I wish I had known that NASA was running a contest for the top 10 images taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

If you’ve read Duane’s Wizard’s Holiday, you’ve seen the SOHO mentioned there as part of a plot point.

Thanks to Fark, I now know where to look up anything I want to know about Middle-Earth.

If you’ve never read to the bottom of my blog, there are a few links there that don’t show up otherwise.

I just borrowed Phil Ringnalda’s code for formatting the Blogger archive links a bit better. Bear with me while I try to figure out how to get it to show up where I want it to go.

I was just talking to Donna on the phone, when the following exchange took place.

Donna: “Erin, give me that yo-yo, you hit Mac on the head with it this morning.”

Erin: “Mommy, you’re bad!”

Donna: “You’re worse!”

Erin: “No, you’re worse!”

Daddy: laughing helplessly while thinking how lucky he is to be stuck at the office for another hour

Where to begin? I wish I hadn’t left my notebook back at the office…

The focus of the presentations was mostly on the new Smartphone platform. The people who did the demos had both of the US-available phones, from Samsung and Motorola, and switched back and forth between them. Much of the emphasis was on ease-of-use: for example, they showed how 2000 contacts could be trimmed down in 5 keystrokes to a single user. The Inbox integrated well with other apps, the internet, and even Exchange, for people to read their corporate email. One of the neat features was that the phones could be auto-synced with the mail servers, so that you have the same always-on experience that you do on your desktop — and for people who live in Outlook, like your average Microsoft employee, this is a big deal.

There was a demo of AT&T’s Smartphone configuration service. It lets you set up your preferences in your desktop browser, and then sends an SMS that tells your phone where to download the installation program it just created, into which you need to type the PIN it just gave you.

It’s so nice of Microsoft to leave internet kiosks all over their Conference Center — I think this is the first time I’ve blogged an event in progress. :-)

I’m at the Windows Mobile User Group Tour. There are Pocket PCs on display all over the place, along with displays from third-party vendors. I overheard somebody at the GPS vendor’s table talking about geocaching — seems like a pretty good use of the technology at hand. :-) After the display in the lobby, they’ll be giving us a presentation in the Kodiak room: I’ll talk about that later.

(Did I mention the beer, wine, and coffee, in addition to MS’s traditional free soda coolers?)

It’s getting traditional — or at least seasonal. Tonight’s meeting of the Seattle VFP Special Interest Group was almost as wet as last month’s, but the attendance was a bit better – including one first-time attendee who claimed he had been drawn in by the pizza. :-)

Richard Stanton led us through a demo of the latest features in Europa reporting — in fact, this was the first time the reporting features had been presented in the US. He explained that there was a huge emphasis on extending the reporting features, rather than replacing them, so that our existing investment in FRXs would be protected.

The first thing he demonstrated was multi-detail bands. The example he used was an employee – orders and employee – territories pair of relations. He set up the employee table in the group, and then created two detail bands: one with orders for the controlling alias, and one with territories for a controlling alias. The report he generated looked like this:

Employee1
   Territories
      Territory1
      Territory2
   Orders
      Order1
      Order2
Employee2
   etc.

This is… umm… non-trivial to do in earlier versions of VFP, but is almost trivial in Europa. Another thing he showed us was the possibilities of including the same detail band twice. He added another orders band, but instead of outputting the records in the detail band, he used report variables that reset after each detail band, and put the order count, total, and average order in the detail footer, which then displayed directly below the Employee header.

Another new feature is the PROTECTED keyword. Since the Report Writer is included in the runtime, it’s not uncommon to allow the end-users to modify the reports. This allows you to lock down given items so they can’t be modified, edited, or deleted.

Europa will also include a report builder. One example Richard gave was that now, if you double-click on a label, you don’t get a positioning dialog: you get a five-tab dialog that gives you access to all sorts of info, including the ability to edit the label text and to set absolute positioning (watermarks, anyone?). The architecture for this will be fairly open, so if you don’t like the supplied ReportBuilder.app, you can build your own.

If you open a Europa report in VFP8, it will open correctly if you’re only using a single band. If you have multiple bands, VFP8 won’t mess it up for you: it will just refuse to open it.

After that, we had some extra time, so YAG, Ken, and Richard collaborated on some free-flowing demonstrations of other Europa features. We saw auto-anchoring controls, that remained in the correct place as the form was resized. We saw rotating text and polygons (not just rectangles anymore!). We saw the different ways you can now put a picture on a CommandButton. In fact, we saw so many things I forgot to take notes, so those are just the highlights. :-)

We had two special guests tonight: Susan Graham, former Fox Software employee and VFP manager elaborated a bit on a story from Fox Tales involving Dave Fulton, a new 4-wheel-drive truck, an Ohio snowstorm, and an enforced workday; and Robert Scoble popped in to see the new Europa stuff that I invited him to check out.

The next meeting will be Monday, December 15th. We have a tentative speaker: I’ll post in the usual places as things finalize. See you there!

As one of Ael and Erin’s favorite books is 10 Minutes to Bedtime, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the author, Peggy Rathmann, live at Third Place Books tonight. We walked in while she was reading her new book, The Day the Babies Crawled Away. Afterwards, she played a “game” called “5 Bumps”. She drew a face on a page with the 5 bumps for the nose, mouth, etc., and then added all the other features. She then invited kids up to do the same thing. After they drew the 5 bumps, she turned it into a face, no matter how creative the positioning of the bumps was. Ael was the second volunteer, and Erin ran up with her, so they both got to draw faces. Afterwards, she signed our copies of 10 Minutes and The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury, which included her Goodnight, Gorilla. Her husband, who was touring with her, said that it was unusual for someone to bring that edition.

Ken Levy posted his monthly letter to the community tonight, with some straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth info about what to expect down the line in VFP.next.