Sorry I couldn't make it. I was a lot closer to Newcastle than I usually am but unfortunately up to my eyes in the new contract and stretched to the limit financially until it starts paying out. This is the first time I've been on CP in weeks. I hope you had a reasonable turnout and an unreasonable amount of fun. When things are a little less mad and I'm not living half my life on the M1 I'll be back on a more regular basis.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

That would indeed be cromulent.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I must be low on iron(y) again. I'll go and take an iron(y) supplement and try again tomorrow :)

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

Hemel was still green and beautiful as ever when I passed through a couple of months ago. The most ridiculous concentration of speed cameras on ordinary suburban roads I think I've ever seen but it is Hertfordshire so I guess that's to be expected.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

If there sense of ugly is that warped it's probably because they spent too long in Milton Keynes. I wonder if wallpapering the outside of your house with black tar-paper ever really was fashionable, I suspect not. :laugh:

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

No, the egregious professor for the public misunderstanding of science is not right. He is seldom, if ever right. I'm not getting involved in the detail or a flame war but suffice it to say that even the secularists have disowned him as a religious zealot. On that at least, they are right.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

:laugh:

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I agree, that would be better unless it makes validation against your query language impossible which seems unlikely.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I do actually have puts working on Windows and Linux so yes I could do that. The sample apps I've written require printf in a few places although if you use printf with just a format string, no parameters, GCC 'magically' turns it into a call to puts anyway.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

Eric Blair, who wrote under the name George Orwell was a former member of the Millner society, a neo feudalist secret society somewhat similar to the Nazi Thule society but less mystical. The Millner group had almost succeeded in taking over the British government in the 1910's using money from its founder Cecil Rhodes vast estate, with a view to using the British Empire as a vehicle for their own private enrichment. At one point they had 5 members in the cabinet. Orwell understood their plans but was probably unaware that after Word War One they abandoned the British Empire as their vehicle of choice and 'sold out' to a like minded group of Americans who had recently succeeded in carrying out the silent private takeover of the US dollar and by extension the US federal government. The deal was brokered in the back rooms of the Versaille conference by a Colonel House who was Woodrow Wilson's equivalent of Carl Rove or Peter Mandleson only scarier. The same US group part funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power (George Bush's uncle was the bag man) and tried unsuccessfully to assassinate FDR. He sought to cripple them financially by making them pay for a large proportion of the Marshall plan to repair Europe after the Second World War. They turned the tables after FDR's death by employing Jean Monnet, a French spy and former bureaucrat who designed the EU as a synthesis of faschism and communism, to use embezzled money from the Marshal plan to fund the setting up of the EU, the Anglo American Bilderberg group to disseminate their policy agenda and later groups like the Pinnay Circle to neutralize the power of the RC church in Europe and hijack various national security agencies especially the French equivalent of MI6. (DGCF?) Today the inner core of this group has sufficient power to get laws they have written passed without scrutiny in the USA, Australia, UK, almost all the countries of Europe and maybe a dozen other countries scattered around the world within a few weeks of one another as they demonstrated with the 'Civil Contingencies Act' The wealth they control is estimated to be equivalent to about 50% of all valued assets in existence and they have no accountability for their actions. Is this the plot of a really bad novel or in fact the true history of the 20th century? I'll let you do the research and decide for yourself. :)

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I agree. If the user is going to enter the query in textual expression form they probably don't need it represented in another form by the GUI. The graphical builder can close/grey out at that point. The good thing about the dual approach is discoverability. The user can begin constructing a query with the slow but simple GUI, see how the textual Boolean expression works with &&, ||, ! and the various functions and then cut to exactly what they want by typing it in. Most users will initially ignore the code string being built up for them but will absorb subconsciously and quite effortlessly what &&, || and ! mean. When they later see a Boolean expression they'll understand what it means and they probably won't even know how. It will just be obvious. :)

