Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/08
Some great venn diagrams of SQL JOINs via Data Visualization – Google+ of which I wish they were PNG:
Thanks to that link, I found the original article and images by C.L. Moffat!
Click on the image to view a larger version.
–jeroen Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Access, Database Development, DB2, Development, Firebird, InterBase, MySQL, OracleDB, PostgreSQL, SQL, SQL Server, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 7 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/07
Every once in a while, some major OS vendor removes a really useful feature.
As of OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), the battery icon indicator cannot show the remaining time on battery any more, though it uses that time to indicate low power.
I’ve found that feature really useful in Lion (10.7) and Snow Leopard (10.6), and I’m pretty sure OS X versions before that also had the option to show the remaining battery (charge) time.
There is a big thread about the lack: Time remaining on Mountain Lion battery: Apple Support Communities.
A quick scan in that thread got me a these replacements:
I hope the $099 one is not written by the people that removed the feature from OS X Mountain Lion (:
After trying a few of the above, I filed a complaint at Apple – Mac OS X – Feedback, clicked on “I have this question too” in Time remaining on Mountain Lion battery and went for SlimBatteryMonitor as it uses the least menu bar estate.
Note that for most applications having icons in the menu bar, this is impossible: osx – Can I change the order of non-apple icons on the menu bar of my MacBook? – Super User.
–jeroen
via: Time remaining on Mountain Lion battery: Apple Support Communities.
Posted in Apple, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, MacBook Retina, MacBook-Air, MacBook-Pro, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/06
(I just found out this post was marked “missed schedule” since April 6, 2014. It’s a [WayBack] known WordPress bug that on wordpress.com still raises it’s head every now and then. Sorry for that.)
The introduction of AppMethod wasn’t only introducing a new product based on the Object Pascal language and Firemonkey framework, it also shows which direction Embarcadero is taking with their community sites all hosted on community.embarcadero.com some of which replace parts of the EDN (Embarcadero Developer Network) sites.
These already saw the light:
Here is my initial impression on them. So below, phrasings like “it is” phrase how I feel about them.
Whereas most of the EDN sites look cluttered (some of which just look like a big landing page), the new sites look much cleaner. Less fuzz, more aimed towards their goal.
This is only part of the story. EDN has two credentials: a username and an email address. At the EDN sites, you can use either one. But not all community sites support that. I hope this means “not all community sites support that yet”.
So far, the Answers, Articles and Forums sections (which are hosted on the main site) understand authentication using either the username or email.
The Quality part
I have mixed feelings about this. On the plus side, PHP is used by many people, Embarcadero has a PHP based HTML5 Builder product (initially called Delphi for PHP, then RadPHP; well Delphi was almost called AppBuilder so that is still positive). On the negative side, even big PHP users like WordPress do horrible things with it (don’t get me started on their scheduling engine, or on breaking posts that contain source code).
Answers does not have a predecessor within. It is a bit like a StackExchange site targeted at one product, but unlike StackOverflow, it feels more welcoming to new users. I hope that stays so, and that some people with capabilities like John Skeet will join it, and not the typical StackOverflow moderators that think they can judge questions that are clearly out of their field of expertise.
I’m not yet sure how to maintain this in
The forums server doesn’t keep articles forever: depending on the forum, the retention duration can be as little as a couple of months or less.
It means that valuable information gets lost as nobody puts this in the WayBack machine and the WayBack machine is not indexed by Google anyway.
Currently there are the categories Tutorials, Technical Articles and Support.
Quality is the future direction of QC. It is based on JIRA (from Atlassian). Whereas QC was developed in-house (initially bound to the then internal RAID) a long time before publicly accessible quality systems became widespread, JIRA is an external system.
QC is dated^w dead. Though [WayBack] it has a – for its age modern – WSDL API, the web interface is horrible as of nowadays standards, and even the [WayBack] Windows and [WayBack] Java clients mentioned on the [WayBack] QC home page are not a pleasant use (personally I still use the QC Plus client though it is not publicly available any more).
Embarcadero has used JIRA internally since at least 2009 (and presumably converted their internal RAID bug database to JIRA), so they have experience using it.
I love JIRA as it is the central piece in a lot of agile environments, has all its functionality on a web-based fashion backed with a publicly documented REST based API so you can hook up native tools with ease and is in use by many closed and open source projects. There are options to host it yourself, or in the cloud or mix and match.
