Shedding Some Light

There was no possible way I was not taking a couple of days off to see the beautiful sites of Sydney Australia while I am halfway around the world from our humble home in Michigan.

The flights from Detroit to LA and from LA to Sydney were pretty uneventful. Minor turbulence over the Pacific did wake me up a few times. I got about 4 hours of sleep on the leg to Sydney interrupted each time someone used the bathroom and locked the door. The good news is this was 4 hours more sleep than I expected. I watched a couple of movies and a couple of episodes of Quantum Leap (Season 1) I bought for the trip. It is one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

Sydney is gorgeous. Craig Bailey was a fantastic host on day one of our tour. He kindly picked us up at the airport. The city reminds me of Seattle because it is near a large harbor, close to the Pacific Ocean, has ferries, a bustling downtown, numerous tall buildings, mass transportation, people of all nationalities, and lots of coffee shops and restaurants.

As Doug mentioned in his post we got a sweet tour from Craig on Thursday after our arrival. We talked about the life down-under, VFP, conferences, VFP, running software businesses, the future of VFP, and our busy lives. A major highlight was the view from the Sydney Tower. We could see for miles as the weather was clear. I have always enjoyed going up the towers like the Seattle Space Needle, the Empire State Building in NYC, and CN Tower in Toronto. I am not sure I have seen a more spectacular view of a city. The end of the day was topped off by a fantastic dinner, and watching the Queen Elizabeth II leaving port just outside the restaurant.

Tuesday we let Craig get back to work on the conference and headed out on our own. The Taronga Zoo was fabulous. I have not been to many zoos, but the number of animals and the native Australian animals like wallaby (see Doug’s picture how close one came up to me), kangaroos, and koalas made my day. My pictures are still in my camera and I forgot the cable needed to bring them to my laptop. I’ll try to post them later including the one of the wallaby I caught up close when I return home.

Doug and I headed from the Zoo to the Olympic Park. In between we almost lost our lives when our ferry boat almost was taken out by a couple of sailboats that were tacking against a very strong wind. I have some great shots of these boats too (not the ones that almost rammed us). I am a big fan of the Olympics and really enjoyed the Sydney games in particular. We walked all over the complex and even went into the Aquatics Center where the swimming and diving events were held. The pools were filled with lots of people learning to swim. It is nice to know the venues are still in use today. We must have walked 10 miles on Friday and spent a lot of time in the sun. I was hoping this would help with the jet lag, but in my case it did not as I barely slept that night.

Saturday we were off to the Blue Mountains and the Jenolan Caves. Doug does a great job describing the trip. He mentioned the “somewhat white-knuckle road”, but did not mention the tunnel we went through where there is barely a foot in each side of the bus and the walls of the tunnel, and it winds around a bend. Nice driving by our driver Steve. The Lucas Cave. It reminded me of the time my family went to the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Lots of cool formations, lots of cool history, and a fantastic sound in the “Cathedral”. The cave is host to concerts and weddings in this dome that goes up to 168 feet from the floor. Coincidentally, back in Michigan my wife was at a Josh Groben concert with her sister taking my place. The music played in the cave was similar to Josh’s so the moment was a bit chilling for me. Fortunately, I grabbed a nap on the way back to Sydney.

Sunday I got up early after a decent 6 hour sleep. I wanted to rehearse my part of the keynote and my first couple of sessions. I have been waking up between 4:00am and 5:00am every day, regardless if I want to or not. Doug and I got together to fine tune the keynote and got ready for the conference to start.

I have had a little struggle with email and Internet connectivity here at the Vibe Hotel. The people have been great and helpful. The good news is the conference has wireless available and it appears to be working well.

I have met some developers I know from blogs and even a couple of customers of my developer tools. The Fox developers here are as friendly as the Aussies we met on our tour of Sydney. This should be a great conference. The trip certainly has started out with some unforgettable memories.

Last we left our humble hero, he was installing 100+ apps on his new ThinkPad and working on configuring many of them. The good news is I am mostly done and on my self-imposed pre-conference moratorium of not installing new applications with OzFox only 10 days away.

I have come up against a little glitch I have never seen before with a new machine. It is not a show stopper by any stretch of the imagination, but one that is irritating me every day. In my Windows Quick Launch toolbar I have short cuts to different versions of VFP. The weird thing is the VFP icon is the VFP 7 icon, not the VFP 8/9 icon for the VFP 8 and VFP 9 shortcuts. Even the icons for the VFP8.EXE and VFP9.EXE files are the older foxhead in Windows Explorer. Why?

If I try to change the icons in the shortcut properties I see all the icons inside of the VFP executable and the old foxhead is there, not the new foxhead. It smells of a registry problem, but I am not sure where to even start.

