Sorry for yet another technical article but I just can’t let this one slide. One of the most frustrating error messages you’re likely to encounter if you are doing any Access development is:
can't find the form "|" referred to in a macro expression or Visual Basic code
In addition to being unhelpful to the extreme, this error is also difficult to search for on most search engines.
I encountered this error on a report. A control on the report was executing a function in its data source. This same function was being used successfully by another report. The change I made wasn’t referencing a form, and certainly not a form named with the pipe character (|).
As it turned out, the cause of the error was that the function my control was trying to execute could not be found. It was not a public function in a module as I had assumed, but a private function in the other report which was working. Quite logical really once I thought about it, but a big thumbs down to Microsoft for an error message that was not at all insightful, bordering on being completely incorrect.
The Source of Ideas
This month, on the ChristianWriters.com Blog Chain, we are discussing the question of where we get our ideas for writing, in general, and in the case of our current work in progress.
My ideas come to me all over the place. I am often thinking about stories – as I walk to work – as I make the bed – as I do jobs around the house. A lot of my “writing” is done during these times as I make up stories in my head.
My children can be a great source of ideas. One minute I’ll be playing with my daughter and she’ll point up at the ceiling and say “A shark”. Suddenly I’m envisaging a story about flying sharks who have made a deal with the dragons. In exchange for making war against the peaceful people of the land, the dragons have given the sharks wings. Next, my daughter says something about her brother and a tiger – and sure enough I’m imagining her going on a great quest to find the prince of the Tiger People to ask their assistance in defending her Kingdom from the sharks. This may become a children’s story some day – or perhaps it would be more suited to a Sierra-style adventure game.
This brings me to my current work in progress – my first novel – Hybrid Force. I’ve completed a first draft and would love to get it published. The idea for this one first began to germinate in my mind about six years ago. I’d been watching the X-Men movies, and the Smallville television series. About that time I also re-introduced myself to the 1978 Richard Donner Superman film. I was essentially re-discovering a genre as an adult, that I had loved as a child. I began to think to myself – supposing I was ever to be given the opportunity to re-imagine a classic superhero story, how would I approach it? I knew that I would treat the material as a work of serious science fiction, and try to portray it in that way. Then I started to think, why not create my own characters? I came up with a cast of several characters, and a potentially interesting origin story. I gave them some abilities beyond the human norm, with what I considered to be a reasonably unique explanation for these abilities. These characters would not be normal people who ‘aquired’ abillities, their abilities would be intrisincally tied into who they were – but they would not know themselves why they were different.
This lead to me thinking about these characters on an emotional thematic level. A lot of us tend to feel a sense that we are somehow “different” from everybody else. I know I have certainly experienced these feelings. I would try to tackle that theme through the lives of these characters whose “difference” was exaggerated by their unique abilities.
I think I started to write, but quickly reaslised I needed to get to know the characters better first. I decided to write a short story involving them as a way of “hanging out” with the characters. Sadly I have lost this story.
A few years passed. Many other writing ideas came to me. Our first child was born. I honstly don’t know what it was about this particular story but somehow it must have re-asserted itself in my subconsciousness because a few years ago I started writing chapter one. This time the story just flowed straight out of me. Now, today, I have a 60 thousand word manuscript, four potential sequels already in my mind, plus a prequel spin-off.
I really hesitate to call this novel a “super hero” story, becuase that’s not really what it is to me, and it carries with it so many connotations. That was how it started, but I prefer to think of it as a science-fiction thriller. There is a lot of work still to be done but I want to see it through.
At this point, I should share the teaser trailer I created for the book. I realise that this is probably a bit premature, but I couldn’t help myself.
It’s funny how a story can start as such a tiny seed of an idea and become something unepected. As the story progressed in my mind, I found myself discovering a few spiritual themes and lessons, making it a more ‘Christian’ book in the end than I had originally anticipated, but in a way that feels very natural to me, rather than preachy. I hope my future readers will agree.
Follow the chain
- Sheila Holllinghead – 2nd August
- Brian Jones — 2nd August
- Tracy Krauss — 4th August
- Janalyn Voigt — 5th August
- Traci Bonney — 6th August
- Linda Yezak — 9th August
- Kat Connolly — 10th August
- Chris Solaas — 12th August
- Adam Collings — 14th August
- Edward Lewis — 15th August
- Sandra King — 18th August
- Chris DePew — 21st August
- Nona King — 24th August
- Ruth Rockafield — 26th August
Also – check out Chris Solaas’ story – inspired by this blog chain. Read it here.
If you’re developing an assembly, placing it in the global assembly cache, and testing it from another application you probably want to keep making changes to the assembly, but don’t necessarily want to keep upping the version number (which means you will have to constantly change the reference in the testing application).
