July 2006

I'm with Frank on this one - this has to be the coolest, most exciting, newest concept I've seen all year.

Make sure you watch the video, so that you really do get it - and when the penny drops, your brain will be overwhelmed with ideas for how to employ this technology. Just as Google Earth transformed mapping a year or two ago, this is gonna transform the way we use photos...

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html

Stay calm but: although a CTP is coming soon, there is no indication of a general availability date.

This week at the Sydney VFP User Group we had a change in format. Instead of a presentation on a particular topic, we had four of our regular members present on an application they have worked on.
All the applications are written in VFP 7, 8 or 9 and most used 3rd party controls to improve their presentation.

Here's a summary of each:

WINEfile by Peter Huish
www.tallships.com.au

A great VFP7 application by Pete Huish's company (Tallships) for managing the production of wine from the vineyards through to the cellar door. The application is used in Australian states (QLD, NSW, SA) and throughout New Zealand.
The application uses the Sharp Grid control by www.datadynamics.com
They found that the product didn't actually claim to have any FoxPro support, however it worked fine. The grid control requires a Recordset as its data source, so they used the function in VFPCOM.dll for converting a Cursor to a Recordset.
One of the aspects about the users of WINEfile, is that they are more often than not on very low specced machines. Many are still on Windows 98, with low RAM and small hard drives. This is one of the challenges for the user base, where VFP provides a good solution. Interestingly, all the main competitors are VFP based products.
Future enhancements include Web access and portable device access, and possibly support for SQL Server for larger clients.

KenSys range of Software by Rahul Desai
www.nationalcom.com

Rahul has developed a vast range of applications (all in VFP9) for a variety of industries.
In this presentation he covered the general features across all the applications, including all the comprehensive documentation.
All his applications have an Active Desktop style which allows shortcuts to be put on the application desktop.
Rahul has applied standards across the applications including things like displaying all mandatory fields in red until set.
He went through his date component (written in pure VFP) which has standard keys for setting dates etc.

MYOB Accountants Office product by Doug Bower
www.myob.com.au

Doug talked about his work within the MYOB Account division.
The product is used by thousands of accountants across Australia and NZ.
The MYOB Accountants Office product:
Started in 2.6 (being programmed by accountants)
Then moved to VFP3.0
Then 5, 6, 8
Not moving to 9.0 yet, but waiting for the Vista side of things in Sedna to be confirmed.
The application uses a main exe that calls .app files of which there 374 at the moment.
Very interesting to see the structure of the program and the tables, as they are all under separate directories, and they keep backup .app files for each tax year (for backwards tracing if required).
We went through the Client app and then the report generator that they use. They developed their own reporting preview system which is an exposed COM object.
It supports built in use of barcodes in reports etc.
Many of the forms are data driven because a lot of the tax details changes from time to time and it is easier to add a new record rather than changing a form.
The product uses some of the Outlook bar controls from dbi Tech.

CashFocus by Cyril Baskir
www.cashfocus.com

This (VFP7) program is used for preparing budgets, and features a nice step by step process. The application uses the dbi Technologies treeview control for handling treeviews.
There is nice functionality for budgetting either by dollar amount or a unit quantity X price.
CashFocus uses grids extensively for data entry, plus a lot of right click functionality. Most copmpetitors use a formula based approach, however because CashFocus uses FoxPro it is able to use a double entry accounting approach. This is one of the great advantages of using FoxPRo.
the program uses Crystal Reports for all of its reporting requiements, with its built in control for the Crystal reports object (which can be distributed royalty free).

Summary
Overall this User group meeting was one of the best this year, with a stack of practical ideas and tips for VFP developers. A big thank you to the presenters.

We will be having more of these 'Demo your app' session in future meetings.
www.svfpug.com.au

An interesting article in yesterday's Australian IT caught my eye. This article (here) on Ray Ozzie is interesting to me for the following reasons:

1. He promotes simple

2. He is a people person

3. He is honest about the challenges that Microsoft face

However, the reason I link to it here is because I was wondering what possible piece of software they could easily bring with renewed vigour to the masses. Say perhaps to the developer space. Something very simple, yet reliable and powerful, something proven, something that doesn't have huge hardware requirements, something that interfaces iwth all their other products, something they could revamp or develop quickly, something that could return significant ROI with just a little tweaking of how it is licensed... yeah, you can see where I'm headed right?

I finally got around to fixing the hibernate issue on my notebook. XP has a known issue on notebooks with more than 1.5GB or RAM whereby it won't hibernate properly. Rather it will wake up, stay warm, flatten your battery and then give you a 'Insufficient system resources' error in your system tray.

Now, the fix has been available for ages, by simply calling Microsoft Product Support and getting them to email it to you. But I have just never got around it to it. Anyway, I was heading out on the weekend and wanted to hibernate when I thought I'd just google the problem. Sure enough, someone has the hotfix generously hosted on their site. Downloaded it (here) and all is fixed. Why didn't I do this months ago?

