John Backus, RIP

*--------------------------------------------------------------*
	Program BACKUSJW
*
* This program notes the passage of the creater of the
* Fortran Language
*
      integer count
*
      print*, 'John W. Backus, RIP'
      print*, '1924-2007'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Led the team that designed Fortan in 1954.'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Server on the committees that design ALGOL.'
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Invented the first Function-level'
      print*, 'programming language '
      print*, ''
      print*, 'Won the Turing award in 1977.'
*
      do counter = 1, 15
          print*", 'RIP'
      enddo
*
      end
*--------------------------------------------------------------*

Tech Tags: John+Backus+Fortran+Turing+Award+Winner+Algol+Functional-Programming

Why I'm looking forward to "Orcas"

I have stayed away from the Visual Studio betas (I beta test enough stuff already, thank you), but the more I hear about the next version of Visual Studio (code named "Orcas"), the more inclined I am to installing it in a VMWare session.

Scott Guthrie has been running a series of blog posts about the new language features coming in "Orcas".  His post about Extension Methods caught my eye.  In a nut shell, Extension Methods let you new methods of an existing object type, without having to subclass that object or modifying the object.

You bascailly create a new static class with a static method.  The first parameter has the keyword "this" prepended to it.  This informs the compiler that the new method should be added to the class referenced by "this".

Codegear does something similiar with Delphi 2007 to allow it be a non-breaking upgrade from Delphi 2006.

Scott also has a good example of how to use LINQ Extension Methods to query an XML file.  That for me was the first I really got the value of LINQ.

Automatic properties look pretty cool.  It's just syntactical sugar, but it goes down pretty good.  I have always been in the habit of creating properties for the public variables of a class in C# and Delphi, this makes it a little quicker write on the C# side.

Tech Tags: Orcas Extension+Methods LINQ Automatic+Properties

Julie Lerman's coming to town

On Tuesday, Julie Lerman is coming in from Vermont to do a presentation about ADO.NET Orcas at the TVUG meeting.  This will be the first meeting held at our office, it should be a cool presentation.  I saw her speak last year at a TVUG meeting and she's very good.

Thinking about WAIS, Gopher, and ExecPC

I was reading a post by Brad Abrams, where he was wondering why WAIS and FTP had died out.  While I disagreed with the idea that FTP has died out, WAIS is one of the long gone technologies of the Internet.  Unless you were using the Internet in the early '90s, the odds are that you have no idea of what WAIS was.  WAIS is over.

I remember trying it and not being terribly impressed by it when I got my first dialup Internet account (to get cheap access to ExecPC).  In the late 80's and early 90's, ExecPC was a super (as in huge) BBS, run on a bank of 386 machines.  At the time, ExecPC was one of the best places to get Amiga and DOS freeware and shareware.  While writing this post, I found out that ExecPC was still up and running, just without any modem access.  You can telnet into it from here.  I took a quick peek and it looks exactly the same as as it did the last time I logged in, back in 1998.

I got my first fast modem from an ExecPC auction.  Back in the days where 14,400 baud modems were the top end and 9200 was the norm, US Robotics had their own HST protocol that ran 16,800 downstream.  You only got HST speed when connecting to another HST modem, but the better BBSes had a least one HST modem.  One fine day, ExecPC upgraded their modems and they auctioned off the older ones.  A buddy and I got a couple of Courier HST Dual Standard internal models.  I think we paid about $150 each, at the time HST Dual Standard were going for $500.

If two those modems were not the original prototypes from US Robotics, then their serial numbers were still in the single digits.  These were full length cards and they had wires running all the place..  They worked great though.  After a couple of months, I was able to trade mine in for a new external Courier V.Everything modem.  This was back in 1994 and it was probably the fastest modem available on the consumer market.  I was able to upgrade it to the V.34 and V.90 standards when they became available.  It was is built like a tank.  I had stopped using it 7 years ago, when I got broadband, but my in-laws used it until last year, when they finally got broadband.

ExecPC was run in Wisconsin and it was expensive to call from NY.  ExecPC had a deal with an ISP named Concentric Research (CRIS).  If you had a CRIS account with a local dialup number, you could access ExecPC through the CRIS Unix shell as a local call.  When you dialed into CRIS with a terminal program, you got dumoed into a menu, from which you could access ExecPC.  It had other things on that menu.  You could drill down into WAIS and Gopher space, you could run Lynx (a text based browser), Pine (a text based email app), or even drop down to a Unix shell.

