DLLs, IDEs & flowers Microsoft Ho!

I managed to be sailing along through development of many things quite nicely. My ship had no alternative but to crash directly into the land of Microsoft. I wouldn't mind so much if the natives were friendly, or even if they were unfriendly but made use of common sense.

After a few days of frustrating experiments trying to get a VFP XML webservice COM object to run on a server, we realized a few things. We should have known that DLLs built on one version of an MS Operating System would _not_ work on another platform. It makes sense now that we think about it. It is not obvious in the documentation.

The COM server generation just places the DLL wherever you state. The mapped drives are on different machines, and it turns out that is a bad thing to do. It's not a problem ... we'll just build DLLs for every platform and run an MSI installer to choose which version of the dll to use. Pain in the ass ... and of course there is no documentation to help out the VFP developers.

I then decided to venture further inland and start climbing the VFP 9 development tree. It's very similar to .NET / VB development. If you have done one ... you have done them all. It was very frustrating to build my simple hello world program, and run things until I was shown a few tricks, and realized a very startling fact. VFP does not allow you to build a project while your code is open. That is _so_ inefficient! I only had one form, and one code window open. What happens when you are coding multiple objects, and events at the same time. Did someone at Microsoft really think it would be desired to close 10 windows, and build to find a compile error, and then open 8 windows again to get back into coding? What an enormous waste of time!

It makes me love the *NIX style of development. Just code away, open 20 files if you want. Just hit another terminal and run make. You get some errors, just flip a window with SHIFT+Right and go to you file line number. It just "MAKES SENSE"! Every time I am forced to dabble into the IDE that supposed to be "The Best Programming Tool _Ever_". I find so many glaring deficiencies that just fires me right back into my Konsole code. If windows had efficient programming tools it might not be so bad ... but they don't. Let the cannibals eat themselves on that island my friends.

Flowers. A couple of days ago at the office one of the employees was celebrating an anniversary with his girlfriend. She sent him a lovely bouquet of flowers to the office. Needless to say he was ridiculed for this. Much to his chagrin. Since I am an endless practical joker, this happening set into to motion my next victim. The "boss" had recently experienced a visit from a cross country old acquaintance. It was a surprise visit, that simply could not be avoided. Although avoidance may have been desired. His surprise continued when I set in motion the plan, with the support of many other employees, to send him a bouquet of his very own. "Great to see you after all these years, Love Jim". I think it's time to let him of the hook. Let the retaliation begin.

I gotta be me!  ¶ 2:56:00 PM 0 comments

  FC4, Stampeded & Getting Fired BUSY BUSY BUSY!!


I've been so busy lately, I have not even had time to write for a while. I had made the trek out to Victoria once again. Powersoft has moved into a new office. The renovations are spectacular. I have my own office on the second floor. There is a balcony with a barbecue, and the foozeball table seems to attract a great deal of attention.

I was given a computer to install Linux on. :D A P2 350, but thankfully it was loaded with 392 RAM. I ended up installing FC4 on it. Mostly to try it out, and because I forgot how slow the machine actually was and got tired of waiting for SuSE to get going. I had left my office during the FC4 install. I'm quite happy with it. I have a basic KDE setup, and configured. There seem to be no problems running my development. I do however spend most of day inside Konsole, and use Konqueror, and Firefox for testing. So a fairly minimalist use. I do seem to remember some issues making use of PostgreSQL ... which is surprising considering RHDB is PG. It installed no problems from source though. Back to my days of compiling. I was quite impressed with the speed increase to using yum. It seemed faster on a 350mHz box than FC2 running on my AMD 2400+. I was happy.

The productivity was good for myself. Mik and I had an entire development environment in Mac OSX created. Development, and pre-production machines. I had written several startup, and installation scripts to aid in setup. I created a test website for all new products. I also fixed some bugs, and streamlined the web site file structures. We did run into an IIS incompatibility issue right before Mik left, but we'll sort that out next time.

Completely exhausted, I flew back to Calgary to find my sister who was in town for the Calgary Stampede. We went to the L&Y pancake breakfast, and hung out for a while. We went shopping for cowboy boots ... no dice though. We ate a great supper, and came back to my apt to chill for the evening. Thursday we went down to the Stampede grounds. We got tickets for the grandstand and watched the afternoon rodeo. It was quite entertaining. We had some really good balcony seats. Our day continued eating corn dogs and playing the carny side show games. I won a GIANT spongebob squarepants prize, and Diana totally kicked my ass at the watergun game. She took home a very large Oscar The Grouch. We won some other smaller prizes, but those two were the show.

Today I had a lunch / business meeting at 11:00. Prior to that I had to fire one of my clients. Continually they are an extremely annoying client. Always demanding immediate attention, and their problems are of course more important that anything else I could possibly be doing. I had had enough of begging to get my invoices paid by them. With two outstanding bills, and returning home to no cheques, I gave them until the end of the week. I sent a notification, asking very bluntly for my money, and stated my company was no longer interested in their business. It sucks getting fired. I am severely less stressed out now. When will people learn. The rest of business is very good. The outlook for me is quite pleasant. We'll get into that some other day though.

Supposed to be going out tonight. Don't know if I feel like it though. It's kind of nice to camp out at home. My sister is at the Stampede again with Rich and A.J. and his family. She is not alone, but I suppose I should venture out and find them eventually. Oh deer ... the night is young.  ¶ 7:50:00 PM 0 comments