FLUSH BUFFERS

http://www.4d.com/company/blogs/Thibaud Arguillère/

It looks like he started in June 2010. Worth a read, in my opinion.

One of the fun things to do with 4D is to take it apart. Long-time Mac users know how to edit an application’s resources, and sometimes you can find rather interesting artifacts in that way.

As it happens, in 4D 2003 and earlier, resource PICT ID=9000 was a picture of a dog. It is used for a QuickTime preview or something. This made me ask myself the question, “Whose dog is it, anyway?” I remember asking Someone French this question at a 4D Summit long ago, and I was interested to learn that it is (supposedly) François Marchal’s dog. It was nice to know that it was actually someone’s dog, and not just a dog from a clip art collection. I’ve always wondered about the dog’s name. Is it Buddy? Is it Rex? Anyway, the picture is a nice little Easter Egg in 4D and it made me happy to know a little bit of the story behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you develop in 4D on Windows, or even if you only test in 4D on Windows, eventually you’ll need to know which TCP/IP ports are open and which application opened them. Windows has a handy built-in Command-Line Interface program called netstat that does this nicely.

The problem with netstat is that doesn’t update by itself. You have to run it each time you are curious about open ports. This lack of convenience led me to search for an alternative. I was happy to discover CurrPorts. It displays the same information, but updates itself every few seconds and visually marks the changes to make them easier to see.

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In July 1994 I flew down from Anchorage to attend the annual 4D DEVCON 1994 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. It was the first I’d ever attended in person. I was awe-struck by Silicon Valley and star-struck by all the 4D Luminaries and Personalities. For me, it might as well have been another world.

I took 48 pages of hand-written notes over the course of the event. They are a little time capsule of what was and wasn’t important at the time. They make for an interesting artifact. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early 1990s Natural Intelligence was one of the premiere 4th Dimension development consultancies. Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Joshua Wachs and staffed by luminaries including Hillel Cooperman and Aparajita Fishman, NI produced the most advanced and well-known 4D tools of the time: Easy4D, QuickCode Pro, and ObjectTools.

At DEVCON 1994, my first, I met Josh. NI was growing, and he was actively recruiting. I took him up on an offer of an interview, and as a prerequisite I received the famous Natural Intelligence 4th Dimension Proficiency Test. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best indicators of a development community’s health is its internal communication: more talk means more health; less talk means less health; no talk means the community is dead.

For better or worse, the 4D iNUG Tech Mailing List — the NUG — is the main conversation for 4D Development. It’s where we all talk to each other, all the time.

There are a few places where the NUG’s messages are posted in web page form. GMane is my favorite. It includes a graph of Messages per day since it started tracking the NUG back in 2005.

Lately I noticed a trend. An uptick. We’re talking more.

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One of my favorite bits of 4D Memorabilia is my Signed 4D v3 Key Disk.

Key… disk? What is this, you might ask? Children, gather ’round and learn of the great mystery of a key disk and of the night when mine was signed by its author in the exotic surroundings of an Egyptian temple.

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There is an Easter Egg that has been hidden in 4th Dimension for many years, since 4D 6.0 and probably before. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an old joke in the 4D Development Community, and it goes something like this:

Developer 1: Hey, wouldn’t it be great if 4D could (insert interesting thing here)?

Developer 2: Why would you want to do that?

Both Developers: Pause, look at each other, then laugh hysterically.

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