I had that CRIS account so long ago, they didn't offer a PPP connection when I signed up.  I had to use their SLIP implementation.  And this was with Windows 3.1, which didn't have native support for the Internet protocols.  I remember having to go through all sorts of gyrations getting the Trumpet Winsock to work.  You take for granted how easy it is to hook a PC up to the Internet these days, prior to Windows 95 you had to do some work to get it set up the right way. 

It's kind of funny what pops out of the deep recesses of memory by the reference of an archaic acronym.

Tech Tags: WAIS FTP Gopher HST Dual+Standard ExecPC Trumpet+Winsock Concentric.Net

Where is puterSoft.com?

Don't you hate it when a software component vendor disappears without warning?  In some of our applications, we use a custom datetime edit control named TPSCDateEdit.  This is part of a package from a company named puterSoft.  We have been using it for about 5 years and when we migrated our Delphi code to Delphi 2006, we got the Delphi 2006 version of their code.

Well, we discovered an annoying cosmetic bug.  If you exit a TPSCDateEdit control without entering in a date, the text of the control gets the date '12/30/1899'.  12/30/1899 is the day that the world began if you are a COM based life form.  The control was saving the right data (or in this case the lack of data), it was just the display that looked ugly.

So the first thought was to check puterSoft's web site to see if this was a known issue and had a fix or work around.  That failed and when I tied to ping the domain name, that failed.  I did some playing around on http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and I learned that it was hosted at DiscountASP.net and that DNS lookups are failing.  If you perform a DNS lookup for puterSoft, it goes into a loop and DNSstuff is smart enough to break out of that loop. 

I can't tell if puterSoft is gone or something is all fracked up with DiscountAsp.net's DNS records.  I've emailed Sergiy at puterSoft to see if they are still around.  I also fired off an email to DiscountAsp to see if they can tell me anything.  After 20 minutes, I got a reply back from DiscountASP.NET that the account has been cancelled.  That's Not Good^tm.

Since I'm not going to get any resolution from puterSoft in the immediate future, I decided to take a whack at it and see if it was a simple fix.  And it looks like it is.

When you exit a TPSCDateEdit, the following methods are called:

• TPSCCustomDateEdit.PostValue
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.SetDateTime
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.UpdatePopup
• TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText

Other methods are called, these are the ones important here.  UpdatePopup has the following logic:

 

If Text <> GetAsText Then
  Text := GetAsText;

 

The code in GetAsText looks like this:

 

function TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText:String;
begin
  Result:=DateTimeFormat.ToString(DateTime,Kind)
end;

By changing that code to this:

function TPSCCustomDateEdit.GetAsText:String;

begin

  if DateTime <> 0 then

    Result:=DateTimeFormat.ToString(DateTime,Kind)

  else

    result := '';

end;

 

I get result that I want. And life is good again.

Tech Tags: puterSoft DiscountAsp Delphi TPSCDateEdit DNSstuff

FinalBuilder to the rescue (again)

One of our applications has an installer that is created with Wise InstallBuilder 9.  The application is built from our shiny buildbox under the control of FinalBuilder.  When FinalBuilder builds the application, it does everything locally on that box.  With one exception, the installer.  The installer script file resides on another box, and our QA department uses the same installer to test various versions of the installer.

To keep our builds separate from QA's builds, I have FinalBuilder set to call the Wise compiler with a variables file.  That file is created each time FinalBuilder runs and it defines the version number, the name of the setup.exe and where the setup is created.  By sharing the installer source script with QA, we ensure that our test builds match their final layout.

Which was all good until QA edited that file on a machine that has Wise installed to a non-default location.   For some inane reason, Wise stores the location of the their runtime files in the script file.  When you open that file with the runtime in a different location, Wise throws up a dialog and prompts you to save the correct value in the file.

We have been invoking FinalBuilder from a script and that prevents the Wise dialog from being displayed.  So the build script hangs at that point.  The only way to get control back is to kill the wise32.exe process.  Why does Wise need to store a hard coded path in a script file when it already knows the location of the path?

That's annoying.  However, using FinalBuilder makes problems like this trivial to fix.  I added a Copy File action to the FinalBuilder build script to copy the install script to a second file.  That would allow us to pick up any changes that QA makes to the script.  I then added a Text Replace action that did a search and replace on "D:\PROGRA~1\WISEIN~1" with "C:\Program Files\Wise Installation System".  And our builds are back in business.

