Welcome to FORUM Information Systems. Repository for shared Wisescript and utilities written in Wisescript by Doug Glenn and others who desire to share their code. Downloads do not require membership, however for your safety uploads do require you to register in order to upload.

Don't be shy, clean up that wisescript code and donate it for everyone else to use. Nothing is too big or small.

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I have begun sponsorship of the South Eastern Zero Energy Home Project in addition to volunteer administration of Sterling Recreational Center's computer lab.  These projects are to keep broaden my experience in varied environments utilitizing open source software stacks.

Feel free to drop by the project (link on left) and see where we are.  It has only begun so there is not a plethora of items to view.  That will change over the next couple years as the project builds to fruition, then completion by 2012. 

Additionally I will be working on a full home environmental monitoring system to complement this project to provide real time and historical data on the performance of the ZEH POC design.  It will incorporate a small footprint Linux computer, and use Python for data collection and automatic control of the environment in the ZEH design.

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Greetings all.  I have updated the code on the site to the latest revision.  Please let me know if you encounter any issues.  You can contact me using the menu choice on the left.

School is going quite well.  I will be taking honors courses next semester, but honestly it is only for the advantage of being in smaller classes and being among some really bright young people.  It will motivate me to try even harder.  As it is, I am trying to get through this as fast as possible.  As much fun as learning is, and being back at school, I miss working and interacting with my peers.  Yet the more I can work on school and get it done, the quicker I will be done. 

Sad in a way that despite making good grades the only person who it counts for is my wife and myself.  Not a single employer moving forward will actually care   So those of you who are students now, do the honors thing only because you want to or because it means more money on the scholarship.  Otherwise don't go and burn yourself out because no employer is going to be asking what type of grades you made.  All they want to know is if you graduated.  Honest.  Just take care of your self and don't burn it out.

Have fun!  Again, contact me if you have questions or need any assistance at the mail address given.

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I am going on sabbatical, and not taking any new contracts until I have finished obtaining a degree in Infomatics from USC, then completing a Masters in Business from Clemson or USC (University of South Carolina). With the proliferation of younger people coming in the IT profession and outsourcing it has been driving down salaries and requiring higher education levels in order to advance.

Since I have a good 20 years or so until retirement and my last child has left the house it is a good opportunity to take some time off, take a breather and return back to the academic environment. Although my skills are sharp for packaging and desktop deployment technologies, it is not one that is in great demand locally. In fact there is no local demand at my pay scale and it has kept me on the road contracting for several years. I would like to be able to work locally and therefor I need to obtain the academic credentials that local businesses will be looking for and need. Today people insist on a degree over experience and my lack of a formal degree has turned into too great of impediment for me to sustain my earning levels as I move from job to job. It's also going to give me time to focus on my weak areas and broaden my skills beyond mere technical expertise.

Last of all, the opportunity exists and I am taking full advantage of it. Since I will not be spending my evenings "chasing skirts" or boozing it up, I am able to take more than a full load and keep my grades up so I can finish my pursuit of these degrees in about three years time frame. Just about the time my wife expects her job to be outsourced and need me to return to the work force. Then we both can look geographically at where we want to live and where we would want to work that would provide us with the best opportunity for personal and professional satisfaction.

I will still be available to answer questions and provide support for my existing utilities and I still intend on updating my existing programs for Vista as announced earlier this year. In fact now I will not only have more time to devote to it, but will also take some formal training in programming. This should ultimately provide a better port of some of the utilities in their conversion from Wisescript to C#, C or Python.

I have enjoyed my interaction with everyone through this site and will continue to write write papers on packaging and other technologies as time permits for those of you who have an interest.

Thank you for stopping by and keep in touch!
Doug

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The Wisescript bug we reported in this post is finally going to be addressed. After talking to Annette K at Wise who mailed Mike Grueber on the issue Mike told her it would be fixed in the next release. This particular bug has kept my customer from moving to Wise 7 due to multiple legacy scripts that utilize the very functionality that was broken.

