Using Delphi in a team

I was just reading Marshall Fryman's post about getting Delphi set up in a uniform way in a team or group setting.  He's looking for a tool to manage the 3rd party components and compiler patches so that everyone on the team has the same setting.

What we ended up doing was documenting the install process for each component and compiler patch in our internal development wiki.  I prefer this method rather than an automated process like what Marshall described.  The wiki has a page that documents each step and provides helpful notes and also includes extra information when needed.  When we change or update a component, we just update that article in the wiki and then notify the developers what would be affected by the change.  We used MediaWiki, but any decent wiki package would do.

This isn't limited to Delphi, we do the same for our .NET development environments.  When we rebuild a PC or add a new team member, it's a straight forward process to get the IDE setup to our team standard.  It also allows us to customize the how we want the components to be installed.  For example, we make sure that each component set has the compiled units separate from the source code.  By just having the compiled files on the search path, doing full builds will not need to spend extra time compiling the third party code.  Most 3rd party packages already do that, but not all of them.  That saves a bit of time.  We also enforce a no warning and no hint rule on our own code.  Doing a full build with 3rd party code in the mix will toss out all sorts of warning/hint messages that we don't need to see.

We also have a dedicated build PC.  The IDE settings on that machine provide the baseline for the wiki article and ensures that a QA-ready build will be compiled with the right settings and the right components.  When one of our developers needs to verify that his settings are correct, they can remote in to the build machine and compare the settings.  We let our developers deviate from our team standard, but not the build machine.  It's our "Gold Standard".

Marshall suggested that CodeGear should define an API the provides a mechanism for 3rd party vendors to install their components to a shared repository.  The IDE would then pull the components from the repository to the locally installed IDE.  That sounds intriguing, but I just don't see everyone getting on board with this one.  Writing an installer to add Delphi components isn't rocket science, but it can be a little tricky.  Adding a new API to that process adds a non-trivial amount of work to the component vendor. 

A lot of what goes under the hood of a component installer is determined at run time for the installer, based on the settings of the IDE that it is installing into.  The DevExpress installer is pretty intricate.  They use a single executable to install their any and all of their Delphi VCL components.  It handles all of the currently supported compilers and the packages that get installed are determined at runtime, based on your registration code.  In addition to installing or repairing the Delphi components, it will also remove the older versions of those components.  It has some fairly tricky logic, but it works very well.

To include support for a component repository API, a bunch of issues is created for the component vendor.  Most component vendors provide their license is by the user.  The API would need a mechanism to store individual licenses and install counts for group license.  The component vendors would have to come up with a standard mechanism for handling registration or license codes.  DevExpress validates their registration codes online against a user account and email address.  This new API would have to handle that.  I just don't see that happening.  There would issues with components that are add-ons to other components.  You would need to implement the logic for the API to address version conflicts between the component vendors.

The idea of using a repository to manage 3rd party components sounds intriguing, but I just don't see the component vendors getting on board.  There would be a lot of work adapting installers to the new API and I just don't see the ROI in it.  For the most part, this would be a feature used infrequently.  It's not like you are installing your Delphi components every day or even every month.  I used to write the QuickReport installers and while the Delphi versions were pretty easy to install, the C++Builder (this goes back 8 years) were just a nightmare to get right.  The last thing you want to do is to make that process anymore complex than it already is.

We started using the wiki approach when we migrated to Delphi 2007.  The first person sailing into the void (usually me) would write the installation instructions as each step was performed on his box.  The next step would be to update the build machine using the Wiki instructions.  This allows us to perform a sanity check on the wiki instructions and make any corrections as needed.  That made the process for the rest of the team pretty much a trouble-free experience.  We do the same thing with our Visual Studio environments. 

The wiki method also lets us document which service packs or hot fixes are required for each IDE.  It also list optional components or packages that, while not required, provide for a better experience with IDE.  Stuff like the DelphiSpeedUp IDE plugin or the GExperts tools are handy, but not required.

Get ready to say good bye to Google Page Creator

When I get some spare time, I plan on revamping the layout of this blog.  Right now, it’s an ugly mess of hacks placed in Blogger templates.  I want to make use of external CSS and Javascript files, but Blogger doesn’t allow you to upload those types of files.  Since of the design goals for this blog is to run it for free, I wanted to have a way of hosting CSS and Javascript files without having to use a paid hosting account.

I read a cool blog article writen by Lars Gersmann on how to add WordPress style calendar pages to Blogger based blogs to jazz up the blog post timestamp.  Lars provided the links the .css and .js files, hosted on his Google Page Creator account.  That looked vaguely familiar, I have a Google Page Creator account gathering virtual dust out in the cloud.  I logged in my Google Pages account and saw an announcement that Google was pulling the plug on Google Page Creator.  if you don’t have a Google Page Creator account now and go to the site, Google Page Creator, you’ll see one of the messages.

On August 4th, Google posted an announcement that they would be shutting down Google Page Creator later this year in favor of Google Sites.  Both sites let you create simple web sites very easily, but Google Sites, will not let you host your own .css or .js files.  Sometime later this year, Google will be shutting down Google Page Creator and I’m assuming that any site left there will be purged.  Google Page Creator was part of Labs.Google.com, which basically means it was a beta project with no guarantee that it would be around as a permanent fixture.

Why doesn’t an OS that backs your OS have any means of backing itself up?

Steve Tibbets has been writing about his troubles with Windows Home Server.  His homebrew Windows Home Server box had a failing power supply and it hosed the registry on the way out.  When he replaced the power supply, he was forced to reinstall Windows Home Server and he’s facing the fun task of trying to recover the data across 4 drives.   Windows Home Server is based on Windows Server 2003, which has the System Restore functionality.  He should have been able reboot the Windows Home Server in recovery mode and restore the OS from the last good system backup.  But that was not the case.

That stuff kind freaks me out about Windows Home Server.  I was in the beta and I had taken my last development machine at home and configured it for Windows Home Server.  The machine had motherboard issues and went to the land where DOS is eternally blessed after a few weeks.  While it was running, I have to say Windows Home Server is pretty cool.  It has a set and and forget it approach for doing bare metal backups of your home machines.  Since it’s Server 2003 based, you get some of the Server 2003 functionality, like a full blown version of IIS.

I’ve been running a FreeBSD solution called FreeNAS to back key files on my home machines.  It doesn’t have the cool features of Windows Home Server, but the price was right and it just works.  FreeNAS will boot from a CD, if the current FreeNAS box dies, I can just slap the drives in another box and install FreeNAS in just a few minutes.  I’ve been toying with the idea of buying one of the HP MediaSmart Home Server with Windows Home Server, but for the amount of money one of those boxes cost, I can hang 1TB external drivers off each machine at home and run scripts every night to RoboCopy every thing to the external drives.

Why www.nbc.com wont load with IE7 on Vista (and how to get around it)

My kids wanted to watch the Olympic swimming events going on in Beijing.  Since NBC is streaming all the venues, I figures I would just fire up the web browser and wander over to www.nbc.com.   We have a “family” pc that everyone can use and it runs Vista Home Premimum (32-bit), with Service Pack 1 installed.  Since I knew that NBC was going to be using the Microsoft stack with Silverlight to stream the video, I figured I would have the least amount of headaches with Internet Explorer 7.  Wrong!

