was Firebird, now, brain farts

Battle of the Web

This was the second session of Battle of the Web, the first focusing on general Content Management issues and this one about developing for those platforms.

We had fire alarms, technical problems, but had a good look at Drupal, dotNetNuke and a roll your own content management system.  I created a wiki for the speakers to fill in a tick list of features http://ukbug02.pbworks.com/

In addition to the tick list, Cedd (one of the speakers) and I have started a Drupal diary, to document our learning curve in getting 2 separate Drupal sites up and running.

Delphi 2010

Jon Harrison on Embacadero did a great talk on Delphi 2010 with some interesting questions from the floor.  I like the Touch stuff and can think of one application I would love to write with it, BUT until multi-touch devices are more available, it still feels pretty "bookmark and come back in a year".  Today however is the data snap improvements and all the other good things in D2010.

One point that needed clearing up - the Firebird driver is for dbExpress, not as far as I know an overhaul of IBExpress.

Technical Debt

An enjoyable talk by Gary Short of Dev Express.  Not sure if I shoudl say too much as it was a preview of a talk he is giving to a wider audience later in the year / next year.  I enjoyed the talk, which makes you think about your daily development / general working practices to see if they generate problems later.

http://www.ukbug.co.uk/

This applies to you if you are a company doing marketing via e-mail shots.
Normally associated with larger companies:

1) If your domain is acmeproducts.co.uk and you send your marketing e-mails from @marketing7.co.uk it already looks like spam.

2) If the links in your e-mail don't link to your primary domain (e.g. www.acmproducts.co.uk/tracking/abc1294890384098014.htm vs www.marketing7.co.uk/tracking/abc1294890384098014.htm) it looks just like a phishing e-mail to me and anyone who has the sense to avoid phishing traps.

And the biggy, but with smaller companies:

3) If you send out an e-mail to a number of people who are your marketing database, DO NOT INCLUDE ALL OF THEIR E-MAIL ADDRESSES IN THE E-MAIL. It leaks your marketing database, it puts my e-mail onto spam databases, assuming that one of those 100 odd accounts is compromised, it tells people I have no association with something about me.

So rant over. Now I feel a lot more chilled. Have a nice day.

Yesterday I attended a Delphi 2010 talk and made a bunch of notes I intend to blog about. Trouble is I have a few minutes now on the train, so just want to make one point.

In Delphi 2010, if you press f6, you get IDE insight. This is an incremental search into a context sensitive map of options from where you are. So I have a new project and I want to import some XML - I type in XML I get

Bloody brilliant.

Now I have always argued that there is a problem with the growth of any product, they start off small, easy to master and end up with millions of options.  How does any new developer master the package when they are faced with a wall of options?

Delphi 1 had maybe 50 menu items in total, D2010 has a million.  In the Paradox for Windows days, it had two modes, beginner and advanced and the IDE grew / shrank as you switched between them - this was a really good feature when training people how to use the product.  I used to teach the 5 day Delphi Client Server course, now it would need to be a 20 day course!

This power is great for me, but pitty the newbie!

So this is an excellent attempt at making the "problem domain" smaller for newbies - no routing through menus / ribbons / help / readme's / google.  Now it isn't perfect, like it doesn't tell you what you could have if you were in a different place (like a line below which you get a search all), so some options may be hidden from view if you aren't for instance in the code editor or whatever.

Anyway, hopefully post in a couple of hours / days about the overall D2010 presentation in Manchester and my ruminations.

Installing on my main dev machine whilst still working :-), not ideal or labs condition.
Went to the EMBC product trail downloads - selected RAD studio and clicked.  Downloaded the 16MB installer stub.  Unzipped it and ran the most likely item.

Clicked top button, selected language and off we go.
Picked up e-mail and put in the SN

Looks like I'll need a couple of buttons to install each component I want

Entered, checked that it wasn't going to break my install of InterBase or Firebird
Didn't mess with any of the install directories this time :-)
Lets see if I can stop myself from clicking bottons / ZoneAlarm warnings by accident.

And it ticks along

Zonealarms kicked up and said it wasn't happy with SetACL.exe

Rave Reports installing

Onto the docs:

A little confused by the components to install, when you click on an item, it says install or install all options or omit, but doesn't tell you what the difference is.

Still ticking away

ZoneAlarms seemed to block setACL.exe or something like that.  Not sure if it was the set up, but think so.  Ran Delphi, compiled and got an error, rebooted and it worked fine.

Total time a couple of hours, but I wasn't exactly doing it under lab conditions, may have even been for some lunch at one point.
So install, Done.

