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.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
’Way back in the day, ACI employed a form of copy protection for 4D Server that required a special hardware device called a dongle. I still have one!
There is an Easter Egg that has been hidden in 4th Dimension for many years, since 4D 6.0 and probably before. Here’s how to make it appear:
- Single-click somewhere in the application. (I use an unused part of the menu bar for this.)
- Carefully type “somiO”, with a Shift-O for the last character.
- Continue to hold down the Shift key.
You will see a small window open in the center of your screen. It contains a picture of Asmae Benkirane, who must be a very special person to have her picture embedded inside 4D!
Be careful not to hold down the shift key for too long — all, and I mean ALL, event processing stops during this time. As soon as you release the Shift key, the window disappears and things return to normal.
Since it’s Summit Season, I thought I’d mention an old website: 4DSummitNotes.com. It contains my notes and photographs from previous 4D Summits and DEVCONs from 1995 through 2003. At some point I’ll publish my notes from 2004 and 2005. In the meantime, it’s fun to reminisce!
My favorite is still the picture of Hope Venus and John Travolta from 1996.
For me, domain names are like women’s shoes. I have many more than I actually need. For practically any excuse I’ll buy one. Don’t ask me how many I’ve rented over the years; it’s simply ridiculous.
Thus, I introduce to you our new home: FlushBuffers.com. Please let me know if the re-directs from the old site are not working for you.
There’s a buzz in the 4D Development Community: it’s getting close to Summit time!
The 4D Summit is our (usually) annual gathering held (usually) in the United States. It’s not the only one; there are conferences at other times of the year held in other places. However, the 4D Summit is the primary conference for English-speaking developers. It is managed by the hard-working folk at 4D, Inc., who in turn solicit many other third-party event sponsors.
This 4D Summit will be held October 16th-19th, 2007. The Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee is the location. It is a famous luxury hotel, known for its marching ducks. I’m certain this will be a popular venue.
In addition to the Main 4D Summit website and the 4D iNUG Mailing List, this year we have a Community 4D Summit Website hosted on the social networking service Ning. It’s sponsored by Rachel Luxemburg of 4D, Inc’s marketing department, and is a new trick for us old dogs in the 4D Development Community. We’ve been very e-mail oriented, and have lagged in our adoption of Web 2.0 technologies to talk to each other. Rachel’s experiment has been reasonably successful, and as of this writing there are 109 registered members of the community website. So far, so good!
It’s getting close to Summit time! Are you going?
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.
I’ll save the full explanation for another article, but in giving the answer “Why would you want to do that?” you show that you’re a bit out of touch with your constituency. It’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy — if you don’t already understand why you would want to do that, you’ll probably never be convinced of its importance, and will never do it.
For me, a member of the 4D Development Community (to varying degrees) for 20 years, the punch line to the joke describes why I am now writing about the Community in a blog format: almost nobody does it. There are deeper reasons, but for today I’ll leave it that FLUSH BUFFERS is my response to Why would you want to do that?