Tech Tags: Wise InstallBuilder FinalBuilder Automated+Builds

Windows Home Server goes Beta 2

Windows Home Server has reached Beta 2.  Foe those of your playing the home version of "Name That Beta", Beta 2 means that Microsoft has is now soliciting external testers to try the new OS.

I've been running FreeNAS for a couple of weeks without incident, so naturally I decided to see if I wanted to take a perfectly good running NAS and replace it with an unstable beta. It does some cool things that I don't do with FreeNAS, so I decided to see what was needed.  It needs a Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, and two or more drives with at least 300 GB space.

That seems a bit steep for a head-less device.  I'm running FreeNAS on a box that is at least 5 years old.  A 1 ghz Celeron with 256 MB RAM.  I started with a couple of 20 GB drives (remember 5 years ago) and added a 250 GB drive.

FreeNAS is working just fine, I think I'll leave it alone.

Tech Tags: FreeNAS Windows+Home+Server

I hate Macs

You have to love a good rant...

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

That's from Charlie Brooker, someone I will now start reading on a regular basis.  Having an iMac on my desk, I really loved this line:

When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.

Yet another rebuild (Part 2)

I'm not installing Opera this time.  I've been an Opera bigot for a long time, but it's not going on my primary work PC.  I'm using FireFox 2 instead of Opera.  Why?  Three words: Google Browser Sync.  The best description of Browser Sync comes from Google:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions

After having to rebuild my PC twice now in the last month, I'm tired of losing bookmarks and other settings.  With Google Browser Sync, my bookmarks are synched up across machines.  It adds so much value to me, that I'm giving up the faster performance, the better security, and the smaller footprint of Opera.  Of course, I'm going to make Firefox behave like Opera as much as possible.

Tech Tags: Repave Reinstall Firefox Opera Google+Browser+Sync

Yet another rebuild (Part 1)

After two and half weeks, I finally got my primary development box back from our IT manager.  The delay was due to fun with RAID.  After two drive failures within 30 days, I'm not taking any more chances.  BTW, nothing beats having two development boxes.  We are on three year refresh cycles for our PC's.  Usually developer boxes get rotated out to other departments.  On the last refresh, I managed to keep my old PC.  I do enough TCP development work, where it's handy to have to physically separated machines.  Now, the old box is now the insurance policy for when the hard drive goes on the primary box. 

Now, comes the tedius part, installing all the applications and tools that I use.  After the last drive finalure, I made up a spreadsheet of everything I use, that makes things much easier.  (Note to self: Next time, don't store that list on the machine that's meant for.  I was lucky, that file was recoverable when the drive went south.)

The first job is getting Windows setup up the way I want it.  That means XP, not Vista.  None of my development tools are certifed for Vista (Visual Studio 2005, BDS 2006), so why tempt fate.  Plus XP came with the box, might was well use the license.  For now, I'll run Vista from within a VMWare session.

After installing XP, I needed to get IIS installed.  Then Office.  Since the last drive fell on it's sword, I received the Office 2007 disk as part of the MSDN subscription.  I've only had the chance to play with Excel and Outlook, but the usability improvements are real.

The first time I ran Outlook 2007, it connected to our Exchange service and grabbed my mail.  The cool part was that I didn't tell it the name of our server or my email account.  It apparently figure that out from AD.  With Outlook 2003, I use LookOut to provide high speed searching of messages.  I don't think that's supported with Outlook 2007, so I have installed Windows Search.  It seems to work, plus it works across the file system.

The next thing I always disable is the Language Bar toolbar.  Even though you can right-click on the taskbar and de-select the Language Bar, it keeps coming back.  The following steps will take care of that:

1. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Regional and Language Options.
2. On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details.
3. Under Preferences, click Language Bar.
4. To turn text services off, select the Turn off advanced text services check box.
5. Click Yes if you are prompted to confirm your selection.

Then I add Administrative Tools to the Start Menu.   I use that enough so it's handy being able to get in quick.   Now the OS is functional, I can start loading up the tools.

Tech Tags: Repave Reinstall Language+Bar

A new title for Eliot Spitzer

I dub thee "Governor Steamroller".

Generating UTF-8 string s with out Byte Order Marks

Rick Strahl has a good blog entry on how get data from XmlTextWriter with having a Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the start of the data. The trick is to create the encoding manually and pass it with the constructor to XmlTextWriter.

