Yes

===========================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
Web: www.techsol.org

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Summers [mailto:sesummers@...]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 5:54 PM
> To: Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [Firebird-general] Article
>
>
>
> |-----Original Message-----
> |From: Ann W. Harrison [mailto:aharrison@...]
> |Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 04:40pm
> |To: Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com; Firebird-general@yahoogroups.com
> |Subject: Re: [Firebird-general] Article
> |
> |
> |Steve,
> |
> | Other system (Postgres for one) allow adding user functions,
> |but the mechanism is completely different from Firebird. I
> |think that would be very interesting to write up. Will you
> |contact Jon or shall I?
> |
> |Thanks,
> |
> |
> |Ann
>
> Before I agree to this, I need consensus that I'm the best candidate (or
> at
> least, the best of the willing candidates, if any?) for this. (And of
> course, I need a better idea of how big a project this is.)
>
> I don't do much programming anymore- I design the features and UI stuff
> that
> other people actually code. I've never had any need to learn (or had much
> desire to learn) the nuances of COM/DCOM, multithreading, web application
> programming, component creation (beyond little things like multi-line
> buttons), etc. I'm a lot more interested in making useful, easy to use
> application programs than figuring out how to implement multithreaded COM
> interfaces. I LOVE to program, but my role as designer is a lot like
> walking
> on one of those airport slidewalks- I can get where I want to go a lot
> faster and with a lot less (personal) effort with all those motors helping
> me along.
>
> Anyway, a couple years ago, the combination of:
>
> * Needing to understand InterBase better to try to figure out our
> corruption
> problems,
>
> * My frustration with the "Software Requirement Specifications in MS Word
> Documents" approach to conveying my design work, and
>
> * Wanting to spend some time programming again, before my skills
> completely
> atrophied,
>
> led me to develop a requirements and "issues" tracking database.
>
> I chose Delphi because that's what we use, and Firebird because Interbase
> 6.0.1.6 was a dead end, and I didn't want to pay license fees to deploy it
> company-wide. I learned a LOT in that process (it took about 300 hours,
> spread out over about a year), and had a lot of fun. And now I have a MUCH
> better understanding of IB/FB, SQL, UDFs, client/server programming, etc.
> I
> think I know what I'm doing for reasonably simple stuff like this.
>
> The problem is, as Nando pointed out, DDJ is probably not all that
> interested in what is MAYBE "intermediate" level programming in Delphi for
> Win32.
>
> Now, as far as UDFs, the main things I did with them were blob functions
> for
> searching. My Requirements database uses an RTF editor (WPTools). I tend
> to
> use a LOT of italics and bold text, multiple font sizes, tables, etc,
> which
> makes using "Containing" to find text strings pretty unreliable because of
> all the formatting codes. So I got permission from Julian Ziersch (the
> WPTools guy) to use his RTF to Plain Text conversion routine to make a UDF
> that converts RTF blobs to text, and then searches the plaintext for a
> specified string. (That code is in the version of FreeUDFLib that I
> provided
> to Claudio, that's posted on his site.) I also played with using the
> "Searchtext" function concept to do "weightings" - returning the number of
> occurances of the text string in the blob field, for example.
>
> This was all interesting to ME, but it wasn't really that technical.
> Starting with the FreeUDFLib source code in Delphi made it pretty easy.
> Is
> this DDJ article material? Does it show off Firebird in interesting ways?
> I don't know.
>
> If the answer is yes, and the deadline isn't too soon, and the project not
> too large, and nobody more qualified than me wants to do it, I'll do it. I
> know that's a lot of "ifs", but my guess is it's the same if's that are
> stopping any of the other candidates from discussing doing it themselves.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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