The Premier Development and Runtime Environment for Business Application Software
April 29th, 2008 Al Kalter
This is a great time of year to be a sports fan. It’s true that it’s the off-season for football, but NFL fans certainly got their fix last weekend with the draft, and college fans had intra-squad scrimmages and all to keep their juices flowing. In other arenas, though, things are heating up: The Masters and the upcoming Players Championship in golf, a new baseball season to cultivate dreams of glory, the interminable NBA post-season (sorry, I’m not a fan of NBA hoops), and the best of them all - the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 28th, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, just a small update on how testing is progressing. Looks like we are about done with testing PDF Output, the new Appx Connection manager (on unix), Client/Server SSL encryption, and the new Appx session monitor. No big surprises here. A few small cleanup items that are mostly done. We seem to now be in the middle of testing the new source code control features, upgraded database interfaces, audit logging of file changes, and new ILF statements.
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April 24th, 2008 Al Kalter
Sue and I biked into work again today. It is the perfect time of year in Jacksonville, and we’ve used the bikes instead of the cars 4 or 5 times recently. We’re not the only ones who occasionally bike into work here, of course. Gary and Jeff often arrive on two wheels too. The difference is that theirs have a Harley Davidson logo on the side. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 22nd, 2008 Al Kalter
Today is an ordinary day. Weather-wise, it’s the perfect time of year to be in Florida, with sunny skies, comfortable temperatures, low humidity, and, as my wife pointed out this afternoon, no mosquitoes (yet). Work-wise, nothing extreme is going on … Jeff is teaching a training class, Steve and Pete are working on technical aspects of APPX that are beyond my understanding, and I’m blogging (again). I don’t expect today to be a milestone day in any regard, except that I’ll use today to talk about milestones, turning points in life, forks in the road that lead you one way or the other, but never back. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 17th, 2008 Al Kalter
Last night, my Low Fuel warning light came on. I drove several miles out of my way to our nearest BJ’s Warehouse Club, in an effort to save a few bucks. And while the price there was indeed 5-10 cents less than other local stations, it still cost me over $51 to fill the tank of the minivan. If you drive a big SUV or a truck or a Hummer or something like that, or if you’re reading this from Europe or elsewhere in the world where fuel prices have always been a lot higher than in the US, you probably aren’t wringing your hands in sympathy right now. But crossing any threshold - $50 a tank, $3 a gallon, $10 a pitcher - seems to always have an emotional impact. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 15th, 2008 Al Kalter
I admitted last time that I don’t go to a lot of movies. And I don’t watch much on TV either, other than sports. And occasionally stuff on Discovery/History/Nature. And Scrubs. And PTI. With those last two, we’ve discovered the benefits of DVR. A significant upgrade from the old VCR recordings we might have done, DVR allows us to record lots of stuff, watch it when we want, and skip the commercials. Which is a strange thing to say, because today it’s commercials that I want to talk about. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 14th, 2008 Pete Brower
Well, in the process doing extensive testing of PDF output in 4.3 we came upon an issue that we think we need to deal with. It’s not a new issue but does cause some problems. The problem is that the LABEL and RAWTEXT widget types are being treated the same. If you have an alpha or text field defined as a RAWTEXT widget it will act as a LABEL. Vertically centering, doing html formatting, etc. Actually even if you have no widget defined you still get the html formatted instead of raw. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 11th, 2008 Al Kalter
It occurs to me that some people are movie-goers, and some are not. The difference, it seems, is that the former group decides to go to the movies, and then looks at the listings to decide which movie to see. The latter group only visits the theater if there is a particular film that they wish to see. I am part of the latter group, which means I don’t go often. One of the movies I have not seen is called, “The Bucket List.” But I’m going to talk about it anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
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April 10th, 2008 Pete Brower
Testing continues on the release. We have spread out into other areas. In addition to testing PDF output we have divided up the rest of the feature and enhancement list among our staff. Jeff is testing file encryption, application design enhancements, user related enhancements, and new ILF statements. Yana is testing the Appx session monitor, upgraded database interfaces, and data change logging. Joe is testing client/server encryption and the new connection managers. Pete is testing library updates to our ODBC interface, the newer PDFlib utilities we use for PDF output, and our source code control system. Steve is testing PDF output and our source code control system. Not much else to report right now. No significant surprises or test failures have surfaced so far.
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April 9th, 2008 Al Kalter
I’ve always felt that I could be a columnist (not a communist, although I have been accused of leaning left). This perhaps unfounded confidence stems, no doubt, from the egocentric belief that the world will benefit from my opinions, which I have never been shy about voicing through other means. So when Steve introduced the APPX Blog, and encouraged the employees to write about whatever they wanted, well, I figured this was the opportunity I was waiting for. And what you, our audience, were waiting for as well, even if you didn’t realize it. Read the rest of this entry »
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