The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

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

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Archive for the ‘Delphi’ Category

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If you sunset things, at least remove references: Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/30

The sad thing about sunsetting useful resources is that usually a proper cleanup is not being performaned.

Take for instance QC: it died 7 years ago (Embarcadero QualityCentral is dead; man-decades of customer work down the drain) and is still mentioned in dozens of places including this prominent one: [Wayback/Archive] Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio.

This is just an example from a product I still love, so I know what is lost, but plenty of other companies forget they are the custodians of their own sites and leaving things rotting makes for a bad feeling of their overall behaviour.

It’s not hard to be not sloppy. Here are some 20+ more links to fix: [Wayback/Archive] “qc.embarcadero.com” site:embarcadero.com – Google Search

Note the next will be CodeCentral, which was annouced to get sunset 5 years ago:

People want to save this (see for instance [Wayback/Archive] EMBT: Code Central is going away – Tips / Blogs / Tutorials / Videos – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), but regrettably companies aren’t going to do themselves it despite they owe it to their customers and their legacy.

--jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow (and how Embarcadero broke one of the product version neutral redirects)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/24

Quite a while ago [Wayback/Archive] string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow asked by [Wayback/Archive] User Jeff was answered by [Wayback/Archive] Andreas Rejbrand:

The simplest approach is

function GetAlphaSubstr(const Str: string): string;
const
  ALPHA_CHARS = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z'];
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Str[i] in ALPHA_CHARS then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

but this will only consider English letters as “alphabetical characters”. It will not even consider the extremely important Swedish letters Å, Ä, and Ö as “alphabetical characters”!

Slightly more sophisticated is

function GetAlphaSubstr2(const Str: string): string;
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Character.IsLetter(Str[i]) then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

Back in 2011 I added a comment that for more than a decade would redirect to the most current documentation on the IsLetter method:

+1 for using IsLetter which checks the Unicode definition for being a letter or not [Wayback] docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

Back then, Delphi X2 was current, so it would redirect

  1. from [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  2. to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  3. then to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  4. ending at [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE2/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

After a long outage in 2022 (see The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.) only the Alexandria help was restored.

This killed the above redirect.

Luckily [Wayback/Archive] George Birbilis noticed that and commented this:

@JeroenWiertPluimers the correct link now is: docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/…

In order to refer to the most recent Delphi version, now you have to use [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter.

This redirects:

  1. via [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter to
  2. to [Wayback] https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

The above breaks the help integration from older Delphi products which is bad. It is also bad because it makes it harder to port legacy Delphi code to more modern Delphi versions.

Hopefully the above gives you a bit insight how the docwiki help system was designed and what is left of that design.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Encryption, Event, HTML, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Interesting thread on the usefulness of running a syslog server and being able to write to it

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/04

For my link archive:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com 🔜 MCH2022 🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “My Ubiquity setup stopped working (again). This happens way to often in my opinion. I have setup a monitoring environment to debug the issues and consider it not reliable enough for the amount of money I spend on it.”

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Rick on Twitter: “@jilles_com Waar heb je problemen mee? En ik tijdelijk een syslog server draaien. Dan je kun je gemakkelijker de logs doorspitten (kiwi heeft een simpele gratis versie)”
  3. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Ik draai een grafana setup met syslog, snmp ingest en een losse traceroute om uit te sluiten of het aan de provider of de hardware ligt.”
  4. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Software upgrades die falen. In dit geval een PoE switch die op z’n gat lag. In dit geval iets dat met een reboot gefixt is. Maar in geval van de upgrade was het een compleet nieuwe configuratie.”

In todays cross-platform world, it pays if your tooling can send logging to syslog.

Though originating from the CP/M and SunOS background, I have done most of my professional development work in Windows back-ends and front-ends, so here are some links relevant to that:

--jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management, Subversion/SVN | 2 Comments »

GitHub – KirillOsenkov/LargeAddressAware: A build tools package that adds support for making 32-bit exes LARGEADDRESSAWARE (and some words on a 64-bit Delphi product)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/26

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – KirillOsenkov/LargeAddressAware: A build tools package that adds support for making 32-bit exes LARGEADDRESSAWARE

Hopefully this can be applied to Delphi projects as well. If not then in Delphi you can manually call this in an post-build task.

Addition late 20240626

[Wayback/Archive] Kirill Osenkov: “@wiert I also found that you can…” – Mastodon

@wiert I also found that you can target AnyCPU 32-bit preferred and it will give you the same address space. So that tool is only for x86.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Meik Tranel on X: “Please for the love of all that is holy. Do not build #dotnet tools to serve a non interactive task that is supposed to be run during a build – use an #MSBuild task package. Also #JS/#NPM devs should not be allowed to write tooling. Thanks for coming to my ted talk…”.