When I entered in http://www.nbc.com into IE, I got the following error: “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.  I figured I mistyped the URL, that wasn’t it.  Out of the relatively small combinations that the letters N, B, and C can be arranged, I did have the right URL.  Could it be that NBC.com was done?  Nope, I tried “ping –n 1 www.nbc.com” and received the following

Pinging a1669.g.akamai.net [128.242.186.219] with 32 bytes of data:                               
                                                                                                  
Reply from 128.242.186.219: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=55                                             
                                                                                                  
Ping statistics for 128.242.186.219:                                                              
    Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),                                          
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:                                                    
    Minimum = 44ms, Maximum = 44ms, Average = 44ms                                                 

That tells us that their site is live and responding to requests.  Just for giggles, I launched FireFox 3 and entered in the URL.  Sure enough, that worked just fine.  What was the problem with nbc.com and IE7?  I did a search with Google (and Yahoo for a change of pace) and saw that a number of people were reporting the same problem.  No one knew the cause and the only resolution was “just use Firefox”.  Normally, that would be an acceptable answer for me.  Today, I’m feeling a bit cranky and I want to know what the problem is between nbc.com and IE7.  The odds are it’s something trivial on the nbc,com side.  We haven’t had any problems with IE7 on Vista before.

I did notice that a lot of people reporting the problem had Tablet PC’s. I don’t have a Tablet PC, it’s just an plain ol’ Dell desktop.  But I did install a Wacom Bamboo tablet and installing it’s drivers did activate some user input functionality in Vista that wasn’t there before.  Why would this affect the browser?  As it turns out, when Vista thinks it’s now a Tablet PC the user agent string sent by IE changes.

Here’s the typical user-agent string sent by IE7 for various operating systems.

For Windows XP SP2: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

For Windows 2003 Server: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2)

For Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)

Note, these are the base strings, different applications can change or add to these values.  On my machine, the user agent has some information:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Tablet PC 2.0; Creative ZENcast v2.01.01)

That says that I’m running IE7 on Vista, with .NET 2, 3, and 3.5 installed.  Media Center extension are installed, it thinks it’s a Tablet PC, and I have Creative’s Zencast (a podcast download app).

Notice the text in bold, “Table PC 2.0”.  When that text is submitted to www.nbc.com as part of the user agent, the website is doing some sort of re-direct that is failing.  So we have what appears to the cause of the problem, now how do we fix it.  I tried faking out the user agent string with a download from Microsoft called the User Agent String Utility, version 2.  Don’t event bother with that one.  It opens up a new browser window that has been tweaked to report itself as IE 6.0 but that’s the only part of the user agent string that gets modified.  It still uses “Table PC 2.0”, so the problem still remains.

In theory, you can edit the list of items that get tacked on the user agent string by hacking at the registry.  With IE7, the list of fields added to the user agent string are defined as REG_SZ values in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform.  I tried removing “Tablet PC 2.0” from the list, but the OS kept putting it back in.  Plus, we really shouldn’t have to modify our systems, the problem is due to www.nbc.com not sniffing the user agent string correctly.

I did a little searching on the Internet and I found a working solution here.  Instead of using www.nbc.com as the starting URL, use www.nbci.com.  That site bypasses the user agent check and it allowed me to the live feeds of the Olympic events.  A very simple solution, but a typical home user would never figure it out on his own and just blame Vista for it.

How to log the TIDSmtp component

I have some Delphi code that needs to send a quick mail message so I was using the Indy 10 TIdSmtp component.  The code was working just fine for a few months, but this week it would fail with an EIdSMTPReplyError exception.  The message property of the exception was a empty string, not terribly useful.  After a bit of googling, I found references to using one of the Indy TIdLogXXXX components.  Sure enough, there is a TIdLogFile component that will log messages to a file.  That sounded like what I needed, but the help file did not make it clear on how to hook up a TIdLogFile to a TIdSmtp component.

I did some searching and found a blog post by Marshall Fryman on his Ruminated Rumblings blog that a great example of how to hook up one of the Indy logging components.  What I needed to do was to create an instance of the TIdSmtp’s IOHandler property and assign the TIdLogFile to the IOHandler.Intercept property.  He also recommended assigning the IOHandler.OnStatus event to TIdLogFile.OnStatus event

The way my code ended up was something like this:

      try
        try
          IdLogFile.Active := true;
          fsmtp.IOHandler := TIdIOHandler.MakeDefaultIOHandler(fsmtp);
          fsmtp.IOHandler.Intercept := IdLogFile;
          fsmtp.IOHandler.OnStatus  := fsmtp.OnStatus;
          fSMTP.Connect;
          fSMTP.Send(fMessage);
        except
          on e: exception do begin
            MessageDlg('Error sending message: ' + e.Message, mtError, [mbOK], 0);
          end;
        end;
      finally
        if fSMTP.Connected then
          fSMTP.Disconnect(true);
        IdLogFile.Active := false;
      end;

How to disable the Windows Shutdown Tracker Dialog

Rick Strahl posted a great tip on how to disable the Windows Shutdown Tracker Dialog. That’s the dialog that Serer 2003 and Server 2008 make you respond to when you reboot or power down the server.  As Rick noted, usually the only time that you need to reboot a Windows Server is when you install an update from Microsoft.  It’s collecting information that you’ll never use.  You can disable that dialog by making a change in the local computer Group Policy.

To disable the dialog, do the following:

• Run the Group Policy Object Editor by typing “gpedit.msc” from the “Run…” dialog.
• Navigate down to Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System
• Double-click on “Display Shutdown Event Tracker” and click on the “Disabled” radio button
• Click the “Ok” button to close the dialog with the new setting.
• Close the Group Policy Object Editor.

This will work for both Server 2008 and Server 2003.

Delphi Win32 gets a TStringBuilder class

The next version of Delphi, code named “Tiburon”, is getting some cool new features.  One of these will be the TStringBuilder class and Andreano Lanusse (a CodeGeart Evangelist Leader) blogged about it.  Basically, it’s a Delphi implementation of the .NET StringBuilder class.  Only it’s available in the managed and unmanaged versions of Tiburon.  Why is this cool?  If you have code that does a lot of string manipulation, using the string class gets expensive, performance-wise.  If you are building up a string piece by piece, each time you add or modify a string, the previous version of the string is discarded and a new string is created.

The StringBuilder class pre-allocates the memory so that you avoid the constant creating and freeing up of string objects.  If you have code running in aloop, you can get real performance benefits by using StringBuilder.  I’m looking forward to getting Tiburon when it’s released.

How to shoot yourself in the foot with regular expressions

I had some Delphi code that is used a user entered text string as a key. After the user entered in the text, my code would force it to uppercase and strip out any characters outside of A-Z and 0-9. This was for a very specialized task and the following Delphi code did the job.

function GetStrippedValue(const value: string): string;
var
i: integer;
begin
result := '';

// strip punctuation out of the name and force to uppercase
for i := 1 to length(value) do
  if value[i] in ['A'..'Z', 'a'..'z', '0'..'9'] then
    result := result + Uppercase(value[i]);
end;

Nothing elegant, and performance wasn’t an issue as it was rarely used. I wrote that code in the spring of 2000 and it hasn’t been touched much since then. I now have a C# application that needs to work with the same data, so I to perform the same functionality using C#. Since C# does not have the set operators that Delphi has, I had to strip out the characters in a different way. I figured that I could use a simple regular expression and match the characters that way. I should have remembered that old quote attributed to Jamie Zawinski:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.”

Now they have two problems.

