Here the main link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copper_alloys

Here’s a screenshot that helpful comparison chart of the alloys:

I had an absolute blast at the conference, saw many great sessions (as in *every one of them*), and, most of all, I spent as much time as I could engaging anyone and everyone who was walking around with a SWFox name tag hanging around their neck. Heck, I even cornered a few of the hotel staff members in the hallway and asked them if *they* wanted to know anything about FoxPro. (No takers, but I did get a visit from hotel security later in the day.)

This was my third time to attended the conference. If God still has me breathing air this time next year, I will be back for number 4.

I know there are some circumstances which absolutely prevent some of you from attending developer conferences, but, I strongly encourage you if there is any way possible that you can be at SWFox 2013, PLEASE, PLEASE, work hard during this next year to allow yourself to be there. You will not regret it!! 

If I could send off my employees to a conference and they come back this excited about doing their job, I’d do it. So, show this message to your boss so he or she will see how excited *you* will be after attending attending SWFox 2013.

The 2013 conference dates are:  Oct 17-20, 2013.

FAQ

Did I meet Jun Tangunan, the 2012 Ceil Silverman Ambassador?

• Yes I did. I had several opportunities to chat with him, and he is a very interesting and enthusiastic developer. We’ve already swapped a few emails, and I hope to explore his VFP tools a lot more in the coming months. Read more about him here: http://swfox.net/ambassador.aspx

How many people attended the ‘Show Us Your’ App session?

• I did a quick table and body count… There were at least 60 people present, and 7 presenters (myself included) who did 10-minute presentations.

What did I do for dinner on Saturday night?

• Walked 1.7 miles (each way) to a cool burger joint named Joe’s Farm Grill with about 12 other FoxPro devs… Bill, Bill’s (wife)?, Joel, Barbara, Eric, Todd, Randy, Michael, Phil, Stein, Art,  and maybe a few others I can’t recall right now. (If you were there, or can add to this list, please let me know so I can add everyone’s name.)

Did I wear a custom-printed GoFish T-shirt one day?

• Yes. (Photo coming soon.)

Did I fart around on my laptop during any of the sessions?

• Nope! I purposely left my laptop in the hotel room, so as not to be distracted.

How many session did I attend? 

• I attended 16 total sessions, 23 total hours.

What were my favorite sessions (in no particular order)?

• Sql Server 2012
• Sql Server Mgmt Studio Tips and Tricks
• Amazon EC2
• OutFoxThe Fox Report writer
• .Net COM Interop with VFP
• Calling .Net Components from VFP

Lifetime Achievement Awards

Congratulations to Cathy Knight and Craig Boyd for receiving FoxPro Lifetime Achievement awards. Thanks to both of for your many years of invaluable contributions to the FoxPro community.

VFPx Administrators Awards

Jim Nelson and I received a VFPx Administrators Award. It’s nice to be recognized for the work, but the people who use it and communicate with me about it are where the real joy comes from. Congratulations Jim!

Sessions I attended

In most sessions I sat on the front row, as I prefer to do any time I am watching anyone present material of any sort. It helps me focus, and not be distracted by others. (Okay, I did send a few FoxPro related tweets from my iPhone.)

Thurs

• Intro to C# – Doug Hennig

Fri

• jQuery 101 – Rod Paddock
• Amazon Elastic Cloud computing (Host a Windows Server in the cloud)
• ASP.Net COM Interop with VFP – Rick Strahl
• Chit-chatted  with Andrew MacNeill and FoxFire Reports
• Unit Testing with FoxMock – Cristof
• Calling .Net Components from VFP – Rick Strahl
• Show Us Your App (I presented my Dynamic Forms class)

Sat

• Office Automation without Office (via Google Docs) – Cristof
• Advanced Topics in Mercurial – Rick Borup
• More Fox on the Run – Eric Selje
• HTML5 – Steve Bodnar
• Sql Server Mgmt Studio – Eric Selje
• The Dangers of Accessing Sql Data – Kevin Cully

Sun

• Give Me Some Skin – Tuvia Vinitsky
• SQL Server 2012 – Manachem Bazin
• OutFox the VFP Report Writer – Cathy Knight

I hope to see a lot of new faces there next year!

My first attempt at using “sudo mount –t cifs …blah-blah-blah… “ simply would not work. Sometimes it *seemed* to connect, but the folders were always empty. I wasted hours trying to figure out how to solve this.

