I am excited to announce that I started my new job on October 1st, 2007. The time came for me to move on from Trustco, and begin and new and exciting chapter in my career. I am no longer in a Clarion programming job, but have moved into the .NET world full time. For the record, I still love Clarion as a language, and I look forward to seeing all the new updated and improved tools coming from SoftVelocity. If I can find the time, there are still some classes and templates I would love to build specifically in and for Clarion.
So, I am now a part of a great team of developers and architects at an online marketing company called Acceleration. We develop in ASP.NET 2.0 and C#, making use of many of the latest technologies. We have business in South Africa, the US, and the UK, and no doubt more to come. There is a fantastic company culture, and no shortage of brain power - it is exciting being a part of this company.
Posted on: October 11th, 2007 > Read More (2) »
I love Google! Today I needed to remember the connection string to a MySQL DB, which I have not used in a good 18 months, so to Google it was, and what a beauty of a site I found! This one is for bookmarking folks: www.connectionstrings.com.
Posted on: August 8th, 2007 > Read More (0) »
So a bunch of my friends have been nagging me to join Facebook. My reason for avoiding it has been that social networking sites are not top of my priority list, as they are generally untidy, ugly, and a big fat time guzzler. Well, I gave in, and signed up. My thoughts are still the same, but I seem to have been sucked into it. I’ve created a HBCS Class of ‘96 Group, and a Clarion Developers Group, so if you fit into either of those categories, head on over and join up!
As usual, work has been pretty much the top keyword search in my life lately. This is not how I believe life should be, but it is the reality at the moment. Hopefully things will calm down a bit in a few weeks… ja right!
So it’s nearly half way through the year already! Wow. I don’t know about you, but at this point, I am thinking about the goals I set for myself this year, and I am wondering how much of the last 5 months has been put into achieving those goals so far. I am not exactly where I want to be on the progress bar, but taking into account that God sometimes has different goals for you than your own, I’m doing ok. Of course it’s worth re-assessing your goals, and re-planning how you are going to achieve them. This relates to some of the topics we’ve been discussing in Cell Group lately. Which reminds me! I have homework to do… next week is Life Graphs!
Posted on: May 25th, 2007 > Read More (3) »
I recently discovered an error on the Colin Crowder Memorial Website, whereby Internet Explorer users would get errors popping up while attempting to post their comments. This issue has been resolved. My apologies for the inconvenience.
I have also added links to the RSS feeds for the site for those who want to keep track of the postings.
If you knew Colin, we would love you to share your memories of him.
Posted on: March 16th, 2007 > Read More (0) »
It is with great sadness that I bid my farewell to a great friend. Colin Crowder passed away suddenly on March 6th, 2007. I have known the Crowder family for many years, but in recent years Joanne and Colin welcomed me into their home, and made me feel a part of the family. We have shared a wonderful friendship.
Mr Colin, as I always called him, was my chief personal computer support client. Almost every time I saw Mr Colin, he’d call from behind his laptop eying me over the top of his glasses, “Lesley, come look over here.” This would of course mean that there was something wrong with his email, or something disappeared, or something keeps popping up, or…
I must admit that I will miss being able to help Mr Colin with his computer. It was always a pleasure to help, and it was my little thing that I could do to help Mr Colin, and his business.
One of the things that always cracked me up, was when Mr Colin would burst out into song, “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was HOT like me?!” I mean, the most unlikely of people to ask me such a question! 
Seriously though, Mr Colin loved music. Though we had to listen to the TV at high volume most of the time, he had a very good ear for music, and always enjoyed a good Sound Check.
Mr Colin absolutely loved his work. His passion for Southern Africa, the outdoors, and people shone through each and every story he would tell on his return from each trip. Before you’d even finished saying hello, he would start, “So my trip was good thanks… ja… we went to Sabi Sabi and we saw elephants and lions. Then we had dinner at another place, very nice restaurant but my steak was overdone. Service was good though! Then we went to…” …and so it would go.
There are so many things I will remember about Mr Colin… like every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night he would ask, “Is Survivor on?!”.
Mr Colin, I will miss you. But for now, until we meet again one day, I will bid you farewell in the same way as always,
Cheers Mr Colin!
I am sure that many of the Timeless Tours clients who had the privilege of traveling South Africa and beyond accompanied by Colin Crowder as their tour guide, will remember Colin’s excellent humour, knowledge of the places visited, and passion for his country. We have created a place for you too to share your memories of Colin. Please go along to www.colincrowder.com, and add your story of Colin.
Posted on: March 14th, 2007 > Read More (0) »
I’ve started the official LesleyDean.com Download Center. This is a work in progress, but you will find your first treat available there. It’s a Clarion DATE and TIME conversion function for SQL called “ConvertClarionDateTime”. This UDF is written for SQL Server 2005, but you are free to adjust it for any other flavour of SQL you wish.
You will also notice I have added an Articles link above. Stay tuned to see what I have to say there!
