Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Virtual FoxFest 2020

    For many years, late October has meant a family reunion of Visual FoxPro developer in Gilbert AZ for Southwest Fox. But 2020 is messing with everything and that means no in-person conference this year. With a quick pivot, the organizers of the conference have figured out how to make this a on-line conference instead, so […]

  • A Brief History of 25 Years of MadFox

    [An article for the APCUG newsletter] In January of 1995 I had the good fortune to be able to attend my very first FoxPro DevCon. I had been a user of FoxBase, and its precedent dBase, since 1985 but never had the opportunity to attend a national conference. My mind was BLOWN. At this event, […]

  • An Application Lifecycle

    All good things come to an end.

  • A FoxPro to Python Quickie

    [Today in the #ThatConference #ThatTrivia Slack board, there was this math question: “Identify a multi-digit number such that when each digit is raised to the power of itself, and the result of each of those is added together you get the original number.” eg: 274 = (2 ^ 2) + (7 ^ 7) + (4 […]

  • Southwest Fox 2019 Recap

    I’m as surprised as anyone to be reading that headline. Yes, there’s still a conference devoted to Visual FoxPro in 2019, over a decade after Microsoft pronounced the product dead and almost 4 years since the very last shred of support from Microsoft has dissipated. Yet there we were, over 80 of us all gathered […]

  • Finding iPhone Serial Number (Even if it’s locked)

    I sit here with 30 iPhones that need to be responsibly disposed of (recycled). They’re unlabeled, and have tiny IMEI numbers on the back that have no correlation to the serial number we (may, but sometimes don’t) have in our inventory of them. They’re no longer under MDM, so I need to inspect each of […]

  • Quick Utility to Compare DBF Schemas

    I recently revisited a project that I had dropped about 6 months ago. The client sent me an updated batch of data to work with, and I remembered the first thing I needed to do was massage the new data to get it back to where I could work with it again. The problem was, […]

  • Eric’s Completely Unironic Best Practices for Password Management

    Based on Real World Examples I’ve Seen. Seriously. Write your passwords on post-its and leave them on your monitor. Share your passwords with everyone on your commute. Then if you forget you can ask almost anybody and they can remind you. Use your firstborn’s entire first name, not just their nickname, as your password. Use […]

  • Using OneDrive to Sync Development Machines

    [tl;dr : Don’t do it!] I have a laptop at work that I do most of my development work on, but I don’t take it with me everywhere. Sometimes I’ll find myself at home next to my older PC and wanting to do some work. So what’s the best way to ensure that I have […]

  • Southwest Fox 2017 Recap

    Southwest Fox 2017 is in the books. Here are my thoughts: Smaller, younger crowd When I walked into the keynote on Thursday night it was clear that this was a smaller crowd than years past. We were told to expect this because the folks at Alaska Software are taking the year off from conferences to […]

Got any book recommendations?