I had the pleasure of meeting with Sir Terry Matthews this morning. Thanks to our friends at Ethan Group, Peter Metcalf (Talman's MD) and I were invited to a small gathering (15 people) with Terry in which he talked about his background (btw the Wikipedia account is not quite correct - the real version is that a shipping company lost the crate of lawnmowers) and his then his thoughts on broadband, future trends and internet telephony.

This guy is remarkably passionate about technology and 'winning', and is a great inspiration for would be entrepreneurs.

He talked about the importance of timing with regard to technology and the need to be plowing money into R+D if you want to be a long term success.

Peter and I had a chat to him about the interaction of software and IP hardware and Terry's assertion that there now seems to exist a new 8th layer of the ISO model above the Application layer which basically deals with Content.

As an interesting aside, I had actually forgotten about the meeting until I got into work this morning... in my jeans, jumper and casual shoes. There was no time to change so when we got into the city for the meeting I ever so casually strolled into the room where everyone else was dressed up in suit and tie. Rather than run and hide, I put on my best confident look and mingled with the other attendess (all high profile IT managers in big companies). Funnily enough people came up to me to introduce themselves, including Sir Terry who came up and shook my hand early on. I think people had me confused with someone really, really important (you know, the kind that is so important, that they don't even bother to dress up for a meeting with a world famous billionaire...)

Next Wednesday we are having a 'Show off your application' night, with 4 presenters getting up and demonstrating their VFP ideas and innovations.

The aim is to get a broader understanding of some of the great applications out there, ask questions, and perhaps even make suggestions about how they can be improved. I expect it to be an interesting, informal, collaborative night.

Rahul Desai, Peter Huish, Doug Bower and Cyril Baskir are all presenting.

See you there at 6:30pm for Pizza:

http://www.svfpug.com.au/

Now that I've freed up a little, it's time to catch up on all the important business and technical items. Serious stuff. You know, the kind that we serious manager types need to be addressing. And thus it was high time I got Meegos for me and Michele.

Here's me all excited about Tech*Ed:

http://www.craigbailey.net/images/Tech.Chucky.jpg

And here's me and Michele looking really cute:

http://www.craigbailey.net/images/TechEdBabies.gif

Thanks to Frank for pointing this out.

http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2006/07/17/667872.aspx

June and July have been extremely busy as we geared up for a major software release to ALL our wool industry clients. Long days, heaps of careful planning and some clever deployment. But now the hard work is about to be put to the test... our software goes live at 5am Monday morning (24 July).
So far it is all looking good (I'll even be heading off early tomorrow - Friday - to have a reasonably relaxed weekend)... but by this time next week we'll know for sure.

I'm always a little nervous when these upgrades come around. Last year we botched it big time, and the release had a few major bugs that caused a stack of grief. At that time we swore we'd never go through that again. So, from January this year we've been planning, coding, testing and preparing deployment of the release. And now it is out there, ready for switchover on Monday...
I should explain that we are talking about some pretty big systems here - we write enterprise broking and trading packages that are the backbone of some big companies - these are not little applications. And that's why I'm nervous. Compounding this is the fact that 'the industry' dictates that it all has to switchover at once - no staggered deployment to a few companies at a time. Part of the reason for this is that the entire EDI network running the wool industry in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa changes as part of the changeover.

So, why am I blogging about this now? Why not wait until after the changeover and then report (ahem gloat) about how well it went? Well, mainly because I want to make myself accountable. If the changeover is a balls up, then I'll be inclined to not even mention it (like last year). But I want to mention it no matter what. I want to discect it either way - understanding what went right and what didn't. So, stay tuned for the wash up...

It is 15 years ago to the day that INXS, one of Australia's greatest ever rock bands, took to the stage at Wembley Stadium and delivered the perfect rock concert. No backup dancers, no fancy lights shows, no silly interludes. Just a sensational rock concert. It showcases exceptional musicianship, as great rock song after great rock song is performed for an ecstatic crowd of over 70,000. This is a band at the pinnacle of its career.

The DVD has a stack of behind the scenes features, in particular an interview with Michael Hutchence where he reveals he has terrible eyesight and can't see more than 10 metres without glasses. It may come as a surprise that this shy, often misunderstood, and sadly missed consumate frontman chose never to wear glasses or contacts on stage - for all his talent, charm and charisma, he was afraid of seeing the crowd.

This DVD should be required viewing for any 'real' band touring these days.

You can buy it from Amazon here or from Chaos Music (Australia) here.

Interesting post over on ASP free

Craig Bailey on Microsoft

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STUNNING: Photosynth - Amazing

VFP: Sydney Visual FoxPro User Group last Wednesday

LINK: Ray Ozzie article on simplicity

RAM: Fixed my XP hibernate issue with 2GB RAM

INSPIRATION: Sir Terry Matthews

VFP: Sydney Visual FoxPro User Group next Wed 26 July

PERSONAL: Meegos for me and Michele

PERSONAL: And it all falls into place

INXS: 15 Year Anniversary of Wembley Stadium

LINK: Using VFP to create data centric web pages