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 Monday, 5 April 2004
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OK, thanks for being patient. All the old blog posts are here now, and the blog is running under Radio. At this stage it pretty much just works like before, but at least now I have the flexibility to add more features (trackbacks, comments, categories, etc)
I had hoped it might be easier than this. Why can't I just point Radio at my old RSS feed and have it suck in all those posts (as posts I mean, not in its aggregator). One of the unfortunate side-effects is that my posts from the last month or so all show up as being posted today (I guess from Radio's point of view, they are).
Anyway, it's done, so let's move on.
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Yes, I know the dates here have gone screwy. I moved from the beta of Powerblog 2 to the release version this morning, and the rot has set in. It use to deal OK with the fact that I don't do dates in US format, but now it doesn't. The RSS feed seems to be fine, and articles created under the beta also seem OK, but new articles are buggered.
I've been thinking about going to another tool for awhile (Radio maybe), so maybe this and the fact that Danny tells me my RSS won't validate, might push me over. Suggestions anyone? I need a desktop tool, as I need to be able to blog offline. Most solutions I've found seem to be server-based.
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Since FBO have re-sent my DVD's, I've been watching Cowboy Bebop - Session 4. It's going to be a sad day when I reach the end of Session 6. Bebop has been the most enjoyable of all the anime series I've watched.
The other series I've been trying out to replace my Cowboy Bebop addiction haven't really done it for me (Rurouni Kenshin, for example. Samurai X was OK, but the slapstick in Rurouni Kenshin really annoyed me).
Someone suggested I try FLCL, but I want to do a little more research first. My copy of Rurouni Kenshin Vol 1 is destined for eBay, and I'm not in a hurry to order another one on spec.
Any other suggestions?
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I have a bunch of ISO images of product installs, and it's always a pain in the bum to have to either burn them to CD or extract them using something like WinISO to use them. To make matters worse, I've just downloaded a not quite 3gig DVD ISO file and need to install, and of course, can't find a DVD Burner anywhere.
Luckily, a quick Google turned up this, Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP, an unsupported tool from Microsoft which lets you mount an ISO file as a drive letter. You have to manually install (there is a readme.txt file) but it seems to work well, even with 3gig ISO's.
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This probably only of interest to Aussie readers, but anyway...
I've ordered Anime from www.fbo.com.au a couple of times with no problems, but my last order never arrived. Talking to Lexie (spelling?) at FBO, it appears to have been delivered to our building, but where it went after that I don't know.
Strictly speaking, this probably isn't FBO's problem. They could probably have legally said "tough" and I'd have been out of pocket. But, they have ensured that they will be my first stop for buying DVD's in future. They are resending my entire order at no charge!
Problems occur, but a company that thinks like this will always get my recommendation.
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I've always been quite interested in extending Delphi using the Open Tools API. My first add-in was back in Delphi 2 days, called CodeQuick. Amazingly, it's still listed on Torry's for all you D2 users out there :-).
Anyway, lately I've been writing a few add-ins for Delphi 8 on flights and in spare moments, the first of which is ready for some more public scrutiny.
FileExplorer is a free add-in for Delphi 8, which provides Explorer-like functionality in a dockable window inside the IDE. There's more info and some screenshots on the project page, along with some ToDo's, but please feel free to grab this version and try it out. Feedback is of course welcome.
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In an earlier post, I mentioned the new C++BuilderX 1.5 which, amongst other things, includes a Visual Designer for Symbian apps. Well, we've finally posted the Flash Demo. Well worth a watch before you download the trial version.
Update: More detailed screenshot here
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One of the guys in the Borland Korea office mentioned in conversation that most Credit Card companies in Korea offer to send you SMS messages whenever your card is used. Apparently they pitch this as a security measure, but it is not much used for its original purpose. It's wildy popular, apparently, among husbands who get their mobile numbers assigned to their wife's Credit Card, thereby letting them monitor their wife's spending.
I told my wife about this (who, by the way, was out shopping while I was at work being told this), who quickly declared that it would never take off in Australia, and added, with a challenging look, "certainly not in our household".
Funnily enough, my bank back here in Oz has just sent me an email saying they are about to start trialling it for all their accounts, including Credit Cards. They aren't pitching it as a security measure, more as a way to find out when that important payment gets deposited into your account. Hmmm, wonder if I'm brave enough to tell her :-)
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Australia, a country in denial.
Man, this is kinda the same feeling as when you were a teenager and one of your parents tried to act cool around your friends :-(
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I've been having a lot of fun playing around with the new C++BuilderX 1.5 Mobile Edition.
