Good Buddies

I had a chance to chat with Randy Brown, formerly of the Fox Team, the other night. We had a great conversation. I am sometimes terrible about keeping up with people and haven't spoken with Randy for a few months.

He's getting married on the 9th of August and his fiance delivered a beautiful baby girl on June 6th. My family wishes his family all the best.

Here's a link to some baby pics on Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randybr/sets/72157605562372633/

Technical Fixation

Ever noticed that when some coders learn a new technique they apply it like slathering butter on bread even where it makes no sense?

I'm re-engineering a web page where there is a parent-child relationship between two entities akin to a user and what rights they might have. The original coder used two listboxes to show assigned and available rights (good!) but then used checkboxes in each listbox row with a check all box in the header (the newly learned technique). To move rights around you check your butt off and then hit Save changes.

What the hell? I'm replacing it with the traditional mover lists construct while enabling multiple selections in each list. A lot fewer mouse clicks when moving shit around and conforms to a better understood standard, IMHO.

To paraphrase an old saying, if builders built buildings the way some web designers code web pages the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

I go back to what I keep preaching: Experienced Fox coders should run absolute rings around pure .Net weenies if they put up the intellectual investment to learn the syntax and idiosyncrasies of .Net. MS has had problems with migrating VB 6 coders to VB .Net and adoption of VB .Net has been slow. Wanna know why, IMHO? Because most VB coders couldn't architect their way out of a bird fountain. Experienced VFPers understand the interconnection between all aspects of the application and think long and hard about the architecture, meaning UI and classlibs, before writing a line of code.

You all could be rockstars. My sole regret is that it took this long for me to get this deeply involved with .Net not to see it.

A New Neurophysical Theory

OK, this is complicated, bear with me.

I spent the day today watching the rebroadcast of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on the Science Channel. My wife, Teri, flitted in and out without a real interest in the show. After 18 years of marriage, I'm used to that - my sense of awe and wonder not being reflected back is common - she just doesn't care.

It sometimes bothers me. I know my wife is intelligent and I always took her lack of interest in science or history as an affront; a personal insult since - to me - a lack of interest was a vague reproof since she obviously had the brains to comprehend the material.

I know she loves me and wouldn't want to hurt my feelings, so there had to be another answer. Sagan inspired, I began to think about what was going on. I came to what I believe is an answer that has profound implications in a lot of areas.

What if she doesn't care about these topics because she's not genetically or intellectually predisposed to do so although entirely capable? Is it possible that there is an evolutionary governor in our brains that sets limits to the amount of interest we should show in certain topics?

I think it would be part of the survival mechanism. What good does it do for an individual to be too wrapped up in looking at the stars if a sabertoothed tiger is coming in for the kill?

Is there a mechanism in our brains that limits our interests in areas that have no direct bearing in our personal survival in the here and now? Is this why so many kids have a hard time learning abstract math like Algebra?

Are those of us who yearn for more information about the Universe and read history genetically inferior because we are diverting energies away from attention directly related to personal survival and the propogation of species?

Does evolution put soft barriers in our minds - "No, no you don't have to think about that" on certain subjects? Is that barrier elastic insofar as it can be stretched when an area of thought is linked to another area the brain thinks is important? I think so.

So many things make sense if my hypothesis is applied. I'm sure I'd word all of this better if I was a psychiatric clinician.

I wish I could explain it better.

What, This is Hard?

More time diving into the peculiarities of the .Net Framework...

I have to say that I am not finding this very hard at all. Granted, I can't do UI design using Divs and such in ADO to save my life (mental block - I expect things to be rendered where I goddamn put them) the coding is nothing that any other experienced VFP-er would take very much time to learn.

In fact, I'm coming to actually love the way this all holds together. Mind you, this project is stuck with 2.0 Framework and I'm sure that a lot of what I'm grinding through is better handled in 3.0 and 3.5.

Still, though, there are weirdnesses that I guess are better handled by experience. It's the same in VFP, I suppose, but I had years and years and professional incentive to master those oddities. I'm now exposed to the firehose.

Example: If you include a column in a GridView but don't actually show it, the value is blank. WTF??? I can't count the number of times I had a primary key stashed in a ListBox or Grid in VFP and made it's length zero just so I could grab the value from the selected row when needed. Nope, not in .Net unless you use a Template field (I think that's what it is called - kinda away from .Net at the moment).

