27-IV-2002.: Fox Essentials
Berix held a lecture in the morning, about SpeedCanvass and what we did there and how, basically showing off the nifty GUI and how we used vfe for it, and the InTouche add-on that we tested for them.
I was sitting in the front row (the angle of this photo reminded me of that) and, oh boy, did we look good as a capable team. We kept looking for more work while there, and I coined a phrase that „we're a solution looking for a problem“. Many years later I heard that phrase in a completely different context, something about a tool which looked like a great idea when conceived, but that actually nobody needed.
This was shot during the lecture held by Trish. She was somewhat amusing, and I actually like deeper female voices (specially when they sound as if we were drinking all night and speaking loudly), but something was off in her funmaking... there was a lot of weakly hidden malice, bordering on insult. This is when I began to change my opinion of her.
Met the vfe's authors, this is a lecture held by the lady. Don't remember whether he had one.
While waiting for lunch, one guy asked whether I knew any trick to make a fox for Dos app run under visual fox. Well... that's where I got an idea.
What I've made work is to create a blank form, set its measurement unit to foxels, set size to 25x80 (we need the 25th row for messages etc), and used any nonproportional font. After form.show, it became the active window, and any 2.x stuff ran inside that window. The major obstacle was the colors - Set Color of Scheme doesn't really work in visual fox, because many of the schemes are welded to Windows default color sets, but that could be tweaked by intervening in @x,y ... color RGB(...). Note that there are six numbers here, because we set both the fore- and backcolor.
It even worked when we set this form to be desktop, top-level, with _screen.visible=.f.; the whole FP app lived inside this form, thinking it has the FP screen as its playground. It even accepted the background picture etc - I don't know what happened later with this, don't remember the guy's face nor name, I did it as an interesting exercise on someone's laptop during the lunch break at the conference. We actually missed the lunch, so we went to a restaurant on the other end of the parking, he treated me a lunch for solving his problem. The only miracle in the whole story is the very existence of that restaurant - the hotel is in the middle of barren nothing, out of town, the surroundings weren't built yet, there are only traces of construction on the edges of the site.
We then also missed one lecture, it passed while we ate.
In the evening, the usual round of drinks in the dining hall, with a bunch of famous folks, including Rick Strahl, both of the Levy guys (unrelated, I guess), C.P., Kristin, H.R. (I guess a fresh transplant from South America), Trish and Peter, Doug Hennig and a few others, two authors of fox books, B.P. (a weird face, you'd never say she's pretty, yet we often sat together and talked a lot), that guy from Utah (mentioned on 27-XII-2000.), M. Cox... For beers, only Corona and Heineken.
Mentions: 27-XII-2000., Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), fox, Kristin Peiser, Peter Branow, SpeedCanvass, Tricia Deakin (Trish), VFE, in serbian
2-IV-2022 - 25-III-2026