It was only released in the last couple of days, but one of the big changes in this one over v1.0 is the addition of a Visual Designer for Series 60 applications (the phone-looking thing in the screenshot above is not an emulator, it's actually the Form Designer).
There are normal GUI-type components, but there are also non-visual components for everything from interfacing with BlueTooth, accessing the camera on your phone, the Address Book, etc. Obviously, a Visual Designer is no substitute for synaptic activity, but it does seem to make the whole process more approachable. I had my Hello World Symbian app up and running in an emulator in about 5 minutes, and debugging it on the device via Bluetooth in about 5 more. Now, all I need is a good idea for an app :-)
There's a trial version available here (the Mobile Studio link partway down the page. Mobile Studio includes Java and C++ in the same IDE) and we should have a Flash-based demo available shortly.
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Does anyone actually want to interact with their computer like this?
Seems like every few years, somebody pops up and decides that a desktop that looks like your house is exactly what non-computer literate people need to be comfortable using a computer.
I guess I have a couple of problems with this:
1. It's insulting. It kinda assumes that because someone is not computer-literate, that they are stupid. If you sat my Mum down in front of Windows, she wouldn't know where to start. But that doesn't mean she'd be any happier in something like 3DNA. She knows her computer isn't her living room, and she doesn't need it to be, she just needs it to be a little more intuitive. Let me give you a simple example. My Mum doesn't want to have to remember that Powerpoint is for presentations, Outlook is for email, Internet Explorer is for browsing the web, she just wants icons that say "Presentations", "Email", 'Web". That takes a minute of creating and renaming shortcuts on her desktop, not an investment in some wizz-bang, 3D, virtual reality doo-hickey.
2. It doesn't work. OK, let's assume my Mum really does want her PC to look like this. Will this help her get up to speed? I don't think so. Look at the screen shot on this page. Will a non-computer literate person know that to open a document, they click on Media sign on the wall? Is that intuitive?
3. It doesn't scale. Ok, let's assume that 1 and 2 above are wrong, and this IS exactly what my Mum is looking for. What happens once she is comfortable using this interface and wants to get into more advanced stuff. With this, there is not a nice progression over to the "normal" Windows interface. She pretty much has to toss out what she's learnt and go back to being a newbie.
OK, so that's 3, not a couple, and given time I could probably ramble on further, but am I off base here? I don't deny that from a geek perspective the technology in this is pretty cool, and I would never suggest that Windows does a good job in terms of being easy for a novice to use, but I don't think this is the solution.
I suspect a big part of helping novices is to let them work in a task-based approach, not in an application-based approach (the example in point 1 above). I have nothing but gut instinct to justify this, but I suspect the advances will be made with smaller tweaks to the exisiting UI, not by throwing it out and replacing it with a video game.
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We actually got caught up in this protest in Seoul last week. We came out of Kyobo (Korea's largest bookstore) and walked straight into a horde of protesting Koreans. The photo makes them look angry, and indeed the people I spoke to in Korea were mostly irate at the opposition's behaviour, however from what I saw at this protest they were enjoying themselves thoroughly. Bands were playing, vendors were selling food and it seemed like hundreds of people were trying to give us candles in cups (it was bloody cold, so we were very tempted to take them just to warm our hands). Apparently the protest went on for 3 or 4 days, so maybe all protests should be this much fun.
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Whenever my issue of The Delphi Magazine used to arrive, the first thing I would read was Julian Bucknall's Algorithms column. He's got such a knack for making complicated and oftentimes fairly dry subject matter not only clear, but interesting as well. I learn new things everytime I read his columns, even when I reread them.
Anyway, he stopped writing them awhile back, but today I stumbled across him twice. He's blogging, actually, he's got two blogs. One is on his homepage at www.boyet.com (RSS) and one is over at Falafel (RSS).
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We took a bit of a holiday in Seoul at the end of my trip, so I'm just getting back into it.
Before the holiday, however, we had a half day Delphi 8 for .NET event, with just shy of 700 Delphi developers showing up! I'm going to write something up for BDN with some photos.
Anyway, the Borland Korea staff worked like crazy on the event, and I swanned in to do the opening keynote bit and a C#Builder plug (as well as inflict my grasp of Korean on the audience. Needless to say, they were very polite).
As is usually the way, the one who did the least work got the glory, and I ended up in Korea's largest IT newspaper the next day, which earned me many brownie points with my Korean Mother-in-law :-) However, it has raised the bar, as she expects me on TV next time I'm in Korea, another newspaper clipping just won't cut it.