Today was also a clean up day for the web site. It has been upgraded to a newer version that should help eliminate some of the spambot entries that had caused us to close down the forums and comments. We also cleared out several thousand entries that had accumulated slowing down the site response.

With the release of Vista, we have not been able to get it up and running on a virtual machine yet so we have not begun testing the Hotfix Installer utility. We anticpate having to rewrite it in C# in order to optimize it for Vista. This may take several months. Not because it is overly complex, simply because we are so busy with our primary customer we don't have much time to work on things not related directly to their account. We thought momentarily about charging for this version because we had never anticipated the use or amount of support we would find ourselves giving on free code. Although the downloads from this site are not that high they have exceeded 20,000 at the Novell site where it was posted first. From the number of postcards recieved we have about 7,000 installations worldwide ranging from small companies to the DOE, Army and Air Force here in the USA along with hundreds of EDU sites. Shocking really since we never anticipated such use. Nonetheless we are not going to begin charging for it. It would make us a minor one trick shop and we don't want to be caught up having to support it full time. There are far too many other interesting projects happening to interest us. Money after all is nice, but it only goes so far.

We should be able to begin finding more time to go back to adding more links. The site has been somewhat dormant due to the work load and the fact it was never meant to be active in the sense there would be a new post or new something each day. It is merely a respository for code we wanted to share with others and so it remains in that basic role.

We will be adding a generic visual posting verifier sometime soon so comments and requests for support can be posted again. You can still use the contact information posted on the left main menu to contact us. It is still the prefered method for reaching us.

Have a great 2007 and we look forward to sharing more code this spring.

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Recently I noticed in my catch all account that a large number of bounces appearing as some bright individual has apparently chosen to use foruminfosystems.com as their return address.

I do not send out spam, or unsolicited mail to anyone, members included even though I have the option to send out a newsletter. I don't like unsolicited mail and I refuse to subject my members to it.

FYI

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As I find myself outside the office more and more it has become important to have access to the more useful sites I frequent for information. Not everything revolves around application packaging because sometimes you are called in to fix something that someone made the assumption was done by your package. So you have to have learned to fix a wide range of issues.

Despite a wide range of experience I don't have the best memory in the world. I can't remember my wifes birthday or our anniversary at times but I can remember the memory map of a computer. Silly but true. There is a limit to how much I can remember at any given time and the next best thing is knowing how to research a problem and find the answer even when you know little or nothing of the problem to begin with.

The links I am posting under Troubleshooting and Repair are handy sites with a plethora of information. Some links will point to a specific page while others point to the home location of the site. I will continue to be adding to these sites over time as I pull the information from my bookmarks and post them here to share. Thanks to Googles Browser sync I now can sync up my bookmarks with any new contract site and it makes me more productive right away. And it is easier than carrying around my bookmarks on a memory stick which is something else that can be forgotten.

I hope that you will find them as satisfying as I have for answers for the problems we see daily.

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I have officially incorporated in Delaware this week. This step is in an effort to make much of what I do tax deductable. Keeping up two residences in two states is an effort and without a means to validly deduct those expenses it makes it more expensive as an individual.

My present contract expires on the 29th of this month (Sept) and at that time I will be coming a full fledged independant with all the risks that entails. With luck though, I may be contracting two Fortune 100 companies to do all their packaging as they continue to outsource much of their work. Both are within a days drive which is good because part of packaging is determining what environment the application will be deployed in and in part to determine what is expected. You cannot do this without some face to face meetings and learning what your customer expectations are and managing those expectations.

I will continue to be posting information and advice on packaging since there is still a dearth of this information available to new people and to existing people doing the work. I hope you as I, will continue to learn moving forward. Those that think they know everything are doomed to irrelevance in time since nothing in IS is static and packaging is included. It is becoming more and more important with both Windows and Linux systems having their own versions of DLL "Hell" although the Linux proponents may not wish to admit it, it is an achilles heel of Linux with so many application management systems in use from Apt, RPM and such.

Regards,
Doug Glenn
Chief Cook and Bottlewasher,
FORUM Information Systems, LLC