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<title>PoliceBlog Feed</title><link>http://www.policepro.com/index.html</link><description>PoliceBlog</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2006 Steamboat Data Systems&#x2c; Inc.</dc:rights><dc:date>2012-04-05T16:45:43-04:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:50:09 -0400</lastBuildDate><item><title>PolicePro 12</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2012-04-05T16:45:43-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/79539fe7cbbf07d8a761da966359cee5-77.html#unique-entry-id-77</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/79539fe7cbbf07d8a761da966359cee5-77.html#unique-entry-id-77</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Filemaker, Inc. has released Filemaker version 12 effective April 3, 2012, along with Filemaker Server 12 and Filemaker Go 12 for iPhones and iPads.   This is a major new release, involving a change in the database format that opens the door to a whole new era of possibilities.


PolicePro 12 and PolicePro2Go 12 are released and ready to go as well.   Any new PolicePro installs as of April 2012 will be version 12 based to take advantage of database speed improvements particularly, as well as a host of other new or improved features.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title></title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2011-10-06T07:59:50-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/9b13310b5263376d8749276c189a7160-76.html#unique-entry-id-76</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/9b13310b5263376d8749276c189a7160-76.html#unique-entry-id-76</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[What an awful day.   God bless you, Steve.   You changed the course of my life.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PP2G Testing Is Underway</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-07-27T16:40:53-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/1aad23c73d124a6b08fb55dfbe5ddc60-75.html#unique-entry-id-75</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/1aad23c73d124a6b08fb55dfbe5ddc60-75.html#unique-entry-id-75</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We're located in the Saratoga County area of upstate New York, a beautiful place if there ever was one.   But for testing purposes on PolicePro2Go, we wanted to put our data files on a server a good distance away, certainly a lot farther than any normal police usage would ever occur.


So Ohio, then. 474 miles off to our west, we've got a test suite of PolicePro files running 24x7 on a high quality server with a solid internet connection, and we're whaling away on it as much as we can.


So far the speed of things over a wireless connection is pretty good!   3G data speed is a little soft on the program loading - there's a lot of things that go on as far as setting user identity, setting preferences, etc... and that's what we're focusing on now.


The thing is functional right out of the barrel, but we're thinking in a few days we should be able to see some pretty good improvements.


So far, everyone we've shown it to has reacted really well.   Everyone wants it, and a couple of places have ordered it up already for when it's ready to go.   Encouraging!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PolicePro2Go</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-07-25T14:00:07-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aec858a67d530a950e4464e29826ace7-74.html#unique-entry-id-74</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aec858a67d530a950e4464e29826ace7-74.html#unique-entry-id-74</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Filemaker has hit it right out of the park with the July 22 release of Filemaker Go, the new mobile client for Apple's iPhone and iPad.   Now that the secret is out, we can start talking about the next generation of PolicePro, which we've cleverly named PolicePro2Go. 

...We have been working diligently on PolicePro2Go for the iPad for some time now as well.


...A uniform police officer has enough to carry around without giving him or her an iPad and expecting them to bring it back in one piece after a busy shift.   Just from an officer safety standpoint, it's a bad idea... patrol work can get physical unexpectedly, and an officer cannot be worrying about the six hundred dollar piece of equipment in his or her hand.


...The sweet spot, as we see it, is the Chief at the Town Board or City Council meeting, a department representative at a community group meeting or a monthly Domestic Violence Panel review, a sex offender panel meeting, or the monthly regional or area Chiefs of Police meeting.   Any group setting where you may be called on to explain, summarize or otherwise report on what is going on in the jurisdiction.


...The elegance and ease of use of these things has been well documented, but if you've never spent an hour or two with one, you just can't imagine how good and game changing they are.   Put a PolicePro2Go suite on the thing and it becomes the Number One piece of equipment you have, bar none.


With PolicePro2Go and a wireless equipped iPad, you've got your department's full PolicePro data instantly available anyplace you can find a wireless network. 

...WIth a 3G equipped iPad, you can check on the status of a burglary from the previous evening from a bass boat in the middle of Upper Saranac Lake. 

...While technically PolicePro2Go will run every bit as well on the iPhone, the small screen just doesn't work well with the amount of information that an average PolicePro screen needs to display. ...  All the fonts, buttons and other onscreen objects have been redesigned to work and display on the iPad as you would expect them to.


We haven't given up on the iPhone - I have a client running on my own all the time these days - but if something has to go on the back burner, this would be it.   Maybe we'll rethink it down the line, but the fact is that the iPad is such a perfect match for this technology it's kind of a waste of time to even think about anything else.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Excellent Darwinism</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-21T17:21:04-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/1903166ea14fbd1760a3064eca1772b1-73.html#unique-entry-id-73</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/1903166ea14fbd1760a3064eca1772b1-73.html#unique-entry-id-73</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[How many times have I prayed for the opportunity to see this happen?   Didn't see it, but love reading about it.   Albany Times Union, NY, 5/21/2010:


ALBANY -- A 31-year-old Crosby Street man was hospitalized Thursday night after losing control of his motorcycle while doing wheelies and slamming head first through the windshield of a parked car in West Hill, police said.


Witnesses told investigators that Karream Crenshaw, of 23 Crosby St., was riding east and doing wheelies when he lost control near 577 Third St. and swerved to the opposite side of the road and sideswiped a parked car, police said


The motorcycle then struck a second parked truck head-on, throwing Crenshaw over the handle bars and sending him face-first through the windshield, police said.


Crenshaw's helmet -- which on one side depicts the smoking barrel of a gun -- smashed through the windshield and came to rest against the car's steering wheel.   Crenshaw was treated at the scene by fire department paramedics and taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital with neck injuries that police said did not appear to be life-threatening.


Detective James Miller said Crenshaw likely will face charges.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PolicePro Travels</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2010-05-16T11:26:11-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b4934184013d1a7d4a1f136f2d61f41e-72.html#unique-entry-id-72</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b4934184013d1a7d4a1f136f2d61f41e-72.html#unique-entry-id-72</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We don't always get to say who the PolicePro clients are; we do work with specialized task forces, investigative agenices and outfits that aren't clearly branded as the So And So Police Department or Hard Knocks University Campus Safety.   We just completed one of these install trips - very successfully - to southern California.   Greg and I got to spend a week in and around the stunning Coachella Valley, the Palm Desert and Rancho Mirage area.   The people we dealt with couldn't have been better, the work was interesting and satisfying, the scenery was incredible, and the Mustang we rented was a red convertible.   How can you top that?


Mountain views down Highway 111, Rancho Mirage


Dave and Greg on top of the Mt.   San Jacinto Tramway


The cool, other worldly windfarms in the Banning Pass


The (temporary) Corporate Batmobile - I grew up driving these things, had forgotten how much fun they are!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>More Great Personal Tech Stuff </title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2009-11-14T15:50:01-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e0a416c3b6839a1436d9b8d7136d4018-70.html#unique-entry-id-70</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e0a416c3b6839a1436d9b8d7136d4018-70.html#unique-entry-id-70</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[But Amazon had the brilliant idea to put a Kindle application on the iPhone, and that's where I found and fell in love with it.


Amazon has added a PC based Kindle Reader as well that I can use through Parallels on my MacBook Pro... they say a native Mac version will be out shortly.


...Whenever I open a book on either my iPhone or my computer, the application syncs to the last point I was reading at, regardless of which device was involved.   If I spent last evening in my Windows 7 virtual machine reading Clive Cussler and I now find myself at the car dealership getting my oil changed, all I need to do is open Kindle on my iPhone, select the Cussler book if need be (if it was the last one I was reading, it will automatically load) and click the Sync button.


...My preference is Sepia, which softens the black text (which is also resizable) against a faint sepia colored background as opposed to a bright white. 

...Turning pages can either by done by dragging your finger or just tapping anywhere along the edge of the screen; right side for forward, left for back a page. 

...But the best part of the whole experience, where Amazon took a page from Apple's model, is the Kindle store on the iPhone. ...  Jump into the Kindle store on the iPhone and select just about anything either by viewing the latest releases or doing a search for title, author, whatever. 

...Today I happened across a new Joseph Wambaugh novel that will be coming out in about two weeks.   I ordered it on the spot, and on the official release date it will just appear in my Kindle library. 

...To add one more personal tech wrinkle to this whole thing: I've been looking around for awhile for a way to write stuff like this, or technical stuff for business, or whatever, on my iPhone.   This week I've been playing around with Google Wave, and it occurred to me this morning that here was exactly what I needed.   I am writing this whole thing as a new Wave to myself on my iPhone.   When I go to my computer later, I can edit or just copy this text out of that Wave and stick it wherever it needs to go: in this case, into RapidWeaver, my weblog software, and it will become a blog entry in a heartbeat.   Google is positioning Wave as a collaborative tool, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work great for collaborating with yourself! 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>We Are NOT The Police Pro Virus</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2009-09-08T14:32:21-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/6f13ff96061b8c2a89aba6ced0a7202b-69.html#unique-entry-id-69</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/6f13ff96061b8c2a89aba6ced0a7202b-69.html#unique-entry-id-69</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I had an unexpected phone call today (Tuesday, September 8) from a truly nice woman in North Carolina informing me that a virus by the name of Police Pro had taken over her computer, which is now useless.   She had called the Norton Utilities company who somehow apparently directed her to us, since (reasonably) we have a similar name - but no space between the &ldquo;Police&rdquo; and &ldquo;Pro&rdquo; words.


So some filthy, lowlife piece of crap has inflicted the world with yet another worthless virus, and this time they&rsquo;ve used a name a hell of a lot like our own.   While I was on the phone with the woman, trying to figure out what was going on here, I Googled &ldquo;Police Pro Virus&rdquo; and, sure enough, there&rsquo;s hits all over the place about this new and very virulent piece of malware/adware whatever you want to call it.


IT IS NOT US.   PolicePro has been around for some twelve years now, performing what every one of our clients will tell you is a vital function in their police departments.   Whoever the idiot is who is perpetrating this new scam, be assured that no one would rather have their hands around his throat than we would.


Apparently this occurs when a webpage that looks a hell of a lot like a real Microsoft security window appears and tells users that their computer has been infected with one of several virus names, and directs users to click a button to safely remove that virus.   As soon as you do that, you&rsquo;re apparently toast... the Police Pro virus is installed on your computer, and from what I&rsquo;ve read in the last several minutes, it can be a hell of a thing to remove.


There are various suggested solutions already on the Web, but be warned they all require some fairly technical familiarity with the operating system.   As much as I wanted to help the woman on the phone, it became obvious pretty quickly that she was going to need some onscene, knowledgeable assistance.   In her case, a nephew in the IT field is probably getting a phone call right now with the list of a few of the suggestions I read about.


So we are also victims of this outrage, in that a brand I have been building for twelve years is all of a sudden associated with all this hell.   I can&rsquo;t wait to see who this eventually turns out to be, and what we might be able to do about it... which is probably nothing, since the name, while close enough, is not actually the same as ours.


My complete sympathies to anyone who becomes a victim of this virus, but trust me: it does not come from Steamboat Data.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Step Away From The Computer</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2009-03-07T13:44:49-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b91d7eb3a4a123a4aedf73405b33a6a1-68.html#unique-entry-id-68</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b91d7eb3a4a123a4aedf73405b33a6a1-68.html#unique-entry-id-68</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Too many hours in the office, a long, cold winter... enough already!   Wednesday it&rsquo;s back to Jamaica and Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay for nine days.   See you on the other side.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PolicePro 10: Use of Force reporting</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2009-03-05T09:27:58-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/88c466b1e28b62071e8af13e05b1b4e7-67.html#unique-entry-id-67</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/88c466b1e28b62071e8af13e05b1b4e7-67.html#unique-entry-id-67</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Police officers and departments are now operating in a world where every single thing they do, individually or institutionally, is sooner or later going to be scrutinized or asked about by someone.   The more we can do to help agencies and officers document things that happen - especially controversial situations - the better it is going to be for everyone.


...Every agency with an interest in protecting itself as well as its officers either has or is getting ready to have Use of Force report requirements.   Documenting what actually happened and why is the best insurance against a future nightmare when a defendant eventually comes back with some cooked up story about injuries he sustained, the way he was treated, or whatever.