The Delphi bit inspired a few months ago by: [Wayback/Archive] Andreas on X: “Will there ever be a 64bit Delphi IDE or at least a LargeAddressAware version. Our Projekt crashes the IDE between 14-18 compilations because it runs out of memory. Maybe I have to patch the IDE myself by moving all .NET and Compiler memory allocations above the 2 GB address.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Continuous Integration, Delphi, Development, Event, msbuild, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi has had a more type safe FreeAndNil or a while now, but in order to do so it lies to you

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/26

During my year+ of cancer treatments, Embarcadero did a tiny thing that makes [Wayback/Archive]FreeAndNil safer to use. In order to do so, the method now lies to you by taking a const [ref] parameter which technically it is not allowed to change, but the internal hackery allows it to. Dalija Prasnikar explained it in 2020: [Wayback/Archive] Magic behind FreeAndNil.

The new signature is this:

procedure FreeAndNil(const [ref] Obj: TObject); inline;

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 10.4 Sydney (Denali), Delphi 11.0 Alexandria (Olympus), Development, EKON, Event, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Reminder to self: check to see if Delphi improved support for MMX/SSE/AVX instructions

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/13

This is from a long time ago [Wayback/Archive] Does Delphi support all MMX/SSE instructions? – Stack Overflow:

Delphi 2007 supports the MMX and SSE instruction sets. Certainly, Delphi 2010 and XE support up to the SSE4.2 instruction sets (but so far no support for AVX).

The [Wayback] Delphi 2005 Language Guide explained a bit, but no more recent PDF is available and the [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki is very much outdated on this information as per [Wayback/Archive] Talk:Assembler Syntax – RAD Studio:

Re: “Instruction Opcodes” The information on available instruction sets is outdated. D2010 and Fulcrum support the SIMD instruction sets all the way up to SSE4.2 (i.e., SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2).

–jeroen

Posted in Assembly Language, Delphi, Development, Software Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »

delphi – What is the meaning of the bScan parameter value 0x45 in keybd_event? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/06

From a long time go and a project that got cancelled, but maybe in the future I will need a similar thing again: back in the days not all raw key codes were readily documented or converted correctly from winuser.h to other environments (0x45 is the keyboard raw scan code value for VK_NUMLOCK of the Num Lock key).

[Wayback/Archive] delphi – What is the meaning of the bScan parameter value 0x45 in keybd_event? – Stack Overflow (thanks [Wayback/Archive] David Heffernan and [Wayback/Archive] kludg):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development, Windows Development | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Field Tested Systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/14

Besides a cool portable spectrometer and software (written in Delphi), [WayBack] Field Tested Systems also has a really nice poster showing the spectrogram fingerprints of all the elements:

Via Delphi: 2 things to check when FMX/VCL units are inserted when you use VCL/FMX components (G+ post by Tom Field)

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, FireMonkey, LifeHacker, Power User, science, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

webcamoid/webcamoid: Webcamoid is a full featured and multiplatform webcam suite.

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/11

This is cool and works well (including the portable version) :[Wayback/Archive] webcamoid/webcamoid: Webcamoid is a full featured and multiplatform webcam suite.

Most code is C++ with bits using the QML language of the Qt cross platform UI library.

It reminded me of the Kylix days: the first Linux version of Delphi where the CLX GUI framework was a rework of VCL but based on Qt instead of Win32 GDI.

The downloads are at [Wayback/Archive] Webcamoid, The ultimate webcam suite! with installable and portable versions of 32-bit and 64-bit for Linux, Mac and Windows (I have tried the latter, see below why).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in C++, Delphi, Development, Kylix, kylix_rd, Qt, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

The Global Delphi Summit: June 13+14 in “Amsterdam” (actually the H20 venue in Purmerend)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/03/15

Cool event – for me even relatively close (about 60 minutes driving) – [Wayback/Archive] The Global Delphi Summit taking place this year on June 13 and 14.

The speaker line-up is great as are their sessions. The main web-site pages are:

Via [Wayback/Archive] Delphi Summit 2024 – GDK Software

If you come from abroad, consider spending a few extra days. Purmerend has a nice old Dutch city center with roots going back as far as the 1100s. The map File:Waterland 1288.jpg – Wikimedia Commons shows it situated in between various lakes which in the 1600s all became land by pumping out the water and transforming them into polders. There are scenic routes over many of the dikes surrounding these polders.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Conferences, Delphi, Delphi Summit, Development, Event, Software Development | Comments Off on The Global Delphi Summit: June 13+14 in “Amsterdam” (actually the H20 venue in Purmerend)

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