I had decided to make the expression as simple as possible. I used the following function to accomplish what I had done years earlier in Delphi:

private string GetStrippedValue(string value)
{
  string pattern = @"[^\w]";

  string result = Regex.Replace(value.Trim().ToUpper(), pattern, "");

  return result;
}

What I am doing here is to replace any text that matches the Regex expression with an empty string. The “^” caret character negates the expression, in other words replace anything that doesn’t match the “\w” token with an empty string. I had found the “\w” documented to match any non-word character, but I didn’t look too closely to the definition. I was using the syntax defined at www.regular-expressions.info, where it is documented which matches letters ,digits and whitespace. That turned out to be different from the definition used by .NET and Python.

With .NET, that pattern allows alphanumeric characters, PLUS the ”_” underscore character. A slight, but fatal flaw on my part. I didn’t catch it when I wrote because my sample data didn’t have any underscores in them. I found it today while adapting that code for a new task, where the data can have underscores.

Einstein put it best, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”. My attempt to write the least amount of code was flawed. What I should have done was to use the following syntax:

private string GetStrippedValue(string value)
{
  string pattern = @"(?i)[^A-Z0-9]";

  string result = Regex.Replace(value.Trim().ToUpper(), pattern, "");

  return result;
}

This way, I am explicitly defining the allowable characters and now I’m getting the results that I wanted. Since I am passing in a string that is being forced to uppercase, I don’t need to test for lowercase letters (“a-z”). An alternative version that produces the same results would be:

private string GetStrippedValue(string value)
{
  string pattern = @"[^A-Z0-9]";

  string result = Regex.Replace(value.Trim().ToUpper(), pattern, "",System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

  return result;
}

I’m not sure if one way is better than the other. The “(?i)” is equivalent to the System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexOptions.IgnoreCase RegexOption. For this project the performance of the code is not an issue, it only gets called a few times.

The moral of this story is if you need to use regular expressions, check the syntax for the implementation that you are using.

Black Crayons and the school psychologist, a true story (just not mine)

I follow Raymond Chen’s blog (required reading if you program for Win32) and the other day he had a link to a story that was both hysterical and scary.  My first thought that it was another urban legend.  After a bit of searching, I tracked down the author, Deirdre Sholto-Douglas, and she confirmed that the story was true and gave me permission to repost it here.

It had been originally posted in the alt.peeves newsgroup on USENET back in 1994.  Click here for a reasonable definition of alt.peeves or here to access that group. I’ve included the text as posted, with the exception of the email addresses.  It was posted before the spammers started harvesting email addresses out of USENET and I see no reason to make these addresses public.

---

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS… (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: good@p…. (Craig Good)
From: finch@M… (Deirdre Sholto-Douglas)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves

W. Blair Haworth Jr. (bhaworth@a…) wrote:
: In article 331ipk$omb@v.’.. finch@… (Deirdre
: Sholto-Douglas) writes:

: >You go ahead with your kidlessness and while you do so, I'll continue to
: >kiss skinned knees, assemble bicycles, and enthusiastically accept popsicle
: >stick 'ashtrays'. 

: Ashtrays!  Godamightydamn, things being what they are these days, I'd've
: figured that any kid that turned out an ashtray in arts'n'crafts would be
: immediately sent to Special Ed. for re-grooving and Social Services
: notified to investigate the home environment. 

<sigh> Your comment reminds me of one of the run ins I've had with the school psychologist.  After our disscussion, I've gained a reputation of being unreasonable and my daughter has gained the freedom to construct anything short of atomic bombs without psychological interference.

If I haven't peeved about this in the past, I certainly should have and if I have, I beg the readers' indulgence.

It all started shortly after my ill-fated Parent-Teacher Conference (as did my public school reputation for being unreasonable).  Within a week of this conference, I received a phone call from said 'psychologist'  requesting that I present myself in his office to discuss my daughter's 'problem'.  When questioned, he indicated that the 'problem' was different than the one the teacher and I discussed (which was not addressing adults by first name), but coyly refused to 'discuss a situtation of this magnitude over the phone'.

The following day, at the appointed time, I appeared with offspring in tow. Horrified looks resulted and said offspring was shuttled off to play in the gym.  Apparently these discussions are SECRET.

He began by folding his hands on top of his desk and wearing his 'saintly, patient' expression.  *This* is a man who has not only READ the psych books but *believes* them.

"Has Lauren appeared depressed or been behaving unusually at home?"

"No, she has not."

"Her behavior *hasn't* changed?!"

"No it hasn't.  Pardon my abruptness, but precisely *what* are you driving at?"

He is now refusing to meet my eyes and fiddling with a paperclip on the desk.  Hmmm.  I should have trundled my copy of 'Body Language' along with me.  He could have fidgeted and I could have merrily looked up all the  underlying pyschological causes. 

"Well, erm...you see, Lauren is using only black crayon when she's drawing and studies have indicated that when this occurs the child is usually depressed and attempting to deal with repressed emotions."

"Ah." 

At this point, I was having considerable difficulty repressing one of my own emotions....namely laughter.  What rocks do these nitwits crawl out from under?  Realising that my original response would be a Bad Thing, I quickly pasted my Concerned, But Amused Parental Expression on and continued:

"Have you considered asking Lauren her reasons for using black crayon?"

Shock.  Horror.  Complete dismay.  He actually began stammering.  One does NOT ask the child.  It could cause deep-seated emotional problems, stunt their growth, cause them to suffer from low self-esteem and possibly begin hanging about on street corners with gangs of second graders. 

I excused myself from his office, obstensibly to collect myself, in actuality to collect my offspring from the gym.  I arrived at said gym to find my depressed, repressed, emotionally devasted monster attempting to deal with her deep-seated frustration at not being able to reach the rings.  Was she crying, fussing or sulking?  Nope.  She was trying to negotiate with the custodialdrone for a stepladder.  At this point, I decided she was entitled to draw with black crayons the rest of her life, if that's what she wanted.

We meandered back to the office and I ignored the look of distress that was shot at me.  I parked my recombinant DNA in a chair with orders to 'Behave like a lady.' (Yeah, I know.  So sue me.)  The conference resumed, this time I addressed my questions to Lauren.

"Lauren, Mr. Shit-for-Brains indicates that you only use blackcrayon when you're drawing."

"Yeah."

"Do you *like* drawing in black?"

"No."

"Then why do you do it?"

I was treated to the expression that is reserved for humouring slightly thick parents and watched as my offspring pasted on her Mom's Old Lady But Harmless Expression:

"They make us line up in alphabetical order when they pass out the crayons.  And I'm always last in line...there's nothing left *but* black!"

I turned to witness what our psychological brainchild is making of all this.  He has gone strangely quiet.  Fine.  This interview is over as far as I'm concerned. Although I confess, I couldn't resist lobbing one more over the fence at him.

"Thank you sooooo much for your concern regarding my daughter's emotional well-being.  I suppose your job would be *much* easier if all depressions could be cured by simply starting the crayon box from the other end of the queue.  In the future however, do you think you could at least ask *her* before you haul me in here?"

He managed to mutter something which I took for assent neither Lauren or myself has heard anything from him since.

ObPeeve:  School Psychologists that are looking for deeper meanings in simple kids' actions.

!Peeve:   He now scuttles around the nearest corner whenever he sees me coming.  I think the poor man probably suffers from deep-seated, repressed emotions.

