ProFox April 2017

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44 participants
50 discussions

[NF] What's in your event log?
by Ted Roche 14 Apr '17

14 Apr '17

Every morning, I get emails from my Linux servers with the output of 'logwatch' summarizing interesting events that occurred the day before, often leading to some corrective action. Does anyone have an equivalent utility for Windows machines? A client called with a support issue and I logged onto their machine and reviewed the Event Log. It was full of interesting stuff, some of which I'm still trying to resolve. One of the more interesting was a C0000118-something "AirSpace" error that was caused by an Office log which was locked to a max size of 1Mb and needed to be cleared manually, rather than being set to Overwrite or Rotate. Every time the client got a "Do you want to save your changes?" error, all the details were written to the log. The change was easy to apply, once the error became known. There was nothing in the desktop UI nor pop-up notices that this was happening. I know this is more a sysop question than a developer question, hence [NF] for Not Fox but not Off-Topic. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com

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Fuzzy Name Searching
by Ken Dibble 14 Apr '17

14 Apr '17

Hi folks, I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it. I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches is that in order to be efficient, they require pre-processing all of the names in the system and storing the results, which can then be queried to find matches. Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing. I've played with various schemes to assign "weights" to matches based on the number of matching letters, but they all end up being very slooooow and also producing too many false positives. I suppose there are no easy answers, but if anyone has an algorithm for this kind of thing that they would be willing to share, I'd be grateful. Thanks. Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org

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Re: Fuzzy Name Searching
by Gene Wirchenko 14 Apr '17

14 Apr '17

At 10:15 2017-04-13, Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: >>>Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, >>>which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. >> >> Why would that be an issue of consequence? >> >> You add some columns to a table. The rest of the software >> can ignore them. (Unless you use select * or other black arts, >> said rest might never see the new columns.) > >Yeah, there are black arts involved. My framework has some generic >code that expects to be able to process every field in certain types >of tables. If there is not corresponding code for each field in >certain subclasses, errors are thrown. Probably a poor design choice >in retrospect, but the choice was made in 2004 and rectifying it >would require a huge amount of work. Oh, my! (Alternative pronunciation: "You poor bastard!") Can you modify the framework? One kludge would be for it to ignore certain columns, say those starting with a certain prefix. I have a couple of anvils around my neck, too. They prevent my system from easily being multi-user. One was a reasonable trade-off at the time, but the downside continues to bite. The other was an argument I lost, because my boss does not understand relational databases. [snip] >No, I don't have a loader program. I would have to introduce >internet download capabilities in order to provide that, and that's >a headache I don't need. Loader programs are not difficult to set up on a local network. Still not an option? [snip] Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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Re: Fuzzy Name Searching
by Ken Dibble 13 Apr '17

13 Apr '17

Thank you everybody. I will be working through these suggestions and let you know what I come up with. Ken >I remember this joy of searching names in a system that had 2+ million >customers and names were all varchar() instead of a key to a secondary >table. My indexes sure took a beating when I got another "Williams", the >number one last name in the system, and it had to tear a page to make a new >page in this area. > >I found that making a table called NAMES fixed the search time I was >experiencing. Two text boxes had input for whatever they keyed. I added >the % for wildcard after any text in each box and one of the keypress >events was the trigger to run it. > >Select <field_list> >from customer >where lNameID in ( >select nameID from names >where Name like @Lname) >and >fNameID in ( >select nameID from names na >where na.Name like @Fname) > >That has been 10-13 years ago. > > > > >On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 9:55 AM, Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: > > > Hi folks, > > > > I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to find > > people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it. > > > > I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove > > spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches is that > > in order to be efficient, they require pre-processing all of the names in > > the system and storing the results, which can then be queried to find > > matches. > > > > Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, which I > > try to avoid due to the downtime they require. > > > > I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include close > > matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing. > > > > I've played with various schemes to assign "weights" to matches based on > > the number of matching letters, but they all end up being very slooooow and > > also producing too many false positives. > > > > I suppose there are no easy answers, but if anyone has an algorithm for > > this kind of thing that they would be willing to share, I'd be grateful. > > > > Thanks. > > > > Ken Dibble > > www.stic-cil.org > > > > [excessive quoting removed by server]

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RE: Copying to a Cursor
by Gene Wirchenko 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

At 14:57 2017-04-12, Richard Kaye <rkaye(a)invaluable.com> wrote: >Select <fields> from table where <filter> into cursor mycursorname. > >If you want to be able to manipulate the cursor by adding or >removing rows, adding indexes, etc. use the READWRITE clause. Thank you. I blindsided myself. I was thinking too much of source and destination. (A command like copy to cursor thecursor would be nice.) Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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Copying to a Cursor
by Gene Wirchenko 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

Hello: I just wanted to copy some data to a cursor for some analysis. I prefer a cursor to a table here as it is easier to throw away. I suppose I could create the cursor and then append into it, but is there a way to copy to a non-existent cursor which is created with the same command? I do not see one. Am I overlooking something? Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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Re: VFP9 and Windows 10 PDF printer
by Gene Wirchenko 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

At 14:36 2017-04-12, "Mike McCann" <mike(a)morchellas.com> wrote: >Anyone have experience with printing regular FRX reports to the Window 10 >PDF and directing to a file automatically (i.e. no user dialog)? I do not use .frx, but I have written code for that for both Adobe Acrobat and Bullzip PDF generators. If no one replies more specifically, give me a nudge. Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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Re: Fuzzy Name Searching
by Gene Wirchenko 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

At 07:55 2017-04-12, Ken Dibble <krdibble(a)stny.rr.com> wrote: >Hi folks, > >I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to >find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it. > >I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove >spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches >is that in order to be efficient, they require pre-processing all of >the names in the system and storing the results, which can then be >queried to find matches. > >Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database, >which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require. Why would that be an issue of consequence? You add some columns to a table. The rest of the software can ignore them. (Unless you use select * or other black arts, said rest might never see the new columns.) You can split up the task. Write your code for filling in the new columns in your add/change code. Then, write a utility to fill in the rest. Then, implement the searching. >I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include >close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing. I can not see that the preprocessing would be very involved. >I've played with various schemes to assign "weights" to matches >based on the number of matching letters, but they all end up being >very slooooow and also producing too many false positives. > >I suppose there are no easy answers, but if anyone has an algorithm >for this kind of thing that they would be willing to share, I'd be grateful. There are not, because different languages assign different values to the Roman alphabet characters. You are going to have decide on language trade-offs. Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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Re: VFP EXE and RDS random crashes
by Gene Wirchenko 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

At 04:06 2017-04-12, Alan Bourke <alanpbourke(a)fastmail.fm> wrote: >On Wed, 12 Apr 2017, at 10:58 AM, Wollenhaupt, Christof wrote: > > > ago HP printers where notoriously famous for changing the exception > > handling for the floating point uni I remember an HP printer driver that could not handle printing which page number was currently being printed although it did display a "page a of b" message. >Now they're famous for their PCL6 drivers *still* being a pile of crap. I would not know. I do not buy HP anymore. Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko

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[NF] Recommendation on a 3rd party VPN service?
by Malcolm Greene 12 Apr '17

12 Apr '17

Wondering if any of you are using a 3rd party VPN service and if so, which services would you recommend or suggest I avoid? My use case: MacBook, iPhone/iPad devices while traveling. Here's my short list (in no particular order): - Private Internet Access - PureVPN - GetCloak - SlickVPN - NordVPN (recent PCMag Editors Choice) Thanks, Malcolm --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html ---

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ProFox April 2017