The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for February, 2012

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FireMonkey and (OS X, iOS, Windows) Link Clearance

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/21

Some links that I found useful for doing FireMonkey and development for OS X or iOS:

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, OS X FMX, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Funny how Google Search tries to interpret version numbers as dates and totally misses the actual date (via: directx runtime – Google Search)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/20

Funny how Google Search tries to interpret number sequences as dates:

Download: DirectX Redist (June 2010) – Microsoft Download Center …

www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=8109

29 Sep 1974 – The DirectX redist installation includes all the latest and previous released DirectX runtime. This includes D3DX, XInput, and Managed DirectX …

I almost skipped that search result, as the date was from 1974, but since back then DirectX didn’t even exist, I became curious.

This is the original text from the page that Google tried to interpret: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Google, GoogleSearch, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Funny how StackExchange, StackOverflow, ServerFault, SuperUser and differ in indicating their site outage “We are Offline”

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/18

Tonight these most StackExchange sites have maintenance, including their bogs and meta sites (the chat sites like http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ are on-line). I checked these to be off-line, most of the bigger table below are offline too.

Later I will amend this post with the HTML and try to get some site previews too.

A bit later I got this kind of message from Chrome, that tried to protect one of the sites:

Error 139 (net::ERR_TEMPORARILY_THROTTLED): Requests to the server have been temporarily throttled.

Note that http://askubuntu.com/ is up and running :) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Pingback, Stackoverflow, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Free .NET Decompiler – JustDecompile from Telerik

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/17

Interesting:

JustDecompile is a new, free developer productivity tool for easy .NET assembly browsing and decompiling.

–jeroen

via: Free .NET Decompiler – JustDecompile.

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 2.0, C# 3.0, C# 4.0, Development, Software Development, VB.NET | Leave a Comment »

A Programmer’s Life | /* Code lines of a programmer’s life */

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/17

Lovely comic for this Friday afternoon:

/* Sent by Muriel Godoi */

Programmer: I developed a new way to generate random strings…

A. P.: How? It’s based on processor’s clock?

Programmer? No… Just let the trainee using the “VI” and asked him to close it…

A. P.: Effective…

–jeroen

via: A Programmer’s Life | /* Code lines of a programmer’s life */

A Programmer's Life | /* Code lines of a programmer's life */

A Programmer's Life | /* Code lines of a programmer's life */

.

Posted in Comics | Leave a Comment »

Remake of Karateka? Prince of Persia creator returns to games with remake of Karateka | VentureBeat

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/17

Karateka cover art

Karateka cover art

I remember playing Karateka for ages when I was at high school (yes, I’m 42 and counting <g>). Even with the bad eye-hand coordination I have, it was still fun to play (as was Lode Runner). Now it looks like there is going to be a remake of Karateka:

After a stint in film, [Wayback/Archive] Jordan Mechner, a legendary game developer who created The Prince of Persia blockbuster video game series, is coming back into video games to remake his 1980s hit Karateka.

…

Mechner created Karateka in 1984 on the Apple II computer. He made the game while attending Yale University and won kudos for the title’s realistic animations. The game sold more than 500,000 units, which is outstanding for the early days of video games.

“It is amazing to me how many people still remember Karateka and talk about it after all these years,” Mechner said in an email. “Somehow, the 1980s seem to be in the air again. People ask me about Karateka on my website all the time, and I keep seeing videos and retrospectives of the original game posted online. I was astonished when I was in Moscow at a press conference for the Prince of Persia movie opening in 2010, and Russian journalists asked questions about Karateka.”

--jeroen

via: [Wayback/Archive] Prince of Persia creator returns to games with remake of Karateka | VentureBeat.

Posted in About, Games, Personal, Power User, Prince of Persia | Leave a Comment »

Google Mail Spam Filters seem to be a bit too aggressive again

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/16

Lately I’m finding more and more false positives in my Google Mail Spam folder.

