Business – Page 11 – SwitchBL8’s gebazel

Issue Tracker

May 102004

I was looking for a decent Issue Tracker to support my clients. It would serve the purpose of having them know what the status of their issues (problems, questions, rfc’s) is on a I-need-to-know-now basis, whithout bothering me, or without me bothering them everytime something has changed.

A couple of weeks ago, in my .NET rulez period, I tried the IssueTracker Start Kit. Although it works, it was not really what I was looking for. Basically, it has the work-in-progress feel to it, and that’s what it is.

Today I came accross Tuxmonkey’s Issue Tracker, a piece of platform-independent software that uses PHP and Postgres/MySQL. The demo on their website gives you the opportunity to test it without having to install anything.

This is my IssueTracker of choice. When I get home I will install it, and take it into production. The client needs to know what’s up. The client is king.

Lazarus

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Apr 282004

If you like Delphi, but also like non-Windows OS-es as well, you basically are going to have to pay twice or more. Each time for each programming environment (be it Kylix, or something else). Freepascal is a Delphi clone, for Win32 and Linux. It tries to do everything Delphi does, but it does not have a real front-end/IDE. Enter Lazarus. It’s not completely Delphi yet, but it’s nice to see how far they already are. Some Delphi code can be used in Lazarus/Freepascal without altering!

If you look at the Project Roadmap, you can see most of the IDE and most of the components are done and working. The rest of it (LCL, the Lazarus version of VCL, GTK, Qt, Win32) needs some more work.

This how Lazarus looks like on my desktop:

Notice the blue and green line just above and below the buttons? Quite neat: they show if components are aligned or not (then the lines disappear)! Borland, did you see that?

Server was unavailable

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Apr 272004

The server was unavailable today again. That means that my mail-, web- and dns-server are unreachable. The WAP (LinkSys) did it this time. Resetting the damned thing was the solution. I hate to think about it, but I think it’s time to get some wiring up here…

ShellExecute problem found

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Apr 262004

I think I found the problem of my “hanging” ShellExecute. In my application I have a TRichViewEdit in which the user can do basic editing. If the user needs more, he presses the Word button, that will start Word with the appropriate document.

If I don’t edit in the TRichView first, and go straight to Word, any attempt to close Word normally fails. Taskmanager etc will work, but that will cancel all editing.
If I edit in the TRichViewEdit first, save it, and then open Word, things run smooth like a baby’s ass.

The difficult part is this: the TRichViewEdit REMOVES a graphic that is in the Header of the Word document. So I have 2 things to solve:

1: The removal of the picture
2: Word behaving strangely when the picture is still in the document

Sometimes, life is not so sweet….

Normalization not normal anymore?

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Apr 222004

Nick has a nice piece about normalization of database-schemas, or in his experience: the absence of it lately. I’m an educated databasedesigner myself, and when looking at the underlying databases of some applications I’ve used, shivers run down my spine most of the time. People not knowing how to normalize is something I can live with (it means my salary is justified), but if you create a schema for your application, at least be consistent in naming your tables and columns. Don’t mix plural and singular names, don’t use a hyphen in one occasion and an underscore in the other (if both are allowed), and for crying out loud: use sensible names. We have more than 64bkyte of memory in most computer nowadays, so why abbreviate everything to 3, 4 or 6 characters? Because it’s easier to type when coding? Get a decent IDE with CodeCompletion. That’s easier than trying to remember what all these cryptic TLAs stand for.

OUAU 1.1.0.0

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Apr 202004

OUAU should now work for all Office versions, and you can select the Office version (if for some reason you have partial Office installations) and it will reread and write the appropriate registry-entry.

Changes

Ability to change Office version by using the radiobuttons
Added link to this blog in context-menu

To do

Close the application when unsupported Office version is detected (detection and errormessage is already in place)

ouau has no effect?!

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Apr 202004

I tried ouau here at work, and we’re using Office 2002/XP. It finds the correct Office version, I’m able to make changes to the blocked extensions, which I can verify by restarting the program: it finds the new settings. But the new registry-setting resort no effect: right-click and send-to-mail-recipient of a unblocked extension (e.g. .EXE) still results in Outlook saying that the attachments are potentially unsafe. What’s going on here? Something to do with (group)policies?

Update: I think I already know: Exchange administrators can add/remove Level 1 and/or Level 2 extensions within the Exchange-server settings. This can not be overruled by the Outlookclient. So, I guess I’ll have to find another way to test other Office versions.

OUAU 1.0.5.0

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Apr 182004

Another update to OUAU, now version 1.0.5.0.

Changes:

Detection of Office 2000
Detection of Office 2002/XP
Detection of Office 2003

To do:

When user selects an Office version other than detected, modify the correct registry-entries, instead of detected version
Close the application when unsupported Office version is detected (detection and errormessage is already in place)

Visual C++ Toolkit

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Apr 182004

Microsoft must have gone bonkers! After opening up the source to WiX, they are now giving away the commandline tools for Visual C++. How about that?

OUAU 1.0.4.0

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Apr 182004

Minor update to ouau, bringing it to version 1.0.4.0.

Changes:

All extensions show a description as tooltip when hovering the extension
When “Select all” is checked and an extension is unchecked, “Select all” will be unchecked as well
New Icon

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