TechTV archived a few of FoxTrot’s geekiest strips. One strip on this page was so exquisitely painful that I immediately set it as my desktop wallpaper. You’ll know it when you see it. :-)

(I found this page while looking for the strip where Jason dressed as the Blue Screen of Death for Halloween.)

Joe Bork wrote an interesting defense of why Microsoft might choose to ship a product with known bugs. He walks us through the decision process of a particular bug that was found during the beta testing of Windows CE Utilities for Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add-on Pack 1.1 (whew, there’s a mouthful). Check it out if you’ve ever moaned “why did they let this one get by?”

Thanks to Craig for the link.

Well, it’s not my open letter, it’s Wil Wheaton’s. He pretty well nails why it’s not that guy’s fault the Cubbies didn’t make it this year.

Oops, almost forgot — I ran into The Human Aggregator in the lobby on the way to the user group meeting: he was looking for another user group that was meeting nearby.

I tried to bribe him into staying for pizza, but it didn’t work. :-)

Tonight’s meeting of the Seattle VFP Special Interest Group was disappointing. Not because of the content, but because so few people braved the elements to come out and see it. When I’m the one presenting, that’s fully justified. :-)

Tonight, though, Aleksey Tsingauz, of the Fox development team, walked us through the use of CursorAdapters. CursorAdapters are object wrappers for data connections. Where views can only do local and ODBC data sources, CAs can connect to native, ODBC, ADO, or XML data sources with equal fluency. Aleksey showed us the main properties, grouped by topic. There are (can be, actually) custom commands for Inserting, Updating, or Deleting data, and you can hook in Before or After the command fires. You can also do automatic transforms on the data using the ConversionFunc property: Aleksey’s example was ALLTRIMming Fox character fields to go into SQL Server varchar fields.

Cursors can be attached to and detached from CA objects at will. If the cursor is not compatible with the object and you’re using the automatic functions, rather than custom-coding them, it will be rejected. However, if you’ve written the custom functions, your Customer CA object will be perfectly happy attaching to your Employee cursor.

The AfterCursorFill event can be used to create indexes for your cursor, among other things.

BeforeUpdate lets you see the actual command which is being sent to the back end. This is useful for troubleshooting. AfterUpdate lets you overrule failures. It has an lResult parameter that is passed by reference, so that if you can repair the failure, you can flip the flag so that the TABLEUPDATE() function reports that the update succeeded. The various events fire once per row updated, unless you set the CA into batch mode — I didn’t quite get the syntax for this.

Aleksey then proceeded to demonstrate the various PEMs he had been explaining.

One thing that came out during the demos was that the various DataSourceTypes (Select, Insert, Update, and Delete) do _not_ need to match. You could have the select going through ADO, and an update going through ODBC. You could even write a native function that would process the update and then pass it back to the server.

He also demonstrated accessing the data through Stored Procedures on the back end. This is something you can _not_ do with remote views, though you can write lots of code to do it with SQL pass-through.

All in all, an informative and satisfying meeting. Next month on the 17th, Richard Stanton will be previewing some of the new reporting features in Europa, the upcoming version of Visual FoxPro. This will be a don’t-miss meeting, so mark your calendars!

For more information about CursorAdapters, see the online documentation at MSDN. Aleksey will be sending his slides and demos in the near future to be posted on the SeattleVFP.org site.

When the vendor of the milk cartons changes, they file a bug on the new carton seals.

Ok, so we don’t have Robbie quite yet. However, we’re getting frighteningly close. Pay special attention to the video of the robot standing up from a supine position. Incredible.

Thanks to /. for the link.

This looks to be interesting. The Windows Mobile people are doing a user group tour over the next couple of months. There are going to be discussions and hands-on demos of Smartphones, Pocket PC Phones, and Pocket PCs.

Actually, don’t go — that improves my odds at the giveaways.

Ok, so I’m slow. The reason I spent last Thursday taking care of Donna and the girls was that a couple of Fridays ago, Donna was taking some trash out to the dumpster. There are four stone steps going from our walkway to the driveway where the dumpster is. We must have gone up and down them dozens, if not hundreds of times without incident.

She landed in a bush at the bottom, in a great deal of pain.

Of course, she couldn’t actually give in to this, because Erin was still inside. So, after watching two garbage trucks drive by without stopping, she pulled herself together and went back inside. A later visit to the doctor resulted in an air cast and a diagnosis of a sprained ankle.

The radiologist who reviewed the films on Wednesday found the break. So, back to the doctor’s office, only to find that none of the walking casts they had would fit her leg. She had to go back the next day to get a standard cast put on.

Oh, and did I mention that this is her accelerator and brake foot? And that Ael lives out of the area when the bus will pick her up for kindergarten?

Let’s hear it for flexible hours at work! Yeah!

What do you mean, your collar bone still hurts? Uh-oh…

Well, this answers this question.

Hmm, tickets are going for $81 on eBay. Wonder what they’re going to wind up at.

Then again, I probably don’t want to know.

Update: I cut&pasted the wrong eBay link above. Try this one, if you have a spare $280+ lying around.