Here is the original post I made on ServerFault.com asking for help, back in March 2012: http://serverfault.com/questions/370338/ubuntu-linux-cannot-see-files-in-folders-when-connected-to-a-dfs-tree-on-windo

I never solved the problem, that is, until I tried again in October 2012. I’m now running Ubuntu 12.04. So, I started all over… I tried a bunch of things from Google… And I finally got it working, even from “Connect to Server” in Nautilus!!!

These are the steps that finally made it work:

1. Enable/configure  proper WINS resolution

Follow this discussion to enable WINS resolution of Windows computer names on the network http://askubuntu.com/questions/93302/windows-hostnames-are-not-resolved

Basically, it boils down to making this change:

2. Install SMBFS and KeyUtils

Every time I tried to call the MOUNT command, I was getting some error like “cifs_mount failed w/ return code = -22″ that I could see by running dmesg | tail

So, some posts lead me to install these things:

sudo apt-get install smbfs
sudo apt-get install keyutils

See: http://thats-not-working.blogspot.com/2008/02/cifssmb-mount-problem-on-debian.html

and http://technopragmatica.blogspot.com/2011/03/connecting-to-dfs-shares-with-ubuntu.html?m=1

Some posts state that the Samba stuff on Ubuntu is now deprecated or replaced by the newer CIFS stuff, and for some things, CIFS is the only thing needed,  but I assure you that the original Samba package is also required to connect to a DFS tree on a Windows server.

You will notice that “smbfs” will also install “cifs-utils” if it’s not already installed.

3. Configure smb.conf

I also made a few tweaks in /etc/samba/smb.conf. Uncomment these lines, and enter the correct values for your network:

4. Finally – a very important discovery…

This is the magic that finally made this work for me!!! Changing one little parameter…

I happened to notice this teensy little difference in one of my files compared to a blog post referenced in the only reply to my original question on SeverFault.

In the /etc/request-key.conf, I changed this line:

create cifs.spnego * * /usr/sbin/cifs.upcall -c %k 

to this:

create cifs.spnego * * /usr/sbin/cifs.upcall -t %k

Note: This file is created by the  “keyutils” install. It was not present before, as I looked for it. I noticed that it appeared after installing keyutils via apt-get.

Two things to note here…

1. According to http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/cifs.upcall.8.html, the –c option is deprecated and is currently ignored. So, I don’t know why that option is included in the file in first place.

2. Warning: The suggested –t option has something to do with “trusting” the DNS server to resolve and retrieve kerberos session keys. I really don’t understand what it all means, but it is explained in the link listed right above here. All I know is, from my trial-and-error testing, this allows Windows DFS tree mounting to work, and it DOES NOT work without –t on this one line.

So, read the above link to learn more about this and make sure it’s safe for your environment. I tried several times to make it work without the –t option, but whenever it connected It gave me folder names from the DFS tree, but they were empty when viewed in Nautilus.

You need to restart your terminal window after making these changes and before going to the final step below:

Finally, let’s connect to a DFS tree or any other shared folder on the server.

Open a new Terminal window, and type the following:

mount -t cifs //servername/sharename /mnt/temp –-verbose -o username=my_user_name,password=my_password,workgroup=DOMAIN_NAME

The –verbose option adds logging info about the mount, which you can read from this command:

dmesg | tail

Or, from Nautilus file browser, you can use “Connect to Server” from the File menu, and make these entries in the dialog window:

Kaboom!!! It worked. At least for me.

Good luck to others who need this.

Video demo:

FoxPro IDE does font-zooming : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRjMC-IDmKQ

With these hotkeys (Ctrl+ , Ctrl-, and Ctrl+MouseUp, Crtl+MouseDown) you can quickly increase or decrease the font size in the code window (multiple times, if desired) to create a zoom-in or zoom-out effect.

Here are the scripts:

	^numpadadd::Send {ALTDOWN}O{ALTUP}E
	^numpadsub::Send {ALTDOWN}O{ALTUP}R
	
	
	^WheelUp::
		SendInput {ALTDOWN}O{ALTUP}R
		SLEEP,50
		return
	^WheelDown::
		SendInput {ALTDOWN}O{ALTUP}E
		SLEEP,50
		return
	

Go from this:

To this:

by pressing the hotkeys or Ctrl+MouseWheel to zoom in or out as much as you want.

