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In the past couple of days we have been getting spam from... well... us...B) Not really, but someone out there is sending spam with the support@icetips.com in the From header, like:

From: "icetips.com" <support@icetips.com>

The real sender is from industryd0463@resaleworld.com or some other name at resaleworld.com, but even this is bogus. I have been in touch with them and they assured me that this email address does not exist on their servers and has nothing to do with them. In my case the URL in the email is pointing to http://www.bims.web.tr/index2.html which can't be resolved, and pinging it says it can't be found, but the .tr country extension belongs to Turkey.

The content of the email is text indicating that your account needs to be attended to with a link, something like this:

"REFERENCE: Your Email to .

You recently sent email to a mailbox that requires authentication of the sender to reduce spam. Before your message can be delivered you must confirm that you are the sender by clicking on the link below and then clicking on the "Deliver" button that will be displayed. Once you have completed this step, no further authorization will be required for future emails that you send to this address.

Please confirm your email by visiting the URL

Thank you for your cooperation in helping us to fight spam.

Regards,
icetips.com Account Services
-------------------------"

So if you get an email like this, you can be absolutely sure that it has nothing to do with us and did not come from us!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Last Monday, Ed Robinson CEO of Aptimize (http://www.aptimize.com) talked at our .NET user group meeting in Redmond, about optimizing web sites. He pointed out one of the tools they use, http://www.webpagetest.org It is very interesting to run this on your site to see how it will perform.

It lists every item that is downloaded, every file, how long it takes to download, how long the server response is etc. It gives you a really good idea how long a website takes to load from various parts of the world as they route the signal through various servers, for example in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand etc. Four things that Ed suggested to make pages faster to load:

  1. Minify css and javascript files and anything else that can be minified. This can drastically reduce the size of those files as it cuts out all whitespace and with js files it also reduces the length of parameters and variable names.
  2. Use sprites for images. This means fewer downloads, fewer roundtrip requests.
  3. Consolidate files that are sent to the browser, such as css and javascript. This also reduces the number of requests to the server.
  4. Compress anything that can be compressed. Here is an article about compression using php or .htaccess Here is an article on how to set compression on the Apache webserver.

I found an excellent writeup of website optimization that explains each of those items in more detail. Ed's talk was only 15 minutes, but by itself, was worth the 7 hour total time for the trip (including waiting an hour for the ferry after missing the last one by 2 minutes;)

We are in the process of slightly redesigning the Icetips website and the plan is to have it up by the end of June 2010 and we will definitely be looking into how to optimize it as much as we can. We all like fast websites and none of us like waiting for a web page to load! It will be an interesting experiment and I hope you will see a much quicker website by the time we are done with it:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have made Clarion 7.2 compatible builds of all our products available for download from our website. You can now go ahead and download the new installs. All subscribers should have received an email from us with the download links. If you haven't please check your spam filter and if you still haven't received it check the email address in your Icetips account or drop me an email to let me know:)

You need to have a valid subscription to be able to download the installs. If you need to renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php and purchase a renewal. If you do not have an Icetips Subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php to purchase.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Softvelocity released Clarion 7.2 yesterday (Friday, June 4, 2010). As I started testing with it this morning, I immediately ran into an old problem with the #RUNDLL template statement which I use in various places in our templates. This was fixed in 7.1 (or around 7.1 somewhere) but before that it would show a harmless GPF message in the output window but would not cause any issues. Well, that was not the case now as it would make the IDE become unresponsive and it had to be killed with the task manager. So this had to be fixed or worked around one way or the other!

After messing with this for a while and not getting anywhere with it, I decided to bite the bullet and reconstruct my old Borland C++ dll in Visual C++ as I have suspected that there are some incompatibility issues between Clarion 7 and the DLLs created by my old Borland C++ compiler. And lo and behold it fixed the problem! Now the new clean installs work perfectly!

I am currently rebuilding all the installs with the new dll and will finish that tonight and will resume testing in the morning. All new builds of our products will be available some time tomorrow!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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The past couple of weeks have been on the difficult side for me as I had a bit of a cold and as sometimes happens to me I ended up with an eye infection for most of last week, which does not help with productivity in front of a computer screen! I got a good rest this last weekend and fortunately this nasty infection seems to be completely gone now!

