Robert Robbins

Recently I've been studying RPG II for the Infinite 36, an old IBM programming language that was designed for 80 column punchcards. RPG II is probably the most horrible programming language that man has ever devised. Sometimes your code is a single character which has to be in an exact column. There is also a fixed logic that you have to work around. But it is the matter of getting a character in the right column that gives me a pain. The Infinite 36 is an old emulator of the IBM System 36 for the PC. It has some green screen RPG editors but I prefer to use UltraEdit.

I'm currently studying FoxPro 2.6. For MS-DOS. Yes, the company I am working for is still using applications written for FoxPro 2.6! I have to run this old MS-DOS database system in Virtual PC. So the last programming book I've read was Charles Siegel's Mastering FoxPro 2 written in 1991. The applications are completely undocumented (grrrr!) so my first step was to create a data dictionary (aka database schema). In FoxPro this can be done through the command DISPLAY STRUCTURE.

I've been working on my job skills to remain employable. A lot of people are losing their jobs and then getting depressed because they have nothing to do except look for a job. They should be spending their time more constructively. I don't have much to do at work so yesterday I worked through a tutorial on Firefox Extension Development. I use Firefox all day at work and home because its extensions are useful for web development. It will be cool to create my own custom extensions. Today I experimented with the localization aspect of a Firefox extension. There are several things that were left out of the tutorial.

Pennsylvania has not passed a budget for over two months. I was laid off from my full time job because of that. Now that I am collecting unemployment, I’ve had enough spare time to learn French. I have read five books on the French language. I think learning French is more worthwhile than learning Silverlight!

I’ve been having a problem with Windows Live Writer after I installed a WordPress plugin, Now Reading. That plugin allows me to show the books I’m currently reading on the sidebar.

My vacation in Paris, France was a great success and fulfilled one of my dreams. You can read about my travels on my personal blog at: http://williamsportwebdeveloper.com/cgi/wp/

I’m going to Paris France for my vacation this year! I’m very excited about it because I’ve always been a bit of a Francophile. Unfortunately, I don’t speak French so, being a IT professional, I’ve sought a technological solution for the language barrier. I’m not sure that I’ll need to speak any French because I’m going on a guided tour which should reduce my interaction with the locals.

I recently finished reading the book ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking by Andrew Siemer. I was very interested in this book because I want to build a social networking site designed for vloggers and ASP.NET is my area of expertise. Currently I'm working to customize the Elgg social networking web application using PHP because it is open source and has an active developer community.