Welcome to Abnormalized

J Hall

Technology, Software Development, and Whatever comes to mind.

  • Simple Solution to a Complex Problem

    J Hall

    So came across a little problem in FIleMaker today. I had a list of values that I was processing in a loop. It turnes out, I needed to add another criteria to process the the list, this would make the list longer because it would need to have a list based on two fields instead of a list of one.

    You can’t use Distinct() in SQL with Multiple fields, so I had to figure out a way to solve this without using another While inside the current While.

    So this is the ExecuteSQL I was starting with.

    E.g: ExecuteSQL ( “SELECT DISTINCT(checkNumber) FROM MRIJournalEntries WHERE status = 1”; “”; “” ))

    So, to fix it and get a list of values this is what I came up with:

    UniqueValues ( ExecuteSQL ( “SELECT checkNumber,idDepartment FROM MRIJournalEntries WHERE status = 1”; “”; “” ))


    In the use case I’m working on, I have to create multiple records based on the check number AND the department in my while loop. This allows me to create a list I can process and because the “,” is considered a word separator, using getValue(leftWords(posts; 1); I + 1) would give me the check number and rightWords would give me the department. Thus saving the need to go through and put an additional while loop inside another while loop

  • Claris FileMaker Server Administator Associate

    J Hall

    Yesterday I passed the test for the Claris FileMaker Server Administator Associate. This is second of five I’ll be trying to complete before the end of the year.

  • Roll for Concentration

    J Hall

    A Friend of mine sent me this image today and I couldn’t help but completely identify with it. I told her, yeah, would be great if it worked, but even if it did, with ADHD we would have to roll every minute to decided if we could concentrate. I have struggled with ADHD all my life. It was diagnosed incorrectly as an adult in my late 20s early 30s as Bipolar disorder. And of course, being GenX means that ADHD was for “kids.” This meant that a lot of us didn’t get properly diagnosed until we were in our late 30s or early 40s.

    The other thing that was huge for me was anti-anxiety medication. This brought me a lot of peace and when it was coupled with Vyvanse and Adderall, the ability to respond to events rather than react to them. Now with the Vyvanse and Adderall shortages, it’s been a struggle for the last few months to stay focused on things.

    For example, this post has taken me almost 30 minutes to write to get to this point, simply because I’m on the computer and have 10 other things going on. And I’m about to start 2 hours of meetings in a row and so if this gets finished today, I would be surprised. Generally speaking, finding words is not an issue. But when things aren’t working, it’s a serious struggle.

    In the end, getting a balance, especially as you get older is difficult and can really impact productivity. I really want to be able to post something on my blag at least once a day. The question is… will he remember?

  • What Abmoralized Means

    J Hall

    I have had an interesting and what I would consider an atypical life. From being born in Germany and living on military bases until I was about 10, to living in a foster care home supervised by my parents, to my struggles with ADHD and depression. To say I think outside the box would be an understatement.

    At one point I think I calculated that I moved 29 times before I graduated from high school. My dad taught me out to drive when I was 10, my mom taught me how to sew when she owned a fabric shop. I had my driver’s license at 14. Took my first college class between my sophomore and junior years in high school. Enlisted in the Navy and was injured in basic training. I’ve worked for Gateway 2000, Sprint, IBM, and taught computer network engineering for 2 years at a technical college. All before I turned 30.

    See, nothing really normal about any of that. This blog is going to focus on many things. Some of it personal and a lot of it technical. My dad purchased me a Celeco ADAM when I was 12. I was up all night learning BASIC and CP/M while dialing in to every BBS I could find in Wichita. I loved computers. A very good friend of mine said a long time ago that if my dad had bought me a Commadore 64, my whole life would have been different. I think there is a lot of truth to this.

    My main goal for the time being is to get into the habit of just posting SOMETHING regularly. Most of it will be about FileMaker, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and whatever else I get myself into. I’m planning on going back to school next year and completing my bachelors and hopefully my masters. These are two goals I’ve had for a long time. I probably don’t need them at this stage of my career, but I’m going to work towards them anyway.

  • FileMaker and Monkeybread Plugin

    J Hall

    At my place of employment we have the MBS Plugin installed across all the clients and servers. I have have been doing a bit of testing on how much faster using the plugin than “standard filemaker scripts” to populate a table with data.

    I have one script which has an if statement setup to test if the MBS plugin is installed and configured. There is an Entities list gives us a JSON Object with 64 elements that we need to push into filemaker as records. I did it in 2 ways. One is the standard FileMaker way in a script, took 7 minutes 53 seconds to create the 64 records. The second, MBS plugin to do it in a calculation. It calculated it as less than a second. I need to udpate the script to set the timer up for milliseconds and run it again.

    Part of this is that the FM.InsertOrUpdate function doesn’t have to change layouts, peform a find, and then update or create the record. I always knew it was faster than doing it all in a script, but this is a dramatic difference. This is certainly a way that you can speed up a system that has performance issues.

  • App Developer for Claris FileMaker Pro Assocate

    J Hall

    Tonight I became a Certified Assocaite App Developer for Claris FileMaker Pro. This is something I have been working on for a long time. This is the first of 5 certifications for Claris FileMaker. I will be working on the others in the next while. I hope to have all 5 completed by the end of the month.

  • Welcome to Abnormalized

    J Hall

    This is my new blog where I will be sharing things about tech, mental health, FileMaker, and well, whatever comes to mind really. Also: probably some dog stuff. Hope you enjoy!