ClarionLive show notes for December 20 2013

The fund raising target for ClarionLive's own webinar account has almost been reached! A 500 user Go To Webinar account is $2000, and $1800 has been raised so far. 

Clarion Getting Real

Mike continued going through the 27Signals book Getting Real. This week: Fund Yourself! Getting a cash injection may seem like a good thing, but there are advantages to going it alone. 

Feature Presentation: Monitoring TPS files for changes

Roberto Renz and Wolfgang Orth showed a number of strategies for determining when a TPS file has changed. 

One technique: Load the file into CapeSoft's StringTheory and get an MD5 hash of the file's raw data for comparison purposes. You then need some sort of timer process or idle procedure to periodically re-read the file  and compare the current hash with the original hash. 

Another approach is to do repeated Directory() calls. 

A third way is to use the Windows API to receive file change notifications. This eliminates the need for idle procedures. Roberto and Wolfgang went through this code in some detail (building on work done by Larry Sand), showing how to implement it in an APP. (For further reading there's a ClarionMag article by Jim Kane on this topic.)

vuFileTools also has some tooling to monitor files for changes. 

Feature Presentation #2: Mike Hanson on PostgreSQL

Mike, with assistance from JP, walked through server-side autoincremented primary keys in PostgreSQL.