Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/14
The point made by Simson Garfield below reminds me I haven’t been at IKEA for a long long while (:
Verdana was everywhere, and now it was in one more place. It was becoming a non-font that we don’t even register. Which is precisely why it was so effective, and exactly why it was chosen.
--jeroen
via: Why IKEA’s font switch from Futura to Verdana mattered | National Post.
PS: for people that also missed it and want to see the differences:
Posted in About, Font, IKEA hacks, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, Typography | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/14
Today yet another post in the series of BitSavers and History articles.
I already wrote a bit on the Z80 processor in XOR swap/exchange: nowadays an almost extinct means to exchange two distinct variables of the same size.
Popular Z80 powered computers were Amstrad CPC, MSX, Exidy Sorcerer, TRS-80, P2000, Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Kaypro, Osborne 1 and the Z-80 SoftCard for Apple II.
The Z80 was widely popular in the 1980s as it could do more than the MOS 6502 of that time:
- The 6502 (see 6502.org) had
– only 56 instructions (the 65C02 variations had a few more), and the XOR was called EOR.
– addressing memory was limited (not all instructions understood both zero-page-absolute and absolute addressing)
– only 3 registers (A, X and Y)- The Z80 (see z80.info) had:
– only 68 instructions and XOR was indeed called XOR
– many more addressing modes than the 6502
– a whopping 9 registersStill the XOR swap algorithm was used a lot back then because of register pressure in the Z80.
Compared to current processors you’d think the Z80 was so small that a few pages of documentation would suffice.
Not so: back then they had a truckload of documentation and it would all be on paper (PDF ame in 1993 and it took quite a while to become popular).
Some of the Z80 documentation has found its way to BitSavers.org:
–jeroen
Posted in Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, Development, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/13
In the past, I used the XN Resource Editor, but it hasn’t been maintained for a while.
Which resource editor do you use?
Based on a few links I found, I will be trying these:
–jeroen
PS: More comments in this G+ thread.
via:
Edit 20221225: poll results so far
[Wayback/Archive] Windows Resouce Editor – Results (poll 7139042)
Posted in .NET, Delphi, Development, Software Development | 12 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/12
In the With Statement series:
Lars Fosdal – Code Rants
Debugging today, I found another gotcha.
In this case, both Self and DisconnectedClient has a property named ClientIdentifier.
Note the difference for the mouse-over and the evaluation.
–jeroen
Posted in Appmethod, Borland Pascal, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Delphi 2005, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5, Delphi 6, Delphi 7, Delphi 8, Delphi x64, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Delphi XE6, Delphi XE7, Development, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, With statement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/12
A long while ago, DelphiBasics.info (they are hosted on Google Sites) posted a very interesting via: uExecFromMem unit. It was only a code snippet, not much usage info.
One of the things you can do with this unit, is load the memory image of an executable from a database BLOB, then execute that.
bummi showed this as an uExecFromMemory example on StackOverflow including a small memory leak fix.
It opens way for some interesting deployment scenarios. Not for the everyday ones, but for the occassional situation where a regular deployment is impractical.
–jeroen
via: uExecFromMem by steve10120 – fixed for Win7x64 by testest – DelphiBasics.
Comment by Craig Peterson at G+: https://plus.google.com/109418621512564781181/posts/WZSa6Nt44rK
It’s a handy looking unit, but has a licensing bomb in it: The PerformBaseRelocation routine is lifted directly from BTMemoryModule.pas, which is only licensed LGPL without the binary linking exception. That means providing your DCUs so anyone can relink your app. It’s also a bit less maintainable than BTMemoryModule, since they replaced a bunch of declared constants with magic numbers.
Posted in Delphi, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Development, Software Development | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/11
via +Kristian Köhntopp Chris Blasko originally shared:
Today is a good day. I just had a call from a telemarketer. Did I yell and scream at them, you ask? Certainly not. Like a good IT administrator I put my skills to use for their benefit. Here’s how the conversation went.
Which ended with the phone of the Telemartketeer being factory reset.
–jeroen
via: Today is a good day. I just had a call from a telemarketer. Did I yell and….
Posted in LifeHacker, Opinions, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/11
If you ever had one of the below errors and your system does not have Restore Points, then you’re hosed: virtually no chance for recovering from that (except for once case, see below).
The errors are these:
To recover from this error, you have to follow the steps in How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting, which requires you to have System Restore turned on as the global steps boil down to this: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/10
Abstract of The “Just In Time” Theory of User Behavior:
…the design of your software has a profound impact on how users behave within your software…
- Encouraging the “right” things by making those things intentionally easy to do.
- Discouraging the “wrong” things by making those things intentionally difficult, complex, and awkward to do.
–jeroen
via: The “Just In Time” Theory of User Behavior.
Posted in Development, Software Development, Usability, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/09
After reading So, right now I’m in Manchester working directly with my graphics artist on our….
These tools are definitely on my research list:
–jeroen
Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2014/08/09
We’re excited to announce Sysmon, a new Sysinternals utility that monitors and reports key system activity via the Windows event log, including detailed information about process creation, network connections and file creation timestamp changes. With Sysmon installed on your systems, you can collect and analyze these events to identify the presence of attackers, and correlate events across your network to track them as they traverse your network.
It was released on 20140714.
–jeroen
via Windows Sysinternals: Documentation, downloads and additional resources.
Posted in Power User, SysInternals, SysMon, Windows | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 