Category: Blog

  • 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, […]

  • OneNote to Rule Them All

    I’m putting together this session for the SWFox Conference in September, and the more I get into it the more excited I am. You may know OneNote is a pretty convenient place to keep information. But with its ability to store text, graphics, audio, video, hyperlinks, along with its sharing and replication features, OneNote can […]

  • New (Old) Phone Number

    What a way to start the new year. I managed to break not one but TWO Samsung Galaxy phones over the weekend. The glass on my S5 was becoming unglued so I bought a replacement kit on Amazon and tried replacing it. I have done this successfully on two phones already, so I liked my […]

  • 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 […]

  • How to Hack a Database

    Do you ever hear about a database hack and think “Wow, whoever pulled this off must be some super-smart hacker type with access to advanced technology and supercomputers?” Well in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Database hacks are accomplished with a combination of readily available tools, a dash of readily available know-how, […]

  • SBT Flashback

    I got a call yesterday from another tech support guy who was at a place that was having trouble with their custom-written application. He had figured out that it was a problem with a FoxPro table, but not knowing how to fix those he searched “Madison FoxPro” and found my name. (Thank You, All in […]

  • Testing the “Duplicated Shuffle” Odds in SQL Server

    I recently became aware of the (kinda mind-blowing) fact that the odds are essentially zero that the order of the deck of cards you just shuffled has ever occurred before in the history of Earth (we’ll discard other planets for now as that variable is not quite yet known). According to this fascinating thread on […]

  • Good Riddance 2013

    I haven’t blogged in a while. In fact I haven’t done much of anything that can be considered creative or original for quite a while which is kind of a problem when you write code for a living! I’ve been pondering this post’s possibility for a few months, and finally having been inspired by other […]