Has anyone else experienced this? I know I can use my own icons, but it would be nice not to workaround the issue if possible.

I have a streak of good luck when it comes to the stereotypical tech support call in the middle of the night. I have never taken an unexpected phone call from a customer between the hours of midnight and six in the morning. You know the call, the one that wakes you out of a slumber when the only thing you can think of is something bad has happened to someone you know! I have supported customers and users of my software in some way shape or form since January 1984. The streak really is 23 years.

I should say was 23 years – broken this weekend on Saturday morning at 2:01am.

Now I guess I should consider myself lucky, but the streak would still be alive if someone had done their job. I should have expected the call because of a conversation I had with the client earlier in the day Friday. His big concern with the latest conversion was that the end users were calling the Help Desk with requests for unsupported printers. I reported to him my concern is the onsite consultants and end users were not looking at the data we have converted for their review no less than 5 times before, including one last Tuesday. It was too quiet. I had repeatedly asked if the data looked good and got nothing but positive confirmation, but the signs were all there. You all know conversions are quirky, and every one of them is unique. This is the 21st different conversion I have run for this client and every one of them reveals something new. Data conversions are never smooth, never normal, and rarely clean, especially on the night they are processed for production.

Sure enough I get a call at 2:01am. I answer my phone on the second ring, which is real slow for me. Normally I get it on the half ring in the middle of the night, and definitely before the second ring starts. But I was dead tired and in the middle of an excellent dream that had nothing to do about coding or natural disasters. I asked who it was three times before I understood who was calling. Dead tired. Nothing like being greeted with “Hi Rick, the conversion you ran did not work. There is missing data and we think you pulled the wrong data or converted an older set of the files.”

Unlikely. Not that I am infallible (just ask my wife, kids, customers, friends, enemies, well – any human and even some non-humans), it is that I follow a process and the process has checks that make this nearly impossible. Things happen though, and I normally accept it as my problem. I am not a fan of finger pointing.

In the mean time while I was scrambling to determine what went wrong several emails went out to every important person on the planet for this project proclaiming my failure to process a clean conversion.

Come to find out there was data missing. Sure enough the review of the data showed certain records after January 11th did not get converted. But we ran a conversion on 1/30, strange? The fact is: if someone had reviewed Tuesday’s conversion the problem would have been recognized and the streak would be alive. The problem happened because someone did not follow the documented process and run a report that archived the data that we use in the conversion.

I really hate when that happens.

Not a single email was sent proclaiming the real reason for the failure. So my reputation takes a beating and the real troublemakers skate free without showing even a scratch. I am guessing they will get bonuses or some other recognition for finding the problem and getting the goofy Fox guy out of bed to fix his problem. Ah, the joys of being the hero. {g}

The good news is the conversion went into production on time, and I am on day two of my new streak.

I have a tradition about Super Bowl Sunday for the last four or five years, maybe more of watching the commercials, and usually kicking out some code or do something techy as I listen to the game (occasionally watching the replays). This year was no different.

I purchased a new laptop before Christmas. I am typing this blog entry with my old laptop. Goofy for sure!

The fact is I have been too darn busy cranking out VFP code, running conversions, doing sales calls, and preparing for conferences that I have not had time to load 100+ apps and configure everything to make the screaming ThinkPad Z61P anything more useful than a boat anchor running Windows XP Professional. OK, maybe it only takes 50 apps to make it useful, but I think I will have close to 110 apps loaded when I am done later this week.

I started out late in the afternoon recalling where I left off. Last I left the machine I finished installing IIS, and uninstalled all the unnecessary apps like Norton Anti-virus and Google Desktop Search and a few other cycle stealers.

I joined the White Light domain, installed AVG Network Anti-virus, installed the firewall on my server, installed ZoneAlarm Pro, upgraded to IE v7.0, and of course installed FireFox v2.0. I figure any one of these apps could take out the machine so if I have to rebuild, now is the time to destroy {g}.

Next was Office 2007 Enterprise. I have been a little reluctant to load it only because I probably don’t have the time to get adjusted to it at the moment. I was pleasantly surprised how fast it installed and I installed everything (2 GBs of everything). I opened up Word and activated it and started typing the paper log I was creating to a document this process. So far I am really liking the ribbon. Microsoft has made some subtle changes to it since I last saw it demoed and it looks like they were reading my mind on some of the things I disliked from a discoverability perspective. I am hoping the rest is going to be so pleasurable.

