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 ‘Software Development’ Category

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Even perpetual Delphi licenses require an active maintenance support or contacting the Sales/Renewal team to allow re-install on a fresh machine

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/11

Edit 20190612

It seems all the fuzz sort of got restored: if you have an old product, not under maintenance support, then the registration count has been bumped and can be bumped further through the sales/renewal department.

This got posted a few hours after my blog post got live (the WayBack link does not archive all comments, sorry for that, that’s why I quoted toe comment):

[WayBack] From the GM: New Updates and Changes to the Registration “Bumps” Policy [UPDATED] – Blog – Developer Tools – IDERA Community

13 hours ago

Policy Update: We still receive occasional comments on this and want to make sure we are clear on our Policy. Registration limits were introduced a long time ago with very valid use cases, but many of these are now outdated. We still do them, just now they get approved by Account Management (Sales/Renewals) vs. Support. Further, we have done several auto-bumps for everyone that should limit these issues altogether (and will do more as needed). As communicated, over the summer, we will work on a more automated way to increase registration limits through the self-service portal.

Original article 20190611

Last month, people found out that retroactively, Embarcadero has changed the terms of the license agreements on products sold with a perpetual license:

In order to re-install those products, often a bump in license count is needed. That bump now requires an active maintenance subscription which has a substantial yearly cost.

This is yet another sign that Embarcadero parent company Idera is on their way towards becoming like Oracle or Computer Associates: hiding information behind account walls, and by all means trying to squeeze out money of older products.

I think the move is illegal in several countries, especially with products sold to private persons. Uwe Raabe agrees with me on that:

I am not sure they would get away with that – at least here in Germany. As long as the customer actually paid for the perpetual license (this excludes the CE), the ability to use it legally cannot be prohibited just because there is no current support contract. At least a reasonable fee for the registration bump would perhaps be acceptable, but definitely not denying it completely.

If you still own Delphi licenses, and are on maintenance for them, a path you might take is to switch to a local installation (on a separate machine, preferably virtual machine) of the ELC (formerly Belise) licensing server together with a named license.

That requires your machines to be in touch with that ELC service (you can reach it over a network connection, even via a tunnel) every 30 days to stay active.

Another way is to :

  • always install in virtual machines, and keep a backup-history of those virtual machines at hand
  • use different user names for doing different Delphi work (but be aware that a lot of Delphi tools and component suites still insist on installing as Administrator, therefore putting all the settings in that administrative user)

Note that :

  • a Delphi license is bound to a Windows computer NAME, not a physical fingerprint of the machine
  • it is likely easier to keep backups of the ECL/Belise server than of a full development machine
  • ELC/Belise requires Java (JRE 1.5 or higher according to ELC Admin Guide.pdf ), which has it’s own licensing issues
  • Though ELC stands for “Enterprise License Server”, it works for one-man shops equally well as for enterprises (heck: for enterprises it is likely more work as they usually want multiple groups of licenses users)

So renaming a machine will already invalidate your license (but you can usually restore that).

Background reading:

Downloads (.bin files are for Linux x86 or x86_64; .exe files for Windows Win32 or Win64):

 

 

–jeroen

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Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 3 Comments »

A (sad) security user story – The Isoblog.

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/11

The sad thing is that most security people do not like these kinds of user stories:

As any user, I never want to get a “denied” message, but a “in order to do what you want you are missing the X permission” message in order to be able to track down the root cause and request the appropriate permissions more easily.

Source: [WayBack] A (sad) security user story – The Isoblog.

Related: [WayBack] User Stories and User Story Examples by Mike Cohn

–jeroen

Via: [WayBack] A (sad) security user story… – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

Posted in Agile, Development, Scrum, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Githunt – Chrome Web Store – discover new github projects in your technology area of interest

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/10

Archive.is Githunt – Chrome Web Store: Replace the new tab with a list of trending repositories on github belonging to any technology that you chose.