---

Playing with a new toy, a GPS device

While on vacation in Hyannis, I got annoyed with the one way streets odd layouts so I went out and bought a GPS unit.  I had wanted one for a while, and this was a first good excuse to get one.  The Hyannis Staples had a Magellan RoadMate 1412 on sale, so I bought one.  Staples had it for $250, but you can get it cheaper online.  It’s your basic consumer GPS, nice big screen and text to speech (TTS).  It doesn’t have Bluetooth, MP3, or any other non-GPS functionality.  I would have liked having Bluetooth, so I could use it as a speaker for my cell phone, but that would have jacked the price outside the range we wanted to pay.

It worked pretty well and made it a lot easier to get around Cape Cod.  It did have an annoying habit of trying to send me down a one way street the wrong way, but after I ignored that direction a few times it stopped sending me that way.  That would be a fault of the NAVTEQ map used by the Magellan, if you look at Pine Ave on Google Maps (also using NAVTEQ maps), it’s not labeled as one way for any stretch of it.

While writing this post, I visited the NAVTEQ site and found that they have a form for submitting feedback on their maps.  I decided to let them know about the missing one way restriction.  The first thing that I found is that the feedback page fails with Firefox 3.0.1.  As part of the data entry, it loads a map based on the address that you are reporting feedback on.  With FF3.0.1, it never loaded the map and just displayed the text “Please wait. Map applet is loading”.  After a few attempts, I filed it under the “EPIC FAIL” category and launched the page with IE7.  It worked with IE7 and I was able to report the missing road restriction without any problems.  When it prompted me for the GPS device, it did not have the 1412 model listed, but I was able to enter it in manually.  When I tried to save the report, it threw an IE runtime error message: “Object doesn't support this property or method”, but it processed the report.  Many of the links on NAVTEQ’s site threw runtime error dialogs, it got annoying after a while.

After some poking around on the Internet, I found a site called www.gpsreview.net, a fan site for GPS devices.  They had a section for Magellan RoadMate units, so I started browsing the messages.  I learned that there was a newer firmware, 1.34, than the one I had (1.28).  According to the message thread, the newer firmware has a faster touch screen response time plus a few other features.  In this case, faster is better, so I grabbed the firmware.

The 1412 has a standard mini-USB connector, but does not come with a USB cable.  If you have any device that uses mini-USB, then the odds are that the cable that came with that device will work. I keep a USB to mini-USB cable with each PC that I use, it just makes life easier.  If you need one, look for a “A Male” to “Mini B, 5 pin Male”.  Something like this.  It shouldn’t cost more than a couple of bucks.

The installation instructions included a note about having the battery in the 1412 at full charge before upgrading.  Don’t ignore that warning.  When you run the firmware upgrade, you connect the GPS unit to your PC, but you have to unplug it after the firmware has been transferred over to the device.  When the GPS unit is plugged into a PC, it runs in a “USB Connected” mode and normal GPS functionality is disabled.  It has to be disconnected from the PC to complete the firmware upgrade.  That means it’s on battery power.  Magellan claims a full charge will last up to 3 hours.  The only way that is going to happen is if the screen brightness is turned all the way off.  You’ll want to lower the brightness down to the dimmest level that you can still read before doing the upgrade.  After you unplug the cable, the installation process continues on the device and it rebotts a couple of time.  It didn’t take long and the battery held out.

After the upgrade was complete, I started up the 1412.  I brought up the map and the there were no streets.   It appears to be lost.  Being a fan of The IT Crowd, I immediately turned it off and back on again.  No change, just a relatively blank display.  I pressed the little tow truck icon at the bottom of the display to bring up current location.  That showed a blank street location and the while the latitude was correct, the longitude was very close to 0.  Well a longitude of 0 degrees is at the prime meridian, so I started zooming out on map display.  When I zoomed out far enough, I could see that I was in the Pyrénées, in central France.

That’s not good.  France is a non-trivial distance from upstate New York.  I was doing this inside an office building during a heavy rainstorm and it looked like the GPS unit was only picking up four satelites, where it usually picks up quite a bit more.  After some poking around on the unit, I found a “Set GPS Position” option where I could enter in a street address to reset it’s position.  I entered in my office street address and the map went back to normal.  I though that I had somehow toasted the GPS device, but it was back to normal.  All in all, it’s a cool device.

Live from Daryl Hall's House

I came across an interesting site while looking for something else on Wikipedia....

 

Daryl Hall, of Hall & Oates fame, has had a hobby of restoring historic homes here in the US and in England.  Down in Dutchess County, he restored two houses and moved them from separate locations to one property.  These houses were built in 1771 and 1780 and have been joined together by a common room that Hall now uses to perform with friends for a monthly webcast.  The site is http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com and the streaming content is free.  You can download the content for a fee as mp3 or iPod friendly video.  It's worth watching just hear his older stuff reinterpreted by guest artists.  And it's not just his material, I got a big kick watching him sing "Cruel to be Kind" with Nick Lowe.

 

I'm not huge Hall & Oates fan, but they had some really good songs back in the 70'a and he can still hit the notes.  I really liked Hall's Sacred Songs solo CD from 1980 more than I like the duo's music.  I'm not a big fan of watching musical performances on the computer, but this is good stuff.

 

The interesting thing is Hall is paying the all of the costs out of his own pocket.  He's going straight to the consumer without involving any record company.  Of course, the more popular his site gets, the bigger his bill will be for the bandwidth costs.  The production quality is very good, that can't be cheap.  I hope than he can make enough money from the on-line sales to keep doing new shows.  Since he's his own publisher, he can do as many or as few webcasts that he wants.  That's one of the cool things about this format, he has no obligation to perform on any arbitrary schedule.  That should keep the shows fresh.

Bonus TVUG presentation by John Papa

On Tuesday, July 22nd, we will be having a bonus Tech Valley User Group meeting.  We usually skip the summer months, but John Papa is going to be in town and he offered to do a presentation how to consume WCF web services from Silverlight applications. 

John is currently working on new book, Data Services with Silverlight 2, so we get to see first hand what will be in the book.  He posted on his blog what the presentation will cover, anyone interested in doing Silverlight development should attend. 

John has posted an abstract for his presentation:

Silverlight enables developers to use their .NET and XAML skills to develop Rich Internet Applications and to build data driven Silverlight applications that communicate with multi-tier architectures. This session will show how to build Silverlight 2 applications that communicate with and consume REST services and use LINQ to XML to manage XML content, show the various data binding techniques, and show how to use WCF to talk to various middle tier services including custom entity models and the Entity Framework.

If you would like to attend, TVUG meets at VersaTrans Solutions, at 4 British American Blvd, in sunny Latham.  Click here for a map of how to get there.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is coming to an Internet near you.

I can't pass this one up.  “Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is a direct to the Internet miniseries from the mind of Joss Whedon.  It stars Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion and NPH has a knack for playing crazy.

Act One will start streaming on July 15th.  Act’s Two and Three will follow on July 17th and July 19th, respectively.  After the 19th, they will be take down, but they will be available for purchase at a later date/

Here’s a teaser:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Thanks to Marc for the link.

Handling collation sequences with temporary tables and table variables with SQL Server

When building complex stored procedures that span multiple tables, you will probably need to store some intermediate results in a local buffer and process them before returning the final output.  SQL Server lets you do this through temporary table and table variables.  

