Tell Me: Griffo Info

I have travelled the World extensively and have visited the McIlhenny Company factory at Avery Island in Louisiana, USA.

Their product is a favourite of mine.

There is no way that that the one production location in Louisiana could supply the World with Tabasco. Perhaps there are Knock-offs being produced in China or elsewhere. But every bottle I have ever examined says made in Avery Island,Louisiana

Recent reports have been published where China is making copes of some great Australian wines. see WineCopies.

Years ago ( in the 1980s) there were concerns about the real validity of Johnny Walker Scotch. This always proudly announces “Product of Scotland”. An enterprising group purchased several bottles from various locations around the World and ran the samples through a spectrograph. And, you guessed it, only some (about 30%) matched the original product from Scotland. Now, as with the Tabasco product, it all tastes OK, but why do we need to be hoodwinked?

I wish manufacturers, distributors, retailers and governments would be more responsible with their labelling.

We have been in Denver now for our summer break and have been very impressed with the city and surrounding areas. One problem we have noticed is the traffic congestion, but that is pretty much the case in all larger cities these days.

The past couple of weeks we have been entertaining friends from South Carolina. We took a road trip to Moab Ut., Canyon de Chelly Az. and Grand Canyon North Az. We all had a great time but some of the travel distances were more than first thought.

The National Parks around Moab were most fascinating and well worth the visit.

John

RTF Control in Clarionet.

I have a client who has been running a program across a WAN using Clarionet. System was written several years ago in Clarion for Windows 6.1 and has not been modified for several years.

Recently he wanted an additional feature so that the system would generate some documents.
I was apprehensive in making the changes so built a small additional standa alone program to test with Clarionet. The programs are all Legacy template initially.

I needed to add a window with an RTF text window so the system could open a template .RTF document, and replace some tokens, then produce a print preview of the letter at the client side PC.

I knew that the Clarion for Windows RTF control was not going to behave in a Clarionet screen, so this had to be built to run without showing the RTF window and without any Clarionet code. By starting with a generated procedure, I then placed several OMIT statements to exclude any Clarionet generated calls. Next I added all my INIT, Document Open and KILL statements to right after the OPEN(Window) statement. Then I did the token replacements and saved the finished document as an RTF file.

Back in the calling procedure, I then passed the document’s filename to a report procedure, and placed the RTF file into a detail/text (rtf) control. This report then generated and the preview was auto-magically transferred to the client side PC. Done.

Now that I had got it working in a stand alone EXE, and it all worked OK, I then moved it into the trusty DLL written about 6 years ago. This worked fine and nothing got broken.

John Griffiths

Oh Boy this hurts…

As an older computer user, this blows my mind.

And I know from talking with many friends, this deal sounds beyond comprehension.
Makes me wonder where things will be in 5 years.
My first PC was a TRS-80 with 16K of ram and an external cassette sound recorder for more permanent storage. I remember I paid over $2000 for it.

Get the drive at frys.com

John

Where we live in Australia in the southern summer, we got hot with a massive hail storm last Monday.

Our property sustained significant hail damage, as did out neighbours and surrounding area.

The hail was mostly golf-ball in size, with some the size of hen’s eggs. It all happened at about 3:30pm in the afternoon.

We were sitting outside on a pleasant afternoon and could see a bank of wild rolling cloud approaching from the north. I took some video with by standard Canon digital camera.

Then the storm hit! The hail was sporadic at first, then after about 4 minutes, it was a constant hammering of hail for about 45 minutes. We had to retreat to inside as even under an out-door patio area, the hail was bouncing off everything.

Damages: Flooding inside. Smashed roof tile and sky-lights. Significant denting of heavy metal patio roofing. Lead flashing on roof all holed. TV antennae broken. Garden shed roof holed. Luckily our motor vehicle was undercover. Many vehicles in the path of the storm had broken glass and lots of dents.

The State has declared the event a natural disaster.

Trying to get repairs is hopeless, as all services are stressed to the max. I have managed to put temporary fixes on a few things. Today we removed water laden carpets from one room.

But all in all, we are lucky as we survived and still have a home to live in.

John

I have a program I am trying to get ready for potential users to download and test. This is a program developed in Clarion For Windows (6.3). The testing database is a MS-SQL2005 system which is hosted on a shared server at discountasp.net and the server is located in Los Angeles. My users will most likely be located in Australia.

