I’ve had a few queries from people about the next OzFox.The answer is that we are planning to have the next OzFox in September 2006.This is a deliberate move away from an annual event to a bi-annual one (bi-annual? I never know whether that means twice every year, or every two years, but you get the point). This was based on feedback from OzFox 2004 attendees who said having the conference...
Taking on the big boys
Rick writes about his feelings of distress with American business (and this could be equally applied to Australia). I think it is an important read, now more than ever, regardless of whether you agree with him or not. So where do you start? Well, start with the small things. You may think the following is trivialising the issue (not at all my intention), but it is very funny and makes a good...
Gotta love libraries
I’ve been looking forward to this book The Historian for a while.Dymocks and other stores advised me I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it until July 4. But my wife suggested I place a hold on it at the library. The library web site advises me yesterday it is ready for collection. So I picked it up today (July 2) even though it is not available in the stores until Monday. Love it...
.Net Return on Complexity (ROC)
I’m concerned about the lack of return on investment our continuning involvement with .net is going to produce. I guess I’ve bored enough people with my views on this over the past few months to warrant a blog about it (that way I can just point people here, they can smile politely and ignore it :-)) In a nutshell my train of thought is this:1. Developers are not only victims of hype...
Google Paper Advertising
I received some direct mail from Google yesterday. Now, I know I shouldn’t be surprised (I mean, Google must be closest thing to Big Brother so far) but frankly it did come as a surprise. I guess I never really thought Google would stray from their online model.I wonder how successful this move (ie to paper advertising) will be. Obviously direct marketing is a lot more expensive than online...
Ken’s Channel 9 video
I’m not one for just adding links to stuff that has already been blogged by others, but this one by Ken is recommended watching. Ken Levy takes us through some of the ideas going into Sedna. Its a big download (113 MB) and goes for close to half an hour so its not a quick offering, but well worth it.One of the (many) things I like about Ken is how enthusiastic he is about Fox and technology...
More on MSXML sniffing
Following on from the VFP code for checking this in my last post, here’s a link to some code Scott converted for quickly checking a client’s machine for MSXML parser installs. (and Scott, you really should start a blog and begin pushing out your great ideas.)It is a simple VB script file that will run on any machine with W2K or XP installed, ie you don’t need VFP installed...
MSXML sniffing in VFP
Seeing Rino’s blog entry on XML Sniffing reminded me of how common this little gotcha is.So you might find the following handy. When our apps start up we just run a checkdependencies(bCheckXML3, bCheckXML4, etc) method with something like the following (and can someone tell me how to get code samples looking good on blogger please): LOCAL cSaveErrorLOCAL oObject3, oObject4, cMessagecMessage...
Uncyclopedia
A big thank you to Andrew MacNeil for putting me on to this one.Haven’t laughed this much since I saw Team America last week.
Here’s a taste:
DotNetNuke
We’ve been playing with DNN the last few months and so far it is proving to be worth the effort.On the good side it is reasonably straight forward to get up and running, has all the basic building blocks we need in a content management system including security and simple workflow, and is reasonably easy to customise.On the bad side, it is free (ie support is difficult) and documentation is...