Tied to an intelligently crafted Use of Force policy, this is your best way to deal with this lousy reality. 

...PolicePro&rsquo;s new Use of Force reporting is, like everything else in the system, tied directly to the incident it stems from.   An officer can complete a Use of Force report in just a few minutes and get on with his or her day.   All the source material he or she needs for the report is right there on the PolicePro screen.   When the report is completed, a supervisor can confirm it in an instant.   Cases that need reporting can be isolated in a hot second by just running a Saved Find request or requests for incident types that generally require reports.


And like other critical areas of PolicePro, Use of Force reports themselves can be restricted as to who can access or read them.   The only difference is that this time, we leave the arrow icon that indicates the existance of the report or reports, so supervisors can in fact confirm they exist. 

...Probably, though this kind of reporting can keep an officer and a department out of trouble right from the start. 

...Click Yes, and a new Use of Force/Resistance Report pops up with the case reference information already created:


...Eleven years now and we never stop thinking about how to make PolicePro better, easier to use, and continually relevant. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PolicePro 10 Features Sneaking Out</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2009-02-23T16:20:13-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4db68c971aba94ea5e0d4c6f6c86ad74-66.html#unique-entry-id-66</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4db68c971aba94ea5e0d4c6f6c86ad74-66.html#unique-entry-id-66</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The recent release of Filemaker 10 has had us jumping to incorporate some of the new stuff into PolicePro.   One of the first visible changes is what FM calls Dynamic Reports - the ability to instantly present live, editable data in different sorted views.   We&rsquo;ve applied this to some of our lists in PolicePro, such as the general Dispatch incident list.


The default, longtime behavior of this list was an attractive and easy to read list of everything current, where related content (arrests, criminal complaints, etc) can be seen and accessed.   Very useful, very nice, but it was static.


If you look near the top right, though, we&rsquo;ve now added a row of radio buttons.   Clicking any of these - or any others we may enable, depending on what kind of data is being looked at - instantly changes the view to a sorted and summarized list, shown first by Incident Type:


The great thing here is that the data is still live, searchable and editable.   If a review indicated that an incident in the Zone/Post summary view below had been assigned to the wrong zone, changing the Zone field will instantly move the record to the proper spot in the list.


You can print any of these by clicking the Print button - the resulting job will be the same sorted and summarized list in a more paper friendly format.


You can see that anyone whose duties involve reviewing or reporting on multiple sets of information is going to love this!   Doing a quick Find for a specific officer, for example, and clicking one of the view buttons will give you an instant and easily understood summary of that officer&rsquo;s activity by date - how many calls he or she handled, for example - or zone, or any other relevant criteria.


There&rsquo;s a ton more coming, but this is already going over very well with people who&rsquo;ve had a chance to see it.   And many more are going to be seeing it pretty quick - we&rsquo;re rolling out several new and upgrade PolicePro 10 projects in the next six weeks.    Busy is good!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Restricting Critical Data Access in PolicePro 9</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2008-12-30T09:22:43-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7326e4cd32bab0e46779467445b0b0c9-65.html#unique-entry-id-65</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7326e4cd32bab0e46779467445b0b0c9-65.html#unique-entry-id-65</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Most of the best features in PolicePro come from the users; things I never would have thought of that turn out to be so valuable to everyone else once they&rsquo;re introduced.   One of the more recent - and popular - of these is Restricted Access to certain information: the Need To Know scenario.


...Beyond the detectives who may write a criminal complaint or deposition containing sexual information, the bosses and the prosecutors, you may want to keep this stuff under wraps but still available in the system.   The same thing is true for certain internal investigations or, for that matter, virtually anything that a supervisor or Chief wants to restrict for whatever reason.


...We went with a model that can restrict access to any Criminal Complaint, Supporting Deposition, Narrative Report or Evidence record.   Restriction is at the discretion of the person who generated that record or anyone up the supervisory chain from that person. ...  Once restricted, only the person who initiated the restriction or a member of a higher privilege set (the bosses) can release the restriction.


...Once a record is Restricted, the flag that indicates the very existance of that record just goes away for anyone who is not authorized to see it.   Therefore, a detective sergeant looking at the Dispatch record for a Rape case sees the flags that indicate depositions and reports, but a patrol cop out in car 7 looking at the same record isn&rsquo;t aware those records even exist.


...When you return to the Dispatch record for this incident and log on as a &ldquo;regular&rdquo; user, the checkmark as well as the navigation ability to that Complaint are gone:


If there were mutliple Complaints (or narratives, etc.) on this case, the check mark would remain and navigation to those open records would still be enabled; but access to the restricted records still would apply.   Even if a user decides to get tricky and try to scroll through records, they cannot get to, export, print or in any other way access a record once it&rsquo;s been restricted.


Restrict and Open events, like locking events, are all tracked internally by PolicePro and those events become part of a Restriction log that is itself restricted all the way up to a System Administrator privilege set.


...Real Need To Know access on sensitive records while maintaining the usual ease of search and ready access to information that is the trademark of PolicePro.


...Everything has been thought out and discussed with end users to make sure that the function works in the real world as well as in my head. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Ice Storm Truckers</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-12-19T09:18:17-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4ccd76669b14a6cb6732e06fee3ed1d7-64.html#unique-entry-id-64</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4ccd76669b14a6cb6732e06fee3ed1d7-64.html#unique-entry-id-64</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We live right in the heart of the area decimated by last week&rsquo;s ice storm - Saratoga County, about half an hour west of Bennington, Vermont. ...  Clifton Park was like a part of the &ldquo;I Am Legend&rdquo; set for several days: empty shopping malls, empty roads, empty everything.


...The day after the ice storm - which could nearly be capitalized, like The Ice Storm that struck far northern New York and Canada a decade ago - the temperatures fell into the teens and the wind started to really go, something not unknown around here.   The power crews were out in that weather, out in the woods hunting for and dealing with all kinds of truly dangerous situations, for 18 hour shifts.


The news said there were some 900 power crews out in our region, and of course a lot of them came from outside the area under the mutual assistance agreements the power companies have forged to deal with these kinds of situations.   The other day I saw several Great Lakes Power Company trucks out on Grooms Road, and there are others from all over the place.


So this morning I was at a gas station filling up for today&rsquo;s big snow event - over a foot is forecast - and got talking with a couple of guys who were gassing their trucks and talking about when they might get home. ...  They&rsquo;ve been in Saratoga County for a week today, and they were leaving immediately for Massachussets, trying to get out through the Berkshires before the snow really gets rolling.


I asked if they had any hope of getting home for Christmas, and they both just shook their heads and laughed.   They are looking at maybe a up to a week in Massachussets, after which they have already been told they&rsquo;ll be going direct to Iowa, which is having its own problems with the big midwest storm. 

...The local radio call in shows were pretty calm for about two days before people started bitching, demanding investigations, railing at &ldquo;these lazy utilty people&rdquo; and much worse. ...  Doesn&rsquo;t matter, everyone should be back in front of their TVs within a day or two regardless, and if not, then it has to be somebody&rsquo;s fault!


And so when I ran across these guys filling their own trucks at Stewarts and grabbing a cup of coffee before heading off into a new storm to fix the damage from the last, in a state even further from both their homes, days before Christmas, and who miraculously were in good moods despite four or five hours sleep a night, it was kind of an epiphany.   Much like the cops, these guys do what most people are not willing to, in circumstances that most people would not be able to deal with, and to them it&rsquo;s just part of the job. ...  Does it make up for having to leave home at literally a moment&rsquo;s notice to drive halfway across the country and give up the whole holiday season with their families, often for people who only complain about them when they stop in Stewart&rsquo;s to warm up and catch a break for awhile? ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Steamboat Data is now part of the Filemaker Business Alliance</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-12-03T15:56:56-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2b9cc048ad4ff8e994cad861cbe43fe2-63.html#unique-entry-id-63</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2b9cc048ad4ff8e994cad861cbe43fe2-63.html#unique-entry-id-63</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We&rsquo;re very proud to annouce that as of December 2, 2008, Steamboat has been accepted into the Filemaker Business Alliance, the international association of Filemaker developers.   Steamboat itself - as well as PolicePro - had to pass a pretty thorough review process before we could say this.   Added to our existing Filemaker TechNet membership, this enhances our relationship with Filemaker, Inc. as well as our general standing in the industry.   Our clients can only benefit from the tighter relationship with and new business channel access to Filemaker that comes with this.


We hitched our wagon to Filemaker back in 1996.   I&rsquo;m personally very happy to get to this next level of the journey, and look foward to the next twelve years or so.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Snappy Stuff</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2008-11-18T10:43:37-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/926cc2bf24d79d3a2069127abf762c27-62.html#unique-entry-id-62</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/926cc2bf24d79d3a2069127abf762c27-62.html#unique-entry-id-62</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Mantoloking PD in New Jersey has really perked up their police car graphics.   With the new flat light racks, these things look pretty good (unless they&rsquo;re behind you with those lights turned on, of course).]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dashboard Development</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2008-11-10T16:52:41-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/492521732e41eaabeb70c3c205ba1c37-61.html#unique-entry-id-61</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/492521732e41eaabeb70c3c205ba1c37-61.html#unique-entry-id-61</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The PolicePro Main Menu has been around forever, in various iterations.   We&rsquo;re getting ready to leave it behind, in favor of a more useful, user-intelligent Dashboard.


What the Menu lacked was that user awareness to make it actually useful.   The Dashboard &ldquo;knows&rdquo; who is signed on and loads different content based on not only who that person is, but also what their role is within the agency.   Where a patrol officer might see a generic list of currently open calls along with recent Alert flagged calls (among other things), a detective will get his or her own open cases along with that basic list... and a regional or station supervisor in a larger outfit will dispense with both, in favor perhaps of a chart of activity by station, region, zone or whatever.


The current menu, as it has appeared for the past two years - attractive but limited in function:


The new Dashboard, obviously unfinished, but heading in the right direction:


I particularly like the idea of an Officer Awareness list, being anything that has been flagged as safety related over a range of days.   Should an officer receive a call to a &lsquo;hot&rdquo; address, we&rsquo;ll add a special alert that will display right in the patrol car as a Heads Up before he or she ever pulls up outside the location.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Another One Off the To-Do List: UCR in PDF</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-10-27T10:32:38-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/bef3079977644f8ceb089b892a273d6f-60.html#unique-entry-id-60</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/bef3079977644f8ceb089b892a273d6f-60.html#unique-entry-id-60</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This one has been on the list for awhile and we&rsquo;re happy to have it finally on the launch pad: Uniform Crime Reporting output as one multi-page PDF file.   A couple of screenshots from some test data:


__________________________________________________________________________________
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Anybody See a Trend Here?</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2008-10-14T13:11:35-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/fbc46f5202ce7322ff1c973349b4a6b4-59.html#unique-entry-id-59</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/fbc46f5202ce7322ff1c973349b4a6b4-59.html#unique-entry-id-59</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[(null)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Franconia Notch</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2008-10-13T09:49:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/0f3adb30ef4e1bf27eb2481bf381c6ba-58.html#unique-entry-id-58</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/0f3adb30ef4e1bf27eb2481bf381c6ba-58.html#unique-entry-id-58</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We spent the weekend wandering around the mountains of Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, guests of Vicky&rsquo;s sister and her husband at their three acre wooded retreat in Franconia.   What a place to be in the Fall!   Great cool weather, a trip up the Cannon Mountain gondola, breakfast at Polly&rsquo;s Pancake Parlor... even the four hour drive back home across the middle of Vermont was gorgeous.   We do live in a fabulous part of the world.


A waterfall at the top of the Flume in Franconia Notch park


A classic Fall mountain view


On the way up the Cannon Mountain tram


Snow on the Presidential Range - winter is coming!