The problem I saw was the initial time it takes to make a connection to the remote database, and then a further delay with each Table I was opening. These turned out to be two separate issues.

Initial Connection:

The time taken to establish the initial connection was in the order of 20+ seconds. The connection was being attempted before the main APPFrame screen was being displayed. So expecting someone to start a program and wait 20+ seconds before the first screen response was not going to work. This lead me to build a separate “Starter” program with just one screen that received staged updates from the main program, and then once the AppFrame opened, the “Starter” program simply closed, or displayed any error applicable. The Starter program also had a Seconds Elapsed display and a notice that they may need to wait 20 seconds to connect to the database.

But why was this initial connection taking so long? I could fire up MS-Studio Express and connect in about 4 seconds. It was only the Clarion program that was very slow to connect. This I would research further and eventually solve. See below.

Slow File Opening:

The time taken to open a Browse/List screen was also slow. It was taking about 5 seconds per table to open. Again, this is just too slow. I solved this by adding the Driver switches /FASTCOLUMNFETCH = TRUE to most tables. That has helped. I also set the program to Keep Files Open and I opened a few of the larger tables (those with more columns, not rows).

Testing:

After spending several days fiddling with the various Driver switches, I was resigned to the fact that it would take 20+ seconds to connect. I started looking for another closed SQL server that would be hosted in Australia. Then, along came Christmas and I took some time off from the development computer. I was relaxing out-doors and just for kicks, decided to try running the program from a 10″ netbook with an Atom processor and on a local wireless network. I started up the program, which worked just fine, and got connected to my Los Angeles database server in about 4 seconds. Could not believe my eyes! Looked at the data and yes, this was indeed coming from the LA database. This little netbook had no database stuff loaded, no MS-SQL and had very few programs installed. Basically it had IE and Firefox for travelling.

So, back to the development PC which could not be 20 seconds slower than the netbook.

I tried several things… Stop all running MS-Servers, Stop a bunch of system services that were running (pretty much anything that looked like a network service). Still I could not get any faster connection from the PC.

Next I remembered someone on the Clarion Database forum had mentioned SQL Native Client. This certainly was not installed on the netbook. But it was on my PC. I had another notebook PC laying around that did have some SQL stuff installed. It was running MSSQL2005 database. I tried running my program on that notebook and it also would connect in 4 seconds. The laptop also had MS SQL Native Client installed, albeit an older version of SQLNCLI.dll. OK, after backing up my newer SQLNCLI.dll I copied the older one from the Laptop to my Development PC. Testing the program again I was still taking 20+ seconds to connect. Then I renamed the file SQLNCLI.dll (located in \windows\system32 ) and tried again. This time I finally managed to connect in about 4 seconds. I put the original SQLNCLI.dll back and connection time again went out to 20+ seconds.

So there was a problem with the SQLNCLI DLL that was causing the problem. I researched this in several places on the internet and found one other report of this problem. But there was no resolution there.

Next I went to Control Panel, and un-installed SQL Native Client. Now I was back to 4 second connect times. OK, Let’s put the Native Client back in. So I downloaded the latest MSSQL2005 version( which turned out to contain the exact same DLL that I was having problems with, and now I was able to connect in about 4 seconds each time the test program started.

MS SQL Native Client (or a related setting) had been the problem all along. By removing and re-installing I had solved the major connection problem. But I had wasted about 4 days getting to that stage! Oh well, that’s computing.

John Griffiths

It looks like we will have Clarion 7.1 released in the next two weeks. A new announcement has been posted here

I am looking forward to all its new features, from a programmers point of view.

And this should flow through to some happier users. There will be quite a lot of conversion and testing to do, but it should all be worthwhile.

John Griffiths

Well I tried…

I have had a hosting account at DreamHost for about a year and have finally given up on it.

They do not provide a CPanel interface to manage the hosted site, but a script based site manager of their own design.

I found it most un-intuitive and have closed my account there. I know that they think their site management scripting is the best thing since sliced-bread, but for me, I was spending too much time trying to find things I wanted.

Give me CPanel any day!

So I have moved the site that was with them to a new host I am trialling, that being RapidVPS.com At least now I get a CPanel to work with.

John Griffiths