Omar has a trick to get around Windows File Protection (not being able to replace files because they are “in use”, but actually are being protected for update by the OS). At least he can replace Notepad.exe with the brilliant Notepad2.exe (first renamed to Notepad.exe). It is tricky business, so follow instructions with care (and after reconsideration).
And while we’re in the magazine department, why don’t you stop by Borland Developer News: .NET Edition?
If you’re into developing with/for Microsoft, you can’t miss this one: MSDN Magazine May 2004.
This guy has a Panda Joke each year. This is his latest:
A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun, and shoots the waiter dead. As the panda stands up to go, the manager shouts, “Hey! Where are you going? You just shot my waiter, and you didn’t even pay for your sandwich!”
“Hey, man, I’m a PANDA!” the panda shouts back. “Look it up!”
The manager opens his dictionary and reads:
Panda: A tree-dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.
I don’t know whether it works, but it’s worth the try: Spam Poison. Let me know what your findings are!
Late in the afternoon, I could not reach my webserver/mailserver from work AGAIN! I was already cursing LinkSys for creating such sensitive equipment, and was ready to test my cabling skills to have wires all in and over and through the house, just to ban the WAP.
As we were having a party this evening, I called home to check how things were progressing, only to hear a “you have been disconnected” tone. Not good. I tried again about 20 minutes later, only to hear the same irritating tone. Scratch, scratch. No internet, no telephone. Must be a power-outage.
When I got home, I saw one of the neighbours talking to an Essent (our power-supplier) repairman. A big van was near a big pit and they were both standing there, talking to eachother. The neighbour was waving her arms that explained to me “something’s wrong, but it’s not the repairman’s fault”.
A couple of minutes later I walked up to the guy, and found him next to two cables as thick as a man’s arm, one of them severly bent, the other severly damaged. Around our house it’s still a big construction site, so I immediately knew one of the dumbasses (of course we all call them Bob, for obvious reasons) had been digging where he shouldn’t have.
That doesn’t look good, I said cynically.
Nope, he responded. I already called my wife that I will be home late, he replied.
Me: Any estimate?
Him: Well, I hope to be done by 7, but I can’t tell you for sure.
Me: Ouch, that’s two hours from now.
I picked up my cellphone, and started calling the people that were invited. We had to find another place to party, since we would be cooking dinner, but without any power, the oven (which we had planned to be using for most of the cooking) would not work.
Anyways, the party was a success, the webserver/mailserver is up and running again, and all clocks and videos are synchronized. And the LinkSys can stay. For now.
If you like Delphi, but also like non-Windows OS-es as well, you basically are going to have to pay twice or more. Each time for each programming environment (be it Kylix, or something else). Freepascal is a Delphi clone, for Win32 and Linux. It tries to do everything Delphi does, but it does not have a real front-end/IDE. Enter Lazarus. It’s not completely Delphi yet, but it’s nice to see how far they already are. Some Delphi code can be used in Lazarus/Freepascal without altering!
If you look at the Project Roadmap, you can see most of the IDE and most of the components are done and working. The rest of it (LCL, the Lazarus version of VCL, GTK, Qt, Win32) needs some more work.
This how Lazarus looks like on my desktop:
Notice the blue and green line just above and below the buttons? Quite neat: they show if components are aligned or not (then the lines disappear)! Borland, did you see that?
The people of PHP.NET released RC2 of PHP5 to the public. Read the changelog or the announcement (RC1) to learn more about it.
Both Anders and Nick blog about it: Borland changed Delphi8’s license so you can safely distribute Borland.Delphi.DLL with your products and anybody creating a derative of your product (component or whatever it is called in .NET) is allowed to do that too. Great news.
As Bob puts it:
Borland.Delphi.dll is effectively distributable to anyone AS PART OF A COMPONENT OR SOFTWARE (i.e. not just by itself)
The server was unavailable today again. That means that my mail-, web- and dns-server are unreachable. The WAP (LinkSys) did it this time. Resetting the damned thing was the solution. I hate to think about it, but I think it’s time to get some wiring up here…