Thursday, September 21, 2006

Next time, tell me something I don't know!



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Pure Nerd
78 % Nerd, 34% Geek, 26% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Now it's your turn. :-)

THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

++Alan

[UPDATE]  I found this test, and only scored 72.

I am nerdier than 72% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!
 Wednesday, September 20, 2006

FoxForward Conclusion



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I skipped morning sessions on Saturday so that I could prepare some changes for my demo that my coworkers recommended.  I did make it to lunch, however.  <S>

In the afternoon, I saw David Stevenson's sessions on the CursorAdaptor and XMLAdaptor respectively.  David showed some interesting functionality he had implemented in his CursorAdaptor subclasses.  I'll need to wade through the code to fully absorb what he showed.

David's session on the XMLAdapter started as I would have expected, comparing XMLAdapter functionality with CursorToXML() and XMLToCursor().  Things got more interesting when he began working with the XMLTables and XMLFields collections directly.  By the end, he was loading schema-less XML with embedded elements and showing us how to use Xpath statements to map this format to related cursors.  This tip alone is worth the price of admission to this conference for any developer who has spent his time trying to solve the conundrum of emended elements without foreign keys.

Saturday evening at the Ale House I tried a delicious local brew called a Sweetwater420.  I also had a great time talking with other attendees.  I especially enjoyed meeting Ed Leafe.  Ed is the author of the Business Object base class in CodeBook.  I have spent many hours studying that code and learning from it.  It is satisfying to have the opportunity to thank someone in person for helping me along my way.

While we were talking at dinner, I was reminded that Ed is the source of one of my standard practices.  It was in Ed's code that I first saw the GarbageCollect() method which NULLs out any properties with values of VarType = "O".  These days I use Bindevent() to bind destroy to my CollectGarbage() (renamed to fit the coding standard :-) ) method in my base classes.  orphaned object references are one of the most frustrating problems to debug in FoxPro, and this simple fix removes them forever.

Next I moved to Craig Boyd's booth, because I hadn't had the opportunity to do more than introduce myself to him.  Craig is a passionate guy, and we got into a discussion of the FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) being spread by some parties regarding Visual FoxPro and .NET.  I love these type of discussion.

Sunday morning was showtime for me.  I spent the morning testing my demos one more time.  Saturday night, I discovered a bug involving spaces in a file path, so I felt it was prudent to test everything one more time.  Although my session was sparsely attended, the audience seemed truly interested, and actively engaged.  I enjoyed this session, even though I was the presenter.

After my session was lunch, where I won a VFP hat!  I spent some time on the back patio listening to Ed Leafe and John Koziol swap stories about conferences past, and ask each other "where are they now" about members of the VFP developer community.  This was a nice bonus.

The last two sessions, for me at least, where Craig Boyd's discussion of cryptography, and Bo Durban's discussion of the new GDI+ classes from the VFPx project.  These were both awesom