The next thing I installed is Visual FoxPro, starting a VFP 5 all the way to VFP 9 SP2 CTP. For some reason the Visual Studio 6 (VFP 6) install barfed and won’t let me install the Visual Studio 6 .0 SP5 disk. Not a big deal since I can just copy the VFP 6 directory from my old machine. I am a bit worried about the InterDev implications, but it should be okay.

I am probably 33% of the way to productively using the machine. A couple more nights this week should do it. It is not installing the apps that is a pain. It is the configuring them and getting data moved over for SQL Server, setting up all the ODBC connections, and getting all the Web sites up in IIS that is time consuming. I cannot take the new machine to production until I can certify my presentations work for OzFox and I can remotely support customers while in Australia in a couple of weeks. I am already bordering on breaking the new app installation rule so I will have to see how things go over the next couple of days.

Speaking of traditions…I was really disappointed in the Super Bowl commercials this year. Very little humor, and very little creativity. Nothing really stands out except the FedEx “outer space”, which I enjoyed the theme of going opposite of the dinosaurs, but still had one of the astronauts getting whacked like they did with the caveman getting whacked last year. The animated Coke commercial was good because of the pay-it-forward theme.

I received an email this evening from Christa at Advisor letting me know I will be speaking at the Advisor Summit from May 6 – 10, 2007 in Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel. Looks like my schedule will be a busy one with four different sessions:

• Professional Developer’s Toolkit
• Visual FoxPro Debugging Essentials
• VFPX Tools and Components – Live
• SQL Server Toolkit for the VFP Developer

I am not sure who else is speaking, but I am sure the line up will include some great sessions.

Last month at the Detroit Area Fox User Group, my friend Paul Mrozowski demoed a number of tools and tips he uses every day in his VFP and .NET development. It was a great presentation and one where I learned a number of new things. One of these tips is to use the Consolas font from Microsoft.

The Consolas font is a non-proportional font like Courier New, but is better in many respects. The first is it is heavier or thicker than the Courier New font, but it is narrower too. In my opinion it is easier to read and provides more text in the same space. Other big differences are number zero (is it the letter O or the numeric zero?), the possible semi-colon vs. colon confusion, and the comma vs. period. Here is an image with both fonts set at 12 point, bold:

You can download the Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 direct from Microsoft. It works with Visual FoxPro too .

I like to work with smaller fonts and work at a high resolution (1920×1200) on a 15.4 inch wide screen monitor running Clear Type. I believe the eye strain I experience working long hours is reduced.

Thanks Paul for this simple, but fantastic tip!

As Craig Bailey notes in his blog, this is a good news and bad new announcement.

Unfortunately Craig Boyd has to withdrawl from OzFox 2007 because of a family emergency. I really wish there were better circumstances, but after talking to Craig Boyd last week I was happy to hear while things are a little stressful, things are okay. Still, Therese and I will be keeping the Boyd’s in our prayers.

So when Craig Bailey asked me if I could help out and be a speaker at OzFox I did not hesitate and said yes! It is the least I can do and I am honored by the request. I know I am no Craig Boyd, but I will do my best to provide the OzFox attendees with some cool VFP sessions, and hopefully some inspiration in similar fashion to Craig.

One thing is for sure, I am really excited. I was hoping to go to OzFox 2007 as an attendee late last year. I heard OzFox is a great conference, but I decided to hire my son and had to buy him a laptop instead. It was a tough decision at the time, but the best decision I could make for my business. So now I get the best of both worlds.

I have always wanted to make a trip to Australia. What could be better than heading to Sydney in February (Summer) to hang out with VFP developers?

Doug and I will be doing the opening keynote, and I am presenting three regular sessions. Craig is finalizing the details over the next couple of days. If things go well I am hoping to blog live from the conference too.

Now is the time to get registered and save AUD$100 with the early bird registration through January 31st. I look forward to meeting everyone in a few weeks.

You may be wondering why my blog has been silent of late. There are numerous reasons and this is the week many of the reasons will be announced. The first is the CoDe Focus issue from the publishers of CoDe Magazine called “Sendna: Beyond VFP 9.0″.

I was asked to write two articles for this special issue of CoDe Magazine centered on the release of Sedna from Microsoft. Just in case you do not know what Sedna is: it is the next release of VFP currently available as a Community Technical Preview (CTP). I wrote the articles on the changes to the Data Explorer and the new Upsizing Wizard. There are a couple things to note about this issue:

• It is the inside story about the new and updated components in VFP
• It provides details about interoperability with the latest wave of Windows components and .NET
• …and much more

While the articles were fun to write, they time consuming and a lot of work. I am also excited because this is the first time White Light Computing is advertising in a magazine.

The exact schedule of the release has not been revealed yet, but it should be available soon. The issue is free after you sign up for it here. User groups can sign up to get a bulk delivery of issues too.