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Yesterday there was a discussion (again) on Vista's massive memory use. The original poster linked to an article about how Vista tries to predict the user's behavior and caches a lot of stuff. Some people argued that they rather have this memory free so that it's there whenever they actually use it, and I replied that I thought freeing memory wouldn't actually take long, and in case the OS's predictions actually were right, they could see some speed advantage.
Mike Dimmick answered a couple of my questions here[^] in great detail, and I decided to bookmark the post for future reference. It's definitely worth the read
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Well, I am finally serious (or so I say) about this blogging thing, so I installed WordPress[^] in my personal domain, and it's all set up now.
For those interested, it's here:
www.luisalonsoramos.com/blog[^]
BTW, WordPress was very easy to install, very powerful, and there are many themes available. I highly recommend it
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I made a little change in my signature, trying to make it more compact. Let's see how it looks in a real post.
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix
Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!
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I didn't like that blank line at the end, so let's try again!
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix
Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!
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I haven't written anything here *interesting* in a few months, mainly because I don't have anything to write, but also because we have been very busy with several projects (which is a good thing!)
Last week we finally received our new computers. I bought myself Pentium D 3.0 GHz with 160 GB of hard disk space, 2 GB of ram and dual 19" LCDs. Very cool, especially if I take into account that my previous monitor was a 17" CRT from 1997. For the two guys that work here with me, I also bought similar machines (one of them asked for a 20" wide LCD instead of two 19s.) We also got a Dell PowerEdge server for setting up a VPN and the source control repository (now a Subversion convert!). And best thing of all, I got a 13.8% discount froom the list prices (when configuring the machines on the web).
So, what projects do we have right now? We're working on the second version of the software I started last year (see "Uff, long proposal" and "Into a big project" posts below) for a company that lends money door-to-door, and then collects it weekly. The first version took over 10 months (compared to the estimated 3 months -- mainly because they were adding features not initially considered (yes, I more than doubled the initial price estimate)) and consists of over 80K lines. It's written in C# with SQL Server 2000 as database backend, and it's currently being used to manage over 7,000 customers.
The second big project is for a chain of women gyms. My client has 22 gyms in all of Mexico, and also is the master franchisee for three countries in South America (and currently has around 20 franchises over there.) The software we are developing will help them see in real time information about every gym, and keep a central database for their customers. The application is a smart client app written in C# that uses .NET remoting to communicate with a central server (which I hired in 1-800 Hosting[^] -- I recommend them!). Also there's a web application where corporate users will be able to see most of the reports (so they can see them from anywhere, and they don't need to install the client app.) A very interesting project.
Altough we have a couple of other little projects, those two are the biggest, which should take most of our time from here to June or July.
Another interesting thing that happenned is that I'm now officially a Subversion-TortoiseSVN convert! I've been using it since the beginning of this year, and I really like it. Sorry for SourceGear Vault which was a great program, but this one is easier to use, and best of all, free! [EDIT: See this thread[^] for a good discussion when I was giving SVN a try]
I'm still pending on writing that first CP article I have been promising for so long! I have a couple of ideas that would make for good, useful articles. I've just not given me the time.
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
-- modified at 20:42 Friday 10th March, 2006
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My profile page says 1999 posts, so this should be..... number 2000!! :->
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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congrats!!! wow, took you 5 years to do that
-Prakash
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Mr.Prakash wrote: wow, took you 5 years to do that
Altough in those five years I have visited CP almost every day, sometimes I haven't been a very active poster. It took me only 10 months for my last 1K posts!
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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And this is my post number 2222!!
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix
Chihuahua, Mexico Not much here: My CP Blog!
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This is post 3000!
I think I should come back more often to CP, it's such a great place!
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Finally last week we published our business's web page. We had been very busy with our clients' projects that we had not have enough time, but now we made some space in our schedule and we finished it.
For those of you who would like to see it, it's http://www.intelectix.com[^]. Currently it's only in Spanish, but an English version is coming soon (that's what I said about our web page about a year ago ).
Feel free to post your comments on the design, and content (if you manage to understand it)
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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Yes Luis, it does get read. Sorry to read about your VistaDB woes.
David
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David Cunningham wrote:
Yes Luis, it does get read.
So, it does... wow!!
BTW, how did you get here if I may ask?
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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Luis Alonso Ramos wrote:
BTW, how did you get here if I may ask?
We've added a site-wide RSS feed that collects all the blog entries together into a centralized list. We should be able to open this up to everyone soon, but it's still being tested.
David
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Yeah. I read all the CP Blogs.
Yours is one of the better ones, actually having some proper content.