One quick minor PolicePro tech support issue on Saturday, resolved with my faithful iPhone from the top of Cannon... what a country!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Keynote and PowerPoint</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>None</category><dc:date>2008-09-20T10:34:36-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/953087a8da0f737fff5d9fbbc0591a5b-57.html#unique-entry-id-57</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/953087a8da0f737fff5d9fbbc0591a5b-57.html#unique-entry-id-57</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I know there&rsquo;s a tendency	 among  some (usually young, which I am NOT) Macintosh-centric people to throw rocks at Microsoft, and I don&rsquo;t subscribe to it generally.   Everything has its place.   But I&rsquo;ve found myself having to do some presentation work on PowerPoint lately, and my God, who knew it could be this bad?


Keynote (OS X):


PowerPoint (Windows):


I&rsquo;ve never seen anything less intuitive and more infuriating - from the viewpoint of someone just trying to get some necessary work done on a tight schedule - than PowerPoint 2007.   At least the earlier versions had a menu interface that made sense!   I am absolutely certain that with some time it all becomes usable and functional, but who in the name of God would willingly subject himself to this Hell just to put together a few decent slides?
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Little Surprise from DCJS - Domestic Violence reporting on UCR</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2008-05-17T08:52:43-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/28f61ab692ac4130c51a099cab1cab26-56.html#unique-entry-id-56</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/28f61ab692ac4130c51a099cab1cab26-56.html#unique-entry-id-56</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[On Wednesday, May 14, I was notified by several of our PDs of a bulletin from New York Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) that they had just received.   Dated May 8, it announced that effective immediately, DCJS is requesting (not requiring, to be fair) addition of a heavy level of Domestic Violence data to Uniform Crime and Incident Based reporting.   This kind of stuff demands a lot of new logic, new data fields, and significant impact on processes and user viewed layouts... something that can literally take months to implement in a SQL based system.   Therefore, it imposes quite a burden on the software vendor, who has to decide if, when, and how to implement it - since this is not just some new layer that can get added on top - and to the police department and its users and/or officers in that all this new stuff has to be captured and totaled manually until the software vendor comes up with the fix (and the likely very large bill attached to it).


I get the "why Filemaker" question a lot, though not as much these days as we used to, since Filemaker embarked on its Platform direction. 

...Even though it stems from a single identifiable incident - a dispute in a parking lot, a straight-up domestic dispute at a residence - the reporting itself is actually person (or more accurately in a database context, contact) based, and can involve several persons per incident, though each person can only be assigned one reported value. 

...Turns out each reportable entry involves thirty five possible combinations of data in a matrix of five reportable crime generic types and seven types of personal relationships involving the victim (Wife by Husband, Husband by WIfe, Child by Parent, etc).   Therefore, what is really required are two base entry fields: one for the crime type and one for the relationship type - and thirty five calculation fields, one for each of the possible thirty five outcomes.   Add thirty five summary fields to total the results of those calculations, twelve more summaries to total the sums of all the originals, and one final grand summary to total all values in the lower right corner of the matrix, and you're done, right?


...And then, not every Domestic incident is going to rise to the threshold outlined by the five reportable classes, so we need to be able to ignore those.   And since we can't just ignore anything without giving rise to the question of was it ignored on purpose or forgotten about, we need some kind of flag to announce that this incident was in fact excluded deliberately.   And for data integrity, you should not be able to tag that flag if any reportable information is already attached to the person involved.


And of course there's more... all the process to drive and cause this stuff to happen has to be added, new layouts to display it all need to be written, print routines created, error checking, and don't forget to touch the existing audit trail stuff as well!


...Even with a quick trip to the airport at noon, by 3:30PM I was able to lean back and realize that the entire job was done on the Master file.   Now it will be the not insignificant matter of getting it in to the existing client base, since this is not something you just throw on the pile, but the bottom line is that from the initial outrage at this latest bureaucratic insult to a completed and working solution, invisibly integrated within PolicePro like every other part, the whole thing ran two days.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Activate the Southern Command Again</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-03-12T15:20:16-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7f331bc6dd8a291898a19cd688a780e8-55.html#unique-entry-id-55</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7f331bc6dd8a291898a19cd688a780e8-55.html#unique-entry-id-55</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So it's a week in the sun before we start a big round of PolicePro installs in April and May.   Nothing like poring over XML document trees on a beach in Jamaica!   Everything goes better with a Red Stripe, I'm told.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Beat Goes On</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-03-10T10:45:45-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/5db22f980918d598394e04469041b06b-54.html#unique-entry-id-54</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/5db22f980918d598394e04469041b06b-54.html#unique-entry-id-54</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[(null)]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>iCops? Who Knew?</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-01-11T11:49:19-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ecb4e923a6341f829acb4d8f3e4de58f-53.html#unique-entry-id-53</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ecb4e923a6341f829acb4d8f3e4de58f-53.html#unique-entry-id-53</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We've been doing a bit of traveling lately.   One thing I have noticed out there in the police world is that there are apparently plenty of police officers who have caught on to the iPhone.   I don't know if this surprises me or not - on the one hand, the thing is elegant beyond belief, but on the other, largely except for the younger guys, cops tend not to be the most techno-centric people in the world unless it really plays to what they need.


Maybe that's it.   It's eminently useful.   An iPhone fits perfectly in the usual police uniform shirt pocket, since it lies nice and flat against a ballistic vest and there's no antennas, corners or anything else to catch on things.   The screen is completely easily readable in just about any light.   You're not going to lose endless styluses down on the floor of the police car like we did with the Palms.   The iPod part of it is great, and the click switch on the headphone wire makes it really easy to go from phone to music or podcast.   Throw in the Web and Google mail and it's no wonder the thing is such a hit with everyone, much less the police.


That's all, just a casual observation... but again and again, I am seeing that virtually everyone is aware of it, the officers who don't have one want one, and are often just waiting out their current contract before getting one.   Starting to make me wonder about new ways of delivering information in PolicePro in the future, perhaps!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Why gas is cheaper in New Jersey</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2007-12-19T08:18:27-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aa6f411754dc9af533600fb88962a1dd-52.html#unique-entry-id-52</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aa6f411754dc9af533600fb88962a1dd-52.html#unique-entry-id-52</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Greg and I spent most of last week at the Milltown, New Jersey police department, upgrading their five year old PolicePro system to version 9.   We had a productive, enjoyable, and sometimes frustrating (it's computer work, after all) trip, resulting in the PD personnel settling in even quicker than we expected to their new system.


So across the street from our hotel - not three hundred feet away - is one of our favorite barbeque joints: Famous Dave's, this one the East Brunswick place.   It's all good, right?


...This is New Jersey, the home of the Jersey Barrier, a place where the government seems to think that no person alive is capable of turning the steering wheel to the left for any reason.   Down the middle of the highway, looming and unbroken, runs that ugly concrete barrier that graces every major road in the state.   To get to that Famous Dave's, to cover that 300 feet, involved almost three miles and six minutes or more.   To get back across the street to the hotel was four miles and nearly ten minutes.   If you missed the sneaky entrance to the parking lot because of the endless traffic streaming from the ramp off route 18 right before the place, that four mile return became ten miles and took damn near half an hour by the time you ran through the whole stinking loop again!


Want to get gas?   Five mile round trip to THAT gas station right over there.   Move to another hotel for the extra night I tacked onto the trip?   Something like ten miles, a half hour in heavy traffic, to get to and back from a Comfort Suites that I could SEE from the intersection I started at.


I would go stark raving insane if I had to put up with this every day.   I kept asking the guys how the hell they live with it, and they just said that you get used to it... and that's why gas is cheap in New Jersey!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Hardware update</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2007-11-30T08:42:55-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/9b6a4dc2892ddaf1053a7e3003f5af09-51.html#unique-entry-id-51</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/9b6a4dc2892ddaf1053a7e3003f5af09-51.html#unique-entry-id-51</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[After four years plus of six and seven day heavy usage, my Mac 15" Powerbook, Buford, is retiring on Monday as my main business computer.   This thing has been across the country again and again, been dropped off airport security counters, left for hours on a freezing Alaska runway while four inches of snow piled up on its carry bag, visited the Caribbean several times, and just basically been beaten on pretty much constantly since 2003.   Still works just fine, mind you, but operating systems and the graphic intensive stuff of today have left its 1GHz processor and limited graphics abilities pretty much behind.   When I alter a cell's contents on an admittedly very large and complex Numbers cash flow spreadsheet, it can take five or six seconds to see the change!


I am admittedly an Apple enthusiast, but by no means a fanatic.   There's an HP laptop right behind me that I've had longer than this thing that is still running XP like a champ... but it weighs a ton so you can't travel with it, the fan noise is like a jet landing, and it's got some of other lesser issues of the OS that moved me back to the Mac as primary in 2003 anyhow.


Don't know what I'm going to do with Buford, but it will remain in service around here at a secondary workstation, probably as a backup Filemaker design box on our network.   I fully expect to get another four years out of it before we're done.


If the MacBook Pro that's arriving Monday is half as good as this thing has been, I'll be more than happy.   Planning ahead, I bought a Fusion vmWare license for it when vmWare was still in beta early this year, and I am very much looking forward to having XP and OS X coexisting on the same computer.   That alone is a good enough reason to move up, since I seem to spend more time on the road these days and I'll have a pretty complete arsenal with me at all times this way.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Back To School (Sort Of)</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2007-11-06T17:09:08-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2dc21a4b5b481d8ec8194203dc0f2c08-49.html#unique-entry-id-49</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2dc21a4b5b481d8ec8194203dc0f2c08-49.html#unique-entry-id-49</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Marist College's modified PolicePro 9 system for the Public Safety and Security department went live the first week of November.   This is their third upgrade in nearly eight years since we started with them in January of 2000.   We're currently in that period of working out bugs and procedural issues that always accompanies a significant upgrade, but already the grumbles are giving way to more pleasing feedback.   We'll write some of it up here during the week, time permitting.


The growth of Marist over the past ten years or so has been remarkable.   The place actually is as good looking as this great photograph from their website, taken from across the Hudson River.   That nice structure at the lower right corner is the new boathouse along the recently reclaimed riverfront.    The beautiful centerpiece, the new library, is at the center of the image.


You can't see the new football field in this picture, but it's lightyears ahead of what they had two years ago.   There is a sort of design cohesiveness that has started to emerge on campus, ever since the construction of the student center several years ago kicked it off.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Joe Wambaugh</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2007-10-31T11:32:31-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7074a56570c848c4787439d4d83da259-48.html#unique-entry-id-48</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/7074a56570c848c4787439d4d83da259-48.html#unique-entry-id-48</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Hey, the October issue of Police Magazine has a pretty good - but too short - feature story on the great Joseph Wambaugh, retired LAPD detective sergeant.   Certainly the greatest police storyteller of all, in my book he's one of the greatest writers of our time, period.   No one paints a picture of a time and place like Wambaugh.   My personal favorite, the nonfiction Line And Shadows, can still put me out in the San Diego canyons in an instant, with all the looming menace that hung over the place in the time of the book.


After long periods of apparent silence, it is a great thing to see Wambaugh back on the shelves and out in the public world, so to speak.   Lieutenant Chris Davies of my former police department, a longtime contemporary and great friend, speaks of coming to his decision to retire when he looked around the lineup table one morning on a day shift and realized that not one of the young cops on his squad had a clue who Joe Wambaugh was.   Time to go!


But now they get a chance to climb onboard, along with us old dinosaurs, with last year's Hollywood Station and the pending sequel.   In the meantime, the Police article is a good place to start if you see a copy lying around the station.   GREAT writer, apparently a pretty good guy too, from what I've heard.   One of the top people I'd like to sit around and have lunch with someday.   Chris could come, too!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>WriteRoom - A Great Find</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2007-10-16T09:27:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c06350d37cd736176deb2ebce0c92741-47.html#unique-entry-id-47</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c06350d37cd736176deb2ebce0c92741-47.html#unique-entry-id-47</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I love a guy who thinks outside the box!   Who in the world would have thought that people could - in some circumstances - actually welcome a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when a text editor was plain white text on a blue screen?   In this time of a million toolbars, Drag and Drops, every damn thing in the world?   Who'da thunk it?


So along comes Hog Bay Software and WriteRoom, which is just that - a plain, completely abstracted and non-distracting environment for basic text creation, and I'll be damned if it isn't very pleasant to use for some things.   You can set up whatever color scheme you like, and there you are with that old-fashioned rectangular cursor and nothing but a blue (in my case) background in front of you.   Nothing else competing for your attention.


