Posts by BongoJoe

Re: @GBE They're going to move it.

Having held a kilt for my friend one time

Why? What on earth was he doing at the time that required someone to hold his kilt for him?

Re: 30 years on...

Oh yes, indeed

And try to explain what you mean to a user, over a telephone, that they have perhaps opened a new instance of Excel rather than opened a spreadsheet into the same instance of Excel...

Normally, yes.

But there are advantages with Access with million row databases (I have one) over 'proper database servers' such as:

- Back up (XCOPY *.mdb will do the trick)

- Sharing the data with a chum who is not on the network and is clueless (it's on your drop box, copy it somewhere and then open it)

- Not having to maintain a proper database server

Doing these things whilst at work and being paid for, as one person above mentioned this, and doing this at home when one wants simplicity is another.

I could have a proper database and that being backed up but it's easier to rebuild a machine that's died, sling onto it Office via CD/DVD and then copy from pendrive the .mdb file.

But despite the million record tables in my Access it's never died. Perhaps because I haven't used it for multi-user which, once upon a time, used to kill it (unless one did lots of clever stuff, but that's another story).

It's another one of these If It's Access/Excel/VBA then it must be crap memes. It's actually a bloody good little database. Not perfect but still bloody good and has given me less grief than SQL Server over the years.

VBA is massively underrated.

In the spreadsheet that I am using day in and day out, I couldn't have done the operation with formulae. But there can't be much that can be done in C++ that can't be done in VBA.

One sheet I use most days is something that I have knocked up which handles linked lists with tens of thousands of entries and has its own garbage collection built in. Doing stuff like that, without storing the data within a sheet, would be nigh on impossible and even if I used a worksheet to store the data rather than in a linked list I would perhaps still need VBA.

If one treats VBA as Visual Basic 6 with $APPLICATION objects glued in (be it Excel, Word, Access, Powerpoint, etc) and writes proper code then it's rather good.

Yes, one doesn't have all the fancy Object Oriented coding facilities offered to us that C++ does but it goes most of the way there, and I except that, but this doesn't mean that it's a bad language or should be taken out and shot.

Like all languages there are people who abuse it or miscode and this gives the language a bad name whereas in actual fact it's the coder that's usually to blame.

Some of my VBA applications are tens of thousands of lines long and they work perfectly. Yes, I could use a standalone language, as I do in some cases, and talk to $APPLICATION via COM. But then I've seen on these boards people saying that COM is also the spawn of the devil. Sigh

There's nothing wrong with VBA apart from a few bits of OOP architecture missing but it's still a bloody good language.

Re: Fit for purpose?

As a full time motorhomer, I take an interest in what's out there with the new builds (the old ones are still better, in my view: which almost echos the Win7/Win10 viewpoints).

Anyway, Olaf, one of the UK firms of motorhome manufacturers released a year or so ago a new range of motorhomes with lots of groovy and fun extras.

One slight problem; the weight of the thing (the payload to be accurate) was in excess of what was allowed to be driven on the roads. It didn't stop them selling the motorhomes though.

Re: FRICKIN BRIGHTNESS????

Or how big it is in units of Welsh Swimming Pools...

Re: Oh no, you didn't just say that.....

put 6 wine bottles in a carrier bag and carry them, Then do the same with 6 bottles in a wine carrier. which feels lighter to carry?

Oooh, that's easy. Can I answer this one?

It's the bottle carrier because half way across the car park the origami has unfolded and what was once six bottles is now a pile of broken glass and lost liquid.

Re: Good lord.

still appreciated is the Aeropress coffee device.

Thumbs up galore from this full timer motorhomer. Though we do have an espresso machine on board.

Some things one simply cannot do without and for me it's caffeine. And gin.

We currently live in a motorhome. I am writing this from the campsite by Perth Racecourse, last week we were by an abbey in County Durham and we're on a long tour around the UK living and working on board.

We have Netflix courtesy of our dongle with the 3 card (all the Netflix we can binge) and we have enough data to work on board and, of course, to talk to other El Communards.

We watch films and we have a PlayStation/4 on board. Why shouldn't we?

And if we're still pushed to peel a starling or to start a fire with sticks, we're still able. though not necessarily willing.

There's a few things that one needs on board and this is where the Great Sage Terry P was ever so right: good toilet paper and good denishtry... The latter is what I do lack and I am now able to get a bit part if they ever wish to remake Deliverance...

Well done for getting that far. I couldn't get past the Clearing Up Of Dinner by the horde of cheery Oirish extras seeming escaping from the wreckage of lower decks of the Titanic.

Re: Amazed no one else hasn't commented.....

Apart from dragons, there's a Netflix show with good people, bad people, scheming and even killings.

A shame, then, that they've just axed House of Cards

Re: You're designing an internet fridge.

This is perhaps the first post on the subject that makes complete sense.

Thank you

Re: Oooooh, really?!?!?

And of course the motives of the unnamed NSA operative (who cant even afford an office license apparently) might well be pretty shady.

And lives in a bedroom? How high is the fellow in the NSA ranking or don't they pay their agents enough not to live in a bedsit or with their parents?

Re: "Free Pascal + Lazarus is also a good bet"

I've been doing Pascal since '78 and it's done my head in too many times over the years. I did enjoy Delphi when it came out as it was something right clever for the day and age. And I will never forget that renaming a control also meant that the event handler's name was updated by the IDE.

I think that my first Pascal on Windows 3.1 was something like Borland Pascal.