I'm finding that I leave a lot of my control state code (what's visible, read only, etc.. based on selections and environment after a postback) in the Page_PreRender method. Is that good practice? Dunno...works for me.

I'm heading in the direction of either being a damn good .Net coder or a damn bad one. Haven't figured that out yet; it may be years before I do. I wish I could get out to a con and bang heads and compare notes with McNeish or Markus to get a better feel. For now I have to operate under the guideline that if it works, it must be good code.

Is It Really That Hard?

Another week with ADO.Net 2.0.

I'm finding that my experience in VFP apps is directly usable in my approach to the design and behavior of web forms. So, what doesn't seem obvious to co-workers insofar as look-and-feel and behavior is obvious to me. Then it's a matter of researching the framework and the .Net OOP model to see how to get it done. Folks I work with are much more familiar with .Net but it seems my approach is novel to them and, for the most part, admired.

I believe I'm pretty smart, but not exceptional in our community. I really think that if presented the right way, dyed-in-the-wool VFP developers would accept and thrive in the .Net environment. Oddly enough, it's the stuff that we take for granted and have the most experience with that drives traditional .Net developers nuts.

Confusion and Bad Docs

Continuing on my reincarnation as a developer.

It's getting old that, in .Net, event x will only work when property y is set a certain way. In most cases, the documentation makes no mention of these cavaets and you have to stumble around until you figure this out for yourself. At least in the VFP world we attempted to document exceptional behavior.

Someone needs to compile a list of all these weirdnesses and then convince Whil Hentzen to publish a book.

Back In The Saddle

I am now in the first week in my new position, for the first time in 10 years, as a pure software developer. I was dreading it but now find that I am really quite happy analyzing issues and proposing and architecting solutions. I never knew how much I deeply missed this aspect of IT.

I coded a fair amount at MS; writing tests and re-engineering our automation harness, Mace, to work with the departmental standard Maddog. But looking at a business process; stakeholder issues, and goals was something I hadn't done in a long time and ... darn it .... I still love it.

Yes, I still have to code .Net web stuff and T-SQL. Not worried; T-SQL is childs play and anything .Net is just a matter of syntax if you know how you want to proceed. Fortunately, I seem to have found an employer who appreciates the experience more than the language expertise.

Hurrah!

I start a new job on Monday at somewhat better pay and benefits than my previous engagement.

The scary part is that it's ostensibly an ASP.Net developer position. Although I made it abundantly clear to the recruiter and manager that I was complete crap in ASP.Net they hired me anyway. Apparently, there's a trememdous amount of data munging involved with the project they have earmarked me for so perhaps my 25 years of xBase and SQL experience appeals to them.

Regardless of their reasonings, I am very happy to be gainfully employed again. I was tired of the job search - difficult in a small city such as this because of the limited number of senior level positions available.

Musings

Lately, gas prices in Tallahassee have been hovering around $3.65 a gallon; perhaps a few cents higher than the national average. It's making an impact on me, I can tell you, since simply taking the kids to school and picking them up again is an investment of about 40 miles of travel. 40 miles is about 2.1 gallons of gas in my old, trusty 1996 Volvo 850 (with 210,000 miles!) which gets roughly 18 miles to the gallon.

If you look at the national average commute distances (I think it's 27 miles one way) and gas mileage (I believe it's 25 MPG) it's apparent that your average worker is paying $2-3 more per day to go to work than last year. Ugh. And it isn't going to get any better; I would estimate seeing trends that the average price for a gallon of gas by Summer, 2009 will probably be about $4.50. Another $2 per day gone.

There are attempts to manufacture an outcry versus the oil companies but they only produce about an 8% net profit in a highly speculative market so there's no real objective cause to rally against them. Having a gas tax holiday is just plain stupid - it won't impact consumers that much and we need that revenue for infrastructure.

Europeans have paid $4 a gallon and more since the early 90's. Maybe the chickens have finally come home to roost and we, as Americans, just have to deal with it.

Maybe, just maybe, the current "crisis" will spure shale-oil conversion and other domestically friendly energy initiatives and alternatives that will once again make this all affordable.

Then again, that assumes intelligence and objectivity in Congress. Hahahaha.

The Unholy Trinity of Dates and Other Comments

This weekend comes my annual nightmare of having three important family days coming at or near the same day. My son's birthday, his 17th, is May 10th. My anniversary (my 18th) is May 11th, as is Mother's Day. I kind of wish that they were spread out a bit more because it's hard to give the kind of attention each event deserves.