When dragging the assembly into c:\windows\assembly you may receive the error message
Cannot create/shadow copy ‘File Name’ when that file already exists
Even after deleting the existing file from the GAC you can still receive this error. What you need to do is go back to the good old command prompt. Click Start – Run and enter cmd.
Navigate to the directory where your assembly is stored
cd c:\windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\assemblyname\
From here, you will see a directory for each version of the assembly. Inside that directory lies the actual dll. You need to remove the dll as well as the directory.
cd 1.1.0.1etc
rm myfile.dll
cd ..
rmdir 1.1.0.1etc
I found that when I deleted the assembly from windows, it removed the file but not the directory. Removing the directory from the command prompt resolved the problem and allowed me to drag my new assembly back in again.
In all honesty, you’re better off upping the version number for every change as this is more correct (and the way the GAC is intended to work), but if you do encounter the problem, then the above is the solution.
My History with Computers
Computers seem to be a dominant thing in my life. I work with them for eight hours a day, and all my hobbies involve a computer in some way, so I thought it might be fun to look back on where I’ve come from and share a few anecdotes.
We got our first computer when I was in primary school. It was a Microbee. My school was getting rid of them and we purchased one. It was useful for writing programs in BASIC which were stored in non-volotile RAM so we could turn the machine off and not loose our program. Theoretically, it was able to save and load programs using a casette player, but we were never able to get it to work. It also had a word processor in ROM, but there was no way to save your document so that wasn’t much use. Despite it sounding like a pretty useless machine, it sparked a love of programming in me. I remember as young as grade 6 telling people with certainty that I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up.
When I was in high school, we progressed to an XT running MS Dos 3. It was set up to use a utility called Automenu to launch applications so it was a while before I really understood what dos was. It came pre-installed with a word processor and a few games. Anybody remember AlleyCat? There was also a collection called Friendlyware. I remember when we bought our first game. We had no idea how to launch it. We inserted the disk in the drive. Nothing happened. We searched through Auto Menu for “Play Disk” and found the option “Format Disk.” I tried it. The screen displayed “Insert new disk and press enter.” This had to be it! We inserted our new game disk and pressed enter. The drive whirred for a while. It seemed to be working. Then nothing. It was only later that I realised we had just erased all the contents of our new game. Fortuately the shop gave us a replacement disk and we learned how to use the dos prompt.
I also learned how to launch GWBASIC. Once again I was able to write programs. I spent many many hours as a teenager programming in GWBASIC. With some help from a friend (actually he wrote most of it) I made a database application for my father, which he paid me for.
One Christmas, my parents bought me Turbo Pascal 6.0. This was my first “real” programming language, and my introduction to object-oriented programming, a concept I wouldn’t fully appreciate until later in life.
Our next computer was a 386 running Windows 3.1. A while after getting this new machine, I got a Sound Blaster 16 for my birthday, and thereby became the first people I knew to own a sound card. I progressed to Turbo Pascal for Windows and then Borland C++ during my university days.
This story becomes less interesting as it gets closer to the present day, so let me just say that I now work for a consulting engineering company as a programmer. C# is my language of choice but I have to support a lot of legacy Access stuf.
I’ve heard it said that nostalgia happens twenty years after the fact, and there seems a lot of evidence to support this. I guess that’s why I’m thinking about all this. Man! Has it really been that long?
New Look
The Collings Zone has been given a much needed facelift. Ever since the move from blogger to wordpress the look of the site has been very inconsistent. I was using the default wordpress theme for the blog, and all the non-blog pages on the site were still using the old blogger look.
The siten now has common look and feel, with only a few low-level pages still on the old template. Some of these I’ll eventually change, others such as my Star Trek and Superman fan fiction I may not bother.
Hope you like the new look.
Anyone who has had to write any Jet SQL for an Access database is probably well aquainted with frustration. The way it nests its joins is horrendous for one thing, but here’s a little trap that caught me up recently.
I was using a subquery, and attempting to ensure that it only returned one record (as required by a subquery within a select) by using the SELECT TOP 1 notation. I received the following error message:
At most one record can be returned by this subquery.
This seemed strange, as I had specifically told it to only return one record. It turns out that when Access sees two records that it considers ‘equivilent’ it will ignore the 1 that you placed after the TOP and return multiple records. There are various ways to try to overcome this. You could try to aggregate the data using GROUP BY to ensure that there is ano equivilence, but Allen Browne describes a very useful workaround to this behaviour on his Microsoft Access Tips for Serious Users. If you place the primary key of the table in the ORDER BY clause of the sub-query, then Access can determine an exact ordering, and therefore no two records will be considered equivilent. This works a treat.
Source Used
- Microsoft Access Tips for Serious Users Provided by Allen Browne, March 2007. Updated February 2009.
