Archive for January, 2009

ScribeFire helps edit your blog, make you money and is free

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Firefox has many add-ons, but one of the best ones I’ve come across is ScribeFire Blog Editor. The current version is 3.1.6. Once you add it to Firefox, press F8 on any page within Firefox and the ScribeFire editor pops up in the lower half of the screen. It’s a simple and straight forward editor. You can add HTML code in line as well as add images and YouTube videos. Once you’ve setup the link to your blog site, it pickups your current list of categories and allows you to add tags to the post. More out of habit, I publish the post as a draft to my blog and finalize it within WordPress before publishing it to the blog.

You can include Technorati tags as well as as sharing the page on many of the social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine and others. I’m experimenting with this post and sharing this page on Facebook.

Did I mention that you can make money with the ScribeFire Editor? You can sign up for ads for your blog in a fashion similar to Google’s AdSense. When people click on these ads, you get paid a small amount. You get paid on the 7th of the month following for your previous month’s earnings. ScribeFire pays on a minimumof $5.  AdSense waits until you’ve accumulated $100 before it pays out.

More info is available at the website here.

Posted in Blogging, Tools & Utilities | No Comments »

Watch out when saving Printer Environment in VFP

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

When creating reports in Visual FoxPro, it’s important to watch when the printer environment is saved on reports. If you create or modify reports in the client’s office, saving the printer environment should produce the desired outcome on the printed report. Generally VFP programmers don’t always have the same printer that their client do. We go about creating and modifying reports without a concern for the printer environment. We test the printed report on our printers and they produce what the client asked for. Then the report gets updated to the client’s version of the program and it doesn’t work. This happened to me last week.

I modified a report and tested it on my computer and it produced the result. Uploaded it to the client site and a part was missing. I tried it again with the same data and the report printed as requested. After further digging, Mike, our senior programmer, found the problem. In the report properties of the particular report, the Printer Environment had been checked. Mike made a rule for our development efforts – make sure that the Printer Environemt on any report is not checked. Inadvertently or accidentally, I broke the rule. So I unchecked the box, recompiled and it worked correctly on the client site. Another happy client.

Posted in Software Development, VFP - Visual FoxPro | No Comments »

Table name prefixes are important in VFP

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Our client asked for a change to an order entry screen in one of our Visual FoxPro applications.  Our senior programmer Mike, accidentally left off the table prefix for one of the fields in a SQL SELECT statement. The net result was that the work tickets printed from the final SQL cursor, sometimes printed customer information and some times didn’t.  After some digging, I found that 2 of the tables in the SQL SELECT statement had the same field name.  The SQL SELECT got confused and sometimes returned the customer information and sometimes didn’t on the printed work ticket. I added the table name prefix to the field and did some testing.

Sure enough, the work tickets that didn’t print the customer information now had the relevant information printed in the proper spot. Our client was happy with the result.

Posted in Software Development, VFP - Visual FoxPro | No Comments »

Not the BSOD, but close and a solution

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

The other day my main workstation was slow to respond. So I used AusLogics Disk Defrag (a free defragging tool) to defrag and speed up my hard drive. It completed the task in a few minutes. The workstation was still slow, so I decided to reboot the computer. The login came up and I entered the user name and password and sat back for the desktop to come up. At this point I was called away and left the workstation to continue its loading.

I didn’t get back to the computer till the next morning and the screen was blue (not a Blue Screen Of Death) with no desktop icons. I though this strange, so I rebooted, logged in  and after waiting about 10 minutes, there were still no icons on the desk top. I pressed Alt-Ctrl-Del to get the Task Manager and ran some of my programs. They worked as normal, but still no icons on the desktop. On the processes tab, I noticed that explorer.exe was near the top of the list in terms of activity, but it wasn’t doing its job. So I deleted the explorer.exe process and voila the desktop icons all returned. Another problem solved.

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Blog your way to better health

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

While blogging may be considered a way of boosting one’s ego, research published in the Journal of Research in Personality suggests that writing blog entries can be beneficial to your health. The full article with links is here

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »

Vietnam to widely use open source software

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Vietnam’s government will require its ministries and state agencies to install and become proficient in open source software. There are various stages to the adoption of open source software products like OpenOffice, Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox web browser and the Vietnamese typing software Unikey. By June 30, 2009 all clients of the IT divisions of the agencies are mandated to be using open source software.

The ministries themselves must have and be using 70 percent of open source software by December 31, 2009. Finally by Dec 31, 2010, all staff in these agencies must be able to use open source software in their jobs. By then most information and documents will be exchanged using only open source software. The government is also encouraging computer traders to install open source software on computers rather then “cracked software”.  More information is available here

Posted in Computer Integration, Implementation, Open Source | No Comments »