Calvin Hsia's WebLog

Looking at temporal data can be quite informative. For example, I have a table of about 16000 photographs . Each record has a datetime stamp. Looking at the temporal distribution one can clearly see events, such as the birth of a child, the visit of relatives...

While debugging code, it might take very many complicated steps to reproduce an issue. The following applies to debugging both Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio Native code debugging, except where noted. The VFP debugger is modeled after the VS debugger...

Our local bridge club uses a computer program to tabulate scores. The bridge director enters scores from each round as they finish, so within a few minutes after the event is over, the final scores, rankings and earned masterpoints are available, and...

Suppose there is a process on your machine that is hijacking your processor. Perhaps it’s in an infinite loop. Or perhaps you have no idea what a particular process is doing, and you’d like to find out. If you have a debugger installed, like Visual Studio...

A couple years ago, despite the airspace security implications just after 9/11, an airplane flew over Microsoft campus for about an hour towing an advertising banner that said “Thanks to Microsoft © 10 years of FoxPro!”. . Last week at DevCon, I was privileged...

I bought myself a notebook computer a few months ago while Dell was having a Free Printer special. It turns out the printer can also scan, and the scanner has an option to output to MS Word after using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert to...

When we had our first child, we had an audio monitor that consisted of 2 pieces: a microphone with a wireless transmitter and a speaker with a wireless receiver. Thus we could hear the baby from afar. Times have changed. Now the hospital uses disposable...

Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) is great: it allows me to access another remote machine as if I were sitting at its keyboard and seeing its screen. My web server sits on top of a 7 foot tall bookcase but I have no need to touch it: I can use RD from other...

Most screen savers will terminate when there is any mouse or keyboard activity, but a screen saver is just a program: it can do whatever it wants in response to input. Below is 40 lines of sample code to make a Visual FoxPro screen saver which consists...

Now that Las Vegas Devcon is over, I’ll be posting some of my sample code from the keynote and my session here. I demonstrated how to make a simple VFP screen saver. To test it, invoking it immediately is useful. Windows XP allows you to have a screen...