SaltyBlog

Author: Eric

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • The Stuff of Nightmares, Part 2

    Things are looking very grim, and I appear to have lost over 40 hours of work due to a perfect storm (as described in Part 1). I feel physically ill. When I log back in I see a notification on my toolbar that says “HP SimpleSave is running”. Oh…that’s right I have this utility that’s […]

  • The Stuff of Nightmares

    Last night I finished (as much as one can ever say anything is “finished”) my Southwest Fox 2016 Whitepapers. Southwest Fox is unique in that speakers must also write whitepapers to accompany their sessions, which is fantastic for attendees as they walk away with hundreds of well-written pages about all of the topics rather than […]

  • Windows Update and the 0x8024401F Error

    I’ve just spent quite a bit of team sifting and winnowing through the internet trying to get to the bottom of a Windows Update error that I’ve been getting for the last few weeks. StackOverflow.com, my preferred answer site, had nothing. If you’ve ever had to try to navigate the awful awful answers.microsoft.com, technet.com, spiceworks, […]

  • String.Format for Visual FoxPro

    [Originally Published in FoxRockX, September 2010] If you haven’t used C#’s String.Format() method, it’s a real treat. There’s nothing natively like it in VFP, but we can certainly roll our own equivalent. This will make our code easier to read and maintain. This article will show why you want to do that, and how to […]