Back in March 2008 I wrote a blog here called Lonely Shell Variables. Today I was fiddling with shell variables in D3 (also called Environment variables) and once again I marvelled at the power and flexibility – but I’d bet the number of people who really use this functionality can be counted on a single [...]

A respected colleague, Bob Joslyn, asked in CDP if I had yet looked at a new language called Go. As of the moment I saw the question, my answer was no. But I just took a quick look and thought this blog would be a better place to post some thoughts on language, and development [...]

In a recent U2 forum thread, difficulties were documented about moving data directly between SQL Server and Unidata. This thread is just like many others there and in other forums. The question is always about issues with direct connections between environments. I posted a blog here in August 2009 where the question was about TAPI [...]

A discussion in the OpenQM forum got me thinking about keys. I’d like to share some quick and mostly unedited thoughts with you on the topic. I always wonder if I’ll regret an off-the-cuff posting like this…

Over the last two weeks we’ve had some reports of permanent keys for NebulaXLite suddenly deactivating. This doesn’t seem to be affecting developers or trial licenses. It’s happened on Universe and D3, no reports from other platforms yet. I encourage application developers to check with your end-users to ensure their product is still functioning as [...]

I needed to get information out of D3 and there is no standard function to get it. After a couple emails with TigerLogic support, I was able to write two lines of code to get what I needed. Wow, that’s cool. Now should I be a good community citizen and give it away? Should I [...]

David Jordan posted some comments to the U2 forum that made me think about how this isn’t just about IBM and U2 – this event is yet another loud message to the entire MV community.

Most MV environments don’t need to be shutdown when Windows is taken down. D3 does. I thought I’d document how I boot and shutdown my MV environments for you. I lead with D3NT but comment on other platforms as well.

When a UniObjects.NET operation fails, how do you know what happened? What about mv.NET? Heck, it doesn’t matter what tool you use. Sometimes things just stop working. Here are some tips that may help in the detection and recovery process for any MV DBMS or connectivity tools…

I had the pleasure of working with a signature capture device recently. Anyone need to get customer signatures at the Point Of Sale?