Amazon are offering a year’s free Windows Server hosting on their EC2 cloud service. If you use the Cardbox Server on Windows, this could be an interesting thing to try as an experiment!
Free Windows hosting on Amazon EC2
18 January 2012Cardbox News for January 2012
18 January 2012Happy New Year!
In 2012 we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the very first Cardbox, which was launched (for 8-bit computers running CP/M) in February 1982. It is a testament to the loyalty of our users and the solidity of the product that there are people using Cardbox for Windows today who first came across Cardbox in the 1980s.
We will be celebrating in two ways.
First, with immediate effect, the Home Edition of Cardbox 3.0 is now a free download, with its manual available in PDF format as well as a printed book. Our ambition has always be that everybody should know and use Cardbox, and we don’t want its price to stand in the way. If you aren’t familiar with what the Home Edition offers, please visit http://www.cardbox.com/downloading/home.htm now, and have a look. Each one of you knows someone who needs Cardbox. Tell them today.
Second, we will be working this year on making Cardbox available through the Cloud, so that it is accessible from any Internet-connected computer. Our client-server architecture makes this easy to do in principle, and the Cardbox Server is our most bug-free product since the original 1982 Cardbox, so we have a good foundation for what we plan to do. By the end of the year, our aim is that every Cardbox user should be able to have databases in the Cloud, accessible, secure, and automatically backed up, and to share them with anyone they want, live, and with updates immediately visible: friends, family members, or business colleagues. Much of this can already be done today, by renting a server in the Cloud and putting the Cardbox Server on it: our challenge is to remove all the layers of bureaucracy and administration from this procedure so that it becomes simple, transparent, cheap, and in many cases free.
None of this makes the Cardbox Server obsolete. In any corporate context where the resources are available, systems administrators will value the security and efficiency of having everything under their direct control. Our job now is to made the same benefits available to everybody else – technical or non-technical, corporate or non-corporate.
We’ll be making further announcements as the year progresses. If you want to keep track of things in more detail, you may wish to subscribe to our blog. If you want to discuss anything in this announcement, please email us at support@cardbox.com.
Best wishes for 2012!
Martin Kochanski and the Cardbox team.
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Build 4299: End of Windows 9x support
16 January 2012Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has been removed from Build 4299 onwards, and the installer will refuse to install Cardbox on these systems.
Build 4299: change to Amazon S3 backup format
16 January 2012When a database is backed up automatically to Amazon S3, it is stored as a number of S3 objects. The rules for constructing the object names associated with a given database have changed slightly: they are documented here. Existing backups are unaffected.
Keeping a cloud server secure: Rackspace
9 January 2012If you are serious about running a server in the cloud then you need to be serious about security. This is just the same as for any server, of course; but cloud servers typically come in a ‘bare bones’ configuration in which everything, including security, is your own responsibility.
Keeping a cloud server synchronized: Rackspace
6 January 2012For various purposes (such as the accurate labelling of backup files) it is a good idea if the time on the server is correct. Here is how to set up a server so that it keeps track of the time from an authoritative source on the Internet.
Setting up a Cardbox Server in the cloud: Rackspace
6 January 2012Rackspace offers Cloud Servers, which are virtual servers of various sizes. The smallest server of all costs 1p an hour, which is less than £7.50 per month.
As an experiment, we took an existing Linux-based Cardbox Server and tried moving it onto a Rackspace Cloud Server.
Build 4298: correction of Find bug
24 November 2011When you use Edit > Find or Edit > Replace, you can represent a line break by typing “\n” and a tab character by typing “\t”. If you want to enter a real backslash, you have to type “\\”.
A single backslash with nothing after it – just “\” – means nothing at all. Previous builds of Cardbox tried to interpret a single backslash as something and would crash as a result. This bug has now been corrected. Cardbox no longer crashes.
Remember: if you want to search for “\”, type “\\”.
Build 4298: correction of pick list bugs
24 November 2011Pick lists are a feature of validation and thus are not available to Home Edition users.
There are two specialised features of pick lists. One is that a value with an underline in it (eg. “pick_list”) is displayed in the list without the underline (“pick list”) but is entered into the field with the underline (“pick_list”). A bug introduced in Build 4297 caused the underline to be omitted in certain circumstances. This bug has now been corrected.
The second specialised feature of pick lists is that they can contain both a code and a longer explanation of that code, much like drop-down lists. For instance, “SE=Systems_Engineer”. In this case, “Systems Engineer” is displayed when you call up the pick list with a right-click, but “SE” is what is actually entered into the field if you select this particular entry. Pick lists can appear in two forms, either as a menu that pops up when you right-click in a field or as a scrolling list that appears when you select “Pick…” from that menu. The menu typically has only a few entries, while the scrolling list has them all. An old bug – as old as Cardbox itself – meant that a menu item containing “=” did nothing when you clicked on it. This bug has never been reported to us. The reason that nobody has ever reported this bug is presumably that the sophisticated users who use “=” also tend to have long lists of options and therefore never use the menu, only the scrolling list. In any case, this bug has also been corrected.
When an image field is unexpectedly read-only
18 February 2010From time to time the following thing happens to people:
- They add an image field to an existing database.
- They try to add an image to the database.
- Cardbox reports that the image field is read-only.
Understandably, this is rather puzzling. It only happens with databases that were created with older versions of Cardbox. The quick cure is to rebuild the database with Tools > Management > Rebuild > Database. This Knowledge Base page gives a detailed explanation.