I’ve manually catched mails from these domains:

  • ns.nl
  • barnsten.com
  • malwarebytes.org
  • apple.com
  • linkedin.com

So: if you are awaiting mail from me, please send me an SMS or tweet me.

Note I am still glad with the Google Mail SPAM filtering, as it catched very authentic looking fake messages from ING Bank, ABN AMRO Bank, xs4all internet, and numerous others.

–jeroen

Posted in About, Personal, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Chrome Google search URLs changed into a webhp redirect; no rootkit; Avast! and eggheadcafe seem involved; reproducible on one machine. What happened?

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/16

Somewhere the last couple of days, Google or Google Chrome has changed the default search URL.

I thought I had a webhp rootkit issue, possibly related to Avast, but it wasn’t (I posted at the Avast forums, and later replied the issue had solved itself, but I still wonder about the real cause).

What happened was that some page I had open in Google Chrome (all other web browsers were fine) forced the redirect.

I can only reproduce this on one system (that has both Avast! Antivirus installed, and Chrome open with the page http://www.eggheadcafe.com/searchform.aspx?search=Cross+Join+Excel) but not on other machines.

So far, it took me about a day of work (quarantining the machine, investigating if it was a virus, rootkit or otherwise, trying to verify this is a one off), and I still feel I don’t have the complete answer yet.

I still wonder if others have seen similar issues.

This is how it redirected

The defaults have a truckload of junk around them, but come down to the URLs below (lmgtfy is the search phrase)

It used to be of this form (which now again works, after I closed all Google Chrome pages)

The redirect made it into a longer webhp form:

The fun thing is, that if you enter the form

then you will end at the Google Search home page with the search phrase pre-filled in.
Now that is a pretty nifty “let me Google that for you” :)

–jeroen

via: Google.

Posted in Google, GoogleSearch, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Jason Southwell (from arcana) just published DuckDuckDelphi: a unit to do Duck typing in Delphi XE2 (not XE)

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/16

If you haven’t seen Jason announce this in the general Delphi 3rd party newsgroup or his announcement thread on the FaceBook Delphi Developer group yet, this is a definitive must read:

Jason Southwell (from arcana) just published DuckDuckDelphi: a unit to do Duck typing in Delphi XE2 (not XE):

Duck Duck Delphi

DuckDuckDelphi is an Open Source (MIT License) unit for Delphi XE2 which adds duck typing functionality to a normally strongly typed language.

Great stuff that makes a truckload of my code so much easier to maintain.

–jeroen

via arcana – DuckDuckDelphi.

(Edit: 1400 UTC+1 Sorry, wrong boolean; wrote “and” but should be “not” XE).

Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE2, Development, Software Development | 8 Comments »

There is a great Android Design – UI Overview site, but no great UI design tools for Android

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/02/15

Recently the Android Design site was launched with great explanation on how to properly design UIs for Android Apps.

Like Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Microsoft’s User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone they are a must for any mobile developer.

Together with sites like Android UI Design Patterns, and mockup stencil tools, more Android UI mockup sketch tools and stencils allow you to give prospective users an impression on how an app might be looking like when developed.

What is lacking is a set of real Android GUI design tools. The kind of tools like the Xcode Interface Builder for iOS, or Expression Blend for Windows Phone that – together with iOS PSD templates or Windows Phone design templates (and more templates) – give you a killer start.

Also note Delphi XE2 that has a great UI designer which has consistently covered Windows UI design for 15+ years, including multi-touch and gesture support, and now covers Mac OS X and iOS for HD and 3D apps (but not yet with multi-touch or gesture support).

The only design tool for Android I could find is DroidDraw that emits the XML needed for Android UIs. It is painfully slow and lacks basic things like a property window to edit properties of UI elements.

Given the number of Android app developers, there is much room for improvement.

  • Am I missing something here?
  • What kind of tools are you using?

–jeroen

via: Android Design – UI Overview.

Posted in .NET, Android, Delphi, Development, iOS Development, Mobile Development, Software Development, Windows Phone Development | 6 Comments »

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