Tech Tags: XmlTextWriter BOM Byte+Order+Mark

Snap Preview Anywhere is annoying

Lately, I've been starting to see idiot popup windows on blogs that should know better.  The popups are from "Snap Preview Anywhere™", a javascript thingie that displays a popup window when you move the mouse over a link on a page.

It sounds like a clever idea, but then again someone once thought the <BLINK> attribute was a clever idea.

I find the popups to be very annoying.  If you are trying to read something and you move the mouse over one these snap-enabled links, your experience has been disrupted.  I'm not the only one who dislikes SPA.

The idea is to show a preview of the site behind the link so that you can tell if you want to click that link.  Come on people, it's 2007 and our browsers have multiple tabs.  No mysterious force is preventing me from opening that link in a background tab.

The good news, it's pretty easy to fix.  You can disable the popup by going here and scroll down to the "Snap Preview Anywhere Activation" block and follow the instructions.  That method requires that your browser allow cookies.

If you are using FireFox, you can really take the snap out by installing AdBlock Pro and adding snap.com to the list of blocked sites.  That works very nice.

Tech Tags: Snap AdBlock

About a year ago, I put together a PC to automate all of our QA-Ready and production builds. We don't have a huge number of applications to build, but I wanted an automated way to build each application. Before "Build Box", each project had one developer who was reponsible for the build.

This worked, but it had some serious limitations:

1. It relied on a developer's machine to the build, which meant it required access to that developer. If he/she wasn't there, the team lead had to make sure that the machine would be accessable.
   
2. Nothing was automated, no two products were built the same way. This opens the door wide open for mistakes like not having the current source code.
   
3. Making a build was a major disruption for the developer who earned the build. This limited the number builds that would get buillt a day or week.

We use FinalBuilder to drive the build process. I can not say enough good things about FinalBuilder. It Just Works. With FinalBuilder, we use the following pattern to build each product:

1. Get the latest source code. We use Vault, FinalBuilder knows how to drive Vault.
   
2. Build the version information from .ini files stored in source control. With FinalBuilder, this was the easiest way to update the version number for the files. By alloing FinalBuilder to control the version resources, we can use the same mechanism for Win32 builds and for .NET builds
   
3. Build the actual project or projects.
   
4. Create updated installers. We use both the scripted and Windows Installer installer tools from Wise, FinalBuilder plays well with both. The only party of installer building that I can't automate, is the code to deal with upgrades in place. With Windows Installer technology, I need to handle that myself. That only happens once per product release, it's liveable.
   
5. Deploy the latest bits to the QA server. QA gets two copies of everything. The first copy has the final filename, the second has the build number appended (ie. something_278.exe) to it.
   
6. Send out an email to QA and the developers that notifies them that a new build has been released.

Now, any developer can remotely connect to the buildbox and start the build process. Of the course the fun part is getting the buildbox setup in the first place. It's like having another developer on the team, it gets everything installed.

Tech Tags: Delphi VS+Studio FinalBuilder Build+Box Vault Wise

What to install, what to leave out...

I have two machines that I do the brunt of my programming on.  One is a P4 1.8 Ghz box, circa 2002 that was my main work horse.  Last year I got a Pentium D 2.8 Ghz and that's the new main work horse.  Over the years, they have accumulated all the compilers that I work with (Delphi 5, Delphi 7, BDS 2006, VS 2002, VS 2003, VS 2005).   In a stunning show of solidarity, both machines had hard drive failures within a few months of each other.  The older one fell down August and the new guy blue screen in the most spectaculiar way just before Christmas.

To make a short story long, I had to repave each machine with new drives.  I have a nice long list of tools that I absolutely require to get the job done and I have been reinstalling each item as I need it.  I''ll post that list later.

When it came to the compilers, I only installed the latest of each one.  That meant BDS 2006 for my Delphi needs, and VS 2005 for my C# needs.  I didn't install the older versions of Delphi.  That was a mistake, I should of installed Delphi 7.  I really like BDS 2006, but CodeGear (née Borland) really broke the help system.  There are two many broken links, you have to explicitly the results to Delphi, or you end up with VB references.  And the content is missing many of the examples that were in Delphi 7.