My brother's birthday was May 9th but he passed away in 2005. He would have been 41 this year.

A few weeks later is my birthday, 48th, on the 26th. Not that I care about my birthday anymore.

I was reading Cathy's blog about an issue with report variables and multiple detail bands. A few issues apparently escaped our attention or were "Won't Fix-ed" during VFP9 testing as it was difficult to come up with automated tests for multiple detail bands and we were stretched really, really thin in personnel by that time. Sorry about that.

What to Do When Your MSDN is Stolen

So, when I was terminated from my last position, I had the option of immediately retrieving my personal effects or of getting them later. I chose later to avoid turmoil. All of my effects were boxed up almost immediately and shipped to my home a few weeks later.

About 2 weeks ago I needed a SQL Server disk and went into the box that was shipped. My MSDN binder was not there.

I had a year-long MSDN subscription, courtesy of an MVP award to my friend Cathy Pountney, that expired last year but I had all of the critical disks - Vista, VS 2005, and Office 2007. I kept the binder and disks at work since I was constantly creating virtual machines for testing and the company's copies were not always available.

My first few inquiries to my former employer were not answered and, finally, they performed a search for the binder and could not locate it. Since they are a secure facility I don't have the option of looking myself.

I am left in a bit of a spot. I could report the missing disks to MS and as the regcodes are unique (I think, for the big stuff) perhaps they could invalidate them.

If I do this and the subscription disks were stolen, it'd be the right thing to do. If the disks were inadvertantly mixed in with the company's own subscriptions then it could cause them problems and I don't really want to do that.

What to do?

Fox Team 2008

By pure happenstance, I've recenly had the pleasure to write or otherwise chat with a lot of the folks who worked on VFP 8 and 9. It occurred to me that there's no single source of information on everyone, if anyone cares, so here's what I know:

• YAG (Y. Alan Griver). Still doing good communities architect work at MS and part-time involved with VFP issues and Sedna. Still happily attached to Ms. Beth Massi, another VFP superstar and now working with VB at MS.
• Gene Goldhammer. Happily retired in Las Vegas. Honestly, haven't seen or heard from him since 2005 DevCon.
• Ken Levy. Very involved with VSX so much so that he doesn't return emails from his pals (hey Ken!).
• Randy Brown. Still (willfully) unemployed. Engaged with a child due in June and official marriage in August.
• Calvin Hsia. Deeply involved with VB.Net and LINQ and still posting great code at http://blogs.msdn.com/Calvin_Hsia/
• Aleksey Tsingauz. The database code master is also involved with LINQ at MS and impressing everyone, as usual.
• Richard Stanton. Kicking butt still in the VS world for MS and doing some work for Sedna.
• Mike Stewart. Working for a startup and loving every minute of it. Still residing in Redmond with his wife.
• Chandra Srinivasan. Formerly a VFP tester, now a developer in the Windows division. He's now married (since July 2007).
• Garrett Fitzgerald. Gainfully employed in Maine where he resides with his family.
• Greg Reichert. Employed in Memphis, TN, since last year. Lost his wife earlier this year (so sad). One of the best and most intuitive VFP coders I have ever met.
• David Anderson. Still going strong as a partner in Alden Anderson, LLC. A gifted database man.
• Jay Jones. The buildmaster for VFP9, now working as the same with Visual Studio.

Boy, it's fun to remember old times!

Starvin Marvin

Yep, that's me! Still unemployed after two months. Perhaps I have been too picky about what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. I was in one interview track that lasted two months where my potential employer loved me but the client has a veto vote and ....ahem... exercised that vote.

As I said, maybe I'm being too picky. If I was willing to relocate, I'd have a job very shortly; I've turned down offers. But it doesn't seem fair to my kids to relocate as I've asked them to do so four times in the last seven years.

Things are tough for an old Fox hand. Oh well, I guess I'll have to soldier on.

Arrggh

I was fired on the 15th of Feb. It's something I saw coming as my previous manager left the company and the guy I was placed under never liked me. He essentially orchestrated an "epic fail" situation for me. This company is in utter chaos when it comes to process and organization and morale is in the toilet as well. In a way, I'm glad I was canned as I was looking to leave anyway. I'm on the fasttrack to a much more rewarding job.

My previous employer is date-driven. They don't allot for true testing cycles and they don't provide functional specifications. Shit is released to testing with major functionality not working. They are a leader in law enforcement technology by being first in the market for some tools but also having marketers who are good buddies with the customers. They have dreams of being a $100 MM company but, honestly, I don't know how that can happen with the idiots they have running the show.

