Tell Me (and Others)

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

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

After seeing Carbonite mentioned on a newsgroup, I thought I would try it. They offer a 15 day free trial. And then US$55 per year to store unlimited backup files on their servers.

I selected a few folders and let it rip. Took about 4 hours to upload my selected folders.

Then it was SUPPOSED to upload any altered files “soon” after they were altered. I had several files that were not uploaded again more that 24 hours later. This is not what they said in their spiel. It says the files will be uploaded whenever the running service detects in-activity on the PC. Well, I left it in-active for a couple of hours and still no upload.

Actually, here is what they say on their site:

When your computer is idle, Carbonite automatically backs up new and changed files. You don’t have to do anything! When you’re using your computer, Carbonite goes to sleep so it will never slow down your computer or internet connection.

I would be loathe to try it again. It is just not for me. But it may well suit someone whose files are not altered too often. If you think you may like it, go ahead. But check that your files are actually being uploaded once changed. The initial upload went very well, but not the uploads about a week into the trial.
I give it a rating of 2 out of five

John Griffiths

UPDATE: 20091005

Chasing down the problem where a changed file is not backed up automatically as advertised by Carbonite, I have found this in their FAQ area…

When Carbonite detects that a file has been modified, it checks to make sure that the file has remained unchanged for 10 minutes before the file is made eligible for backup. (By default, a modified file is backed up only once every 24 hours so that you’ll have the opportunity to restore the previous version if necessary.)

That would be why then! Carbonite goes on to say that i can manually right-click the file and select to force it to “Backup as soon as possible”. That sure conflicts with their sales pitch shown above, where they say:-

When your computer is idle, Carbonite automatically backs up new and changed files. You don’t have to do anything!

So it is not very suitable for situations where an important file (or group of files) are NOT automatically backed up!

A few weeks ago I ordered an external USB 1 Tb hard drive. This was to replace a 250Gb drive that I use for one of my backup regimes.

It costs less than US$90 and seems a little quicker than my older 250Gb USB drive. This is probably because it is 7,200 RPM in lieu of 5,400 RPM. And I think it has more internal cache memory.

I did not really need the extra room, but perhaps I will one day… The price was right, so why not have more free space available for backups.

Specs of the new drive are: SimpleDrive 1Tb Hitachi HDD.

Backups

Whilst on the subject of backups – I have recently trialed a few simple backup tools that let me schedule backups to remote FTP sites. Two I like are “Backup4All-Pro” and “GFI Backup 2009″

BackUp4All is about $49 and you can get it here

GFI Backup is free, and you can get it here

If you are looking for off-site backup space, you may look at DriveHQ

John