But that's an annoyance, I installed only VS 2005 (plus SP1), completely forgetting that of the projects that I am involved with has an ASP.NET 1.1 front end.  Oops, I should have saw that one coming.  I don't do any of the coding on that bit, but I lost the ability to step throught that code to test my BDS 2006 based web service.  I'm trying to decide if I want to install VS 2003 (plus the older rev of DevEx) just to test some code.  What happens if you install VS 2003 AFTER VS 2005?  I spent too much repaving these boxes, I don't relish the thought of screwing it up by installing VS IDE's out of chronological order.   I think if I really need VS 2003, I'll create a VMWare session with Win 2K and install it there.  Or I'll create a VMWare image of our build box (everyone should have a buildbox), it has every compiler already configured.  Supposedly, I can create a VMWare session from an actual PC, that should be an interesting trick.

Tech Tags: Delphi VS+Studio Repaving

Blog Tagged

Andy just tagged me.  This is the geek version of tag.  I share 5 things about myself, then I tag 5 other people.  The hard is finding 5 other people who haven't yet been tagged.

What don't you know about me?

1. I used to be a DataFlex programmer (During the 1st Bush administration).  Mainly for DOS, but some UNIX tossed in.  Once I got called by CDTA to fix a bus routing application that ran on some oddball mainframe version of Unix.  I had just flew in from Amsterdam (not that Amsterdam , this Amsterdam) and I was jet lagged beyond all belief.  I kept jacking the hourly rate up, hoping they would go away.  They didn't and when the rate reached to the point where I felt guilty about blowing them off, I spent the next 12 hours in a bus garage rebuilding corrupt index files.
2. I taught myself C using Lattice C on the Amiga.
3. My wife and I met on a blind date.
4. The first time I earned money from something that I did on the computer was for a simple disk utility named "Easy Load" for the Commodore 64.  It was published in July 1985 edition of Compute!s Gazette.  That was back in the days when you had to type the code in from the magazines.  And they got it wrong and transposed some code, turning my little utility into a weapon of destruction.  I still got paid though.
5. I once taught a dog to jump in and out a living room window on command.  My friend Jack used to be a band named Operation Pluto.  The leader singer, Bill, had one of those little, yappy type of dogs.   Bill's landlord wouldn't let the dog, named "Zero", live in Bill's apartment.   So Bill asked Jack to watch the dog for a days (Jack had this little tiny house) while he worked things out with the landlord.  
   
   The days turned to weeks and Jack got stuck taking care of the dog, and he wasn't terribly diligent about feeding Zero.   I decided to see if Zero could be taught any tricks.  Since Zero was always hungry, he was quite amenable to learning new tricks, especially if food was involved. 
   
   After a remarkably short amount of time and dog biscuits, I had taught Zero to jump out the living room window on command.  The window was above a couch, and he would use the couch as a launch pad. A similar command would launch the hapless mutt back in through the window.
   
   The next time Bill came over to the house for band rehearsal, I was already there.  He came in and the first thing he said was "Where's Zero?"  Zero was outside in the yard playing.  I innocently said, "I'll get him" and then yelled "Zero! In!".  About 5 seconds later, the dog comes flying in through the window. 
   
   Bill is stunned and more than slightly pissed off at me.  He said "What just happened?"  I replied, "We've been teaching Zero new tricks.  Zero! Out!".  The dog ran to the couch and jumped out the window.   I then had Zero jump back in once more, so Bill could appreciate the sound of the dog's claws scrambling against the side of house as he jumped up to the window and pulled himself back in.  Needless to say, Bill took Zero home again.

Now, I have to figure out who to tag. I pick Shawn, Andy, Mark, Renard, and Lou.  I was going to tag Ed Dague, but I don'thave his email address.

Tech Tags: Blog+Tag Amiga Lattice+C Operation+Pluto C64 Blind+Date

Removing the Language Toolbar in Windows XP

This was completely copied from here.   This was bugging me to no end and I wanted to make sure that I had an easy to find copy.

Removing the Language Toolbar in Windows XP

1. Click the Start Button.
2. Select Control Panel option.
3. Double-Click the Regional and Language Options icon.
4. Click on the Languages tab.
5. Click the Details button.
6. Click the Language Bar button.
7. Remove the checkmark from the Show Language Bar option.
8. Click OK.

 

Tech Tags: Language+ToolBar Windows+XP XP+Annoyance

Ed Dague is more than a floating head

I just came across Ed Dague's blog. He's much more than a floating head on a an obscure web site. His comments on local media and politics are both interesting and intelligent. His take on Spitzer's naming of Michael Balboni as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety shows how 2 out of the three 3 local stations completely missed the hidden implications of that move.

He had to retire too soon from local TV for health reasons, but I'm glad to see that he has a forum for sharing his thoughts.