If you have any comments or suggestions on the above, please let me know…
Posted on: February 5th, 2007 > Read More (1) »
As many of you know, I worked with Bruce for more than 5 years at CapeSoft. During that time, I learned unmeasurable treasures in Clarion Programming. Of course, Bruce is well known in the Clarion Community for being extremely knowledgable in the Clarion language and templates, and he is known to be an excellent speaker and teacher.
Way back in about 2002, Bruce released a book called Programming in Clarion’s ABC. These were the days of Clarion version 5.5. The book was released “as-is”, and considered a work in progress. The content was primarily compiled from some comprehensive notes Bruce had prepared for his presentation at ETC3. I think many Clarion Developers will testify to the fact that this book has helped them a great deal in getting their heads around the Application Builder Classes and templates, and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in general.
Now, the entire point of this post, was simply to say, that even though this book might appear to be out-dated (5 years old now), it isn’t! Today I had to implement an Edit-In-Place (EIP) browse. This isn’t something I’ve had to do very often. I wanted to conditionally allow EIP of certain records, based on a specific flag on that record. I fiddled a bit, not really getting anywhere, and then pulled out the old ABC Book.
Who would’ve thought that the exact thing I was trying to do was presented as an example in the book! Page 121 solved my problem beautifully! Not so out-dated after all! Thanks Bruce!
So, if you have left this book on your shelf gathering dust, or don’t even have a copy, I highly recommend getting it, as it is an essential resource for all Clarion Programmers.
When did you last use your Programming in Clarion’s ABC?
Note: As I no longer work for CapeSoft, there is no personal gain in me recommending this book. I simply want to remind all Clarion Programmers of a very useful resource. CapeSoft have not sponsored this post… yet! 
Posted on: February 1st, 2007 > Read More (2) »
Ok, so I have finally given in, and realised that I do not have the time to build my own amazingly awesome wordpress template!
So, I have found this one, by R.J. Kaplan, who built the wordpress version of Luka Cvrk’s design, and I think it’s great. I have modified it slightly, and I am very happy with the outcome. (You can preview the original version here).
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or two.
I hope you are all proud of me, this is my 3rd post this year… and a new design… and I have a few more changes / additions up my sleeve… so stay tuned!
Posted on: January 20th, 2007 > Read More (7) »
This is not cool!
Read Campaign Monitor’s view, and SitePoint’s posting about what Microsoft have done!
I mean, IE7’s CSS capabilities and rendering have finally caught up a bit with FireFox, but now they go an use a completely inferior engine for Outlook! Ok, ok, I know many of you don’t care, because you prefer plain text Times New Roman or Courier emails, but this really does mess around with many companies professional looking corporate image newsletters etc. HTML and CSS have made email worth reading without falling asleep. Bandwidth is getting cheaper, and more accessible, so email size is less of an issue.
I guess security is an excuse, but it’s not a good enough excuse for me. Fight back! Don’t give in to hackers and virus creators!
I think many people (designers / developers / copywriters / etc) are now going to be faced with even greater cross-emailreader compatibility issues in terms of their designs. We might be forced to keep it plain and boring, and possibly use html table-based designs (no float support), which quite honestly is probably more bloated than straight forward neat CSS.
I guess there’s not much one can do about it… Microsoft have decided what they gonna do, and that’s that. I think it’s disappointing.
Posted on: January 15th, 2007 > Read More (0) »
2007 is well and truly here, wow! Happy new year to you all. I trust that this year will be a spectacular year for us all, in many ways.
At least we can bank on 1 awesome event this year (hopefully! ). The long awaited Clarion 7 and Clarion.Net are promised to arrive on our door steps very soon. There have been some more videos shown of the new IDE.
One thing that disappoints me, is that there is no Code Completion for the Clarion 7 release. Apparently this will be ready for Clarion.Net. Hmm… one the most productive things about developing in other languages is code completion. Many Clarion Developers won’t miss it, as Clarion has never had it, but for those of use who code in other modern languages and IDEs, this is frustrating. Since I started using Visual Studio in late 2005, I have become ever more frustrated with existing Clarion IDE. So, I am really looking forward to Clarion 7, as this will hopefully no longer frustrate me. No Code Completion in a very “Visual Studio” type interface will most likely irritate me… so hopefully we won’t have to live without it for too long. It’s not so much the Clarion language that needs it (as it’s not case-sensitive, and I know Clarion really well), it’s the “What did I name that variable again?” and “What was that method name again?” type of productivity breakers. Ohwell, beggars can’t be choosers I guess…
So, what other exciting things are stored up to bless us this year? I think it is going to be an exciting year in many aspects. Technology is still accelerating at an incredible rate, which provides plenty of fun and entertainment for us geeks.
Another exciting thing for 2007 is that my church will be starting construction on our new building fairly soon I think.
So, have a good year everyone, and maybe this year I will keep my promises, and blog more!
Posted on: January 10th, 2007 > Read More (0) »