On March 15, we released new builds of all of our products, mainly maintenance for Clarion 7.1 support. We also released a new build of our Runtime which is used by our templates. Unfortunately some of our installs that we released on the 15 had the wrong runtime DLLs, so I suggest that you download the latest build to make sure that you have the correct DLLs. Nothing serious is going to happen if you have the wrong ones and they will be replaced with new builds soon. Note that those runtimes are only used in the templates in the Clarion IDE and have nothing at all to do with what you need to distribute with your applications.

I have been working on further documenting the Utilities and there will be a release early next week with more updates. Currently I'm working on the Controls Class and the File Search Class. I have also been working on research and alpha testing on a new Utilities product, but it has been slower than I had hoped so I'm not planning on a beta release until around the middle of April.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Today we have discovered a problem in the latest Clarion 7.1 build 6849. This problem affects most of our products and will cause a GPF in the program at runtime. What I found out was that the #PDEFINE template statement, which we have used for years to add defines to the project, doesn't fire in this Clarion 7.1 build so classes that depend on their own defines in the MODULE and DLL attributes are not compiled correctly and will cause a GPF when the classes are instantiated.

I have reported this to SoftVelocity's Problem Tracker and I really hope that this will be fixed in the next build.

If you converted projects from Clarion 6 to 7.1 with our products in them, you should be just fine. This only affects templates that you have added to applications in this latest build of 7.1 and possible some of the latest builds as I'm not 100% certain when this stopped working.

I am also looking into an obscure problem in the SQL browse template that only shows up in 7.1, when the GreenBar is being used and only when a new column has been added. After then app has been closed and re-opened the problem goes away and also if the actions for the SQL browse have been entered after a new column has been added. It could be something in our templates or it could be something that is related to the #PDEFINE issue if some statements are not executing correctly.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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My client reported a problem when attempting to run our project that was a bit baffling:

"The procedure entry point _18ProtectedHashTable__ct__@FiP15CriticalSection could not be located in the dynamic link library c60runx.dll"

Since all that we are sending back and forth are the applications and no binary files there was no way that we were mixing any binaries up, besides we are using the exact same builds of Clarion 6.3 - 9059 so this shouldn't be a problem at all.

After asking around I found out that the reason for this is that Clarion 7 includes a Clarion 6 compiled version of Topscan, which is not compiled local so they have to distribute the Clarion 6 versions of the DLLs with Clarion 7. In our case, the Clarion 7 Bin path has been added to the PATH variable, either manually or by an installer (we do not know which one if it has been done by an installer). Not just that, it has been added in front of the Clarion6\bin folder in the path causing the Clarion 6 application to pick up the C60RUNX.DLL from the Clarion 7\Bin folder rather than the Clarion6\Bin folder.

After some experimenting, I found that at least for Clarion 6.3 build 9059 I could have both BIN folders in the PATH as long as the Clarion 7 one was after the Clarion 6 one. The Clarion 6 apps still run without problems and the Clarion 7 Topscan also runs correctly and without problems as far as I can tell.

So, IF you want to put the Clarion 7 BIN folder into the path statement, make sure that you do that after the Clarion 6 BIN folder. Normally you do not need to do this, but if you don't want to copy DLLs to the application folder using the PATH do access the binary files is one way to do it.

Update: It appears that if you are using Clarion 6.3 build 9056 it does not conflict with the C60RUNX.DLL file in Clarion 7.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We released two new builds today with minor updates to Outlookbar, build 2.0.122, and SQL Browse build 6.2.470.

We have added support for runtime translation to Outlookbar and also made a minor update to the documentation to clear up confusion about the mimic button option. The install was also updated to make sure it detects Clarion 7.1 installs correctly.

The SQL Browse had an issue with template code that, while it had worked for the past 10 years or so, was just plain wrong and could fail miserably in Clarion 7. It did not appear to affect existing procedures, but new procedures would have a problem and show an error message at runtime and completely lose connection to what columns should be displaying in the browse. As with Outlookbar, we updated the install to detect Clarion 7.1 correctly.

I had planned to get the Thread Limiter out into beta testing today but I had to take some time off last week to prepare for the webinar last Friday so it will not be out into beta until later this week.

You can now download the webinar download the webinar from Clarion Live and watch it. I went through how the Window Fixer works and also just scratched the surface of the Icetips Utilities.

Arnor Baldvinsson