On January 4 our service provider had a power outage at the data center where ClarionMag is hosted. We were down for several hours - our alternate server was not available as we're changing backup server hosts.

My apologies for the interruption in service. We hope to have the backup server reconfigured soon.

I've just published a review of Thin@, the smart client solution for Clarion that created quite a buzz at the Denver DevCon. Among other things Thin@ offers a Java client (in beta) that lets you run your Clarion apps remotely on any platform that supports Java (e.g. Mac, Linux).

The smart client space is heating up. ClarioNet's Ivan Mintoff is the featured speaker for the Dec 3, 2010 ClarionLive webinar, and will be presenting something to do with Android...

The 2010 Polish Clarion User Group meeting (read the English translation) was held on November 19-21, the first time for this gathering in a number of years. The meeting was held near Warsaw, at the Hotel Groman in the Sękocin Forest.

Clarion Magazine was one of a number of third party vendors to sponsor this event. You can see additional photos here.

A draft of ClarionMag's Thin@ review has been sent to the Thin@ folks for comment. I hope to have the review up later this week. Following that, look for a NetTalk review as ClarionMag covers two of the hottest technologies in the Clarion third party market.

Check out Brahn Partidge's ClarionEdge site for some terrific C7 IDE addins. Some are specific to C7 and some are more general. Brahn is also working on packaging the C7 addins into a toolkit.

Harry Bennett of SyPort posted something interesting in the softvelocity.clarion.chat newsgroup on protecting fragile items during shipping:

What I have done in the past is to use a small processor board and a tri-axis accelerometer and basically built a data logger to record the accelerations v time to identify where the problem occurs.

This allows diagnosis of when the problem occurred.

That sounds like a lot of work, so if you need that maybe you should contact Harry. He also points out that you can buy inexpensive shock sensors you paste on the packaging itself and which will change color if a specified G load is exceeded.

Last week the SV news server was down for a time, and when it came back up the URL for the news server web login page no longer worked. Didier Le Duc (and a few others) pointed out that the default port (80) no longer works - that URL takes you to the PTSS login. You need to add :8132 to the end of the url http://discuss.softvelocity.com to specify the port number.

I suppose I could have posted the full URL but I don't want to give the bots of the world any free opportunities.

*** UPDATE ***

To use the secure version of the page you'll need to (of course) specify the https:// protocol and use the port 8133 instead of 8132. And you'll have to add a security exception for the certificate, which as far as I know is a safe thing to do but I accept no responsibility for the consequences!

Rohan asked in the newsgroup:

Just wondering if anyone has taken the plunge and released any of their C7.2 applications into the "real" world yet?

While the responses didn't make up a huge sample size, the majority of those responding said yes, they had C7.2 (and sometimes C7.1) apps in the wild and running without any significant problems. Robert Paresi is still waiting on a few runtime fixes; I think it's safe to say he stresses the RTL more than most Clarion devs.

I've started going through my DevCon notes and photos, and I'll have several more articles in the next couple of days.

John and Arnold put on a terrific conference at a great venue. I heard a lot of positive comments from attendees, and you know it's been a good show when people start asking about next year before this year's event is over.

Stay tuned for more coverage!

I just renewed my Comodo code signing certificate via Lindersoft (thanks as always to Friedrich for his excellent service) but I did so a little carelessly - I used FireFox and I didn't do any re-reading ahead of time to make sure I was doing everything right. And so when I went to retrieve my new certificate, FireFox automatically installed it into its certificate pool. That's not helpful, as I need a physical certificate file and a physical private key file.

A quick search of the SetupBuilder newsgroup led me to a post by Friedrich and a link to a forum post by someone named bshardi. That information stepped me through the process of extracing my certificate and key using OpenSSL. I got my files, and OpenSSL got a donation from me (good on 'em for adding a donation option to their installer).