Tell Me (and Others)

I have an old Sager notebook and the CMOS battery has been dead for about 12 months. The unit had been sitting idle for some time. I decided yesterday to mess with it again.

I had tried a few weeks ago to dismantle it looking for the CMOS battery, but could not find it. So yesterday I called the Sager technical help line and got some great help on how to find and get to the battery.

I released the keyboard, removed a heat-sink, replaced the battery and re-assembled the unit.

Booted it up, ran the BIOS Config process to set the date etc.. and it booted just fine.

Problem was, that it would not produce any sound output, which is one reason for me messing with it again.

So, figuring the loss of BIOS was the cause, I rebooted and reset a few BIOS settings that might have had an impact on the no-sound situation.

But, still no sound. Next step was to emove all the sound drivers, download new drivers, and re-install said drivers. But still now sound. I could record and save a small .wav file using the inbuilt speaker which I could play on another system OK. On the laptop it would show the wave-form as it played, but no sound. I tried using the in-built speakers and a plug in headset, all with no success.

I could set volume levels OK with the sound controls. I looked around the case for any mute-switch, but found none.

After about 4 hours I was ready to give up. I thought that perhaps there was some trash in the earphones jack so grabbed a flashlight and shone it into the hole. That was when I noticed the small and well hidden volume control, just near the jack! Rolled it around and had great sound.

Oh well.

John Griffiths

There are about a million [ OK, slight exaggeration ] settings that must be just right for your Clarion For Windows compiled program to successfully connect to a running MS-SQL 2005 database.

I have posted some things to check that should help you get configured and connected at…

SQL_CW_Setup

As I get more time, I will add to the page. Getting all the settings and configurations correct can be a task.

Enjoy.

Well, it has been a real busy few months and I am beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel.

We have re-located back to our home in Perth, Western Australia after spending the Northern summer at our home in Kerrville, Texas. Boy, am I getting sick of those long flights across the Pacific between LAX and Sydney. The journey is not so bad if you are lucky enough to be on a plane that is not too full. Getting an empty seat or two between us is our ideal seating arrangement. A bonus is if we can get empty seats in front of us so there is no one leaning back into “our” area!

But, just for fun, we are heading back to Texas for two weeks at Christmas. This is mainly to see our granddaughter (now aged 2). We had enough frequent flyer miles/points to pay for the trip so it is not costing us much.

Software Development

My software (a finance system) has become increasingly popular over the past few years. I concentrate on one core product, and modify it for each particular client. Presently I am working on six versions for five different clients. I am doing some really fancy stuff with CapeSoft’s NetTalk plus a bunch of other 3rd party add-on tools.

Hopefully things will slow down some in the next month or two so that I can relax a little.

JohnG

Capesoft have a fabulous add-on (NetTalk) for ClarionForWindows. I have used it in several programming projects with great success.

In June 2007 they are hosting a training seminar in Las Vegas and I am going to be there.

I want to get up to speed with the new feature they have added to the product which allows me to write a WebServer program. I have sort-of done this before, but I have always built a proprietory program for both the Server and the Client. They now allow me to write just the Server product with client systems using a normal web browser.

If y’all are planning to be in LV for the event, please say Hi to me there.

John

Over the past few days, I have been working on giving several programs a more “modern” look.

I read about amazingGui for Clarion and lashed out and bought a copy. US$119.. That looks like REALLY great value and does a wonderful job. I would score it at 9.5 out of 10

Several cutomers who I have sent sneak preview screenshots to over this weekend have already come back to me and say they love it. (Says a lot for my older more conservative approach to screen design).

Now when I look back and compare the two styles side by side, I can see a lot of benefits in the new look.

See the amazingGUI site.

John.

Well, it was time to upgrade my wife’s monitor to an LCD flat panel. So, Friday i went down to my local PC supplier, and he was out of the one I wanted.. (A 19 inch standard aspect ratio). So, I thought the 19″ widescreen would be great on my development PC, and she could have my 12 month old LCD.

So, after purchasing, and installing on my new (3 weeks old) PC, I felt something was wrong. It looked “smaller” than my old 19″ screen. I could not see as much screen real-estate, so I measured each of them. Yep, the new one sure was wider, but also a lot narrower. And I had trouble getting an aspect ratio I was comfortable with.

Next, a switcheroo, whilst she was out shopping. I got my old 19″ LCD back, and it looked great again. Then I finally got the new 19″W LCD installed on my Wife’s PC. With some effort, and upgrading of video drivers, I finally was able to get a picture on the new screen.

Today, three days later, it was back to the store, fork out the 10% re-stock fee, and pay another $30 for the only other standard 19″ they had in stock.

Buyer Beware. The newer Widescreen monitors can be a hassle to match some video output.

Do some research and convince yourself that it is really what you want. Otherwise you will end up with distored screens. A handy link I found is Screen Ratios Explained

My favourite programming tool, “Clarion For Windows” is soon to have a major version upgrade.
The company who develop the system, Softvelocity , have been working on the new Version 7 for several years.
Though the release of the new version has been delayed many times, I feel confident that it will be available within just a few more months.

There is to be two new versions, namely Version7 and a new .NET version. My take is that the Version7, for Windows 32 bit based programming, will be the first released.

The Clarion.NET version looks likely to follow a little later, as much more work is involved in its development. Softvelocity have said that both versions are working up to a point, but are not yet ready for release.

The delays in release of the new versions has many developers aggravated as they had planned new projects using the promised features of the new versions. You would think that as software developers themselves, they would understand the difficulty in providing firm release dates new products. But, sadly not. Some seem to have decided to switch to using other available tools to develop their newer projects.

When Clarion7 and Clarion.NET do become available, there will be a lot of happy and busy programmers out there in cyberland, including myself.

John

Our summer here in Texas is coming rapidly to its end. We pack up and leave out in just under two weeks. I will be busy shutting down a few systems in development, and making backups onto CDs (some I airmail back to myself, some I carry with me), Zipping up some source code (which I post to an FTP site I have), and this year I will be copying a bunch of development source and tools onto some new external drives I have.

My new external drives come in two flavours, and both are USB connected. The first is a 300Gig internal 3.5″ ATA drive which uses a Sabrent connection kit I learned of on Dave Harm’s blog. I have the bare hard drive fitted into a small metal case adapted for my needs. Works great and the power supply is 110 and 240 volt!

My second one is a small 2.5″ FireLite Smartdisk with 80Gigs. This one is powered from the USB connector and would fit neatly into a shirt pocket.

We spend about three days travelling with overnight stopovers in Los Angeles and Sydney (and just a short 14.75 hours non-stop flight between the two!). Without at least one stopover, the journey is too long.