Blog

The Power of Balance

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

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...

VFP COM object recompile can’t find include file

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...

VFP9 Refresh problem

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...

On swearing

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...

Design patterns

I’m reading a book Andrew Coates lent me called C# Design Patterns (James W Cooper). This idea of design patterns is fascinating. It has been around for a while, but I’m sure is one of those topics that gets put in the ‘nice, but I don’t have time for it’ basket. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never used UML before and this book introduces the topic well – how easy and useful is UML...

Back from the farm

Back home from visiting my dad after his operation. He’s had a recent cancer scare (see my earlier post) and is now living with a new appreciation of things. He’s looking really good. He’s lost a bit of weight and is looking pretty trim. He’s well rested, although a bit sore still, and is very positive. He told me he’d been pretty down recently and before the op was moping around...

VFP and PUBLIC variables

Using PUBLIC variables in VFP. I know I should be writing stuff about VFP9 and in the coming days I will (for a great intro see Castro Shehata’s summary from the Sydney VFP User Group meeting earlier tonight) but this time I wanted to share a thought on PUBLIC variables. We all know public variables are bad and should be avoided right? Well that was what I was taught at uni. But recently...

The sorry horn

Why hasn’t this been invented yet? My wife came up with this idea about 6 years ago, but I am amazed that it is still not mandatory on every car. It’s the sorry horn. You use it when you make a mistake driving (eg you accidently cut someone off, or scare a pedestrian you didn’t see who has right of way). You just give them a toot with your sorry horn. It has a nice reassuring...

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