Usually table variables offer faster performance (less locking and logging are required), but they have more restrictions than temporary tables.  Common to both types is where they are located.  When you create a table variable or temporary table, it gets created in the tempdb database, not in the current database.  This can affect the collation sequences applied to character fields  If the SQL Server was installed using one collation and your database uses a different collation, joins from tables in your database with temporary tables will fail if you join on character fields.  The tempdb database will use the server default collation sequence. That collation may not be the same collation used by your database if your created your database on a different server that used a difference collation.  The server collation is used for all of the system databases (including tempdb) and for any newly created user databases.  Databases that are attached or restored from a backup keep the collation that they were created with.

Gregory Larsen posted some sample SQL code on sqlservercentral.com that will demonstrate the error.  If you run the following SQL:

create table #a (char_set1 varchar(50) collate Latin1_General_CI_AS) 
create table #b(char_set2 varchar(50) collate Latin1_General_BIN) 
insert into #a values ('collate') 
insert into #b values ('collate') 
select * from #a join #b on char_set1 = char_set2

You will an error message like the following:

Msg 468, Level 16, State 9, Line 5

Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_BIN" and "Latin1_General_CI_AS" in the equal to operation.

That example is used to show the type of error you would get in your code.  The actual code that would throw that error would be comparisons between character fields in a temporary table/table variable and with a permanent table in your database.  If you are deploying databases to servers where the server’s default collation sequence could be different than the collation sequence used by your database, then you want to add “COLLATE database_default” to all of your character field definitions when you define a temporary table or table variable.  Using “COLLATE Database_Default” will assign the collation sequence of the current database to the field.  This will allow field comparisons between character fields in temporary tables/table variables and permanent tables to execute with triggering the “collation conflict” error.

Instead of using syntax like:

create table #a(SomeID integer, SomeCharValue varchar(20)) 
  
declare @a TABLE(SomeID integer, SomeCharValue varchar(20)) 

Use the following:

create table #a(SomeID integer, SomeCharValue varchar(20) COLLATE database_default) 
  
declare @a TABLE(SomeID integer, SomeCharValue varchar(20) COLLATE database_default)

This will work no matter what the collation sequence for either tempdb or your database.  You don’t need to query the server to check what the sequence.  The big limitation is that you have to explicitly define the columns in the temporary table.  If you were using SELECT INTO syntax to create the temporary table implicitly by the columns in the SELECT statement, the temporary table will use the collation of tempdb.  You would need to structure the SQL.  For example, if you were using syntax like this:

select name, crdate, filename
into #a
from master.dbo.sysdatabases
drop table #a

You would need to rewrite it to look like this:

create table #a(
  name sysname collate database_default,
  crdate datetime,
  filename nvarchar(260) collate database_default
)
insert #a(name, crdate, filename)
select name, crdate, filename
from master.dbo.sysdatabases
drop table #a

You pay a small penalty by the extra SQL to explicitly define the temporary table, but you gain with having code that will work on any server.

A nice article about using Custom Attributes in your own code

I was poking around the blogs posts on the Falafel site and I came across a nice concise example by John Waters of how to define and use custom attributes in your own code.  His example shows how to use custom attributes as a simple way to define tag values in sub classes without having to write the same code over and over again for each subclass.  It’s a short enough read that there’s no point in excerpting any of it here.

Still time to enter the Darwin Race of Languages

Do you think that hand tweaked C code runs circles around managed code (C#, Java, VB.NET)?  Or do you think that your Just In Time compiled managed code gets the job done more securely than those bit sniffing dinosaurs?  Anxious to prove that Delphi is still relevant?  Want to win some cutting edge component libraries from DevExpress?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, there is still time to enter the Darwin Race of Languages.  The brainchild of Sevensteps CTO Bart Roozendaal, the Darwin Race is pitting a slate of challengers using the compiler and IDE of their choice to write a utility that will solve one of three problems.  The projects are the following:

• Temperatures and CPU load
  A utility that will measure CPU temperatures and CPU load on remote computers
• Multi clipboard utility
  The utility should hold several entries that were place on the clipboard earlier. In effect it should replace the clipboard.
• GUI to a command line program
  A GUI front end for the gbak database command line driven program for the Firebird database.

Each entry will be judged on the software itself and how you documented the design and development of the application.  The goal is not to see which development is best tool, but to see what tools are the best for different types of jobs.  To see where the strengths are and where are the weaknesses of each tool, using real world types of the problems.  The documentation part will share the development process and show how different people come up with solutions for similar problems.

There are already a bunch of sponsors lined up.  DevExpress will be giving away a a license for DXperience Enterprise or the VCL Subscription.  If you wint, you get to pick one of them.  I have DXperience and most of the VCL components, you can’t go wrong with either one of them.

The race is on already, but there is still time to join.  There are a bunch of participants already signed up, covering C#, Delphi, VB, and something on the Mac platform.  Java is not yet represented, does someone out there want to pick up the Java gauntlet?

Installing the “Copy as Plain Text” add-in in Firefox 3

I’ve installed Firefox 3 over Firefox 2 and it’s been a big improvement in performance and UI experience.  But it doesn’t work with all of the add-on extensions that are available for Firefox 2.  There are some nice extensions that were written for Firefox 2 that have not been updated for Firefox 3.  One that I use a lot is the “Copy Plain Text” add-in, written by Jeremy Gillick.  This extension provides a "Copy as Plain Text" option so that you can copy text from a page and have the formatting stripped out.

The problem is that Jeremy hasn't released a version that will run under Firefox 3.  When Firefox installs an add-on extension, it checks the version of the extension and prevents older extensions from being installed.  While this is a good thing in preventing extensions that broke with Firefox 3, it's an annoyance for the ones that work just fine.  I'm not sure what happened Jeremy Gillick, but appears that he has abandoned his simple, but cool extension.

While reading the comments left on the add-on page, I saw that a user named "ervee" (eRVee Moskovic , and that is how he capitalizes it.) had patched "Copy Plain Text" so that it will install with Firefox 3.  It appears that he changed a single line in the install.js file that was bundled in the extension from the line that contained

const gVersion = "0.3.3";
to
const gVersion = "0.3.3b";

And that single letter "b" is all that was needed to allow Firefox 3 to install this extension.

Ervee posted his modified extension as http://ervee.moskovic.org/copy_plain_text/copy_plain_text-0.3.3b-fx+mz+tb.xpi

If you download his modified version of the extension, you have to tell Firefox 3 how to install it.  Save the extension to a local folder, then open the fire from within Firefox 3 by selecting "Open File" from the "File" menu.  You will then be prompted with the Software Installation dialog. Click install and then restart Firefox when prompted.

An alternative method (documented here) would be to open the "Add-ons" dialog by selecting "Add-ons" from the "Tools" menu.  Once that dialog has opened, minimize the main form and drag the extension file to the dialog. You will then be prompted with the Software Installation dialog. Click install and then restart Firefox when prompted.

Either way should work, I did the former and the extension is working just fine with Firefox 3.  Thanks "ervee"!

Valleywag: 10 things Twitter users should not do

I got a laugh from Valleywag’s article: 10 things Twitter users should not do.  My favorite quote was “Twitter is a heat sink for the unexpressed ego.”  If you are on Twitter and don’t find that line amusing, then it applies to you.  It’s like what Ricky Gervais said about the American version of his David Brent character, “If you don’t know a Michael Scott, then you are a Michael Scott”

Google is making Ratproxy freely available

Google has just released the source code to one of their internal testing tools.  Ratproxy is a web proxy that is designed to scan for and log potential problems and “security-relevant design patterns” as you (the user) test your site or web service.