Michael
CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
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Me, on a regular basis, but there is no Changes .
"I am a lair" Is this statement true or false ?
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Well, I guess I'm going to start posting more often... the problem is that I can't find an interesting subject to post about. But I'll make an effort!
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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When r u going to release the page in English? I can't understand Spanish....
Sandeep
+919891027854
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MudkiSekhon wrote: When r u going to release the page in English? I can't understand Spanish....
Unfortunately it's not a priority right now. Altough we would like to have it in English, currently we have a ton of work from paying customers, and we don't have extra time to work on our web page. It took us about 6 months to design it (and it's not so big), so probably 6 more months would be a reasonable timeframe. Altough I can't promise anything.
But I can tell you basically what we do
Intelectix is a software development company I founded back in 2004. We specialize in developing custom software solutions for small and medium business, both desktop applications and web applications.
We also sell one product, WashWorks!, which I developed about 4 years ago when my dad opened a car wash business. WashWorks! is a point-of-sale software designed specifically for car washes, with support for specific features like accumulating a customer's sales and giving a free wash if he gets 10 in 90 days for example; or rain-check in which the customer washes his car for free if it rains the day he last washed it.
And finally, we do some web design. Since web sites are more of a commodity right now, we are not precisely looking for web sites, but if one comes by, we'll take it and do our best job at it!
Thanks for stopping by at my blog , and sorry you couldn't understand our webpage
-- LuisR
P.S. Thanks for the GMail invitation, I appreciate, but I already have an account!
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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I had usually endorsed VistaDB since it seemed to me a great little database for small apps. I mentioned in this[^] post some of the features I liked the most. I also sometimes even defended it in Lounge discussions.
But two days ago I was using it for a project I had to deliver three days earlier and I spent all the morning finding ways around bugs or limitations in the SQL engine. I posted three different messages in the online forum that no one from the support group (or anybody for that matter) has answered as of today, even tough they already answered newer posts.
I submitted two issues for them, and I got only one reply saying that it was planned to be supported in version 3.0 due next year.
So, what were the issues?
- Trying to
JOIN a table to itself. Will be supported next year. Come on, is it really that different to JOIN ing one table to another? It works in Access.
- I was trying to perform a
INSERT INTO Table (....) (SELECT 'literal string', Field FROM Table WHERE ...) and it couldn't do it. Specifically it was blowing on the SELECT 'literal string' part, since the INSERT INTO Table (...) (SELECT ...) worked and a SELECT 0 returned a recordset with a 0 as expected. No reply on the forums, and definitely a bug for which I posted the issue and have gotten no reply. - And finally I had a query with a
LEFT JOIN , that if the records were found, it returned correct results, but if no matching records were found, it returned the values from matching records for antoher condition (year) instead of NULL . I also tried this on Access with the same data and I got the expected results.
I'm using the latest version (2.0.16 released about 15 days ago.)
The first time I tried it I really liked it (see the aforementioned post) but this time I put it into use for a bigger more demanding project, it fell way short. The concept is very nice (a small self contained database) but for real uses its implementations leaves much to be desired. Also, I previously had a good experience with support, but this time that I was really desperate they just never answered.
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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I found one more issue the other day and I'll take the time to document it here, in case I could help someone.
I had two tables, the first with foreign keys that identify records on the second table. Basically I wanted to update all records in the first table that had a related record in the second table with one field set to one value. Sounds easy.
First I tried my newly-learnt trick (a few weeks ago in the SQL forum here in CP ):
UPDATE Table1 SET Field=False
FROM Table1
INNER JOIN Table2 ON Table1.ForeignKey = Table2.PrimaryKey
WHERE Table2.Field = 510 It didn't work, complaining about the FROM being an unexpected token.
Ok, another try:
UPDATE Table1 SET Field=False
WHERE Table1.ForeignKey IN (SELECT PrimaryKey FROM Table2 WHERE Field = 510) So, did it work? Of course not!
Again, I posted my inquire in the support forum and the only response I got, about a week later was from another reader that said that he had had the same problem, and that VistaDB didn't seem to like compound statements. Still no word from support
Really, I still think it's a great product. But limitations like these are making it unusable for real life projects.
If anyone has other experiences, feel free to post them here.
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
The amount of sleep the average person needs is five more minutes. -- Vikram A Punathambekar, Aug. 11, 2005
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I hadn't checked in a while, but I'm getting there... soon, I'll have my first thousand posts!! Anyone wants a ?
-- LuisR
Luis Alonso Ramos
Intelectix - Chihuahua, Mexico
Not much here: My CP Blog!
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