Let the Festivities Commence
It has been a manic couple of weeks trying to make last-minute changes and updates for clients keen to start the new year with something new to show. Given more time there are more things that can still be done, but time (and Christmas it seems) waits for no man. As problems go, having plenty of work is one that's nice to have.
Consumer Protection and Marketing
An EU Directive came into force in the UK on 26 May 2008 by the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. The law prohibits certain ‘sharp practices’ in the marketing, sale and supply of a product to consumers.
Legacy Systems
Over recent months I have been asked to look at a number of legacy FoxPro system, and by legacy systems I mean systems developed BEFORE visual FoxPro 5.
All of the programs I have looked at recently have been developed using FoxPro for DOS, and what is amazing (to me anyway) is that these programs are still operating 15-20 years later and to many companies/individuals they form business critical tools.
10 things you probably didn't know about coffee
Here at Foxsoft we do our part in persisting the stereotypical role of IT and our excessive coffee drinking, though Hugh is more partial to a strong cup of tea.
Introducing Firebug
When you’re styling a website in CSS the tools you use can make a massive difference to the time it takes to get your styling right. If you’re working on a site that’s hosted on the internet – whether it’s a test site or a live one – sometimes you want to see the effect of a change without having to ftp the revised stylesheet onto the remote server. In situations like this Firebug, an add-on for Firefox, can be just what you need.
Working Time Directive
You may well say that implementing European Directives are to make sure that all member states ‘harmonize’ laws in the interest of their nationals. However, it might surprise you to know that a recent article stated:
Ready Made vs. bespoke
None but the smallest of businesses can afford to overlook the benefits offered by the use of computers, whether as a single unit or as part of a network, and so the choice of business software applications is often as critical in the success of the business as any other factor.
Packaging Industry Beware
No need to ‘Beware of the small print’! – There won’t be any. Demands by the EU to fit nutritional information on to food packaging will not work because the labels are too big, food companies have complained. Some of the world’s biggest brands, including Nestle and Coca-Cola, claim the information panels are so large they will swamp packs, bottles and tins, and obscure logos and brands.
Internet Explorer Conditional Statements Continued
Following on from my previous post on conditionals, this time I'll be looking at building your conditional statements and how to implement conditionals into your styling workflow.
Internet Explorer Conditional Statements
The debate over whether it’s good practice to use Internet Explorer conditionals continues, but for many they’re a necessary evil when trying to get Explorer to play nice with your styles. Personally I believe that sensible use of conditionals is much better than the alternatives.
Paperclip Validations and STI
A Rails application we’ve been working on uses Paperclip to make managing file attachments easy to deal with. We’re using Single Table Inheritance (STI) to store all the different assets in a single table. In one of the subclasses I want to restrict the content type to only PDFs. Sounds like it should be simple, right? Unfortunately, the way Paperclip is currently written means that it shares all the validation definitions with all the related subclasses. (You can see the bug on Github)
What is a Semaphore Lock?
A long time ago I fell over the concept of signaling a lock across a network without actually locking a file or record. I forget the programming language, but thought how useful that would be in some of the programs I was developing at the time.
Dynamic conditions for relationships in Rails
So we all know that we can add conditions to relationships in Rails to further filter down the returned objects. Sometimes, though, we need them to be a bit more dynamic.
Absolute Positioning Within an Element
Sometimes things just have to be in the right place. If you’re new to CSS then the frustrating reality of positioning something just so can be too much to bear, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Here’s a quick look at how to position items precisely within their parent object.
Why Use Stored Procedures
Novice programmers or those moving from older versions of Foxpro (or other disciplines) tend to dive straight into programming in VFP, bringing old techniques along with them. Before you know it you have a functioning program that may have benefited from the advances offered by Visual Foxpro.
The Handshake
A greeting, confirming agreement to a deal, saying “nice to have done business with you”. Well these are some of the positives. On the negative side, the great British handshake can create hesitancy, the embarrassment when you are not quite sure whether to offer your hand or not, and risk of being overly formal or too informal, especially with a member of the opposite sex. Should I, shouldn’t I, are they expecting it, would they prefer hug, slap on the back or just a plain old sideways rhetorical question – “Alright!”?
Converting Subversion to Git
So you’ve decided to take the plunge and change your version control system from Subversion to Git. We did this a few months ago and have been slowly converting our old subversion repositories to Git as and when we need to revisit them. This article is just as much for our benefit as yours as we’re now doing this more infrequently.
How did the BNP win seats in Europe and should we care?
Those of you living in an EU member state over the past week might have noticed the European elections taking place. Despite low voter turnout for the European elections, there are people who seem surprised at the performance of smaller parties such as the Greens and the BNP, particularly with the latter gaining 2 seats out of the 72 up for grabs in the UK. So what does this mean for British Politics? Does it mean we’re going to start seeing the influence of the BNP in the running of our country and should it matter if we do?
Automating TYPO3 Deployment with Capistrano
In my previous article I covered the basics of Capistrano and deploying simple PHP based applications. This time I’ll go into a bit more detail about how we use Capistrano to deploy TYPO3 based sites specifically.
Dave's Nuggets: Risk Assessment Gone Mad, or What?
Just how seriously do you take your risk assessment? After organisers of a village Christmas party were told they must carry out a risk assessment of their mince pies, is it time we carried out risk assessment of our workplace vending machines for low flying screw top bottles or water stations for their potential killer infectious agents, toxic chemicals and radiological hazards?
Slow opening documents
Sometimes an Office document takes ages to open. Could be that your application is searching your system for the template that was used when the document was created. Fortunately there's a simple solution.
Managing PHP Deployment with Capistrano
Deploying applications written in PHP is easy, right? Just copy the files to the webserver and you’re done. It gets a bit boring and repetitive, especially if you’re like us and deploying often so our customers can begin trying out the new functionality as early as possible. It’s also prone to error, particularly if you have multiple servers in the mix, such as test or staging servers.
Dave's Nuggets: Motorcycle Couriers
If you are a motorcyclist, you may be relieved that you have already passed your test, but if you haven’t passed yet, things are going to get a bit tougher.
Setting Up Shop Online
It seems like nearly everybody has an idea for an online shop these days, and why not? Internet shopping has become part of our daily lives and is an easy and effective way to sell. The trouble is that it’s not always as easy as it should be to get started.
FoxPro and Include Files
If you know that in the normal course of events some things (values) will not change during program execution, many advantages can be found by assigning these values to variables and storing them in an ‘include’ file, then including the file (in various ways) at strategic points within the program.
If You Believe in Work/Life Balance Read On!
Just thought I would give you a quick update on the new holiday entitlement coming into force on 1st April 2009
A Letter to Our Old Website
Saying hello to our new website means saying goodbye to our old one, but how do you know whether you should try to fix your old site or create a new one from scratch? Maybe this letter to our old site will help you decide.
Why FoxPro?
In today's extensive range of windows application programming languages, such as Visual Basic, C++, .NET, Pascal, many people have not heard of FoxPro let alone considered it as a tool for developing serious database applications.
The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Installing Gitosis (Part 2)
Yesterday I detailed how to get Gitosis installed and set up, today I'll cover how to actually add repositories to your new server and manage them.
The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Installing Gitosis (Part 1)
Here at Foxsoft we use Git for version control. We wanted somewhere we could push our repositories to that would be backed up regularly because, well, you can never have too many backups. We use a mac mini as a CI server so it seemed an ideal place to hold the Git repositories too.
Welcome to our new look website
So here it finally is. For those of you new to the world of Foxsoft, this post comes at a very significant time