This is really basic stuff, and of course it is not going to run Word or Pages off your desktop.   We do all our promo and page layout stuff in Pages, and I love it like a brother.   But it IS going to knock TextEdit back a few steps!   Word has been gone for months on our systems, at least - who would figure such a completely other end experience as WriteRoom would find a spot?


Very cool application, and a quick trip back to the Seventies - if not the Sixties, for that matter - for me on small things.


Mac OS X only, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Windows alternative might not have sprung up out there as well.   If not, there's always that old PC Jr in the back of the closet under the basement stairs!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Burlington</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2007-10-04T08:23:45-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/78700f8652ef2500c1a60407164075e5-46.html#unique-entry-id-46</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/78700f8652ef2500c1a60407164075e5-46.html#unique-entry-id-46</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Greg and I spent a couple of days at the excellent 10th Annual New England Conference on Child Sexual Abuse in Burlington, Vermont early this week.   The conference was held at the Sheraton on Williston Road, which has really stepped up in style over the last several years.   It is big and beautiful, with a really nice outdoor courtyard in the middle of the structure. 

...We set up a booth in the exhibitors section and for two days talked to a LOT of people in the business of keeping kids safe and tracking down those who would have it otherwise. ...  While there was a ton of detectives and police investigators, we also talked with and learned a lot from district attorneys, their investigators, Child Advocacy specialists, social workers and others who we still don't know exactly what they do!   It's an involved and often depressing arena these guys choose to operate in, with stories that are tough to hear even through our longtime police ears.   I recall from my detective supervisor days that you can't leave one person doing child abuse investigations too long without a break - it's a crushing emotional onslaught.


But we got a lot of insight, put some CaseBook and Sex Offender software out there, and learned a lot for the next round of revisions.   It was a bit surprising that of the two products we were talking about, CaseBook seemed to ring more bells.   I guess it's the overall investigative process that a lot of people in this field are really concerned with, and CaseBook plugged right in to several agencies, requirements or Wish lists.


Burlington - where I spent a colorful couple of years around my UVM experience, WAY back - has changed a lot, but is still recognizable.   One thing I remembered pretty quick was that swirling, blasting wind in the mornings, coming up off the lake! ...  I can well recall a lot of winter mornings heading off to class in the face of that wind, often with a nice six or seven inch snowfall as well.


The Church street pedestrian mall, which I understand was modeled after one in Boulder, Colorado, is a great enhancement to downtown. ...  We had a very good trip, and we'll be attending next year as well.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Changes In Latitudes&#x2c; Changes in Attitudes</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2007-09-18T08:26:55-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ffa2cf4ad520b134ead6a049c6242279-45.html#unique-entry-id-45</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ffa2cf4ad520b134ead6a049c6242279-45.html#unique-entry-id-45</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Now, this is more like it!   My son-in-law and myself are meeting in Poughkeepsie and hopping on the Metro North line this afternoon for Madison Square Garden and another Jimmy Buffett concert tonight.   Makes for a longish day when you live in Saratoga County, but there is no better show anywhere than JB and the Coral Reefers.   It's gonna be a great evening, even if summer is already gone.   Ski season starts next!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Last Mile and Drawing the Line</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2007-09-17T15:48:24-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4daad7a9f7891045344ee6f182c6b185-44.html#unique-entry-id-44</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/4daad7a9f7891045344ee6f182c6b185-44.html#unique-entry-id-44</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We're releasing CaseBook - a rewritten, more focused version of Investigator - this week, in time for the New England Conference on Child Sexual Abuse.   This is going to be primarily a single user desktop or laptop application - aimed at sitting on a unit secretary's or supervisor's computer, or an individual investigator's laptop - to keep track of the status of active cases.   When I was still running the detectives in Poughkeepsie, we ran an earlier version with great success on several complicated fraud and missing persons cases, one of which is still under investigation almost five years later.


...What I'm thinking about now, taking a few minutes off from doing just this, is arriving at the point where you say "This version is done, ready, finished" and hit the button that produces the end result. 

...While we do have loose versioning, it's hard to point at any one install and find that it exactly matches any other from that or any time period.


...While PolicePro is arguably a product in a loose sense of the word, CaseBook is specifically just that.   Therefore, once I hit the Create Runtime button, the result is intentionally frozen so that no one, programmer or otherwise, can make any functional changes to it.


...Every detail has to be right - there will be no more jumping under the hood and just fixing some minor (or not so minor) bug or gremlin.   The last week has been nothing but compiling, testing, finding one more damn thing, fixing that, compiling and testing again... 

...And now that it's been beaten hard and found to be durable, and the all important first time install/setup experience - a whole different thing - has been arrived at, we can of course start keeping track of what will be added or changed in the Master file here between now and whenever the next release occurs. ...  With PolicePro, I've always just gone ahead and made the changes to client versions as they arose, and anyone with a brain will tell you that is NOT the way to go. 

...We've made Windows as well as Mac versions of this one, since we may step outside the strict police world into some more social work or security type environments, where Macs may be found.   I can happily say for once that there is such a thing as a program or function that is far easier and more pleasant to run on Windows - creating the install packages.


I've been using successive versions of Indigo Rose's outstanding Setup Factory install creation tool for nearly ten years now, and the thing is always a pleasure to fire up. ...  I  have not yet found a cross-platform or Mac specific installer that can touch it, and even if I did, I wouldn't walk away from it out of sheer loyalty for the suffering it's saved me over those years. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Independence Day - Good Bye&#x2c; Office</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2007-08-08T13:37:00-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/52c547305bba0534ec5a0c0768c44a00-43.html#unique-entry-id-43</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/52c547305bba0534ec5a0c0768c44a00-43.html#unique-entry-id-43</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[We've been using Open Office for some time now on our Windows computer, but I'm not in love with their Mac implementation as it currently exists... so it's been Office 2004 on our Mac boxes, which are our main programming and work computers anyhow.   The day before yesterday, Microsoft delayed once again the supposed release of Office 2008 for the Mac, which was pretty much expected.


But yesterday Steve Jobs hopped onto the stage at Apple's summer press event and released the new iWork 08, which for the first time contains a spreadsheet: the new Numbers product.   So I have recently returned from the Albany Apple store and am pleased to report that Microsoft Office is 100% gone from every Mac in the joint - assuming you can actually completely remove any MS product from anything, of course.   We're all iWork all the time now, and I've been very pleased at how well all our very critical spreadsheets made the move to Numbers.   I had already pretty much stopped using Word, and now that the new version of Pages contains not only full change tracking but distinct modes for word processing and page layout, it was an easy thing to send Office into the void.


The new iWork even supports Microsoft's (supposedly) open doc formatting - before Microsoft itself does, for that matter.   Another really outstanding job by Apple, and a good day around here as far as getting things done goes.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Improving the Experience 2</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2007-07-30T08:53:34-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/99197d243c1b73b3bde1d36ed996e928-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/99197d243c1b73b3bde1d36ed996e928-42.html#unique-entry-id-42</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[One of the new features of Filemaker 9 - released a couple of weeks ago in mid-July, 2007 - is something called Conditional Formatting for fields.   In earlier versions, display tricks such as red or green buttons, different kinds of text formatting and similar things required some trickery with calculations, custom functions and container fields that would hold color blocks.   All this was central to the Lightbar in PolicePro - the row of red and green buttons that displays whether a given police car or officer is in or out of service.   WIth Conditional Formatting, I had an opportunity to remove several layers from the existing process.


Of course, that means that to properly take advantage of the new function, we need to rewrite the whole thing.   Since we're doing that, we might as well throw in some enhancements that would make sense to the dispatchers running the system.


What a pain in the ass it is to get this stuff exactly right!   I rewrote the entire function on a single computer to where it ran flawlessly.   When it came time to test it across a LAN with some other desktops, we realized that the red/green stuff I had changed wasn't working over the network the way I had rewritten it.   Had to go at it all over again to remove all globals and use calculation fields instead with a new discrete relationship from PolicePro to to a single record in Preferences.


I decided the default state for any new car added to the roster should be a green button and an "In Service" tooltip.   Any button that did not have a car assignment needed to open as red with no tooltip notations.


Then it occurred to me that if no location was entered when a green button was clicked, the button should stay green - an additional If statement.


After a day of tweaking and testing, it's this script (times 10, for the 10 possible Lightbar buttons) to control the actions of the lightbar stuff ends up nicely organized, easily readable and very straightforward.


The final step was to go back through the thing and comment the hell out of it for the future, the single most important thing I've learned over the last 11 years of doing this work.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Activate The Southern Command Again</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2007-07-11T08:02:49-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/a473026824ddfae004977601a9a4d741-41.html#unique-entry-id-41</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/a473026824ddfae004977601a9a4d741-41.html#unique-entry-id-41</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Yep, it's mid July again, and that can only mean we're heading for North Carolina.   Greg and I will be conducting business from the wireless-equipped decks of our respective beach houses as needed.   This year there seems to be a pretty good pile of stuff to work on when we're not out on the beach or trying to turn over the Hobie Cat in the Sound: we're into the wrap-up phase of the new IBR capabilities of PolicePro, writing all the exception stuff that will catch errors or non-tagged required fields for the reports; compiling the final system for a Child Advocacy center that will be going in service the week we return; and enabling all the new Filemaker 9 capabilities that we can now talk about since yesterday's public release of FM9.    It's been tough keeping quiet on this stuff, with the huge new SQL and Oracle data exchange and some of the PDF changes they've brought about.   We're fired up now and ready to go with a bunch of it.


In the meantime, there's the daily trip up to the Crab Pot for fresh fish, Jimmy Buffett music playing in the bar there, our three busy beach houses and the nicest stretch of unoccupied beach on the East Coast.   I've been hitting this place for over fifty years now, and it never fails to deliver.   I hope everyone out there has a place like this in their lives, whether it's a beach, a mountain lake, whatever... this stuff is irreplaceable.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Improving the Experience</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2007-06-29T08:10:57-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/00523b8027729dd7ef1b917629383343-40.html#unique-entry-id-40</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/00523b8027729dd7ef1b917629383343-40.html#unique-entry-id-40</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The old truth in software is that the easier a program or function is to use, the more work some poor guy had to do to make it that way. 

...We do a ton of monthly reporting in PolicePro: incidents by Type, Incidents by Zone/Post, UCR, (soon) IBR, Clery reports for college security, Officer activity, you name it.   To capture the date ranges to be reported on, we use Global fields on dialog boxes where the user enters a simple string: 6/2007 for June 2007, for example.   The input field is a Text field, as opposed to a Date based field, since to get that same month result in a global Date field would require the user to enter 6/1/2007...6/30/2007 - who wants to do that if they don't have to?


But to display an English month and date on the resulting printed report, we had to have the users put that in as well under the existing system, or be stuck with a report that said "All Incidents Report 6/2007". 

...So I decided to write some calculations against that entry field, the gDateForSearch field, which would pull out the results I wanted with one simple entry field.


...The gYear was easy: a Right function, pulling the last four characters from the gDateForSearch, since there will always be a four digit year in the string.


Whenever a Print report script runs then, the gMonth and gYear get populated by a calculation that runs in a two-step subscript:


...Since it can be one or two characters, you have to look for the first incidence of the slash character... so that means adding a Position function inside a Left function, but the Left calc looking at that always INCLUDES the damn thing.   Okay, then we'll run a Filter on the result to get rid of the slash... then we've still gotta turn the result into text.


...If you filter for 0123456789, the calc engine will drop the 0 every time, and 10/2007 will evaluate as January, 2007! ...  (Of course, all I had to do was wrap the filter values in quotes, but hey, it was a long day!)


...I originally thought this would be a nice, easy Month calc, but it doesn't work on a text field, and we already talked about why the entry field couldn't be a Date field.