So I do welcome JIRA. But there are a few things that Embarcadero needs to fix:
–jeroen
Posted in Appmethod, Delphi, Development, Missed Schedule, QC, SocialMedia, Software Development, WordPress | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/06
Last week, David M Williams posted a nice question on how can I embed an mp4 video into a Firemonkey app.
The resolution – using the Deployment Manager and TPath – was remarkably simple based on my suggestion:
That depends on your platform. Windows can embed and extract resources in your EXE. On other platforms that is either hard or impossible. I’d just deploy the mp4 with your app. `TPath` has some really nice methods to get you directories (Home, Documents, etc) in a platform neutral way, and to combine directories and filenames to form a full path name.
he went along and this was his solution:
Under Project/Deployment I add the MP4 file, then set the MediaPlayer filename property using TPath.
–jeroen
via: David M Williams – Google+ – Seeking some help – how can I embed an mp4 video into a….
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Software Development | Tagged: David M Williams, Deployment Manager, mp4 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/06
How to automatically notify the user that it’s time to upgrade a Windows App http://feedly.com/e/iksFlEhd
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/05
A while ago, I had to disable a couple of warnings from legacy code so I could first perform the Unicode conversion, then make time to eliminate the actual warning cause.
This post was much helpful here:
Marc’s Blog: Delphi XE2’s hidden hints and warnings options.
He lists all the W#### and X#### warnings he could find in Delphi XE2 (XE3, XE4 and XE5 more or less have the same), including the mapping to the equivalent directive IDs used inside these blocks:
{$WARN SYMBOL_DEPRECATED ON}
{$WARN SYMBOL_DEPRECATED OFF}
{$WARN SYMBOL_DEPRECATED DEFAULT}
{$WARN SYMBOL_DEPRECATED ERROR}
I also learned that the DEFAULT value restores an option to what you specified in the project settings.
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Encoding, Software Development, Unicode | 11 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/04
I’m researching the Spring4D build engine to compile and install the packages and sources for the first Appmethod release.
These are the registry settings that I’ve found:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\13.0
I wonder if the 13 has anything to do with http://docwiki.appmethod.com/appmethod/1.13.
Anyhow: it looks like the next Delphi (XE6) might not use the number 13. Again. Although Allen Bauer was in episode 13 (:
–jeroen
Posted in Appmethod, Delphi, Delphi XE6, Development, Software Development | Tagged: Allen Bauer | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/04
Wow: 8 different javascript emulators for popular and obscure 6502 machines (most of them JavaScript based) at mos6502 – Google+ – This week: 6502 machines running in your browser.
–jeroen
Posted in 6502, History | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/04
It is well into 2014 now, and VMware Fusion still has no way to Clone a VM like VMware Workstation can.
Too bad. Luckily, IrishMike posted a workaround for this about 7 years ago.
The easiest is if you keep these names very similar:
I do moste of the editing from the console, and used this trick to edit text files from the console.
These are the steps to clone from “master” to “clone” with a little bit of post-editing from my side:
Re: How do we “copy” an entire virtual machine?
- Copy the directory holding all the “master” VMware Fusion files to a new one (lets call the directories “master.vmware” and “clone.vmware”).
- Inside the “clone.vmware” directory, change all the files named “master.” to “clone.”
- Inside the “clone.vmware” directory, remove these subdirectories if they exist:
– any directory ending in “.lck”
– Applications
– appListCache
– caches- Then in the same directory, edit the .vmx file changing all occurrences of “master” to “clone”
– any “fileName” entry
– any “displayName” entry
– any “nvram” entry
– any “extendedConfigFile”
– any “checkpoint.vmState”- Also in the same directory, edit the main .vmdk file and change the mane of the file from “master-flat.vmdk” to “clone-flat.vmdk”
- Then from the Finder or from VMware Fusion, open the .vmx file
- Finally tell VMware Fusion that you “copied” the VM, so it gets a new hardware ID.
Then we’re off and running.
–jeroen
via: VMware Communities: How do we “copy” an entire virtual….
Posted in Apple, Fusion, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, MacBook, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Power User, VMware, VMware Workstation | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/04/03
Below is how tables should look like.
Thanks Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) for pointing me to André Vatter – Google+ – Wie Tabellen eigentlich aussehen sollten: .
–jeroen
Posted in Development, Software Development, UI Design | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 