Delphi: Use LIBSUFFIX to Avoid Package Versioning Headaches

Craig Stuntz writes about using the rather unknown {$LIBSUFFIX} directive to Avoid Package Versioning Headaches in Delphi:

In early versions of Delphi, you pretty much had to put the VCL version number into the name of the package. This was because if you were going to support multiple versions of the VCL then you needed to create separate BPL files for each version of the VCL.

Starting with Delphi 6, you can use a single DPK file without reference to the VCL number and then use the {$LIBSUFFIX } directive to have the output BPL file include the appropriate VCL version. The other nice benefit of this is that the DCP file for the package does NOT include the VCL version. Therefore, any packages that require your package, do NOT need to be edited when recompiled for a new version of Delphi.

Full article: Here

Delphi: More articles on Windows Vista compability

David Intersimone writes:

TMS Software, a Borland Technology Partner (BTP) has posted a series of technical articles showing Delphi 2006 developers how they can make their applications ready for Vista today.

As of this posting the following articles are available:

• Using the new Windows Vista TaskDialog from Delphi 2006
• The new File Open / Save dialogs in Windows Vista
• Taking the new Windows Vista TaskDialog one step further

Delphi: Creating Windows Vista Ready Applications with Delphi

Nathanial Woolls has written a great article called Creating Windows Vista Ready Applications with Delphi which shows how to make your Delphi application fit in better with Vista's new look.

Windows: Creating an image of an existing Vista installation stripped of machine-specific information

Bilal Aslam, the Shell’s Deployment Program Manager of Windows Vista, writes about how to capture an image of an already customized installation of Windows Vista so it can be deployed on any PC.

This is possible using two great tools: sysprep and ImageX. /.../ The System Preparation (Sysprep) tool prepares an installation of Windows for duplication, auditing, and customer delivery. Duplication, also called imaging, [using ImageX in this case] enables you to capture a customized Windows image that you can reuse throughout an organization.

So in other words, sysprep can 'generalize' a system by removing machine-specific information, files and registry settings from it.

Full article: Part 3 Dr. Unattend: Sysprep and ImageX or how to capture an image by its toe

Why is programming fun?

I stumbled upon a great quote by Frederick P. Brooks. It’s from his book, The Mythical Man-Month, originally written in 1975 (I haven’t read it):

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctiveness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer,
like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

[via Coding Horror]

Firefox: Gmail chat not working

Had some trouble with getting Gmail chat (i.e. Google Talk) to work in Firefox. After logging in to Gmail, the "Quick Contacts" were never populated, all it said was "Loading..." and after a while it timed out. It worked fine in Internet Explorer as well as when I created a new Firefox user profile from scratch.

How to solve the problem:

1. Write "about:config" (without quotation marks) in the address bar in your browser.
2. Write "dom.disable_image" (without quotation marks) in the Filter field.
3. If the value of "dom.disable_image_src_set" is TRUE, double click the row to change the value to FALSE.

Incidentally, this also solves the problem of the maps not displaying at hitta.se (the instructions are translated from their FAQ).

UPDATE 2008-06-30
I've been getting some hits on this topic lately, and I just thought I'd mention that I wrote this over two years ago! Firefox was only at version 1.5 then, I think. What I'm getting at is that I'm not sure whether this fix still works or not. So if there's anyone out there for which this advice has worked recently, I'd appreciate a comment.

Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants

I stumbled upon Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants a couple of days ago (I forget from where).

It has some really interesting articles, even if I didn’t read them all. Those that I have read and can recommend are the following (listed in the approximate order in which I read them):

• Tour de Babel "A very drunken blog rant that I evidently never published; I ran across it in my drafts. Tours (and bashes) C, C++, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Python."
• When Polymorphism Fails "Essay on how polymorphism doesn't work in sufficiently open systems"
• Singleton Considered Stupid "A somewhat clumsy early essay about how the Singleton pattern is often a sign of poor OO design."
• Scripting Windows Apps "Results of some early experiments with scripting Windows apps using Ruby."
• Ancient Languages: Perl "A whole lot of very mean Perl-bashing"
• The Emacs Problem "Various musings on XML and text processing."
• The Next Big Thing "Some discussion of Java's type system, and speculation about which language will be the successor to Java."
• Is Weak Typing Strong Enough? "Summary of a multi-year showdown at Amazon between two sets of programmers working on the same problem in Java and Perl."
• Digging Into Ruby Symbols "An attempt to explain Ruby's oft-misunderstood first-class symbols in terms of their role in Lisp code."
• Duck Season “More discussion of Lisp and other languages”

C#: New language features in C# 3.0

Niek writes about new language features in C# 3.0. I especially like the anonymous types – you’re able to construct a new untyped object out of the blue, like this:

var o = new { Name = "Niek"
  , Gender = "Male"
  , Active = true 
  };

Cool, huh?

But I was surprised that the adding of static methods to existing classes was new. I mean, Delphi’s had this for .NET since version 8 (released in 2003), with its class helpers. And if I remember correctly, new in Delphi 2006 is that it’s also supported for Win32 (it was buggy and unsupported in Delphi 2005).

Windows: Problems connecting a K750i via USB

I had trouble when connecting a K750i via USB – it didn’t show up as new hardware on the computer in question. But it worked fine on another one (both running Windows XP SP2).

The solution in this case was the following:
Going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Device Manager revealed five K750i items marked yellow. Right-clicking on each one of them and selecting "Update Driver..." and following the instructions solved the problem.