Craig Bailey

Here’s a transcript of the Bill Gates breakfast mentioned in my post back in June

Traditionally I have been putting a lot of the admin business logic (eg auditing, recent changes logs) in the back end, but I’m wondering if I should be moving it to the middle tier.   Let me give you a simple example. In SQL I log the last change to a record in a field using an update trigger that checks SUSER_SNAME(). Previously (read client-server projects) this was fine. But...

The usual problem – why can’t people finish projects?   At work we do so much great stuff: clever design, efficient development, reasonable testing, but then we drop the ball when it comes to managing the client. A client rang me to say they were disappointed with one of the projects we did recently – it was all going fantastically until the final release. It wasn’t...

Steve Vai played Sydney last night. Awesome show. This is the third time I’ve seen him in Sydney. Billy was on bass, Tony MacAlpine on guitars/keyboards, Dave on guitars and Jeremy on drums. Tight band. Nice show. Come back anytime Steve.

During my holidays I had a chance to read a few books. Some were on time management (eg Brian Tracy books) and others were on Alexander Technique (I’ve been taking lessons to help with my back problems – yep those long hours in front of a monitor take their toll if you don’t look after your posture).   Anyway, the interesting thing is that time management books focus on...

OzFox 2004 preparation   I’ve been doing some more organising for OzFox this last week after returning from holidays. Things are coming along nicely. Now that the admin stuff is mostly sorted I am starting to organise the fun stuff eg the Sydney tourist attractions for our overseas visitors, conference dinners, bonus talks etc. I am really looking forward to this conference. It is also...

You’ll remember my newest niece post back in June. Well she has gone back home to Minnesota now. Here’s a piccy:

I made some simple changes to a VFP COM project prg file the other day, but when I recompiled I kept getting errors that it couldn’t find certain variables (eg COMATTRIB_READONLY which is defined in an include file). This occurred in VFP8 and VFP9. To cut a long story short – manually deleted all the fxp files. Opened each prg file and compiled. Then recompiled the entire project to...

I’ve been having a few page refresh problems with VFP9. I’m updating one of my programs to run in VFP9. In VFP8 page displays have been fine, but under 9 they don’t always refresh. If I manually add a .Refresh() to objects after doing something (eg adding records to a grid) it is fine, but this is something I never had to do in 8. A bit strange. At first I was looking for a...

I’m going to try to cut down on my swearing. My close friends will know I have a bit of problem with how much swearing and carrying on I do. Others will be surprised I guess, because I manage to put on an exterior of self control in this regard. But the ‘real’ me struggles with it. I’m not sure why I swear so much, but I guess it has to do with a few things: 1. Wanting to call attention to myself...