It’s not an automated test tool, it follows the actions of a user and examines the pages that the user would hit during a test run.  By following the user, ratproxy sees the same payload the user receives.  All of the login authentication is handled by the user, ratproxy only observes the data as it goes back and forth.  That allows the user to use any browser and browser specific behavior can be tracked by ratproxy.

Since the actions are directed by the browser, AJAX related traffic is picked up and ratproxy will check for cross-domain script inclusion.  It also has the ability to decompile Flash applets, as there are a few Flash security holes that could allow cross-site script injections.  If you are testing your own code, that shouldn’t be a problem, but if you have some 3rd party Flash applets it's always a good idea to check them.

To install ratproxy, you have to download it as a compressed tarball from it's Google Code download page.  You have to compile it yourself with the included source code.  For Windows, you'll need to have Cygwin installed.  If you are not familiar with Cygwin, it's a collection of tools that provide a Linux-like environment under Windows.  From what I read on the ratproxy documentation page, you may need to tweak the makefile to get it compile with the Cygwin GCC compiler.  Someone mentioned that ratproxy was written for GCC 3.4 and the version that is bundled with Cygwin is version 3.4.4.  If that is the case, version 4.3.1 can be downloaded directly from gcc.gnu.org or from one its mirror sites.  If you want to use 4.3 under Windows,you 'll have to install Cygwin first and build it with the version of GCC that comes with Cygwin.

I don't have Cygwin installed (yet).  I plan on doing so in the near future and I want to compile ratproxy and see how it works.  The idea sounds cool and if it's not too painful to build under Windows, I would like to add it to the test arsenal.  The cool part of ratproxy is that you can use it with your existing test methods, all you need to do is to direct your browser or test tool to use the ratproxy as a proxy server.

Ratproxy was written by and is maintained by Michal Zalewski, a computer security expert on the "white hat" side.  His personal site has some interesting side projects.

Where are the Kibos of yesteryear?

To paraphrase an old Yossarian quote, where are the Kibos of yesteryear?  The other day I read a question that Jeff Atwood had tweeted about Kibo, a name I had not seen in a very long time.  Kibo was the handle of James Parry, and he was famous for responding to any message posted on Usenet that contained the word “Kibo” in it.  Wired did get a great article about Kibo in their September, 1993 issue.  To get in touch with Kibo, they posted a couple of messages with the word “Kibo” in them in some random groups.  He replied to each message.

Basically Parry had written some code that grepped every new message posted to Usenet for his handle.  And Parry would reply to those messages, with strange and often surreal posts.  Eventually, he got his own Usenet group, alt.religion.kibology.  This took place in the early 90’s when public awareness and access to Usenet was limited to mainly colleges and computer hackers.  He was also known for having a hideously long .signature (a block of text tacked to the end of every message) with one example here.  Some of his collected work can be found on his site.

Oddly enough, Sonicwall’s content filtering categorizes the www.kibo.com site as a forbidden category. “Cult/Occult”.  Easy enough to get around, but still pretty odd.

It’s not a TiVo, it’s just a DVR

There’s a post on the TV Board blog that really illustrates the differences between a TiVo and a cable company DVR.  A friend of the blog’s author (Mitch Oscar) was contacted by his cable operator, Comcast, and was offered a DVR.  We now join that conversation already in progress:

“I don’t need your DVR, I already have a TiVo,” she said.

“Our DVR is the same as TiVo but it comes free with our service,” the sales rep adamantly replied.

“Oh, really, well I have a lifetime membership with TiVo. Can you log on from any computer and schedule something to record?” she retorted.

“No.”

“Can the DVR you offer be networked to my computer?”

“No.”

“Can I transfer shows between TVs?”

“No.”

“Can you store whatever you record on the DVR to your computer?”

“No.”

“Can you convert anything that you have recorded to play on your iPod video?”

“No.”

“Can you burn anything you have recorded on your DVR onto a DVD?”

“No.”

“Then I would have to say your DVR is nothing like a TiVo. All yours does is record.”

”I guess you’re right, it’s not the same.”

 

That really sums up the advantage that TiVo has over CableCo DVRs.  On the flip side, you do have to pay for TiVo and that’s a $200 or more that you don’t pay with the CableCo DVR.

I came across that post via the TiVo Lovers blog.

I see the Cylons found Twitter

Maybe they can fix it?  You can get the list of Cylons and associated BSG characters from the Hybrid’s Friends list.

If you know BSG and are on Twitter, it’s pretty funny.  Some random excerpts…

galentyrol I am Cylon, but I will never be able to download into a fresh body. Apparently I can grow old & get fat, too. Being Cylon pretty much sucks about 17 hours ago from web
leoben Bored today.... If the Hub was still around I'd airlock myself. You know...for fun. 11:59 AM June 26, 2008 from twhirl
leoben Some wonder why I am so obsessed with coffee. Haven't any of you had Starbuck's coffee before? 09:45 AM June 25, 2008 from twhirl
saultigh @capricasix I know what love is! I loved @billadama and @ellentigh and look where it got me! I mean them! I mean me! Can I call you "ellen"? 08:10 PM June 14, 2008 from web in reply to capricasix 
billadama Breakfasting on a Basestar, and discovering that these new Centurians do a really, really good job at preparing toast. Ironic. 09:47 AM June 13, 2008 from web

 

Why I like owning a TiVo

This tip just popped in my email as part of the TiVo Newsletter:

TiVo Tip: Only the Best, Thank You

So you want to see the 100 greatest American movies of all time, do you? Easy! Get the AFI, 100 Years… Guru Guide and TiVo will automatically record every movie from the list that comes into your living room, from Tootsie to Toy Story, Swing Time to Star Wars, and 96 more. Here's all you need to do:

• From TiVo Central, select Find Programs & Downloads.
• Select KidZone Recommendations & Guru Guides.
• Scroll down to find AFI, 100 Years…
• Movies will magically appear on your Now Playing List, just like regular TiVo recordings.

Note: You must be broadband-connected to get a Guru Guide using your TiVo remote. Alternatively, try browsing the guide and scheduling recordings online.

Being able to do stuff like that is one of the reasons I love having TiVo in the house.

Fix for endless registration loop with Delphi 2006

With the acquisition, our login accounts are being migrated to a new domain.  We are doing this in multiple parts, with the first part changing our existing domain logins from using our last name plus first initial (millerc) to what is referred as the User Principal Name (basically our email addresses).  Of course, when I say “we”, I refer to our IT manager.  I’m just along for the ride and to make witty comments when it breaks.  That part went smoothly, the second step occurred last Sunday night when said IT Manager changed our logins (pre Windows 2000 format) from last name plus first initial to last name “.” first name (chris.miller).

When we logged in this morning and started up Borland Developer Studio 2006 (aka Delphi 2006), something broke.  We would get errors like

The license manager reported the following error: 
  
License storage c:\documents and settings\millerc\.borland\borlands.lic does not apply to current user or host machine. 

  
Please register your Borland products(s).(7006).

Do you want to run the registration wizard?

or

Fatal error validating license for Borland Developer Studio 2006 
  
The license manager reported the following error: 

  
Missing activation file.  Please register again. (7029).

Do you want to run the registration wizard?

Just what I wanted to see first thing on a Monday morning.  Thank you, sir. May I have another?

