Craig Bailey on Microsoft

My wife got the the new Gorillaz CD for her birthday. You know, the one that has a song featured in the iPod ad.

Well here’s the thing, it has copy protection technology on the CD that means you can’t rip it onto your iPod.

Michele thinks it is ironic. I think it sucks.

But here’s the really dumb thing, the CD copy protection technology only works on CD players. Yep, swapped out her CD burner and put the DVD reader in (this is an older notebook, before the combo drives were cheap enough for us) and ripped the CD no worries.

Call me reckless but I loaded this straight onto my notebook.

Everything’s working great so far…

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1C06E35D-10A2-4A05-84FC-495B3A73ECF7&displaylang=en

Just confirming that the Sydney VFP User Group is on next Wednesday 5 October (after being postponed for a week).

Details on the UG site

www.svfpug.com.au

The next few months are going to be very interesting in the Team System extensibility space…

http://www.devbiz.com/teamplain/default.aspx

(noted from Rob Caron’s blog)

Tragic news. The VFP community has lost a great. 

http://drewspeediememorial.visionpace.com/

http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~DrewSpeedieMemories

Back from holidays and feeling great. Spent close to two weeks with my sister-in-law’s family (my wife’s sister and her husband and their 17 month year daughter who is soooo cute). I get on really well with my brother-in-law so it was a great time. They are visiting from Zurich (you may remeber we stayed with them for 6 weeks at the start of the year).

And, by some divine intervention, my computer hard drive crashed on the second day of my holidays. So I had no access to email, the office, blogs (gasp!) for 10 days. Everyone (especially Michele) thought this was the best thing ever, and I have to say I did have a realy relaxing break for a change. My notebook is all fixed now, so I am catching up on blogs and news finally.

I know the Scoble interview with Bill G has been getting heaps of links (and is very interesting), but I reckon the pick of late has to be the Eric Rudder video (the direct download link is here). He even mentions FoxPro in passing (around the 4:25 mark). (The comments have June 2004 datestamps, so I must have missed this when it was first loaded - but it seems to have been reposted this August).

(You may remember how gracious Eric was to OzFox last year when he gave us this plug)

Skype’s new beta adds call forwarding. This is the kicker I’ve been waiting for. It finally positions Skype as a ‘serious’ phone system for any company.

http://share.skype.com/

Sure you had all the easy conferencing options and the ability to take your number with you anyware your notebook went. But there were two things I wanted: Call forwarding and Skype groups. And it seems that their forwarding function will handle the Skype group concept anyway.

Basically I wanted a way for our support team to receive calls and easily hand them on, or if the person was already talking to have the call go to the next available support person (ie set up via a ‘Skype group’). But the forwarding will do all this for us.

So now you set up a Skype name such as MyCompanySupport on a PC and if it doesn’t get answered it just forwards it on until it is answered.

(Disclaimer: Skype ofcourse says it is not a phone system replacement eg it can’t be used to call emergency numbers)

The presenter’s notes from last week’s Sydney VFP UG meeting are online

John Burrow’s excellent presentation on calling VFP COM objects from Crystal Reports is here

Ekasenna’s amazing discussion of callling VFP COM objects from SQL Server is here