The Discomfort Zone
This month I’m participating in a blog chain with some wonderful people at ChristianWriters.com and today it’s my turn to write. We are discussing stepping out of our comfort zones in relation to our writing.
When I first read the subject for this chain I was a little puzzled. Could I think of something to write on such a subject? After all, what could be uncomfortable about writing? Writing is fun. Writing is my leisure activity. It’s what I do when I want to have a little ‘me time’ (not that you get much of that with two young children). Writing is that creative flow that pours out of a person because they simply can’t not write. It’s in the blood.
But this raises the important question – is there more to it than that? What happens when writing moves beyond that place? Up until now, writing fiction, for me, has been a pleasure activity. It has been primarily for myself. All my life, however, I have dreamt of taking it to the next level – publication. Why is it that we have this desire to get our stories published? Is it just vanity? I don’t think so. I tend to be an introverted person who woud rather sit in the shadow than take the spotlight. I think it comes down to one simple thing: a story is meant to be shared. Otherwise it isn’t really a story is it?
Taking that first step, from writing purely for youself, to seeking publication opens up a whole world of discomfort. Firstly there is the inevitable critiquing. Seeking the opinions of others in order to improve your work. I know very well the benefit of this process. I was taught it at school and I’ve seen it in action. Just as with software testing, you need to get a fresh pair of eyes to put your writing through its paces, to look at it with an objective (and hopefully more experienced) eye. Dispite all this head knowledge however, there is always some hesitance. What if the person critiquing the work pulls everything apart and messes up the story? What if they want me to change something that I consider important? What if the result of the improvement no longer looks like my story anymore? What if the improvement to this novel messes up my plans for the fourth sequel down the track? These kinds of fears would seem quite natural. Afterall, our writing is our baby. We’ve nurtured it from an embrionic idea, to a healthy bouncing first-draft. It is extremely tempting to think that the story is finished and ready to go at this point. However, if we are ever to see our story reach its full potential, we have to allow it to finish maturing into adulthood. Even the process of finding somebody who has the necessary skills, and is willing to make the significant commitment to critique a novel-length work is a daunting thought. I hardly know where to start.
That is the first step into the discomfort zone. After that, it gets even scarier. The whole process of publication seems very daunting and mysterious. Who do you call? Do you talk to a publisher? An agent? Where do you find such people? I know that there is information to help with this kind of thing – but most of the imformation seems to be American in nature. Does it work the same here in Australia? We have a much smaller publishing industry, and almost nothing of a Christian publishing industry. I am sure I will find the answers when I seek, but the process itself is daunting.
Beyond that, if a publishing deal is succesfully secured there comes the final step into the discomfort zone – marketing. I understand that this is becoming an increasing responsibility of an author. How could someone like me, with a full-time job, a wife and young kids possibly market a book? Would anybody even be interested?
So, the more I look into it, the more I realise there is a big scary world out there. The road to publishing success looks like a difficult one, and it seems that writing the book may in fact be the easy bit. I am currently standing on the threshold of this big step. I have written a first-draft of a novel and want to take it further. This is the path I must travel if I want to take this dream seriously. So will it be worth it? Well, if something that I write can touch someone, entertain them, inspire them, or make them think, then yes, it will all be worth it.
Finally, I’d like to show from my own experience that stepping into this discomfort zone can bring unexpected benefits to our writing. About ten years ago, I was participating in a course at my church, to determine out abilities and spiritual gifts. It came up that I had a gift for writing and a desire to share spiritual truths through writing. The pastor running the course suggested to me that I should try my hand at writing devotional articles. My first thought was ‘that isn’t my genre. I write fiction, and mostly science fiction’. However, I took up his challenge and discovered a gift and passion that I hadn’t known existed. My blogging has stemmed out of that encouragement. So, let us never be afraid to leave our comfort zones as writers. There is more out there than we realise.
The journey begins…
Follow the chain…
- Ruth Rockafield — 1st July
- Nina Rose — 4th July
- Edward Lewis — 6th July
- Tracy Kraus — 7th July
- Kat Connolly — 8th July
- Linda Yezak — 9th July
- Lynn Mosher — 10th July
- Nona King — 11th July
- Victor Travison — 14th July
- Janalyn Voigt — 15th July
- Sheila Hollinghead — 16th July
- Adam Collings — 17th July <– You are here
- Liberty Speidel — 19th July
- Traci Bonney — 20th July
- Chris DePew — 25th July
- Sandra King — 26th July
- Chris Solaas — 27th July
- Suzanne Hartmann — 28th July
What I learned from The Circle
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Circle’ series by Ted Dekker. If you haven’t come across it you must check it out. This four-part series combines a modern-day thriller with an epic fantasy, and a bit of science-fiction thrown in for good measure. This is all wrapped around a powerful spiritual metaphor.