And, yes, I have seen Embarcadero. Or, rather, its pricing and said NO.

Microsoft used to do a good C/C++ compiler. I remember the pile of books that came with it which weighed in at about twenty five pounds. Simple it wasn't.

I don't know. But it seemed a lot simpler in the old days when the centre of the Windows was a nice simple loop that one interrupted. No idea how it works nowadays if it does and perhaps it's a horrible dream.

I have heard of a COBOL.Net and an APL.Net and that really does take the biscuit. Perhaps I should retire to a cabin in the Welsh Marches with a weekly postal delivery, a monthly oil delivery and just go off-grid until the madness goes away because this isn't funny any more.

Indeed, that's just the opening stanza for Rush's Xanadu.

Re: ActiveX developed in naive times?

Not many people w half of half a clue thought like you in those days.

I would agree. Not many people with a demi-semi clue thinks, or thought, like most of us. Which I am happy to say because I wouldn't like to be on the same wavelength as those with a QuarterClue which, I may hazard, may be where you stand too.

Oh, I really do agree. That was a complete mess because the act of printing changed some of the meta-data within the document and that caused no end of issues with change handling because it was a change. Especially if some nwmpti put one of those macro thingies in the footer which changed the date and time.

And imagine that then in a legal document when the document changes between instances thanks to a printing. Bloody pain in the arse that is.

Re: ActiveX developed in naive times?

Hang on, I wasn't touting NT as the e-commerce platform at all.

But, since you raised the issue. I have to ask, what was the alternative on the desktop at the time?

I couldn't see anyone taking a previous incarnation of Windows seriously at this point. There was the Mac but the problem was writing applications for the platform and getting them approved before release. Unix had died in a series of (still continuing) lawsuits between SCO and about everyone else. Linux was still a very much niche operating system at the time and certainly wasn't going to be taken seriously by 'industry'. OS/2 was making a bit of an attempt of kick starting something but never got off the ground.

Even NT didn't get going until NT4. 3.5.1 was a good improvement over 3.5 but it took NT4 to get going.

At the same time the back end of Microsoft miraculously got itself together like in one of those rare moments when the planets align. Windows Server worked, the domains could stand up on its own but make sure that one had a back-up domain controller. SQL Server worked well and Exchange worked too, though that took a bit of a prodding to get going and needed some real Exchange-heads to get to work properly.

On the front end we had NT4, a more or less working version of Office. Though what comprised Office was a strange permuation of any four from six applications: was Access in your version, did we have Publisher in another and was there Powerpoint? And we had Visual Studio as well.

Everything lined up and for the first time we had a good and stable platform from the back end to the front end (okay, the TCP/IP was traditionally ropey as per Microsoft's wont) but we had something.

And with this knocking out the like of Lotus and Novell losing ground too there wasn't any real competition any more to the new Microsoft. So when they stood up and said we're the new e-commerce platform it was a case of industry looking around at the alternatives at the time, shrugging its collective shoulders and saying "You know, I don't see anyone else so you'll do".

With this it did bring some great technologies. COM as I have said before and got down voted for it was, and still is, excellent. And I will continue to stand by that. VBA was also a brilliant technology and it still offers a lot more back in 1997 than I can do now with a lot of these free office tools, espcially those online.

Re: ActiveX developed in naive times?

Walter, this I don't deny at all. But look at the number of anti-virus suites we had to have in those days? Next to none. The IT world was just waking up to the dangers of malware after NT was being developed.

Yes, we had firewalls in those days and one or two server side malware packages (can't remember the name now) but the dark days of malware hadn't yet arrived in force.

What I am saying is that, at the time, without the wonderful point of view of hindsight Active-X at the time was a wonderful idea, one that was utterly ruined by those seeking to abuse it.

Re: Stupid MS Techs

ActiveX was developed in times when the internet was a wonderful place to be before spazzheads got to play. It had a few faults but it was a fabulous idea but came to a crunch when, if I recall, someone in Germany used ActiveX to hack into bank account details.

Okay, it was developed in a young and vibrant, and very naive, time when the web was becoming bigger than the rest of the internet and perhaps it should have been reconsidered.

As to your other items on your list. OLE was an early strategy that was very young and exciting when it came along. Who can forget the things that one could now do in the early worlds of Windows 3?

As for COM. This is/was a brilliant design and worked well. The only downside is if an installation failed it was a bugger to untangle in order to get going again. It's good to code against because, hopefully, it just works: one creates an interface for someone else to use your application.

I use COM daily in my own business which basically has my applications use MS Word as its report generator and it all works over COM. And it works brilliantly.

As for VBA. I disagree. Yes, it can be misused but it can be a powerful tool. I've got an application that I have shared between my customers that they use. It does a lot of data analysis via piles of linked lists (double headed) and various binary trees and it does all sorts of stuff which one can't do in a simple spreadsheet.

VBA is much derided as nothing more than a macro coding scripty thing. But it need not. In my previous life as a software developer I working for various clients in the City I had Word's VBA interfacing, via COM, various document management systems and contact databases to produce no end of documents and to make the users' lives that much simpler. There could be be tens of thousands of lines of code behind some of the global templates (not to mention the document templates) which would do a hell of a lot more than simply scripting.

It may never have been Flavour of the Month but it was a hell of a great technology and I remember at one time there being over 100 mainline applications with VBA. But your view may differ, and I understand that.

As for DCOM, or "COM 'over there'", that was a right bugger to make that work and I would love something that was better designed so I am with you on that one.