WordPress.com had a nice end-of-year present too: inserting a backslash (\) before every single (‘) or double (“) quote on various sites:
It\’s not your fault. Code rots. We don\’t hold entropy against you, but we expect you to give a damn. This story is about code that brings new meaning to the word \’legacy\’. The accidental discovery of this body of code provoked a moral crisis. I wanted to pretend I hadn\’t seen it, yet I couldn\’t justify tiptoeing quietly away. This talk examines the dilemmas we face when balancing our choices today with their cost tomorrow. It\’s not your fault. Even so, it is your responsibility.
Great move Yahoo (which I only use for Flickr): telling me that Yahoo can improve performance by moving my data to another country without telling which country the data is stored now, and which country Yahoo wants to transfer my data to.
One more of the “Missed Schedule” series, this time it was originally scheduled for October 1st, (2013 that is).
Delphi XE2 and up introduced the FrameworkType and FormType elements in the .dproj files to distinguish between VCL and different flavours of FireMonkey.
Actually, Delphi XE1 already had the value None for FrameworkType, so some cross-platform changes trickled into the Delphi builds early.
There is no documentation about the values in the .dproj files. the only places I could find were these about FrameworkType in combination with [Wayback/Archive] Actions:
Defines whether an action is created for the VCL or FireMonkey (FMX) framework. The default of this parameter is VCL (for compatibility with legacy applications).
This parameter is used to avoid situations when VCL actions are used in FireMonkey applications and inversely; this can lead to a serious increase in an application’s size and to execution errors, for example, calling of Windows API under MacOS.
If you still have a coded base in the .NET Framework 1.1 / Visual Studio 2003, then you should note that after 20131008, the extended support has ended.
Though the introduction of both feels like yesterday to lots of us, they have been supported for more than 10 years. An era has ended. Time to move on to newer versions has passed long ago.
System.ArgumentException was unhandled
HResult=-2147024809
Message=Object must be a root directory ("C:\") or a drive letter ("C").
Source=mscorlib
StackTrace:
at System.IO.DriveInfo..ctor(String driveName)
Same for WMI: that only works when the UNC path has already been mapped to a drive letter.
Each version, Delphi gets more features, and grows bigger.
Especially in testing environments (where you want to have a cut-down base machine you can clone from), it is wise to cut down on the installation size.
A few directories you might want to consider compressing for your Delphi installation:
C:\Users\All Users\{*}
The directories with GUID names contain the installer cache. You can ditch the whole installer cache if you keep ISO images of all installations. I prefer just to compress these directories.
Compressing usually saves 50% of the storage there, which can count for 5+ gigabyte of savings for the newest Delphi version.
C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio
Contains (among others) the help files and SVN examples, and (for the most recent version) the Platforms SDKs.
Saving is usually a couple of 100 megabytes for less recent Delphi versions until about 1 gigabyte for the most recent.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\#.0\lib
This contains all the precompiled files. Since they are readonly in nature, it pays of compressing them, usually saving 50% or more.
Saves 5+ gigabytes for the most recent Delphi version.
Below are the Android remote screen monitoring/viewer/mirror tools I know about:
For a long time, I have used Droid@Screen: an Open Source, Java based mature cross platform tool that uses ADB (it can even restart it for you in case it hangs) with lots of features (zooming, no temporary files, device recognition, disabling emulator devices, etc). There are some Screen Shots | Droid@Screen.
Recently, Jim McKeeth open sources his Android Screen View: Android Screen View | The Podcast at Delphi.org. It is written as a quick hack in Delphi XE5, so right now it has less features and works in a more crude way than the two Java based tools, but it shows the potential of doing similar things with Delphi.
I primarily use Droid@Screen as so far it works best for me.
But I keep a close eye on the other two just to make sure I don’t miss improvements.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 