This is now going to get a Length calc wrapped around the whole thing so it won't attempt to evaluate a string with the day in it, indicating a part of a month: 6/21/2007, or 6/1/2007...6/10/2007.   In that case it will default to the actual date range entered straight out of the gDateForSearch field.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Might As Well Get Them Used To It</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2007-06-14T11:31:49-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e2727e0a63b4f42ff871d451ba5f042b-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e2727e0a63b4f42ff871d451ba5f042b-39.html#unique-entry-id-39</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Joe Wilcox in Microsoft Watch spotted this kids' ride in a coffee shop.   I guess this is Early Windows User Training!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>So Long&#x2c; Tony</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2007-06-11T08:23:16-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f2070b111dd70b40af1a145a68628c75-38.html#unique-entry-id-38</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f2070b111dd70b40af1a145a68628c75-38.html#unique-entry-id-38</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[So it's over, and I think it went out well.   Not at first - I was howling for the first few minutes after the screen blacked out in the diner.   What the hell is the matter with these people!


Then I thought about it for awhile, and this morning I've heard other opinions that sort of gel with where I've landed: You never hear the shot that kills you.


Phil didn't - he got it in the back of the head in front of (some of) his family.   And think back to Tony and Bobby in the boat on the Adirondack lake earlier this season, talking about what happens when you die: "Everything just goes black".


The series didn't end at all, I think, it STOPPED.   Tony's gone and no amount of rationalization by his wife or kids is ever going to take away the knowledge of who he was.   Sort of a final come-uppance to people who routinely sold themselves out no matter what ethics they may or may not have espoused.


At any rate, it was a pretty good eight (?)   years... now we can get back to Salt Lake City and Big Love, and wait for the return of The Wire.   Take care, Tony, it was interesting knowing you.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Bunker&#x2c; v2.0</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2007-05-16T16:49:15-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/3a31f03ed03519d09a1df93726f34e18-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/3a31f03ed03519d09a1df93726f34e18-37.html#unique-entry-id-37</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The renovation of The Bunker, Steamboat's office and programming HQ, is nearing completion.   Three and a half weeks ago this was a very well equipped basement - all the necessary and desirable computer equipment nicely situated atop a concrete floor, exposed pipes overhead, and excellent white pine wall studs cradling the insulation.   What could be more conducive to a good creative attitude?


So now we've got proper sheetrock ceilings and walls, a beautiful cushioned Pergo beech floor, the pictures finally hanging against a very snazzy yet calming desert toned paint - Terra Cotta Red Clay, to be exact, from Valspar via Lowes.   Nice thick stuff!


The second workstation goes back in tomorrow, at which point we can hide all the wires and finish up.   The Airport Extreme wireless network is back online, we've got more power sources than we'll ever need, room to spread out into the "other" part of the space, past two very nice half walls that define the two rooms.   That side has great Berber carpet and contains the new Elliptical machine and four guitars - to allow a nice escape from the desks when a break or general thought is called for.


All in all, a great project and a fabulous place to design and execute PolicePro's iterations, and to do the steady client support that we supply over the Net.   Some difference!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dark Days at Big Blue</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2007-05-08T17:19:20-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/6f9b094decec5019965debd271cbcda8-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/6f9b094decec5019965debd271cbcda8-36.html#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Robert Cringely's column Friday spotlighted a dramatic and frightening situation for IBM employees and contractors, particularly in the US and Canada.   While the actual numbers are subject to great debate, the trend is not: IBM is clearing out its Global Services division and other areas with what started out as small rounds of quiet layoffs that are now heading towards becoming thunderous in their impact.


Poughkeepsie, where I grew up and spent 23 years as a cop, is an IBM town. ...  Back in the mid nineties the Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill plants suffered 5000 layoffs in one day in a purge that almost killed the area.   For over a year, it seemed that every third house on every street in Red Oaks Mill and the Spackenkill area was for sale as people headed for the hills after losing their jobs, or made plans to get out while they still could.


Surprisingly, the collapse of the county did not happen, as a huge influx of people from New York City and the the lower Westchester County region started moving in around the same time, after great improvements were made in the Metro-North train service to the City.   The area stayed afloat and has even prospered, though the character of the county has been changed forever.


This is all a great oversimplification, of course, and from my own highly subjective point of view... but no one is likely to ever forget the Poughkeepsie Journal headline that simply said "5000 Fired" the day after the massacre.   In a town where every family has someone employed by or closely tied to Big Blue, it was a hell of a shot.


...A week or two ago there was a quiet, little-noted round of fifty some-odd employees at Poughkeepsie; if you put any stock in the Cringely story - or, more tellingly, in the now over 800 comments attached to it - it appears as though a lot of people are about to get the shaft, and not just in New York.   Further, it seems that time of service, job performance, any of the old work ethic criteria - none of it matters. 

...That's already out there and growing as this story meets the light of day in the greater media.   I just think it's a damn shame in a human sense for people who have often given a great deal to their employer over the years.   On the street I once lived on, over half the households suffered a direct hit in the Black Monday (I think it was Monday) layoffs.   Good friends, who actually worked pretty hard at their jobs, with mortgages and children, were out in the cold  just like that. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Political Correctness In Police Reporting</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2007-05-01T19:17:06-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f1a5f8af4103cd0b82a267a559e1eb81-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f1a5f8af4103cd0b82a267a559e1eb81-35.html#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[PolicePro 9 will be the first version to support IBR - Incident Based Reporting.   The Feds and various states have been pushing this since the early 80s as an "improvement" over UCR - Uniform Crime Reporting - which dates back to the 60s.


...The first, which applied almost instantly to UCR, was the perversion of the original intent of the whole thing in the first place.   Uniform Crime Reporting - note the word "Uniform" - was supposed to be a nationally scoped levelling of the playing field, so to speak. 

...The first thing that happened is that almost every state - with my own home state, New York, in the lead - immediately began perverting and diluting the value of the whole thing by adding what are known as "enhancements" to UCR reporting.   "Enhancement" in this case means taking something that is logical, orderly and valuable and turning it into a meaningless morass of asinine statistics that no longer mean anything.


So Robbery in the UCR world - depending on what state you're in - became lists miles long, in some places boiling down to Robbery/Force, others Robbery/Force/Hands/Fists/Teeth, and elsewhere Robbery/Force/Intentional.   All through the UCR Part One crimes - the important ones, Murder, Rape, Robbery, Arson, Assault and Kidnapping - various state Divisions of Criminal Justice couldn't wait to put their own wrinkle on it.


...Supporting UCR in several states is a nightmare, since every damn state is different. 

...After all, people have been asking for it for years, and on the surface at least it seems to make more sense than UCR.


...Why the hell would they want to do that when you can have NYBIR: the Enhanced version for, you guessed it, New York!


...So just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, I'm going through the Victim tables this afternoon, dutifully writing new data tables to comply and support this wonderful standard, and I come to a table called Victim Residence Status.


...In the year 2007, when we are under threat of assault from potential intruders who don't belong here, THERE IS NO REPORTING CATEGORY FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT HERE LEGALLY. 

...It really raises your confidence that we might ever prevail against any of our enemies if we can't even risk naming those who AREN'T our enemies, but just might not belong here legally.   I have no problem with people trying to improve their families' lives by coming here for America's opportunities - if I'd been born in the wrong part of South America I hope I'd have the guts to come here too, but if something is blue, there's nothing to be gained by calling it gray. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Library Days</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2007-04-26T15:52:24-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/66dafdcaabba67c571ba2990af892e5d-34.html#unique-entry-id-34</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/66dafdcaabba67c571ba2990af892e5d-34.html#unique-entry-id-34</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Construction in the home office - formerly known as The Bunker - has displaced me from time to time this past week, and will continue to do so for the next two weeks.   What better excuse to wander the five miles over to the new (December 2006) Clifton Park/Halfmoon Public Library building, a gorgeous new fixture in town not far from Clifton Park Center?


Now THIS is a nice library!   Two stories, wide open with a mezzanine floating second floor.   Nice Borders' style seating areas all around the perimeter of the building under the two story windows that look out onto a reading garden that will be great once the trees get blooming in a couple of weeks.   FAST wireless Internet available to anyone who wanders in and plently of public computer workstations all over the place for people without their own laptops, all with real Herman Miller chairs.


From a preliminary wander around, they've got a pretty good selection of books in the joint as well - along with a computer lab, a meeting room that can hold 250 people comfortably, a gorgeous Teen Center and Kids' area, everything you might want.


Staff couldn't be more helpful, either.   The parking lot, often somewhat empty when they first opened, is filling up more and more these days, as well it should.   This is a really nice addition to the area.   It feels as much like Charlotte/Mecklenburg as it does Saratoga County.   Nice to see this kind of stuff available here.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Out on the horizon</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2007-04-18T11:52:37-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/12135dd2246178f655558543339a0d06-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/12135dd2246178f655558543339a0d06-33.html#unique-entry-id-33</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Heaven forbid we ever stop developing stuff!   This is still some months away, but it is very much on the front burner at Steamboat.   Some really tight new design and logic is going to be the keynote of this revision.


As usual, we've been collecting ideas and requests as they come up for inclusion in the next release.   And as usual, most of the best ideas come from the cops and not from us.


Look for more interaction with outside data sources - scanning license information in for Name records, for instance.   We're also continuing to push the new Name/Incident logic we introduced in the v8 rewrite.   Under the hood, v9 features a ground-up rewrite of the program's relationship/ER logic to the new Anchor-Buoy standard, making the whole thing tougher than ever.


Interestingly, development this time is coinciding with a complete remodel/renovation of the Steamboat office - starting over from bare concrete walls - that has me particularly spending a good deal of time at the new Clifton Park library and the Borders store to get away from the noise of construction.   In four weeks though, it's going to look pretty good around here!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Good Work Is Its Own Reward</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2007-04-02T15:54:29-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f8746048999e677668f4264dc9a83570-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f8746048999e677668f4264dc9a83570-32.html#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[That's right... who says no one takes pride in their work anymore?   Humbug!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Now That&#x27;s What I Miss After Leaving The Police Department</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2007-03-30T09:46:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/3f51adae6438032d1e080dde3d682b42-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/3f51adae6438032d1e080dde3d682b42-31.html#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Classic stuff, found, I believe, only in the police/fire world. juvenile, asinine, and I miss it!   We did have a hell of a good time through the years on the job.   As usual, the NYPD continues to lead.   Click the link:


Police Tactical Training


Stay safe out there!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Vista</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2007-03-21T15:01:09-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c9991ed4ca69841fbe793736d42b359e-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c9991ed4ca69841fbe793736d42b359e-30.html#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Anybody else out there enjoying their MS Vista experience?   God help us, Filemaker yesterday announced that as of version 8.5v2, an update released yesterday as well, FM now supports Vista.   Spending as much time as I do in the vortex of the tech journals, I was hoping they'd just blow the whole thing off as a weird anomaly and hope for something better out of Redmond in another six or seven years.


We don't do any operating system consulting of any kind - we prefer to stay in our own sandbox, so to speak - but even my phone has been ringing from people all over the place going through all kinds of hell trying to get Vista to do what their Windows 95 OS did ten years ago: sit there and just run their computer.


All of which speaks to why I enjoyed this entry I came across today in response to a rant posted on The Business of Software about the seeming impossibility of even getting a "Certified For Vista" logo going, much less the actual software.


Hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Passing the Torch in Mantoloking</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-12-08T09:02:06-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/76865bb51b13c84cd88b4362811696ba-29.html#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/76865bb51b13c84cd88b4362811696ba-29.html#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I was at the Mantoloking, New Jersey PD yesterday (December 7) for the retirement lunch for Chief Rick Ortley.   Rick is bailing out today, after (I think) 35 years on the job.   Current sergeant Mark Wright (right in the picture) will be taking over the reins as the new Chief.


Rick is the guy at the left of the picture above..   Don't be fooled because he's not smiling in this shot: he's a hell of a nice guy, and has been a popular figure within and outside of the PD around Mantoloking.   He told me his agenda includes lots of road trips - he's going traveling.


Typical cop humor was the order of the day: apparently Rick sort of piled up a police car back in 1988 and someone had the foresight to grab the driver's door off the thing.   It's been cleaned up and stripped of all the inside stuff and reappeared as a retirement gift yesterday.   Everyone got to sign it and Rick has something a little out of the ordinary to hang in his garage.