It’s got a nice Folder View panel on the side, tabbed edit windows, and tons of cool keyboard shortcuts for doing fancy editor tricks, but the first thing I missed was seeing the beautiful FoxPro language in colorized syntax. So, I dug in to learn how to write a syntax file and added all the keywords that are used in the semi-popular NotePad++ syntax file…

You can download the latest version and read instructions from my GitHub repo:

Sublime-Text-2-Syntax-Coloring-for-Visual-FoxPro

Here’s what it looks like so far:

To be fair, the same thing is possible in NotePad++, it just doesn’t look as cool:

So, being a simple and frugal guy, I have been able to successfully host a few of these small, private login apps right in an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine that I am running inside of a Windows XP box sitting right on my local network.

Yep… A Windows XP machine running Virtual Box which has Ubuntu 10, where I used RVM to install Rails and all the Gems for the app. Then I go to a terminal window and start up the Rails development web server on a certain port, and leave it running. In most cases, the database is SQLite, but you can use anything that you can get running in your development environment. SQLite is plenty powerful enough for this small user-count scenario, even if the database is or becomes large (1GB, 5GB is no problem for SQLite). 

Most of my apps do user authentication to validate the users at login. Myself or an admin for the app are the only ones who can create user accounts . The total number of daily users is usually less than 20 or so, and it is not open to public signup. It’s a low volume, privately accessed app.  So, the developer environment of a simple Ubuntu / Rails machine handles it very well. The users have no idea what is happening on the back end.

I have the XP machine on a battery backup, and I have a static public IP with my business-grade internet service provider.

To handle the hits, I redirect from my main public facing router (switch) to the LAN based IP and port which the Ubuntu VM uses.

So, my users enter an address like this to hit their app (notice that a specific port is requested):

http://210.123.034.104:1234     

(the above is a fake address, but you get the picture)

When this hits my public facing router, I redirect  it to the Ubuntu Virtual Machine LAN IP and the port that I used when I started the Rails development server:

192.168.0.125:3003

So, with this mapping in place, I go to the virtual machine and open up a terminal, CD to the Rails app directory, and enter:

rails s –p 3003

to start up the server on port 3003. (You can use any free port that you have available.)

Boom! A live self-hosted Rails app. 

You can run as many of these as you want. Even in the same VM you can run different ones just by change the port that is used for the Rails server, and then just create a new mapping on your switch.

Sure, since I am using SQLite, it’s single threaded hits to the database file, but hey, for what little traffic this thing gets each hour, it handles it very easily, and the users never feel any speed issues.

Pros: Free, full control, hands-on, dang… it just works! Trust me, I’ve been doing it for months!!!

More Pros: Because it’s a VM , about 20GB is enough size, and you can backup or clone the entire machine as a single file.

Cons: Keeping the host XP machine and the VM alive all the time, keeping my internet connection alive, keeping the Ubuntu updates applied (if needed), backing up the data file(s).

While I’m not available for FoxPro projects, I highly recommend my friends at Red Mountain Solutions group in Birmingham, AL if you need support in this area.

They offer expert FoxPro development work and maintenance on existing software, as well as web development and overall IT support.

You can reach them here:  http://www.RedMountainSolutionsGroup.com/

Installing RubyMine

There is no actual “installer” for RubyMine on Linux. You just extract it to a folder of your choice. (I put mine in /home/matt/apps/RunyMine-4.0.3/). If you try to place it in one of the more locked-down system folder, you could run into permissions problems, which always drives me nuts. So I just create and “apps” folder in my Home folder, and drop all my non-Ubuntu-Software-Center packages in separate folders there.

You can read the RubyMine Installation Instructions in the file named “Install-Linux-tar.txt” file which is located in the archive file for RubyMine that you will download from JetBrains. (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/download/).  It will tell you where to unzip the files, and how to launch RubyMine after you’ve extracted it from the archive. (Note to Windows users… All this talk about “tar” and “archive” is basically what us Windows folks call a “zip” file.) After you download the archive from the JetBrains site, right click on it and open it with the Archive Manager. From there you can extract it to a folder of your choice. After that, it’s ready to run RubyMine (well, after you follow the next step…)

Sun Java JDK

RubyMine requires the Sun Java JDK environment to make its fancy GUI stuff work (note: RubyMine does not work well with OpenJDK, so don’t use this one by mistake!). Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Software Center does not have a click-easy installer for this, so you’ve got to do it in a terminal window, but trust me, it’s not hard. I followed this guide (from a Question/Answer on StackOverflow) to install the Sun Java JDK 1.7.0 in my new Ubuntu machine:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10178601/rubymine-on-linux

Note: This step can be done before or after you extract RubyMine from the .tar download. It’s just that RubyMine will give you an error if you try to run it without having the Sun Java JDK installed.

