises the level of the sound I typically don’t have my hand on the sound wheel, I have them on the steering wheel. So the pain I feel is instant and unavoidable.

So please podcasters, level out the sound level for everyone. It will make listening to your podcast a much better experience. My eardrums and teeth fillings thank you in advance.

I look forward to the 25th hour we get today/tomorrow when we shift back to normal time instead of daylight savings time. I see it as Mother Nature giving me back time it borrowed several months ago. Just wish we could collect interest on the time. I will be spending it watching a movie provided Therese is able to pick one up when she is out tonight (I gave her a short selection I was interested in). I always set my clocks back earlier in the evening so I mentally adjust to the shift.

One thing I learned a couple years ago is working on VFP projects during the time shift is not a good idea. Why? VFP looks at the compile time of the last build and sees the newly saved program as an older file so it does not need to be compiled. I figure it is just easier to read a book or watch a movie than worry about this for one hour every year. One of my favorite 25th hours was a few years ago at WhilFest. It was spent hanging out with the FoxGang.

Over on ProFox, several developers have been debating on the new legislation passed which lengthens the daylight savings time part of the year. Funny how a bunch of lame-brained politicians (I know, redundant) can create unintended hassles in our lives. I would be willing to bet our so called representatives had no thought or clue to the impact on computer users of older, no longer supported operating systems. Some developers are calling this a mini-Y2K. I think this is a bit over dramatic. The hassles this will cause businesses and home users will be trivial to fix, but a pain in the neck. I think the big deal with this is how it can directly impact data. I would hazard a guess that most database applications timestamp data. If one computer is running Windows 98 or even Windows 2000 and others are running Windows XP, some machines will get correctly updated and some will not. This means there potentially could be data corruption. Not a good thing.

I for one like how Windows automatically switches the clock for me. I wish all my clocks worked this way so I could save the 10 minutes it takes me to switch them all twice a year. So how many designers, developers and testers do you think Microsoft, Apple, and the Open Source teams will have on this project to change the code in Windows, OS X and Linux? Then there is all the mainframe operating systems, the Palm OS, and various other platforms. Who is going to beta test the changes? I guess I for one should be cheering this kind of change, after all, it is employing more developers and I see that as a good thing.

The real question is will they be able to get this change done in time for the spring forward of 2006? You would think this is a trivial fix, but what if the daylight savings time module is one of those modules with horrible code no one wants to touch? You know the type of code, we all have it hidden in our applications.