We've been with Mantoloking since around 2000, when Bruce Garon was the Chief.   Bruce showed up yesterday as well, looking great and as relaxed as only an ex-chief can.   Mantoloking always has been a great outfit to us and continues - even though we've never been able to talk them into lending us the four wheelers for a race down the beach.   Some strange fear about citizen complaints!


Best of luck, Rick.   It's been a pleasure.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Betty Lou&#x27;s Got A New Pair Of Shoes</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2006-12-07T17:49:29-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ae29e9234f7b2fac2c602e2241f6439b-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ae29e9234f7b2fac2c602e2241f6439b-28.html#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Well, maybe Betty Lou doesn't, but Mary Jo Foley does!   First she left her longstanding post on Microsoft Watch recently to start All About Microsoft.   Now she's redone the whole site with a great, clean design and gotten rid of the clutter on the old site.   What an improvement!


Disclaimer: don't know her, never met her, but she knows what's going on in the MS world, which of course means everyone's world if you have anything to do with computing.   MJF has covered them - sometimes relentlessly, some at MS would say - for quite a while.   A daily read.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Gall&#x27;s Law</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2006-11-14T10:28:41-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f817cd6db5d9a88effba201fd56f7eae-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/f817cd6db5d9a88effba201fd56f7eae-27.html#unique-entry-id-27</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Here's one I love to agree with.   Gall's Law states:


 A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.   A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.   You have to start over with a working simple system.


This ties in well with my personal hatred of detailed functional specification sheets for database systems.   Some people, very successful ones, love project specs as ironclad blueprints to give a client exactly what they want.   I tend more towards the reality of the "What I thought I heard is what you thought you said" problem: The best stuff evolves out of a general plan as opposed to being built to a blueprint.   Every time we give a client exactly what they ask for, they end up wanting it changed, because it doesn't work like they expected it might.


The people at 37 Signals are really strong on this.   Their Getting Real book contains what I think is the best argument there is against forced structure in program (and database) design.


The Wikipedia page on Gall's law is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall's_law]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Apple</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2006-10-28T14:13:44-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/cd70dfe544475f79563c584b797cf3b1-25.html#unique-entry-id-25</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/cd70dfe544475f79563c584b797cf3b1-25.html#unique-entry-id-25</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Although nearly all our clients run Microsoft Windows based systems, we choose to do all our development - and nearly everything else - on Mac Powerbooks.   I started on Macs back in the very early 90s, moved to Windows for six years when the business got going, and came home, so to speak, in the fall of 2003 when a mail virus nearly wiped me out and stole a week of my time before I was able to completely eradicate it.   We still have two Windows computers, and the HP in particular is reliable as hell, but since I do this stuff eight to ten hours a day, I'm gonna do it where I'm comfortable, and that's on the Macs.


My main development computer, a 15" Powerbook, just passed three years old, and has been used maybe six to eight hours most days over that whole time!   Been across the country eight times, left outside on a snowy runway in Alaska for an hour and a half while the ground crew fooled around with the Piper plane (and an inch of snow piled up on the laptop case - see picture before snow started), worked in 114 degree Arizona summer heat - oops, make that ten trips across the country - and has never so much as coughed once, much less puked up a hard drive or something similar.   Scheduled for replacement next year with a new 15" MacBook Pro when Leopard (the next Apple operating system) comes out, but I tell you I love this thing.   I may have it bronzed.   What a workhorse!
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Another No-Win for a PD&#x2c; victim&#x27;s family</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-10-27T10:45:34-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/96b1d8136e9d73c9d04cccbaaca5d55a-24.html#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/96b1d8136e9d73c9d04cccbaaca5d55a-24.html#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Granville is a small upstate NY town along the Vermont border not far from here.   The PD recently had to deal with yet another gruesome, tragic and possibly preventable domestic murder/suicide case - preventable not by the police department per se, but perhaps if the victim had not wavered on following through on an Order of Protection.   Maybe, maybe not, but the end result is three orphans, families torn apart, and the PD about to come under the gun for alleged inaction in the face of a paper trail of building incidents at the residence of the victim and her killer.


You can clearly see the trend coming that is going to eventually require police to proactively intervene when these patterns start to emerge.   Then you'll have the inevitable gray area surrounding at what point that occurs, and all the Monday morning quarterbacking emanating from the attorneys jumping aboard after the smoke clears.   In at least one county in New York State, police are now required to proactively go out and contact sex offenders in their jurisdictions at regular intervals; at what point will they be required to start supervising troubled families?   After all, in a climate where everything is the fault of some arm of government, where better to place the blame than the police department?


...If you're a police administrator, you have got to keep ahead of this stuff, like you didn't have enough to do already.   Given that it actually involves real tragedy and loss of this magnitude, its somewhat hard to argue with, unfortunately.   In the meantime, document, document, document, and make sure that someone in the department is keeping on top of these things as they emerge. 

...Maybe to some cynics, but again, I've got the street creds to back up these opinions.   I well recall the one we had where the girlfriend - after taking out an Order of Protection against her boyfriend who had assaulted her - two or three days later allowed him back in to spend the night and ended up with a couple of bullets in her.   The idiot boyfriend told us later he'd saved a bullet for himself after shooting her, but chickened out when the cops started rolling up.   If we had known about the issues there, maybe we would have been a little more forceful in our dealings with them before the night of the shooting.   Instead, she ended up shot and the PD had another lawsuit on the pile, accused of failing to protect her.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Don&#x27;t Get Robbed In Omaha</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-10-23T16:02:43-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e509871b11c72ceea6c70a0650d8dfe4-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e509871b11c72ceea6c70a0650d8dfe4-23.html#unique-entry-id-23</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Or if you do, you might as well send the PD a postcard about it... apparently 911 ain't all it's cracked up to be there.   Amazing.


http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?  ARTICLE_ID=52559]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Back To The Lake</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-10-05T10:03:53-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/cd93084e49074471845bcf47be82ca8f-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/cd93084e49074471845bcf47be82ca8f-22.html#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Not a moment too soon, it's off tomorrow for the annual Fall Fish & Puke trip, a weekend of guys tent camping at Fish Creek Ponds off Upper Saranac Lake.   The Spring and Fall F&P trips are eagerly anticipated all year by all members of our hardcore Saranac Lake gang.   Two generations are represented: the 50s age grumpy old bastards such as myself, and the mid 30s group of sons, sons in law, and friends.   Days are spent out on Upper Saranac in various bass boats, evenings sitting around a big fire talking, joking and loudly and uproariously quoting entire scenes from old movies.   Nothing out of line, just a great weekend in the woods with like minded friends.


In a world where even innocent Amish 6 year olds in a bucolic one-room schoolhouse are not safe from the savages, you gotta get away once in awhile.   On that subject, you can hardly believe what happened and what almost happened in that town this week.   Watching the news and seeing the amazing capacity for forgiveness on the part of the Amish families suffering these losses, I hardly know what to think.   On the one hand I want to admire their forgiveness, but I just can't.   Sometimes fury is necessary.   Not everything is forgivable, nor should it be.   It seems that no matter what you do anymore, you can stand up in court or before a camera and call it a "mistake", and credence automatically attaches.


But despite our best efforts to destroy it sometimes, we still have a beautiful world here, and a great way to touch that is with a group of good friends off on a quiet mountain lake on a sunny Fall weekend.   Good for the soul.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Better Living Through Politics</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-10-04T16:47:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/8f9053feeb6d9c8869caa2d8b40894fb-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/8f9053feeb6d9c8869caa2d8b40894fb-21.html#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The latest cause celebre in the social engineering world appears to be sex offenders, now that the bloom is off the rose on domestic violence... every time a cop is called to a domestic dispute nowadays pretty much anywhere, he or she spends more time filling out meaningless forms than actually intervening in whatever is going on.   We have every kind of civilian oversight group in the world meeting regularly to second guess the decisions that the cops made at any given DV call; money has been thrown at the problem and stolen, misspent or just wasted creating all kinds of new beaurocracies of people who have never seen the inside of a working cop's car; marches and crusades and finger pointing go on all the time, and the root problem hasn't changed one iota. 

...Heaven forbid these people go to jail and actually stay there... we now live in a world where it is perfectly normal to release people who have committed incredible, horrific acts against helpless children and adolescents.   But of course they have rights, and the rest of us basically get to sit around and wait until one of them attacks someone we know, and then we can join a victims' advocacy group, or go to candlelight vigils, or find other new and interesting ways to spend our time.


Okay, so once it became public knowledge that these people were out there, some scrambling had to be done by political types, and here came Sex Offender Registries. ...  Never mind that in New York State at least, for several years while I was still a working cop, we were not allowed to release any more than absolute bare bones information, and then only on Level 3 offenders... the lower level guys were just cited as being in a general jurisdiction, since their privacy rights were more important than the those of normal, law abiding citizens.


And isn't it a fine thing that we actually accept a world where we not only have known sexual predators walking around among us, but there are so many of them that we actually classify them! 

...Of course half of them never did, and the various probation authorities never went out and apprehended anyone anyhow... and the ones that did check in were subjected to the most rigorous cross examination (again, what we were allowed to ask):


...If they have to check in with the cops and whether they do or not, something unpleasant happens, there could be some liability for the County!   I mean, heaven forbid the county authorities who are supposed to keep track of these people - having had them dumped in their laps from the State - actually have to do that... there must be an answer...


And of course the solution is simple, once you look for it: Let's take the cops, who are already well on their way to being social workers anyhow, and stick them with the responsibility. ...  If someone acts up now, either the cops are at fault for not going out and finding him every three months - they've got nothing else to do, after all - or the cop who DID go out showed poor judgement and is personally responsible along with the police department. 

...When I read a story in a regional newspaper the other day and saw that the police in that county have now actually been mandated to go and seek out their sex offenders on a regular basis - and therefore become responsible for what they may do under the "special relationship" court precedents (check out Torrington, Ct and a domestic violence murder that happened several years ago) - I was once again relieved to be out of the active game, and paradoxically faced with an opportunity arising out of this crap.   We went back to the Sex Offenders file we created a year ago and really wound it up tight, added a ton of function to it, and have started calling around on it. 

...***Don't for one minute mistake this as an attack on the probation or parole people, either... they're drowning under all these mandates as well, the people actually in the trenches. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Simplify&#x2c; simplify</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2006-08-26T13:40:13-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/af0b127e1b762f54be43f0534cc92635-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/af0b127e1b762f54be43f0534cc92635-20.html#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[A New York police department ran into a problem with their Uniform Crime Reporting this month when they had no arrests of anyone under 18 for the month.   The error trap I had for that situation was in the wrong place in a very long and obtuse script, written eight years ago and just brought along as is into the subsequent updates and rewrites of PolicePro.


So I'm looking at this thing and trying to figure out where the break is, and of course when you do this, you inevitably just get stuck and miss the obvious: this so-called script was a disaster, and while it had been sort of modularized (calling two external scripts to handle the actual Print events of the two reports it produces, Over 17 and Under 18 arrests), the modules were broken out in the wrong places and missed the whole point of doing it in the first place.


The only way out of stuff like this is to step back, hit the Delete button, and start all over again writing the routines.   And Part Two of that, the important part, is that when you're doing stuff in (hopefully) logical modules or sequences, you need to work from the bottom up instead of from the top down!   The Top Down approach has you trying to get the whole grand sequence in some kind of order, creating pieces to handle the If branches as they arise.   That's how I originally wrote this, and that's what was wrong with the damn thing.


Bottom up means you start at the basic steps: write routines for extracting the Over and Under 18 stuff, THEN tie it all together into something that runs at the mouseclick or is called from an even further up script.


...What was once this (calling two poorly thought out subscripts for the Print events and one to end up at the proper Admin menu):


...	#Now set Find Criteria for arrests under 18 this date range.


...By way of making excuses for myself, I'll restate that I wrote this mess back in 1997 or 1998, and that when I did the big rewrite, I just shoved the existing UCR stuff in As Is because it worked, and I had just finished defining 845 UCR related fields from scratch and by hand. 