Along with the idiots are a couple of rat-bastards. Folks who feel threatened when underlings show initiative so they go out of their way to screw them. Further dinks in morale.

I have the feeling that I will have the opportunity to dance on their graves in the next 12-18 months. I feel bad for the friends who are still there but....thems the breaks.

As I said, better opportunities are coming my way.....

The Other Big Game

I find it amusing that the TV pundits are almost all wrong on predicting the results of the primaries so far. They seem to be missing the point of the whole primary game. I recall discussing this with some of my co-workers at MS over lunch during the early part of the 2004 campaign when Howard Dean was the leader of the Democratic pack.

A few of my friends were convinced that Dean would go on to win the nomination. It was obvious if you understand the process that Dean would not - I predicted that Kerry would get the nomination and I was right.

Am I that politically astute? No. It's a simple study in psychology to understand how the process evolves.

Think about this: Who gets involved in the early part of the process? People at the fervent extremes of their ideologies. Moderates may have an interest but, I believe, unlikely to vote in primaries in as great percentages as the politically motivated.

Huckabee won the Iowa caucus. Will he win the nomination? Hell, no. The man is an uber-Christian preacher who attracts strong conservatives who are now the most active Republicans in the process. He didn't win New Hampshire and it's unlikely that he will win too many other primaries coming up. He's too polarizing. The GOP winner will be McCain, Giuliani, or Romney in that order of likelihood. As time progresses they will begin to moderate their messages as more moderates become involved in the process.

On the Democratic side it's a slightly different equation. There is a very strong Democratic Party political machine who greatly promotes the candidate with the best chances to win. Analysis may dictate that Obama is currently the exciting candidate and the change candidate but Clinton is the annoited one and the influence of the "machine" will gradually push her into the winning position as time progresses.

The behind-the-scenes deal that will occur, I believe, is that Obama will be urged to drop out at some point and become part of a Clinton/Obama ticket. For the Party as a whole that would be the "best of both worlds" - it would mix the candidate of change with the establishment and possibly ameliorate some of the high negatives associated with Clinton.

The Big Game

I have to admit to being torn by this game. If the Pats win, they go 16-0 and are the first undefeated regular season team since the 1972 Dolphins. If they lose, hey, no big deal for the playoffs.

I am a lifelong Dolphins fan. I attended several of the '72 games with my father and was in attendance for that final game versus the Colts that sealed the Perfect Season.

But I have seen the '07 Patriots in action. Offensively, they are a juggernaut. They don't even bother with an honest running game since they can pass at will. I've watched 5 Pats games this year and the only weakness I see is perhaps in the middle versus the play-action run or power run.

Can the Giants stop them? Sure. The Ravens and Eagles almost did. Dumb playcalling and sheer luck stopped those two teams from winning.

Will they? Lord knows. Manning is not terribly reliable but the Pats may rest their players. This may be a game for the ages.

Happy Holidays

One of the downsides to this time of year is that I don't have the opportunity to personally wish all of my friends and associates good tidings for the season.

I am terrible at keeping track of phone numbers and addresses. Just terrible. I don't send out cards because I know for every address I have right there are a gazillion I have lost or overlooked and I don't want to be unfair to those folks.

I can't honestly think of anyone in my past 25 years that I would not shake hands with or give a hug to for the holiday season. I am sure that there are those who would not return the feeling...heh.

To all of you, Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year.

Next year, dammit, I will send cards and make calls. Help me out by emailing me at john.koziol@datamaxx.com with your current contact information. I'd love to hear from you all.

John

Led Zeppelin

Anyone know why the fadeout music for almost all MNF fadeouts tonight were LZ song clips?

VFP9 SP2

Initial reports on this SP were scary so I pounded the crap out of it last weekend. Honestly, I didn't run anything under Vista because I wanted to test the core stability of the bit and I had no Vista machine handy anyway.

My conclusion is that this service pack is fine to run with. The fixes the dev team made to issues far exceed my expectations insofar as some of these issues have been around for a long time.

Good job to the devs at MS!

Express Lines

A quandry:

I was in the Express Line (10 Items or Less) at the store yesterday. I had 12 items but 2 were from "buy one, get one free" offers, so technically, I was buying 10 items.

Was I OK or breaking the item limit? Hmmmmmm