Hmmm, do you think I might be losing my hair?
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At the end of April I'll be speaking at the ADUG Symposium on issues around porting Delphi/Win32 apps to Delphi/.NET. I've spoken at Borcon and other conferences with most of these guys before, but never in such a condensed setting. AND I'm at the end of the day. Bloody hell, talk about pressure.
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This piece raised some interesting questions for me.
I'm going to try and avoid the obvious response which, as I work for a development tools vendor, you can probably guess.
But I'm wondering at what point do you decide that your tool is doing quite enough thank you very much? I know this will be different for everybody, but why is today's level of abstraction enough, whereas the level we had 5 years ago was not? Why was it OK for dbExpress to abstract out details of dealing with databases, but it's not OK for ECO to take that further?
Is the rise of code-focused features (like refactoring, smarter code templates, code intentions, etc) in IDE's a recognition that giving people more wizards, components and frameworks is not necessarily what they are after? Just give me stuff that lets me bang out code faster?
I was just chatting with someone about this who said that your comfort level is determined by the technologies at which you first become truly proficient. Actually, he qualified this by saying this was the point where you no longer had to spend too many cycles on the details of the framework, language syntax, etc and could focus the majority of your attention on the problem. For example, I used to be a C++ developer, but I really sucked. I jumped ship to Delphi 1, but I don't think I approached this "proficient" point until around the Delphi 5-ish timeframe. So, this theory says that Delphi 5 should be my comfort level and everything after that just becomes "this bloody tool getting in the way".
Hmm, don't think I buy that. I'm not sure what I would buy instead, but this doesn't do it for me. Or is it that you reach a point where it's just hard work to keep up with the latest doo-hickey and you either put on a suit and tie or grumble about Microsoft taking the fun out of programming.
Well, I'm wearing a suit and tie as I write this, so I'm sure that's not it :-)
However, it is an interesting thing for tools vendors to be thinking about. I know I've faced this type of response from people while we've been out evangelising .NET via C#Builder and Delphi 8. Our industry is pretty much built on raising productivity by lifting the level of abstraction, and I'm not suggesting that should stop. Is it just a case that, as Geoffrey Moore would suggest, eventually market pressure will force the the laggards to adopt the new abstraction or get left behind?
Theories anyone?
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I'm in Seoul, Korea at the moment, and a few days before I got here they had their biggest dump of snow in 100 years. Needless to say, there is still snow to be found lying about, which is a novel experience for a boy from Sydney (where today, BTW, it was 39 Celcius/102 Farenheit). I've been caught a couple of times smiling like an idiot at a pile of snow by folk from the Borland Korea office. I've restrained myself so far, but I may just sneak out of the hotel tonight and find a quiet spot to throw a snowball or two.
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Speaking of eBooks, Safari comes close I think. I like that I am subscribing to a library of books, rather than to a specific title. I'm still trying to decide how effective the whole download token thing would work for me, given that the bulk of my programming time these days is in Qantas economy class with no access to the net.
I also thought O'Reilly were onto an interesting idea with the Visual Studio.NET editions of their Nutshell books. Having the text of these reference books available integrated into HTML Help 2.0 in C#Builder and Delphi 8 appealed to me a lot, however they don't seem to have expanded this offering beyond a handful of titles.
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The Free Beer post below made me think of the whole eBook thing again.
I currently receive a number of magazine subscriptions in electronic format, and I love it. It takes bloody ages for hardcopy magazines to make it all the way to Australia, and I have no problem at all reading PDF versions of magazines on flights, etc. Worst case, I can print out the specific articles and read them in the proverbial.
So why are eBooks so unsatisfying, when magazines in this format rock?
Part of it for me comes back to updates. Magazines are almost meant to be transient (although don't mention the boxes of Delphi Magazine, DDJ, etc back issues I have in my garage), but books are supposed to be longer lived. As far as I can tell, most eBooks don't come with updates. The Indy book is one exception, but I wish more eBook publishers would treat them like software. Give me minor updates for free, and charge me (a reduced amount) for major upgrades, or let me subscribe so I get everything for a year.
eBooks give publishers the cost model of software, but they don't seem very keen to pass on the other benefits to end users.
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Just stumbled across Srinivasa Sivakumar's list of free sample chapters from (mostly) .NET related books. I kinda expected them to be fairly light on detail and not terribly satisfying, but I've just read one on remoting which solved a specific problem I've been having. No substitute for the whole book, but a great way to know if they whole book is worth buying. 568 samples and counting.