Done!

With Rails and Ruby installed (see link at the top of this page) and RubyMine extracted, and Sun Java JDK installed, you are ready to ride on the Rails train.

Update 2013-03-18: These instructions also worked well on a Linux Mint 14 box (which is based on Ubuntu 12.10)

I just setup a fresh VM with Ubuntu 12.04, and I wanted to setup Ruby on Rails on the machine right off the bat.

I followed this “Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 12.04” guide from The Tech Journal, which worked very well, except I had to make a couple of changes in the instructions, which you can see in my notes below:

Again, here’s the guide I followed :

http://www.the-tech-tutorial.com/?p=1868

Better way of installing RVM:

I had a little trouble installing RVM per the instructions in the above post, so, I followed the basic install instructions directly from the full RVM site:

https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

Install RVM/Ruby dependencies:

Next, from the terminal window, type:

rvm requirements

RVM will show you a list of dependencies that need to be installed. So, run the sudo apt-get commands shown (copy and paste them in the terminal window) to prepare the environment for rvm, ruby, rails development.

Install a version of Ruby:

rvm install <ruby_version>

I can’t tell you which version(s) you’ll want or need, but this how you will install them.
You can get a list of available versions with this command:

rvm list known

 

You’re on you on from here…

Create a GemSet, then install Rails and any other gems your app needs. You’ll probably use the “bundle” command to pull in the required gems from a gemfile. From here on, it’s basic Rails stuff.

Other crap I’ve had to deal with if something goes wrong….

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9056008/installed-ruby-1-9-3-with-rvm-but-command-line-doesnt-show-ruby-v/9056395#9056395

Oh, yeah, one more final point about (not) installing gem docs…

I always like to turn off the documentation downloads (rdoc and ri) when installing new gems (I never read the docs locally this way, I always use the web). You can make a permanent change on your system to *not* install gem documentation when installing new gems. Run this line in the terminal window:

echo "gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri" > ~/.gemrc

This will create a .gemrc file in your home folder telling the gem installer not to download the docs when you install new gems. You only need to do this once.

Do this before you run any “gem install” commands, or use Bundler, so that it won’t waste time and space pulling down docs for the gems.

Other detailed instructions for installing a full Ruby, Rails, Apache, MySql stack

If you really want a LOOONG tutorial that also gets deep into installing Apahce, MySql, and all that jazz, check out this post which has a 35 page PDF mega walk-through.

Setting up RubyMine

If you want to install RubyMine IDE for your Rails development, you can follow my instructions here: http://mattslay.com/installing-rubymine-4-on-ubuntu-12-04/

Other goodies I installed on my new Ubuntu machine:

I installed these personal favorites right from the Ubuntu Software Center  (I’ve listed links so you can learn more about these tools, but I recommend installing them through the Ubuntu Software Center right inside of Ubuntu):

• Krusader (A better File manager than the standard Ubuntu one)
  http://www.krusader.org/
• Konsole (A better Console/Terminal window that then the standard Ubuntu one)
  http://kde.org/applications/system/konsole/
• Tortoise HG Workbench (for Mercurial version control) (install via PPA to get latest version):
  https://launchpad.net/~tortoisehg-ppa/+archive/releases
  Note: Read the notes at the top of the page to install the PPA key for apt to work properly.
  Also note that they recommend not installing Mercurial ahead of time. Let the TortoiseHG PPA handle that for you.
• gitg – Git repository browser/GUI
• KDiff3
• XRDP – Remote Desktop Server: Access your new Ubuntu machine from Windows via Remote Desktop
  http://www.xdrp.org
• DropBox
• LuckyBackup – To create/schedule backups.
  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/luckybackup
  LuckyBackup tutorial here:
  http://www.liberiangeek.net/2011/02/schedule-backup-luckybackup-ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat/

 

 

If you’ve got favorite Linux/Ubuntu tools that you think are helpful to Rails developers, please add them in the comments.