A recent U2 forum discussion brought up yet another topic that’s been close to my heart for a long time. The original inquiry was for an interface from PHP to Universe. Many people have excellent suggestions. The topic gradually starts to include Perl and Java. But there is a bigger picture here.
Many of you are familiar with the concept of byte ordering, or you’ve heard the terms Big-endian and Little-Endian. Various utilities are used to converts one to the other. Let’s take a look at this topic so we know where and how we need to be concerned about byte ordering, regardless of the DBMS we use. The endianness of a […]
While activating a Universe/HP-UX site we realized that the license verification process may work differently depending on the OS user permissions. To explain this I thought I’d provide some insight into how our activation process works.
I just upgraded my older U2 Personal Edition environments to the latest release. Here’s some FYI for anyone else upgrading (Windows) Unidata 7.1 to 7.2 or Universe to 10.2.
NebulaRemoteControl is the working name for a new product is getting close to a 1.0 release. Excerpts from the documentation are provided in this blog entry to explain what it is. Inquiries are welcome from site managers, VARs, and developers.
I got an email about an issue with high-precision data passed to NebulaXLite. That started several exchanges with Tiger Logic Technical Support, and I’m summarizing what I’ve learned here.
My friend and colleague Kevin Powick recently posted a help wanted ad for consulting work: 30-40 hours per week at $35/hour over a period of about six months. One way to look at this is that for someone who doesn’t have a job that’s over $25,000 that they didn’t have before. Some people who charge more for their services consider […]
In the U2 forum there have been a couple questions on the new U2/DB2 .NET data provider from IBM. I thought I’d write up a couple quick notes.
I was writing a note to the Google QA department via their webpage to ask for better filtering for specific kind of trash results. Having some experience with custom searches and filtering it occurred to me that everything I was asking them for I could probably just do myself. As they say, if you want a job done right… OK, […]
Microsoft continues their effort to reduce the amount of code required for C# developers to accomplish certain tasks. The more I see of this the more I want. Somewhere between where we are now and the point where the system reads our minds and just does what we want, there is a place where guys like me can get the […]
In my last blog I mentioned there really isn’t such a thing as "The Linux Desktop". The topic was mentioned in a forum today so I thought I’d post a follow-up with some related thoughts and hallucinations – you can decide which is which. I apologize if this posting isn’t organized very well. I’m blasting this one out quickly and […]
Dawn made a comment in comp.databases.pick: "I like to say that "it takes hard work to make software simple". That triggers a thought: as software evolves and user expectations increase it takes a lot more work to keep it simple. I don’t think some of my colleagues have embraced this concept.
We’ve been putting together an ASP.NET starter kit which may or may not be productized. It’s a Visual Studio solution / template which includes the following features.
One of the most common inquiries we see in MV forums involves exchanging data between the MV DBMS and relational databases. In this multi-part series over the next couple weeks, I’ll describe ways to get data flowing in both directions without using platform-specific ODBC tools. This Part 1 is just an introduction and I’ll start describing some details in Part […]
Questions frequently arise in forums about how FlashBASIC works. So I thought I’d summarize it here. First, a primer on compilation and object code in general
A common statement that comes up in forums and other discussions about software is "the vendor should have put feature X into their product". There is no clear line where vendor responsibility "ends".
A question came up in comp.databases.pick that asked how we could use a pre-defined set of values in a D3 query. For example: SORT CUSTOMERS WITH STATE “AZ” “CA” “NM” “OR” … but getting the state codes dynamically. Sure, we can do that, using shell variables.
In this world of "Open Source" it’s amazing how many software offerings completely die because the one author on the planet that cared about the code has lost interest and no one else seems willing to maintain it. The concepts behind OSS go beyond software toward philosphy and changes in the way we work. And unless people subscribe to these […]
People frequently ask about PrintWizard, how it works, what they can do with it, etc. As time permits I’ll start posting some info here about how to use it. Unfortunately this won’t start at the beginning like a tutorial. I’m just going to post some nice tips as I happen to think about them. In this first tip I’ll show […]
Whether using Windows, Linux, or Mac, we all tend to customize our desktop and use our favorite tools. Have you ever been curious about what other people use? Ever wonder what life saver you’re missing that someone else uses daily? Well, here are a few tools that I use every day. EDIT 2017: Originally published in 2008, I’ve crossed out […]