[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] In a comment on my Shaggy Dog story yesterday commenter Iztok gently chastised me for not having backups of my VM’s. Ironically I did. The problem is that my backup strategy is so silently effective that I completely forgot I had it ! Having been reminded, I thought it might be worth sharing.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Marco Cantu just blogged about the price of Delphi and his conclusion that it is reasonably and comparably priced. Whilst it might be encouraging that he is looking at these things in his new role, his methodology and reasoning leaves a lot to be desired.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Simon Stuart recently shared a comment on Google+ about the modern relevance of BASIC. This prompted me to think about BASIC, it’s role in my career and how software development career’s get started today. This post is what came from those thoughts.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] “The Delphi Geek” recently blogged about a performance bottleneck he had identified in FastMM when used with a particular conditional define. Although not directly related, his post reminded me of an experience I had many years ago, working on a highly complex multi-threaded system (long before FastMM) and the strategy we found we had to employ in order to get optimal performance from our threading code when encountering different numbers of CPU’s (these days “cores’).
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] The most important lesson I ever learned in this business… Be cautious or even suspicious when a specification/question is provided in the form of a request for a specific technical solution.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Simon Kissel – of CrossKylix fame and Alternative Roadmap infamy – apparently recently re-appeared in the Delphi forums. I say apparently because Embarcadero or TeamB have seemingly been doing their best to maintain his status as a non-person. Can this be A Good Thing™? I don’t think so.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute] Today is a special day indeed, marking as it does my first contribution to the blog of the product I work on, announcing a technical overview of the forthcoming new version of Flow, the middleware, EDI and integration solution developed using Delphi by us at Flow Software, here in New Zealand.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute] The usually exhaustively complete Raymond Chen over-looked a crucial factor in his most recent posting on his excellent Old New Thing Blog regarding SHAutoComplete. In his post he discusses a technique for disabling auto-complete in a common dialog, but along the way discusses why calling SHAutoComplete twice cannot be used to remove flags previously applied. As I say, Raymond normally is very precise and exhaustive in his coverage, often pre-empting “nit pickers” by calling out in advance anything and everything wrong with a question or with approaches that are implied in the question (or in his answer). In this case, I would have expected him to draw particular attention to the warning in the MSDN docs for SHAutoComplete: “SHAutoComplete should not be called more than once with the same HWND. Doing so results in a memory leak.” But far from it – he actually advocates calling SHAutoComplete a second time to modify flags if needed! Sadly, comments are currently disabled on The Old New Thing due to an extraordinarily lengthy upgrade process being carried out on the underlying blogging system, so I was unable to draw attention to this (and no doubt earn myself a Nit Picker “badge” in the process), but in this case I think it’s worth Read More…
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute] For some reason my two most recent posts don’t seem to have been picked up by the DelphiFeeds aggregator. Apologise to anyone who found my posts by other means. I wouldn’t normally be bothered except that I thought that those two posts were worth some attention.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] As I alluded to a couple of posts ago, I have only recently regained something approaching good health. To get me back on track among other things I have found music to be a great healer. I’ve been playing electric bass and singing with a bunch of guys from work since Christmas and having a blast. Then a few weeks ago a friend in that group suggested I audition for a “proper” band that were looking for a lead vocalist. The long story short is that I took the plunge and I am now lead singer with “5th Quarter”, a covers band here on the North Shore of Auckland in New Zealand where I live.