Each time we would run the registration wizard, we would go through all of the steps to register Delphi and it would report that it was successfully registered.  After closing the wizard, we would get the same error message again.  Not a good sign.

I ran the registration wizard one more time and selected register by phone and called the number for US support.  The support representative was friendly but had no clue for what was happening.  The only thing she could was to open a support case.  I tried a few more times after completing the call and found out that you could only register 10 times, after that your registration code has been used up.  I was somewhat less than thrilled when I found that little gem.

After four hours had passed, I decided to call that support number again.  The support representative that answered this time was much more helpful.  He immediately contacted a support engineer, who knew what the problem was and referred to it as “an endless registration loop”.  They emailed me a list of instructions and I was able to get Delphi 2006 up and running again.  He also updated my account to accept two more registrations.

The funny part for me was that I had migrated all of my projects to Delphi 2007, which was not affected by the change in user id’s.  I jumped in to help out the other developement team, who were still on Delphi 2006. 

The following is a slightly edited version of the steps that CodeGear support had sent to me.

Sometimes the registration information on a machine can become corrupted and cause an endless registration loop. This also happens when the user login name is changed or if a machine is changed to log in to a Domain. The following steps should help to resolve the problem.

WARNING: These step will remove registration information for other Borland IDE products as well.

1. Close down Delphi and the Registration Wizard if they are running



2. Browse to the .borland directory in your user home directory. For Windows 2000 and XP this will be located at c:\documents and Settings\<username>\.borland



3. Open the file registry.dat and copy the SerialNumber and AuthorizationKey values stored under "[Delphi 2006]", this save you the step of trying to remember where you had stored that information. Also make a note of either the UserName or EmailAddress values stored under "user". You will need these values when you register Delphi.



4. Delete the borland.lic and registry.dat files in the .borland directory. You may also want to move those files to another location that is not on the path



5. Remove the .<Random#A> directories from your User Home (directory name will start with a . and contain 6 or 7 random numbers and letters)



6. Remove the .<Random#>.slip files from your User Home file name will start with a . and contain 6 or 7 random numbers followed by .slip)



7. Remove any activation files that you saved in your User Home. These will by default be in the format of reg*.txt



8. Launch BDS 2006 which will activate the Registration Wizard.



9. Cancel completely out of the Registration Wizard (This is an important step and will write new correct default information to your User Home).



10. Launch BDS 2006 a second time and this time register the product when the Registration Wizard comes up.



11. If you ran the registration wizard too many times, your serial number will get locked out. You are limited to 10 installations. If you exceed this count, you will need to call CodeGear (800-523-7070 for the US) and asked for that count to be raised. They can raise the count limit by two each time that you request it.

This worked for me, but the usual YMMV caveats apply.  I added steps 3 and 11.  Once you delete the registry.dat file, you will have deleted the cached copy of your serial number and authorization key.  By making a copy of them, it becomes one less this to have to lookup.  If you already have Delphi 2007 or RAD Studio 2007 installed, these steps will not affect them.

Resizing the “Bookmark this page” dialog in Firefox 3

I like using the new Firefox 3, but there is a little thing that annoys me.   When you go to bookmark a page, you get the “Bookmark this page” dialog.  Inside that dialog, there is a folder tree that will display your bookmark folders.  Out of the box, you can only see a little more than handful of folders at time, you have to scroll around to find the folder to use.  If you are as hierarchal-retentive as I am, you can have lots of folders, some nested pretty deep.  I know about the new tags functionality, but I still like to file my bookmarks like a squirrel with his acorns.

The “Bookmark this page” (and the “Page Bookmarked”) dialog isn’t doesn’t have the resize widgets.  You can’t just drag an edge or a corner and resize it with a mouse.  For some reason, it’s size is fixed.  Unless you want to go under the hood and tweak the UI a bit.

There is a file named userChrome.css in the chrome sub folder of the profile folder.  This file lets you override various GUI settings in the Mozilla product line.  It’s doesn’t exists by default, you have to put one in the chrome folder.  A file named userChrome-example.css should exist already in that folder.  All you need to do is to  copy that file to userChrome.css and you are ready to start.

I added the following CSS code to increase the size of the folder tree control that is located in the middle of the dialog.

/*
* FF3.0, FORCE BIGGER DISPLAY OF FOLDER TREE WITHIN 'BOOKMARK THIS PAGE' POP-UP
*/
#editBMPanel_folderTree
{
min-width:400px !important;
min-height:600px !important;
}

After adding that definition and saving the file, you will need to restart FireFox.  This should work for Firefox 2, but I haven’t tested it there.  I found that little gem right here on the mozillaZine forum.  That will give you a much longer list when you open the folder tree.

A new user to Delphi reports on his annoyances

Branden Tanga posted a list of annoyances with Delphi on his blog.  While there are some legitimate complaints you can make about Delphi (the borked help system), his complaints largely stem from being unfamiliar with the IDE. I’m going to paraphrase his complaints to just list the gist of complaint and my responses.  Other people have commented on his complaints, but I did want to note that his first one has some value.

• “Can’t indent a block of text”  You can indent by pressing Shift+CTRL+i and unindent with Shift+Ctrl+u.  You would never know by looking the IDE.  Those actions could have been listed on the “Edit” menu.  I searched the help and could not find it.  If you are new to Delphi, there is no way you would have know how to do this with asking someone.  I had to go back the Delphi 7 help system and search on “Block commands”.  I hope that Nick Hodges is following this.  And there is a free plugin named DDevExtensions that (among other things) will give you the ability to use the Tab/Shift+Tab for indent/unindent.
• “Weird bug where RAD will crash”  Hmm, can’t say much without knowing what he was trying to do at the time.  The obvious question is did he have all of the updates and hotfixes installed?
• “If you launch your application from within RAD, it must be managed within RAD”  That’s because you are running it from within the debugger.  And you can stop it from the debugger.
• “You have to pay 3rd parties for extra widgets. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Visual Studio and the Windows API provide me all the widgets I could want….Delphi developers like to make their own widgets and sell them to each other.”  That one made me stop and say “Huh?”  Out of the box, you get more components with Delphi than with VS.  Delphi has Project JEDI and their huge library of controls and other functionality.  There is nothing quite like that in the Microsoft ecosystem.   Is Branden aware of the huge market of 3rd party components for Visual Studio Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, etc)?  I just don’t see how he came up this complaint.
• “There is no free version of CodeGear RAD”  Actually there is a version, it’s called Turbo Delphi.  It’s not the current version of Delphi (Delphi 2006 based), but it’s current enough to introduce you to the product.  I hope that the new owner of Delphi, Embarcadero, will release new versions of the Turbo line.  it’s fine line that they will need to walk.  Having the Turbo Editions allow people to get a taste for Delphi without having a large expense, but they don’t want to take away from sales of the full product.  it is a commercial product, sales revenues pay for the continued development of the tool.
• “You can only write Delphi code using RAD, which costs money to own.”  That’s negated my previous comment about Turbo Delphi.  The whole idea of doing application development with Delphi is that it’s a RAD tool.  Why would you want to do app development with notepad anyway?
• ”There are properties and objects that are COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the developer, and the only way to access them is through RAD's wysiwyg editor.”  The visual properties and objects are stored in the .dfm files, which are text based.  If you embed graphics into a component, the image will be streamed as series of hex values, but you would get the same type of stream with images embedded in .NET components.