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I'm a bit of a packrat when it comes to email. I constantly receive warnings about exceeding my space allowance on our mail server, and have PST files so large they would kill a brown dog. I just can't bring myself to delete mails because "you never know when I might need that". I blame my Dad, actually. Over the years he has had to build successively larger sheds to house his collection of stuff that might came in handy one day.
Well, rather than having to deal with the source of the problem, technology has once again allowed me to live in denial. LookOut, from http://www.lookoutsoft.com/, is a free download that adds full text indexing to Outlook, and I'm totally smitten.
Yes, once you install it you'll have to let it index your folders (make sure you go into Options and check out what it is going to index. It's default wasn't quite aggressive enough for my liking), but this can take place in the background. And yes, the indexes will take up a bit of space, but not as much as I expected.
But I guarantee, the first time you enter a search and have it return in less than 2 seconds, having searched every piece of mail you've hoarded away for the last few years, you will not care. This is what Outlook Search should have been from the start!
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Danny Thorpe, Delphi compiler god has started blogging here. He only has Atom feeds at this stage, but http://www.2rss.com seems to work ok. This should give you a RSS version of his feed.
Danny wrote what I consider the best Delphi book, Delphi Component Design, so I am very much looking forward to reading his blog.
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SQLSite is available for download here. SQLSite is an extension to CodeSite 2 from Raize Software which allows CodeSite messages to be sent from SQL Server Stored Procedures and Triggers. It comes as a collection of Extended Stored Procedures, which once installed into SQL Server, can be called like any other procedure from T-SQL.
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IBSite is available for download here. IBSite is an extension to CodeSite 2 from Raize Software which allows CodeSite messages to be sent from Interbase Stored Procedures and Triggers. It comes as a collection of UDF's (User Defined Functions), which once installed into Interbase, can be called like any other statement from Interbase SQL.
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Over the last few years, my company has been called in to help various development projects in trouble. Sometime these troubles are management-related, sometimes process, sometimes the troubles can be traced back to individual team members. But at the beginning of 2000, we were called in to help a Delphi project with an out of control bug-count.
This development team (who were kind enough to let me write about them, provided I didn't tell anyone who they were<g>) seemed to be doing all the right things. They had a manager who did his best to "run interference" on the developers behalf, letting them focus on writing software. They had source code control and a bug-tracking database. They had a good range of experience across the team, and they had regular code-reviews. Yet they still had a pile of bug reports that would kill a brown dog* and seemed to have been 2 weeks away from delivering their software for the last 4 months.
* A translation is probably required for any non-Aussie readers. The Australian mongrel brown dog is notoriously hard to kill. All sorts of stories abound regarding brown dogs that have survived snake bites, crocodile attacks and Taco Bell burritos (personally I'm sceptical about that last one). At the very least, understand that having a bug list that would kill a brown dog is a very bad situation to be in.
What follows are the techniques we used to reduce their current bug count, and more importantly, reduce the number of bugs they were introducing into the new code they were writing. With one exception, none of the techniques we'll discuss were that difficult to implement, nor did they require a big investment of time.
more...
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This paper was originally written for the UK-BUG magazine.
In a dark, paranoid corner of my mind, I imagine the conversation went something like this:
"How many?"
"Two. We've got two Australians presenting at DCon 2002"
"How did this happen?"
"Well, they submitted papers, and the Advisory Board accepted them"
"Yes, but what are they like? Are they like that horrid Crocodile Hunter fellow, always saying 'Struth' and 'Crikey' and 'Dry as a dead dingo's donger'?"
"I don't think so. One of them even lives here, and the other one seems civilised enough on email"
"Well, I don't know. Do you think anyone will want to listen to them?"
"Maybe we should get them to write an article each for the User Group magazine. Then everyone can get a chance to check them out"
"OK.but if either one of them even mentions the Cricket, he's packing his bags"
OK, maybe this is just a symptom of some colonial inferiority complex, but this is what flashed through my mind when Joanna wrote asking me to submit a short article. Of course, this was quickly replaced by fear born of having no idea what to write about. So, in a move that I'm getting particularly good at, I promptly forgot about it, hoping that either inspiration would strike, or desperation would drive me to think up some topic of worth.
more...
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I'm gradually bringing over the old articles from the Madrigal website. They'll show up here in the blog, and also on the Writing page.
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OK, I've moved over to Radio. Unfortunately, I can't see a way to import my posts from Powerblog, so I'll be doing it manually (not many thankfully). This will screw up the dates, so it'll look like I've had a very busy posting day :-)
Please be patient
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