...The new script calls the same two subscripts as before, but this time the Set Field and Find steps - and the Error Captures - are in THOSE scripts where they should have been all along.   They're exacty the same except for the Find criteria on the Age field and the layout they go to for the Print step.


This thing was the Filemaker developer's version of getting hit by a bus while sporting old underwear. ...  So now on the rare occasions I don't have much to do, I guess I'll be revisiting what's left of the old pre 2004 code and seeing what other horrors lurk there. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Bethlehem</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-08-11T10:53:49-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/786b050da4a07147d88738d7d8339687-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/786b050da4a07147d88738d7d8339687-19.html#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[During the predawn hours of November 15, 2004, 52 year old Peter Porco and his wife Joan were attacked in their bed with an axe in the Albany, NY, suburb of Bethlehem.   Mr.   Porco died; Mrs.   Porco managed to survive, though terribly disfigured and suffering permanent injuries.


Yesterday afternoon, at the end of the most sensational case and trial in a long time in upstate New York, their son Christopher Porco was found guilty of the murder of his father and attempted murder of his mother, who - mercifully - has no recollection of the attack.


This case is a terrible tragedy for everyone concerned, with plenty of "collateral damage" inflicted both by circumstance and by the actions of the defense team.   Seeking a scapegoat, the defense attacked the Bethlehem police department and particularly one detective who worked the case and conveniently - for them - died during the investigation.   It was not long before that detective in particular became the corrupt, manipulative and vengeful bad cop, and his family along with his memory were tarnished in the news - pretty much constantly.


Well, they got an intelligent jury who looked at the evidence - which was in fact the result of an outstanding investigation by the Bethlehem cops and the New York State Police and their amazing forensic team - and not only found Porco guilty, but vindicated the Bethlehem cops and gave their detectives, alive and deceased, their good names back.   The circumstantial case that the cops and the Albany County DA's office put together is a textbook of intelligent detective work and thinking outside the box on occasion.   Nice job.


The Albany Times_Union's coverage and summary of the case is pretty good, too, and includes the timeline put together by the prosecution that put the jury over the top.   We did plenty of timeline cases in my detective days as well - they're a damn good way to turn a bunch of information into a compelling story.


Kudos to all the cops in this caper, and wishes for some sort of peace and hope for Mrs.   Porco and her other son, Jonathan.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Copcast</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-08-01T16:06:48-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/959c3ee2318f9e4727633490f7472877-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/959c3ee2318f9e4727633490f7472877-17.html#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Greg advised me several weeks ago about Copcast, a weekly podcast on police culture, police news and technology.   It is uploaded every Sunday, the work of Mack Pettigrew and Rich Schumaker, cops from Ontario, Canada and Salem, Virginia.   These guys mix general police banter with training announcements, guest discussions, technology news, and, unfortunately, weekly updates on police deaths across the US and Canada.


Copcast is an intelligent and entertaining effort by working cops who know their subjects.   You can even subscribe to the podcasts on iTunes and put them on an iPod for something to listen to on the night shift, if you're a midnight marauder!   I worked nights as a patrol cop and a sergeant for years - in those days, we didn't even have AM radios in the police cars.   Times change...


I don't know either one of the Copcast guys, and have no affiliation with them - just feel it's worth listening to and wish them well.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Activate the Southern Command</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-07-12T15:13:57-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e484cb21db5138726bf20795c96aba01-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e484cb21db5138726bf20795c96aba01-16.html#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[If it's the middle of July, then it must be time to head for the North Carolina coast again.   We look forward to this trip all year, and in two days we're on the way.   We'll be on the beach near Wilmington for a week.   The forecasts from the Weather Channel are looking good, so everyone is pretty well fired up.


The beach house has, among other great attributes, a very nice and private home office area at the top of the stairs with broadband Internet.   We bring along an Apple Airport Express, and lo and behold, wireless internet!   This year I'll be able to work on client systems from the huge deck - right on the ocean - as well as from the office.   It's pretty cool when you can sit at a table on a ninety five degree day fifty feet from the Atlantic and work on computer systems in Alaska.   It makes the time spent working pretty pleasant.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>PolicePro is on the new Filemaker website</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2006-07-10T10:50:30-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ab34cfb01cae05f852b4f66057667e0d-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/ab34cfb01cae05f852b4f66057667e0d-15.html#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Filemaker Inc, the makers of the Filemaker software that we use to write PolicePro, announced the new version 8.5 this morning (Monday, July 10).   Lo and behold, one of the prime examples they use to show the power of their outstanding new Web Viewer capability is PolicePro.   The Web Viewer allows us to embed a Google or Mapquest map of an incident location directly into the Dispatch Report in 8.5, something extremely helpful to cops responding to a call with PolicePro in their patrol cars.


It's great to be recognized by Filemaker, with whom we've had a long relationship... in the late 90's they ran an ad campaign featuring the early PolicePro with a tag line "This collar belongs to Filemaker Pro".   I was on a plane reading Fortune Magazine and turned the page to the ad without knowing it was running there, and how good did THAT feel?


The reference to PolicePro and the screenshots are here.


And it's nice to now be able to announce this great feature, which has had to be a secret until FMI made the new version release.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Snake Oil</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2006-06-26T16:29:14-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/5f5507bad5311059c194303828630a72-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/5f5507bad5311059c194303828630a72-14.html#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I love working out the database schema to make it all work, solving the problems that arise, and addressing the new problems that solving the last one end up causing.   Creating the design for a new project, doing the actual layout work, writing all the stuff that makes it go: love it all.   For a 27 year cop, I turned out to be a pretty good database guy.   I can sit here in The Bunker for 12 hours a day churning through all this stuff and never notice that it got dark somewhere along the line.


...If there was ever someone who was the Build A Better Mousetrap guy, that would be me. 

...So right now, of course, is not a good week at all, because Investigator is just about done, it's a really nice piece of work that thousands of PDs could really use, and it's now up to me to make some of them realize that.   Fire up the Spammer jokes, because this week we're sending a bunch of email out into the void in an effort to get cops from all over the place to come and take a look, and hopefully realize that this is a hell of a deal we're talking about.


And the best part, for them at least, is that no one is going to start calling and driving them insane every five minutes, like these demons from American Honda or Lowe's, calling and calling and calling just to make sure we enjoyed our last visit to Saratoga Honda or that the guy who installed the new storm door did a good job.   For crying out loud, doesn't it occur to any of these people that if we were dissatisfied, they'd hear about it pretty quick?   There was a time last week when almost every day one of these calls was coming in, and it was driving me crazy.


So putting myself on the other side of the fence, so to speak, is a tough one, something that just goes against the grain naturally.   You just don't want to inflict yourself on people who are busy trying to get through their own days, even if you're carrying something that would help them do it.   I guess what we need around here is a PT Barnum type who can waltz in the door. talking a hundred miles an hour, and just wear people out... but I would hate to have anything to do with an outfit like that.   So if you're the surprise recipient of one of our emails or letters that has brought you here, before you shoot the monitor, consider that what we're talking about comes from a LOT of real world experience and wouldn't exist if I hadn't in my detective supervisor capacity said one day, "Dammit, isn't there something we can find that would make sense of all this stuff!"


And of course there wasn't, but especially in the case of Investigator, there is now. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Don&#x27;t I Wish</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-05-21T10:58:08-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/dec8aa3006f3ee35f1fbfb2c2e7111af-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/dec8aa3006f3ee35f1fbfb2c2e7111af-13.html#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Boy, where have I heard THIS before?   On the other hand, wouldn't it be a nice problem to have!


I got laughing this morning when I checked out our client intranet site for To Do items that I have pending... right at the moment it appears - miraculously - that I'm all caught up, and this is the default way that our Basecamp site indicates that.   On the one hand, it reminded me of every teacher I ever had at Vermont Academy way back when... and on the other, it seems to indicate a nice quiet Sunday ahead.


Of course, this is only one of several project lines we have on the intranet, and the others have a few more items in them, but this looked like a good way to start the day.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Unexpected Results - Even Googlers Get The Blues</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><dc:subject>Weblog</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-05-14T11:37:41-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/d98abbdf8ce411f02d63e0e281ef3a25-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/d98abbdf8ce411f02d63e0e281ef3a25-12.html#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Imagine my surprise when, checking the logs for where site traffic is coming from, I found that two search strings that brought people to PolicePro were "Lesbians" and "Lesbian Passwords".


Well, that's interesting, and I wonder exactly what the hell on the PolicePro site caused us to pop up for these people, but you can only wonder about the disappointment they felt when they got here!   Miles of space and not a lesbian in sight.   Oh, the humanity!]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New Stealth Mobile added to the fleet</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2006-04-26T11:26:53-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/80b516cc9f272799266531eeab6c70a4-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/80b516cc9f272799266531eeab6c70a4-10.html#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The official PP-Mobile is a 2002 Nissan Pathfinder, which is a fabulous conveyance for many reasons - but gas mileage is not one of them.   For carrying necessary PolicePro related technical equipment such as skis, sea kayaks or camping gear, it is second to none - but when the time comes to make a 400 mile sweep through New Jersey visiting our NJ clients, the charm fades somewhat.


Hence, this shiny new dark gray bullet: a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid.   Surprisingly, you give up NOTHING in the name of fuel economy.   This thing has plenty of power, cruises the Northway as smooth as silk far above the speed limit, and handles like a slot car on the winding roads through the farm country of middle Saratoga County.   All that and 45 miles per gallon so far, which is slowly creeping up with the warmer weather and the car breaking in a bit.


The car is pretty much always under the control of financial officer and controller Vicky Lundgren, but the programming/road trip staff will get a shot at it once in a while when necessary.   I wish we had two of these!   Honda has an unbelievable home run with this car.   Ours is the extremely popular and rare Magnetic Pearl color, which makes it a real head turner, something Vicky enjoys endlessly when people comment on the car.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Some more off-topic</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Personal</category><dc:date>2006-04-25T10:36:33-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/093d67f548200533fefafce9e10c086a-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/093d67f548200533fefafce9e10c086a-9.html#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[As long as we're sort of wandering today, you want to hear an absolute masterpiece?   Get thyself to iTunes and grab Shawn Colvin's Another Plane Went Down, from the Whole New You album.


I have been a Shawn Colvin fan forever.   This one grabs you every time you listen to it, without fail.   It's not her normal folk guitar-driven thing, but a very complex and layered piece of work.   You have to really listen to what's going on with the instruments to realize how rich it is.


This is so good that I listened to it on the airplane on the way to and from Alaska, kind of unusual given the story it tells.


Everything Shawn does is worth listening to.   Try Shotgun Down The Avalanche (what a great title!)   when you're done with the planes and see if you don't end up dropping several dollars on iTunes if you haven't heard her before.   She is supposed to release a new album sometime in the next couple of months, last I heard.   This is a fantastic artist, worthy of the term.   Hell of a guitar player, too.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>And now for something completely different...</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2006-04-25T09:50:50-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2828ff64e8381092e41904275529736c-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/2828ff64e8381092e41904275529736c-8.html#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[What to do with the few free evening hours on the recent PolicePro trip to Skagway, Alaska?   Why not write a quick program for a local tour/adventure tour outfit owned by some friends of one of Skagway's officers... not rocket science, but a basic, solid and useful tool for these guys to get their work done.


There is a force in the design/programming universe called Scope Creep which says that every project will grow beyond all recognition as requests for One More Little Thing are made and addressed, which lead to more and more.   This project, being self-limited as far as my short local access, was an exercise in fighting that force.   We whittled it down to the most basic useful form and worked to that and nothing more.


The result?   No fancy audit trails, no endless snazzy automation, but a hell of a nice interface and a shot right at the heart of the work that actually needs to be done.   The program tracks bookings and clients, sends automated email confirms, and handles the rest of the nuts and bolts stuff.   If they ever want to go bigger, they certainly can, but this is a small family outfit and all they really need is to be able to track the clients and make sure everyone gets what they expected.


So they don't all have to be huge showcase projects... and it was a nice change, cranking this one out.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Dyea</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-04-07T22:20:23-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/264088367f1d68df85143ca517a83496-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/264088367f1d68df85143ca517a83496-7.html#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[During the Gold Rush, this area went from a mud flat at the edge of the Chilkoot Pass to a city of 10,000, and then back to a wilderness again. 