More information: [WayBack] How to get trending GitHub projects in your Chrome new tab screen with GitHunt

–jeroen

via: [WayBack] This is how I discover new and interesting open source Delphi/Pascal projects – install Githunt and it replaces my ‘new tab’ page, there I set the langu… – Edwin Yip – Google+

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, GitHub, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

ls colour codes on OpenSuSE tumbleweed when accessed from Mac OS X ssh

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/07

`ls` colour codes

`ls` colour codes

I got confused as I thought red text would mean an error.

But they’re not: greenish yellow on a read background means error (a symbolic link to a place that’s no longer there).

It’s the output of https://github.com/gkotian/gautam_linux/blob/master/scripts/colours.sh as the one at

Actually the script is here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gkotian/gautam_linux/master/scripts/colours.sh as the one at [WayBack] command line – What do the different colors mean in the terminal? – Ask Ubuntu failed with errors like this one:

-bash: *.xbm: bad substitution

The full script output is below.

Since various terminals have a different mapping from colours in the ANSI escape code colour table, I used the standard HTML colours using (which slightly differs from the Terminal.app screenshot on the right):

References:

Note that the shell on Mac OS X uses a different way of configuring colours CLICOLOR as described in [WayBack] settings – CLICOLOR and LS_COLORS in bash – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange. I might cover that another day.

Script output:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ANSI escape code, bash, CSS, Development, Encoding, HTML, HTML5, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Software Development, SuSE Linux, Tumbleweed, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Re-read “I am looking for a good replacement for INI files for storing large/complex configuration”

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/06

Reminder to re-read [WayBack] I am looking for a good replacement for INI files for storing large / complex configuration. So far I have used JvApplicatoinIniStorage + a custom INI f… – Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+

INI files are textual and allow for comments. They are not good at large bits of information, and are hard to compare because the order is unimportant.

Alternatives like JSON or DFM have similar limitations.

XML is too chatty, and hard to get right by humans.

Related: [WayBack] JSON as configuration files: please don’t

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

What not to estimate: defects, spikes and (in during sprint planning): stories.

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/06

A few nice reads on that not to estimate and why:

Related:

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Agile, Development, Scrum, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Working with big data databases in Delphi – Cassandra, Couchbase and MongoDB (Part 3 of 3) – grijjy blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/06

Reminder to self to check out [WayBack] Working with big data databases in Delphi – Cassandra, Couchbase and MongoDB (Part 3 of 3) – grijjy blog and see if by now it supports authentication.

Repository: grijjy/DelphiMongoDB: A Delphi driver for MongoDB

Via: [WayBack] We finish our trilogy on big databases with a Delphi driver for MongoDB. – Erik van Bilsen – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »

windows – How to simulate drop-down form in Delphi? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/05

Since I might need it one day: [WayBack] windows – How to simulate drop-down form in Delphi? – Stack Overflow

Via [WayBack] for whatever reason this SO question from 2015 showed up in my rss stream as “new or updated”. Interesting though. – Thomas Mueller (dummzeuch) – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

GrijjyCloudLogger, remote logging for Windows, iOS, Android, macOS and Linux – grijjy blog

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/05

Interesting use-case based on ZeroMQ and Google Protocol Buffers: [WayBack] GrijjyCloudLogger, remote logging for Windows, iOS, Android, macOS and Linux – grijjy blog.

Everything is Open Source at GitHub:

Via: [WayBack] The Grijjy team is proud to introduce our GrijjyCloudLogger, https://blog.grijjy.com/2017/08/22/grijjycloudlogger-remote-logging-for-windows-ios-android… – Allen Drennan – Google+

–jeroen

Related: For my research list: Delphi and ZeroMQ

Posted in Delphi, Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Many flow strategies at GitLab Flow | GitLab

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/06/04

Many flow strategies: GitLab Flow | GitLab

After me doing some research on [WayBack] What your approach to branching tells me about the state of your agile transformation. | LinkedIn – Marjan Venema – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »

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