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

You linky is broky. Needs an l http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/ASP/Grid/filter_editor.xml[^] That's not a terrible UI but it lacks the editable query string I mentioned and it doesn't promote query or sub query reuse.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I've not seen one that does this but there are 2 things I would certainly do. Break down the expression building so that at any time the user is building a single operator condition A AND B and then B OR C. Allow them to use the conditions they've already created as the A or B in subsequent conditions. This does two things: It limits the otherwise unlimited potential UI complexity and it makes the user think in a way that means confusion of A AND (B OR C) with ( A AND B ) OR C is unlikely. At all stages as the expression is being built show the user the query text. The slightly intelligent ones will soon spot how it works. Allow them to bypass much of the UI by simply entering a query directly, not by overwriting the displayed partial one but in another parallel edit control. This is where validation becomes a major issue but it can be done. Only if the directly entered query passes validation should they be given the option to use it to replace the built query. When I went to university it was still assumed that GUIs could not be used to create SQL queries as SQL was too complex. We laughed at the lectures who sagely told us this. Now it's often assumed that users are incapable of learning to use a simple query language and will have heart failure if they are shown anything so code-like. They must use a GUI that hides all the details from them and teaches them nothing. Revolution, counter revolution but nothing actually gets improved, what are we French? :doh:

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that I'm afraid to get a 'correct' answer. Are we talking England, Scotland, Wales or Ulster. The north, south, east or west of England, Yorkshire north or south, Somerset or Kent, this village or that one and is the name a misspelled French name, a misspelled, mispronounced Irish Gaelic word like mine or so old that it predates the Normans and derives its pronunciation from Old English. This will be the case if it's in the doomsday book. You see 'it's spelled, "Raymond Luxury Yacht," but it's pronounced, "Throat Warbler Mangrove".'

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

In general it works fine and I have to say my test runs alright once it has paused for 40 seconds to load the 144MB Dll. I think the issue is building a Dll that includes static libraries which has generally been considered evil with MinGW in the past. I've even seen statements claiming it can't be done which is silly. I can't complain too much though I am pushing the boat out a bit far, not only building a Dll with static libraries linked in but using -nostdlib, my own replacement for libsupc++ and still linking to the MinGW libgcc for the rest of the dependencies. I had to write my own spec file to make it do that and I'm not surprised if it has a bit of a strop, hardly a 'normal' test case. :) All this craziness is mainly to provide a stepping stone between Windows and Linux in terms of development. I start with the code working on 32bit Windows and then change one thing at a time, Compiler to 32bit MinGW-GCC. OK, Build for x64 under VS2012 (that's still not quite working) and then having got both 64bit and GCC support I make the jump to 64bit Linux GCC. It's worked a treat and reduced what I thought would be 3 months work to 3 weeks.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

Thanks, I know about Ruben and others working hard on MinGW64. The MinGW I'm using is the one that comes with the latest CodeBlocks, 12.11. It has the MinGW64 CRT but uses T Dragon's GCC build. I think the compiler is OK but the MinGW linker has frankly always been dodgy. I don't know why it should be so hard to get a PE linker to work? LLVM/Clang's PE linker is also broken and even Microsoft's VC linker has always been flaky. Fortunately and completely out of character Intel who normally can't write software to save their lives seem to have got it right. The ICL linker xilink is OK.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

More Live streaming spam I'm afraid. Only my one report so far 01:58 BST All gone now :)

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

I wouldn't want to stress the compiler any further having to parse over the commentary. It takes 20 minutes to build on a quad core i7 spitting fire at nearly 3GHz as it is. Though switching from 32bit MinGW-GCC 4.7.1 to the 64bit Intel ICC 11.1 Compiler took the runtime from 144MB down to less then 2MB the build times are about the same. :wtf:

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

What? Are you serious? Do you know how much extra work that would be? :laugh: At the moment printf works on Windows but is stubbed on Linux. I have the necessary code for the formatting and IO but I need to review it for commonality with the Windows code and work out exactly where to put the formatter especially if it can be common. I'll come back to it in a few weeks and get printf to work. Then there will be "Hello World!".

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)

Thank you. I'll be taking the weekend off before the new job begins Monday.

"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)