Next is to see if I can move my main clients application, BDE, Firebird, Components, JVCL, JCL, WPTools, TMS.....

Image filenames have the timestamps in the name.

As an aside, the Developer Group (UKBug) will have someone from Embarcadero 21st October 2009 in London See www.ukbug.co.uk

So It was over a year since my last post. If you have a look at my website, you'll see a similar dereliction of duty!

Just thought I would update the Mobile Broadband post.

Three 3G Mobile Dongle

I took out an annual subscription to one of these on the 1GB teriff, cheaper if you already are a Three customer.  Works well and when it can't link will attempt to fall back to Orange for GPRS (currently Orange, used to be O2 I think).  Very unreliable on trains or when moving in and out of good reception areas, but means I can go anywhere (camping in Barmouth) and be in emergency contact with work for that all important remote in.

So this next month is going to be really busy for me, but am determined to do get all my to-do's well underway and improve the website and the blog (www.jac2.co.uk).

Vodaphone - Tried their 3G mobile broadband, gave back after 7 days. When it worked it was great, but on the move, suspending and un-suspending my laptop seemed to throw it. Also at my home postcode, their website said good signal, I only managed GPRS (slow) signal. Therefore not much use as a backup to my broadband and as it was patchy on the train to London - it had to go back. There was no fuss and they took it back immediately.  One other strange thing, it wouldn't let me goto port 80 on a broadband router - strange.

Legoland Windsor - get the Q-Bot unless you love queuing. Cost an extra £10 per person, but I reckon you could get on 3 extra rides in a day and without standing in line for hours.

After leaving, we queued again to get onto the motorway, I decided to stop off in Marlow to get some food, rather than face a McKFCKing. Found Thai Square, a Thai resteraunt that had wonderful food and helpful staff. If you are in the area, I would highly recommend it. www.thaisq.com

I'll keep this brief.  I need to get back to bashing my head against a brick wall.
I am in the process up upgrading to a new laptop.  I have transferred Skype, Outlook and Firefox over to a new machine.
1) Skype - decentralised storage of contacts, so just install and log onto new machine and you are up and running, EXCEPT you don't get the chat history.  The help isn't helpful as it tells you where the history is stored and how to back it up, but not how to transfer it to a new machine - that would be too easy!
2) Outlook - Three documents to read, backup, moving your pst and where files live.  None of them complete the process of how to move all you e-mails and settings over to a new machine with the same version of Outlook on it.  So I skip backup, and just move all the files to the same location on the new machine.  I was expecting it all to blow up, but it seems to work.  Layouts have gone back to defaults and not sure what it has moved over other than my messages.
3) Firefox - help tells you where all the files are, you just copy them over to the appropriate place on the new machine and you get everything, history, searches, plugins, skins, the lot.

Moral of the story, why do developers make things so complicated for themselves and users.  Next onto moving Delphi 7 and another dozen -> 20 programs.  wish me luck!

I travel 30 odd miles to go to a shop to buy my running shoes. I am a jogger / slow jogger. What I like about Running Bear (in Alderly Edge, Cheshire, UK ), is the no fuss advice. They look at your old trainers, ask what you run, they select a pair from the rack, get you to run up and down the street in them a couple of times looking at your gait, then back inside where they say, you could also try this, this and that, they will all suit your running.

I hate web based newsgroups! It is one of those "better on the web" ideas that just defies common sense. My main grudge is not being able to use them off-line. I am a confirmed laptop user and as such often find myself with 20 minutes without and Internet connection, when I like to sort out my in-box and newsgroups. Lesser problems are that it isn't easy to see which threads you have read and which threads you haven't read yet, again, for a grazer like me, it is vital I can get up to date on a newsgroup and then visit it again a month later and ensure I have at least viewed all of the headers.

I use the excellent XanaNews - http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/xananews.htm.  It is great for filtering on words in headers (except when people write headers like "oh no another problem", instead of "Excel filtering problem - another problem" for instance).  It is great at downloading lots of groups simultaneously over a fast link.

Don't get me wrong, a hybrid where you can engage in newsgroups using a news reader and search all newsgroups via a web interface is great, but Google already has that based covered.

The reason for the post is that IBExpert & FIBPlus have both moved over to web based news groups and as such I haven't looked at the posts on them for a while and probably won't now.  Does this mean that I will no longer be using the product, well, no, but it means that I am less likely to give support or keep abreast of issues and ideas.

Maybe they are just telling this old fart something........

I just can't get used to not calling it the UKBug or the UK Borland User Group. Anyway, ran the recent meeting in Microsoft, Victoria, London. My aim is always the same, to learn one thing from the meeting. It keeps my knowledge horizons broad.