Tech Tags: Ed+Dague WNYT Albany+Eye Albany political+commentary RPI+Alumuni

Sybase has left the building

We dropped support for Sybase's Adaptive Server Anywhere, effective 12/31/06.  It wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right choice for us.

About seven years ago, our main application used file based database storage, through the BDE.  As we were designing what would be the present day version of application, we evaluated many different client/server solutions.

• It had to be designed for SQL.   Sounds like a given, but at the time file-based databases usually had SQL bolted on.

• It had to require zero maintenance.  Many of our clients do not have an IT department that can run a database that requires hand holding or was difficult to install.

• It had to be affordable.  We didn't want to have to charge for a database runtime for entry level pricing.

• It had to have name recognition.  That makes a big difference when making sales presentations.

• It had to support views, procedures, and the other good stuff that comes with a modern SQL database.

• Had to run on Netware.  Many of clients were running Novell Netware as their network server and they wanted the data to stay on the server.

The president of the company wanted us to use Microsoft SQL Server.  It fit the list except for the last item.  Novell Netware.

That was hard one.  We needed a database that would be on the Netware server.  That meant it had to run on the Netware box.  The number of client server databases that run on Netware is a short list.  Back in 2000, the list included Oracle, Advantage, Pervasive, Interbase, Sybase SQL Anywhere.

We had ruled out Oracle because of cost and support concerns.  Advantage was a client server engine wrapped around a file based storage system and didn't have the name recognition.  Pervasive was the current incarnation of Btrieve and I had bad experiences with Btrieve in the past.  It didn't have the name recognition that we wanted and pricing was a concern.

Interbase met everything, but the name recognition.  At the time we were considering it, it was in the process of going open source and we had concerns over the long term viability.  Plus there was the name recognition.

That left Sybase's Adaptive Server Anywhere.  It had everything, but the name recognition.  It did have a feature that none of the others had.  It supported the T-SQL dialect of SQL that Microsoft SQL Server uses.  That allowed us to write code that would be compatible with both SQL Server and Adaptive Server Anywhere.  There were a few places where the SQL was different, but that was less than 1% of the time.

Sounds great, so we did end support at the end of 2006?  There were a few reasons that added up to a big reason.

Performance was a sore point.  All things considered equal, SQL Server was faster than Adaptive Server Anywhere.  The more complicated the SQL, the bigger the disparity in the performance.  We ended up migrating most of our clients that were on Adaptive Server Anywhere to SQL Server or the MSDE.

The Sybase native OLE DB provider (ASAPROV) had bugs that never got fixed.  Our Win32 applications use ADO and OLE DB to connect to the databases.  The native Adaptive Server Anywhere OLE DB provider would throw strange errors when working with client side record sets.  I submitted multiple bug reports to Sybase and they addressed some but not all of them.   Instead using their provider, we used the Microsoft's generic OLE DB to ODBC provider (MSDASQL) to connect to Sybase over ODBC.  That worked, but it added an extra layer to the mix.  Another concern was that Microsoft has deprecated MSDASQL and stated that it will not be available in 64-bit operating systems.  At some point a custimer was going to get a 64-bit edition of Windows and wouldn't be able to connect to the database.

The additional testing time became a concern.  Sybase releases frequent updates, and we found many bugs that were reported on our application were caused by bugs introduced in the latest and greatest patch from Sybase.

After talking to some of of clients, we made the decision over a year ago to end Sybase support.  We down to a handful of clients still using Sybase and we expect to be migrating their data within the next few months.  It has gone very smoothly.

Tech Tags: ADO ASAPROV Adaptive+Server+Anywhere Deprecated+Providers MSDASQL Netware OLE+DB SQL

TiVo now placing ads on the delete screen

I finally saw TiVo's new advertising placements on the "Delete this recording?" screen. It was a one line blurb for Burger King that you could click into via the remote. It was not intrusive and didn't change how to delete a recording at all.

If TiVo can do stuff like that to improve their bottom line, I'm all in favor of it. They are saying: "Here's some advertising If you want to see it, click on it." I still have the choice in viewing the ad or not. If it keeps TiVo from going under or having to raise the subscription fees, then it's a great thing. I do wonder how the advertising is selected. Is it targeted by the show that was recorded, or is it more random?

One thing TiVo could do is to display subtitles when you fast forward through a commercial. That way if you were skipping over a commercial and you could still get the message of the commercial. You might see something that makes you stop and view that commercial. The technology is already inplace, subtitles are already encoded in the TV signal.