Icetips Blog

We have made a minor update to our Icetips Previeweravailable for download as build 2.7.349.  There was a problem with the Previewer and CPCS reports that could cause invalid code to be generated for the CSV export class. 

Important information for Clarion 7 users:
Yesterday I discovered a problem in Clarion 7 that affects our Previewer.  I have reported this to Softvelocity and hope they will resolve this quickly.

The problem comes up if you drag control templates, such as the "Save As Buttons" or "Save Button", to the toolbar.  Because there is a panel control on the toolbar, the IDE places the controls belonging to the control template on the window under the toolbar rather than on the toolbar.  This means the controls will never be visible as they will always stay underneath the toolbar.

The work around is to drag the control template to the window first and then drag the control(s) to the toolbar and when prompted if you want to move the controls in to the toolbar, you click on the YES button.  This moves the controls correctly to the toolbar and everything works correctly.

You need a valid subscription to be able to download the Icetips Previewer.  To purchase a subscription please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

To renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php 

Icetips Previewer:
  Build 2.7.349 released on July 01, 2010:      
http://www.icetips.com/downloadfile.php?FileID=149

• CSV option caused code to generate unconditionally on CPCS reports and caused compiler errors.
• ITCSVExportClass.clw file was not installed for Clarion 7. 
• Issue discovered with Clarion 7 toolbar and control templates, see above.

If you have any more suggestions or questions, please don't hesitate to drop
me an e-mail

Arnor Baldvinsson

In the past couple of days we have been getting spam from... well... us... Not really, but someone out there is sending spam with the support@icetips.com in the From header, like:

From: "icetips.com" <support@icetips.com>

The real sender is from industryd0463@resaleworld.com or some other name at resaleworld.com, but even this is bogus. I have been in touch with them and they assured me that this email address does not exist on their servers and has nothing to do with them. In my case the URL in the email is pointing to http://www.bims.web.tr/index2.html which can't be resolved, and pinging it says it can't be found, but the .tr country extension belongs to Turkey.

The content of the email is text indicating that your account needs to be attended to with a link, something like this:

"REFERENCE: Your Email to .

You recently sent email to a mailbox that requires authentication of the sender to reduce spam. Before your message can be delivered you must confirm that you are the sender by clicking on the link below and then clicking on the "Deliver" button that will be displayed. Once you have completed this step, no further authorization will be required for future emails that you send to this address.

Please confirm your email by visiting the URL

Thank you for your cooperation in helping us to fight spam.

Regards,
icetips.com Account Services
-------------------------"

So if you get an email like this, you can be absolutely sure that it has nothing to do with us and did not come from us!

Arnor Baldvinsson

I will be out of the office today, Wednesday June 23, 2010. I will not be able to answer emails until tomorrow morning.

Arnor Baldvinsson

Last Monday, Ed Robinson CEO of Aptimize (http://www.aptimize.com) talked at our .NET user group meeting in Redmond, about optimizing web sites. He pointed out one of the tools they use, http://www.webpagetest.org It is very interesting to run this on your site to see how it will perform.

It lists every item that is downloaded, every file, how long it takes to download, how long the server response is etc. It gives you a really good idea how long a website takes to load from various parts of the world as they route the signal through various servers, for example in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand etc. Four things that Ed suggested to make pages faster to load:

1. Minify css and javascript files and anything else that can be minified. This can drastically reduce the size of those files as it cuts out all whitespace and with js files it also reduces the length of parameters and variable names.
2. Use sprites for images. This means fewer downloads, fewer roundtrip requests.
3. Consolidate files that are sent to the browser, such as css and javascript. This also reduces the number of requests to the server.

4. Compress anything that can be compressed. Here is an article about compression using php or .htaccess Here is an article on how to set compression on the Apache webserver.

I found an excellent writeup of website optimization that explains each of those items in more detail. Ed's talk was only 15 minutes, but by itself, was worth the 7 hour total time for the trip (including waiting an hour for the ferry after missing the last one by 2 minutes

We are in the process of slightly redesigning the Icetips website and the plan is to have it up by the end of June 2010 and we will definitely be looking into how to optimize it as much as we can. We all like fast websites and none of us like waiting for a web page to load! It will be an interesting experiment and I hope you will see a much quicker website by the time we are done with it

Arnor Baldvinsson

We have made Clarion 7.2 compatible builds of all our products available for download from our website. You can now go ahead and download the new installs. All subscribers should have received an email from us with the download links. If you haven't please check your spam filter and if you still haven't received it check the email address in your Icetips account or drop me an email to let me know

You need to have a valid subscription to be able to download the installs. If you need to renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php and purchase a renewal. If you do not have an Icetips Subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php to purchase.

Arnor Baldvinsson