...Gold hunters had a choice to make when they reached the end of the waterway: the deep water harbor at Skagway allowed boats to dock and discharge passengers and goods directly into the booming city, where the White Pass route went off towards Bennett Lake, the first part of the overland trip to the gold fields.   A little further up, the channel ended at Dyea, where a wide flood plain made for a miserable, muddy start.   Small boats would take people off the bigger steamers and transport them as close to the shore as possible, depending on the tide... but then it was a slog to the dry ground and the start of the infamous Chilkoot Trail, the only other way to the gold fields.


The White Pass railroad as much as anything assured that Skagway would prevail in the end, and the equipment required to build it was only able to be offloaded in the harbor that Skagway provided.   Today, the Dyea area has returned to thick, heavy forest, with bright green moss covering all the ground under the trees.   A few determined people still live there, and the area is a favorite with tourists and adventure seekers in summer, looking to experience the Chilkoot Trail.


To stand on the flats and try to imagine what faced those people only a hundred or so years ago, a thousand miles from the civilization of Seattle, is an amazing thing.   It's tough to walk ten feet through the forests here, much less the thirty miles over the mountains that was only the beginning of a long trip further north.   Consider then that a person had to take a year's worth of supplies with him - on his back - and the task seems impossible.   For some, according to the Park service, the 30 or so actual miles meant a thousand actually trekked, going up and coming back for more again and again and again.   On the Golden Stairs over the pass, if a man stepped off the path in the winter of 1898, it could take four or more hours for a break in the human chain to get back on.


...In the Gold Rush cemetery just outside of Skagway, the average perceived age might be 30 or so, but it might be a lot younger if you do the math with all the babies and children who never even got started before ending up on this now forested hillside below a waterfall.


Now, don't believe any of this as gospel - I'm just a fascinated visitor here myself.   But the history of this place, and the hardships involved for those who came here, is so worth reading it can't be overstated. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Skagway</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-04-05T18:28:32-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c3a0fb74306d99f116ad483fd26ef246-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/c3a0fb74306d99f116ad483fd26ef246-6.html#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Black bears, hostile bears, docile bears, bears up on the mountain, bears in the alleyways in town... bears!   Lots of em, if you believe half of what you hear being discussed across a couple of tables near the front of the restaurant.


...Skagway sits on one of two flat pieces of land anywhere around here, a small triangle whose base is along the Lynn Canal, and whose sides are closed down by the mountains that hover right over town.   It's impressive to look at, and when you start to realize that those are pine forests way up there near the treeline, and they are much farther away and therefore higher than they first appear, it gets more impressive all the time.


...Last time, we swooped in off the canal, at the wide part of the triangle valley... lots of room!   Yesterday the wind dictated the other approach: you come in off the water at altitude, flying along the left shoulder of the valley where the Dyea Road starts off the main road, then stand that baby on its right wing and crank it around before you encounter the mountainside on the right side of the valley.   Looking out the window as we started the turn, all you could see was trees coming at you.


But the pilot was the same guy I flew with last year, and he's still alive and well, and for him its probably pretty straightforward stuff.   For someone not used to the immediacy of the mountain everywhere you look, it was a nice shot of adrenaline to start the day.


So now its Wednesday, a day and a half into the onsite part of the project, and the new Inventory system is running, the barcode scanner has been installed and is working like a champ, and the next order of business is to get the label printer going.   While not doing all this, I've created a new Booking Intake workflow that includes the DUI Offense Report question form, written an output to the FBI Fingerprint cards, incorporated a new video capture section into the Arrest Record file for video recorded statements and interviews, rewritten the Traffic Ticket section top to bottom, screwed up everyone's account privileges, fixed them again, handled two remote tech support issues back in New York, and gotten halfway through a quick example file for a tour company in town back at the bed and breakfast last night.


...Every time I get a chance to really immerse myself in Filemaker, in the deep end of the pool, so to speak, I am impressed all over at what you can get done and how fast you can do it if you have a game plan and some expertise behind you. ...  Ray Leggett (the Chief of Police) is on a mission to get rid of paper wherever possible, and this is going a long way towards realizing that aim.


...The Alaska State Criminal Case Intake and Disposition form, for starters... then maybe on to the evidence file and some applications for the barcoding stuff there, as well as in the department's inventory system.


And lunch at the Sweet Tooth - yesterday and today - was pretty damn good as well. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Back in the 49th State</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Road Trips</category><dc:date>2006-04-03T20:34:15-04:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/84b62d07c48ab002e4c5cad060a3f4df-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/84b62d07c48ab002e4c5cad060a3f4df-5.html#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[When the big Alaska Air jets take off on the southbound runway at the Juneau airport, they look to get some air under them quick!   There are not one, but two substantial mountains just south of the airport that the outbound planes go right up and over.   I'm sure it's more routine than it looks, but from my second story room at the Aspen Hotel across the street from the airport, it's a pretty impressive sight, watching the planes heading right at those snowy peaks.


So the hidden message here is of course that I am back in Alaska, heading up to Skagway tomorrow to get going on the PD's accreditation work, all being incorporated into their PolicePro install.   Due to some very lucky plane connections and some fast talking in the Chicago and Seattle airports, I made it from Albany, NY, to the parking lot in front of the Juneau terminal in almost exactly twelve hours.   Not a bad day's work!


Tomorrow morning it's that great small plane ride up the Lynn Canal to Skagway and time to get busy.   I've scheduled five days - six with the inevitable Anti-Disaster Factor - and while there's a lot to get done, I'm sure there'll be some time to get around a little bit at least.   I particularly want to head up into the Yukon Territory on the South Klondike Highway, and stop next week down in the Klawock/Craig area to visit a friend living there and have some King Crab.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New things in the works</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2006-03-28T08:51:22-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e150110fa9b4a33c5f7e8ef0c7f5bb9e-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/e150110fa9b4a33c5f7e8ef0c7f5bb9e-4.html#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The jet will be taking off to Alaska in a week, so the new Inventory and Personnel systems are moving along pretty well now.   Nice to be on schedule!


Skagway's new Inventory system will track anything and everything the PD desires to follow, from when they buy it, to when it is assigned to an officer, and when it comes back for its next assignment.   Barcode features will minimize typing and make it easy to keep track of where things are.   All this is designed as a response to Alaska's state accreditation requirements, and will put the Skagway PD right where they want to be.


Inventory and Personnel records will be tightly integrated as well, allowing supervisors to see at a glance what is assigned to any particular officer.   In the event that things require periodic qualification or calibration actions, that information will be available at either the item or the assigned officer's record.


While we're at it, we're enhancing the training records for personnel and moving the personnel files themselves more fully into various PolicePro operations.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Two Officers Killed in Upstate NY - In Two Days</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>Cops</category><dc:date>2006-03-03T10:50:04-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b43020ed9fc0547fe64409d23fc3fe3a-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/b43020ed9fc0547fe64409d23fc3fe3a-3.html#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Two guys doing their job have been killed in upstate New York in the last two days.   What the hell is going on in this - and every other - state?


A 10 year NYSP trooper, Andrew Sperr, out of SP Horseheads, was shot and killed by two idiots who had just robbed a Chemung County bank  - which the trooper apparently did not know about - when he stopped to check their suspicious vehicle by the side of the road.   Trooper Sperr managed to return fire and shot both of them.   They were arrested separately when they showed up at two Elmira hospitals whining about gunshot wounds.


The day before, Wednesday, March 1, New Hartford PD officer Joseph Corr was shot and killed while chasing yet another worthless bastard who had - you guessed it - robbed a jewelry store.   A vehicle chase ended with the robbers crashing their car into a gas station, and in the ensuing foot pursuit of one of them, officer Corr was killed.   Corr was all of 30 years old, with six years on the job.


In the only bit of good news in the whole story, the person who killed Corr was killed himself the next night in a battle with cops in Chester, Pa - but not before shooting a US Marshall, though not seriously.


Governor Pataki - from his hospital room in New York City, where he is recovering from two surguries - is coming out strongly for getting the death penalty law back on the books in connection with killing police officers.   While I doubt it would deter so-called people like these from shooting at the cops, it would be nice to see them removed from the world afterwards, at least.


So it doesn't matter if you do this work on a 26 officer job out in Oneida County or in the South Bronx or East LA - it's all the same, every time you get out of the car or approach anyone you don't already know.   Be careful out there.   I was lucky to get through 27 years pretty much unscathed.   It is a damn shame that so many good people aren't.]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>We&#x27;re Live</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>General Tech</category><dc:date>2006-03-01T17:19:09-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/a2375d14f1adad5317b251adbbfb113b-2.html#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/a2375d14f1adad5317b251adbbfb113b-2.html#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The site is out in the world as of today, March 1.   Over the past few weeks while under development, it's been hiding in a private directory... the basic navigation from the existing Steamboat Data/former PolicePro site is in, though that will change a lot over the next two weeks.   Now the page counter might actually start to show some activity...	]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>New website&#x2c; new direction</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2006-02-28T17:18:09-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/64f3dd025a131d3353e7eef3e0e5fe0d-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/64f3dd025a131d3353e7eef3e0e5fe0d-1.html#unique-entry-id-1</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[PolicePro and Steamboat Data Systems operate out of New York.   What's with the Alaska stuff?


Hey, why not?   It's not that big a deal, in a state where going to the dentist often means a plane ride.   From Albany you hop on a jet, turn right at Seattle, land in Juneau and go from there.   And in the new wireless world of the much improved Internet, we find we can service our distant clients from pretty much anywhere, until it comes time for a major new project or upgrade.


So the story is that Dave Lundgren will be in Southeast Alaska during the first part of April this year, and if you are part of a PD in that state that is tired of the system you have, tired of having no system at all, or just curious about PolicePro, you won't get a better opportunity than this to do something about it.


We love Alaska.   PolicePro, even though a Lower 48 flatlander program, could not be a better fit for Alaskan law enforcement if we had written it in a tent atop the Denver Glacier.   PolicePro will shortly meet every standard of the ALEAAC Accreditation program as well.   It certainly couldn't hurt to contact us, especially now since we will be in the (so to speak) neighborhood.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Welcome Aboard</title><dc:creator>dave@steamboatdata.com</dc:creator><category>PolicePro</category><dc:date>2006-02-19T11:31:14-05:00</dc:date><link>http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aab0dbb3cdf8a5ddd3b7ab445460e7d3-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.policepro.com/PoliceBlog/files/aab0dbb3cdf8a5ddd3b7ab445460e7d3-0.html#unique-entry-id-0</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I had one of these going last year, the Steamblog, attached loosely to the Steamboat Data website.   It was done in Six Apart's Typepad product, which was excellent to work with; but I let it lapse as pressures to get other things done slowly pushed it further off my radar.


...When we incorporated in 2003 as Steamboat Data Systems, I had the bright idea of consolidating everything under one site umbrella.   I can't say it was the best idea I ever had, and so this site is the result of recognizing that fact and putting PP (as we call it) back in its own house.   The Steamboat Data site persists as well, and will start heading in its own independent direction shortly.


...The new site is being done completely in RapidWeaver, just an outstanding web creation product.   It ain't the most sophisticated product in the world, but we're not the most sophisticated people either, so it's alright.   It is some solid, practical stuff for people who want to get a site up and out there.   It is also a Macintosh only product, so Windows users either need to find something else, or buy a Mac mini to use for web creation along with your other computers. 

...What Rapidweaver does better than anyone is let me create, manage and update this site by myself without requiring all sorts of technical assistance from anyone else.   Since our message is pretty straightforward and our corporate culture is about Relaxed Excellence, it's a great match for what I want to do.


Rapidweaver also lets me run this weblog as an integral part of the site, again a great timesaver and ease of use tool.


So the weblog will (slowly) evolve into the usual self-absorbed ramblings that they all do, but hey - there are people out there who are interested in this stuff!   I intend to pontificate occasionally on what is going on with PolicePro, what we see for its future, and how we're going about it all.


With maybe just a little tech talk sort of content in there as well as things appear that impress me - like Rapidweaver.
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