Automation Adventures

The first day of the Progress User Conference 2009 is behind me, and there were some interesting, some not so interesting sessions I attended.
The Opening Session went largely past me: I had to switch around windows a bit which caused me to restart the session a few times, and then a production issue took me [...]

I’m currently attending my first Progress User Conference without being on location. Progress decided to go with an on-line conference this year in honor(?) of the economic recession.
The on-line format has some advantages and some disadvantages. Advantages are that I don’t need to get on a plane, check into a hotel, run all over the [...]

One of the newsletters I subscribe to is the SQLCentral solutions. A couple of weeks ago they issued the Summer SQL Stumpers 2009, asking for the fastest way to calculate all the primes 1000 or lower. The fastest solution they came up with runs in about 7 seconds, which I thought was terribly slow for [...]

To increase the security when dealing with credit card processing via ICVerify’s request/answer methodology, it is possible to encrypt and decrypt this information. However, the documentation is fairly sketchy on this subject, especially when you’re not working in one of the languages used in the examples in the SDK.
After some hair-pulling on why it doesn’t [...]

I came across this interesting page, that shows the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” program in 366 different more or less well known programming languages.
It clearly shows the difference in the two database language that we use at my place of work, Cobol and Progress.
Cobol:
* Hello World in Cobol
*****************************
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
DATA DIVISION.
PROCEDURE [...]