Out of all of those complaints, only the one with any value is the blocking indenting issue.  And that’s a help/documentation issue as Delphi has a full set of block commands, they just are not documented anymore.  I work in both VS 2008 and Delphi 2007, they both have their strengths and they both have their weaknesses.  I am curious about how much time Branden spent with Delphi before composing his list.

Understanding locking issues with multithreaded code

From Joe White’s blog, I came across a link to an interesting article about working with various locking models when writing multithreaded code.  It was written by Vance Morrison, the compiler architect for the .NET Runtime and it’s required reading for anyone doing multithreaded coding.  It was written a few years back, but is still relevant.  I’ve read it a couple of times and I still have not grokked all of it.

The article is written for the .NET Framework 2.0, but the concepts are applicable to anyone doing multithreaded code.  I agree with Joe’s assessment, if you don’t understand what Vince is talking about for any of the techniques described in the article, then don’t use that that technique.  Debugging thread interactions is not easy and using a debugger will change your program flow enough to make it difficult to catch thread conflicts.

What’s good with this article is that Vince goes down to the metal and explains how the multiprocessor machines changed the game with how threads access memory.  Memory access is no long serially consistent, each processor has multiple levels of cache memory and the processor will attempt to retrieve cached memory before checking system memory.  Know how that works and when cache memory is synchronized back to system memory is important and can be a factor in determining what type of locking mechanism to build into your threads.  This article describes situations where you can eliminate locks for locks for some types of threaded memory access.  Vince refers to these techniques as “Low-Lock”.

It is important to note that using Low-Lock will make your code fragile as you are much more dependant on on how the hardware will behave in terms of memory access.  They should only be used when the performance increase is absolutely required.   Vince has a related article called “Concurrency: What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps” does a very good job of explaining how to use locks properly with multithreaded code.  He linked to that article in the lock lock article, but that link is broken.  Use this one instead.

Evans Data’s 2008 IDE User Satisfaction Survey

Evans Data has released their 2008 edition of their Integrated Development Environments User Satisfaction Survey.  They surveyed actual IDE users and asked them to rate the various features and capabilities.

The IDE’s that were ranked by the survey:

• Adobe Macromedia Studio/ Creative Suite 3
• CodeGear Delphi
• IBM Rational Application Developer
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• MyEclipse
• NetBeans
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Sun Studio

They were ranked based on the ratings for the following features:

• Debugger
• Editor
• Make/Build Functions
• Documentation
• Application Modeling Tools
• Web Design Tools
• Sample Applications
• Profiler
• Compiler Performance
• Performance of Resulting Applications
• Ease of Use
• Ability to Integrate 3rd Party Tools
• Availability of 3rd Party Tools
• Quality of Technical Support Options
• Size and Quality of Developer Community

Delphi was rated 6th and Visual Studio was 3rd.  The survey is worth reading because despite Delphi’s mid-pack rating, it scored at the top or near the top for the following features:

• Debugger
• Editor
• Compiler Performance
• Performance of Resulting Applications
• Ease of Use
• Ability to Integrate 3rd Party Tools
• Availability of 3rd Party Tools

It’s kind of an eclectic mix of IDE’s.  Half of the IDE’s are Java development, Adobe is all about the graphics and Flash development, Sun is C and C++ for their OS.  That leaves Visual Studio and Delphi for the Windows camp.  It does identify what we already know abut the weaknesses of Delphi.  Namely the documentation is still pretty bad.  Documentation has been a moving target for Delphi since Delphi 2006 has been released.  It’s been getting better, but still has a way to go.  I hope the new owner is willing to put in the resources to get it the documentation back up to the level it was at with Delphi 7.  As I noted earlier, the Delphi talent pool is shrinking and Embarcadero needs to decide soon where they want to take Delphi.

Thanks to Roland Beenhakker for posting about this survey on his blog.

Good help (Delphi programmers) is hard to find

I was just reading a post on Bart Roozendaal's Sevensteps blog titled "Are Delphi programmersa dying breed?".  The title pretty much sums up Bart's point, it's getting harder and harder hire programmers with Delphi experience.  It took a long time for us to find our last two Delphi hires.  Here in Albany, we never had a huge talent pool to pick from, and these days you just can't find the Delphi talent.

Whenever I posted for open positions on the Borland jobs newsgroup, the only responses were from outsourcing companies.  That was something we just didn't want to pursue.  The domain knowledge in getting up to speed with our products can be a little steep, we prefer to keep that knowledge in house and make a long term investment in our development staff.

So where did they all go?  At my last place of employment (nearly 9 years ago), I was on a team of 7 programmers, all using Delphi.  Right after I was hired, we bought by a company that had no use for Delphi and decided that we would be the Java team (minus the tools and the training).  To make a short story long, within 6 months the team all departed to other local companies.  Of that group, I'm the only one still using Delphi.  And I'm not even full time Delphi, it's 50% Delphi and 50% C# (and the Delphi percentage is trending down).

For the other 6, two of them went the Java route, just not at that company.  Another went back to his AS/400 and DB2 roots, the rest bounced around with VB and ASP and eventually ended up in .NET.  I'm betting that's happening to a lot of the Delphi programmers.  A lot of the work out there is for web based applications.  For that market, the Microsoft stack is much stronger than the web based development tools that Delphi provides.

This has to be hitting the companies that still do desktop applications with Delphi pretty hard.  I still think that Delphi is a better choice for desktop applications and services than .NET.  The problem is finding people that still want to work with Delphi.  We are fully staffed now, but it too a long time to get the last two.

Is anyone taking up Delphi anymore?  if you are a fresh new programmer, Delphi probably isn't going to be something you will take up on your own.  I don't know how Embarcadero is going to deal with this.  They just bought a powerful development tool in Delphi, but will they get people to take it up?  Without fresh blood coming in, the Delphi talent pool is going to continue to shrink.

I really want a Dalek surveillance cam for my office

I saw this linked to on Boing Boing, a remote control Dalek toy outfitted with a pinhole security camera with wireless transmitter. It will transmit decent quality video up to 100m.

It’s not cheap, but the really cool toys never are. 

Is there ever a good reason to “Google Bomb”?

I was just reading this article in Computer world about a political blogger, Chris Bowers, using a tactic called “Google Bombing” to raise the profile of some negative articles about Senator John McCain.  While I’m not likely to be considered a McCain supporter, I’m not a big fan of Google Bombing.

If you are not familiar with the term, "Google Bombing" is the practice of getting as many sites as you can to link to the same page or pages, using the same format for the links.  The intent is to raise the page rank of the links, so that they show up earlier in the Google search results.  For a more in-depth explanation and some historical context, please visit your local Wikipedia.

Basically this blogger is trying to game the system to promote his viewpoint.  if you have to stoop to tricks like that, that tells me that what you have to say is not strong enough to stand on it's own.  Bowers isn't the only one doing this, he's just being the most vocal about doing it.  It wouldn't surprise me to hear that both the Obama and McCain campaigns are doing some targeted "Google Bombing" of their own.

Is it really worth the effort?  If one or both the candidates were unknown, then "Google Bombing" would have some effect.  I think anyone is on the fence between the two isn't going to make up his mind until after they debate a few times.

Getting past the political considerations, I just don't see the long term value of add of messing around with how Google and other search engines index web pages.  Being able to find just anything I need on web instantly is a luxury I would not want to give up.  Using "Google Bombing" to mess with Google's advance ranking technology has the tendency to turn valued search results into noise.  What would be considered an acceptable or desired reason to "Google Bomb"?