In addition to being a great story with interesting characters, The Circle really made me think. Here are some of the things that I learned from reading.
Book 1 ‘Black’ gave me a new perspective on the absolute horror of sin, and the extent to which it has poisoned this world, from what God originally planned.
Book 2 ‘Red’ challenged me to ask myself the question, “If I had been alive when Jesus walked the earth, would I have been his disciple, or would I have condemned Him as a heratic?”
Book 3 ‘White’ reminded me just how much God loves those that we tend to think are far from Him, and how He is calling them to Himself. It also spoke powerfully about Jesus’ command to ‘love your enemies’.
Book 0 ‘Green’ continued the theme from book 3, and highlighted the fact that our struggle is not against flesh and blood.
As for the story, I still have many un-answered questions, but not to fear because there is still the Paradise spin-offs, and The Lost books.
Happy reading!
Adam.
Send in the Diplomats
It was a triumphant scene. The great compaign was over. The tribes of Israel were settled in their new homeland. The trbes of Reuban, Gad and Manasseh had chosen lands on the eastern side of the Jordan River, but they had faithfully fought side by side with the other tribes until all had rest. Now they were returning home with the blessing of the nation’s leader: Joshua.
“When they came to Geliloth near the Jordan in the land of Canaan, the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh built an imposing altar there by the Jordan. And when the Israelites heard that they had built the altar on the border of Canaan at Geliloth near the Jordan on the Israelite side, the whole assembly of Israel gathered at Shiloh to go to war against them.” Joshua 22:10-12
How quickly things turn. The western tribes were angy because they thought the eastern tribes were setting up a rival altar to the official one at Shiloh. They thought their neighbours were abandoning God to create their own new belief. They were all set to discipline the eastern tribes.
Fortunately, before they started fighing they sent Phinehas son of Eleazar, the priest, to go and try to sort things out. Given the chance to speak, the eastern tribes explained that this alter they had constructed would not be used for sacrifices, it was a monument to show all in the future that they too followed the Lord and were a part of his inheritance. Phinehas was pleased with this explanation and there was no war.
It can be so easy to jump to conclusions when we are angry. We often “go to war” without first sending in the diplomats to assess the situation and get a clearer picture. May that’s why James, who knew Jesus as Lord, saviour and brother, wrote:
“Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” James 1:19
Just imangine how more peaceful out homes, workplaces, nations, and even churches, could be if we followed this advice.
The Ameteur Approach
If you’re an ameteur writer like me then you may find yourself sometimes feeling a little envious of the professionals out there. Those are the people who get to write stories all day as a career, and even get paid for it. Don’t get me wrong, I would never call their job easy, and I know there is a lot more to it than just ‘the fun bits’. There is research, editting, and all of the business aspects of publishing and marketing a novel. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to put aside my stable income from software development and just be a novelist full time. (Then I look at the mortgage and the power bill, and thank God that I have a regular predictable income.)
For better or worse, we ameteurs have chosen to make writing a hobby rather than a career. It makes it harder to find time to write, and even if we do succeed in getting a book both written and published, we will never keep up with out output of stories that a professional would. Could it be however, that there are advantages to the ameteur approach? For a start ameteur writing is a great way to practice, and develop a talent.
Several months ago, novelist and blogger K.M. Weiland wrote about the importance of daydreaming. In her article she pointed out that it can be sometimes difficult for a busy writer to make the time for this essential creative activity. As I listened to the podcast of this article I began to realise that my ameteur approach gave me a little advantage in this area.
Between work, home and kids, I don’t often find much time for writing. I’m lucky if I can get a good solid “story date” once a month. Because of this, I tend to do a lot of thinking about my stories in between writing sessions. I do a lot of creative day-dreaming. It’s what makes me feel like I’m still a writer, even when I’m not doing much writing. I find the best time for this is when I am walking to and from work. I always park my car a good fifteen minutes walk from the office. This is because I’ve found a free carpark in an adjoining suburb, and I flat-out refuse to pay money just to park my car. As an added benefit, I get my 30 minutes of excercise each day. Much of my novel has been sorted out in my head during this walk. In fact, over the last year I have mentally ‘written’ several sequels to my novel walking to and from work. My most creative moments seem to come out of this type of activity. Even as a teenager I would make up stories while going for walks with my family, to type up later.
There are many advantages to being an ameteur writer, this is just one of them. We write simply because we love it. If some day a publisher sees enough promise in our work to give it a go, then that is an awesome bonus.
I seem to have writing on my mind a lot lately, and this has certainly come out in my blogging (it is in fact one of the reasons I have resumed blogging regularly.) This will all culminate on the 17th of July when I take part in a blog chain with some other great people from ChristianWriters.com.
