Do you have a bug database?

 6 Responses »
Mar 082005
 

No. I should. Perhaps I should buy Joel’s latest book and read it.

Most of the time when developping I can remember what I was working on, or what bugs bugged me. But sometimes solving one bug takes a lot of time, or there’s a weekend, or something else that takes the attention from developping, I just forget about the smaller bugs. Tracking them in a database is wise.

Does anybody have suggestions? Preferably ones that are free? I’ve looked at Mantis in the past, but never got so far to actually using it. Open Source is not mandatory, but a pre. Other than that, it should run on Windows XP + Apache2.

 Posted by at 13:28

Imagegrabber – progress

 No Responses »
Mar 082005
 

Functionality sofar working:

  • Saving directory is created if it does not exist
  • AfterPaste working properly
  • Basic functionality for splitting URL into seperate parts (filename, startnumber, etc)
  • Basic functionality for finding out which part is the numeric part of the filename

I didn’t work on it last weekend, because I had other things to do. After the “determine where the numeric part is” will come the implementation of the download-function into a seperate thread. If that works, the number of threads will be a configurable item.

 Posted by at 01:23

Owning vs Right To Use

 4 Responses »
Mar 072005
 

This is another Delphi Architect vs MSDN Universal post. It was brought to my attention (mainly by this post) that MSDN Universal only gives you the right to use the software (for a period of time) and that you don’t own VS.NET and the other products.

Currently, I own Delphi 6 Enterprise. I bought the full product, and even with the Borcon price-reduction, it still had a hefty price tag. Now I find myself that I need to upgrade, because I own the software, and I am not entitled to use the latest and greatest. To be able to develop .NET with a Borland product, I need to buy something new. The upgrade is about $2300 (FP is $3500).

The full product of VS.NET Enterprise Architect costs about $2500. Apart from Object Pascal, it will give me the same .NET development environment that Delphi2005 gives me. It will give me a stable environment (Delphi2005 is slow and unstable on my system, and it gives me an unfinished feeling). It will give me Compact Framework. If we only want to address Win32, .NET has no meaning at all. So the development environment should have this flexibility. Delphi2005 does not have it.

So if I want to OWN the software, Microsoft gives me more bang for the buck.

Most developers have some sort of MSDN subscription. To test your software, you need multiple OS’s (Windows versions) for instance. Or several Office versions in the same Windows version. Or different browser versions. I bought VMWare Workstation just for that purpose. I can’t have 10 machines (moneywise and physical space wise) running different combinations of OS/Browser/Office just because I develop for the Windows.

If you have the choice: buying Delphi2005 with no support (that’s an optional product), with no CF, and with an unfinished IDE. Or buying MSDN Universal, that gives you VS.NET Ent Architect, All-Office and All-Windows and support what would you choose? Heck, working with Delphi6 is like putting on my gloves I had for years. Developing in Delphi2005 is hell. I can develop the same in VS.NET quicker and without less hassle, even without knowing C# that well, than I would in Delphi2005 in Pascal. It’s a shame.

I haven’t bought anything yet, but if a nice client (good hourrate and not too shortterm) comes along and Delphi did not change by then, I know what I will buy.

Thanks for listening.

 Posted by at 14:07

Suredeath’s finale

 No Responses »
Mar 072005
 

I don’t have much information about it yet, but Suredeath has put on his weblog that he’s saying goodbye. To all. To the world. His story is in Dutch, and probably only relevant to people who know him, but if you have a heart (that’s no laughing matter) please find the time to read his story.

Finale.

 Posted by at 10:25

Invalid XHTML

 No Responses »
Mar 042005
 

By clicking on the “Valid” links on the bottom of the page, I just found out that this page is not a valid XHTML-transitional document (as output by blog.php suggests). The reason is the Nedstat-icon, used for hit-counting. First of all, it uses the NOSCRIPT tag, which is not allowed. Second, it uses tags without a closing tag, or without the /> ending, like <BR>.

Got to clean that up a.s.a.p.

Update (21:24): apart from the NOSCRIPT tag, the code is cleaned up now. I’m not sure why the validator complains about it, since it is a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional tag.

 Posted by at 14:28

TRaReEdit = class(TEdit) – part 2

 No Responses »
Mar 042005
 

My TRaReEdit now has an OnPaste and an AfterPaste event. To check that they fire at different moments, you could put a ShowMessage in both of them, showing the Text-property in a ShowMessage.

With that in place, I can create the procedure to split the image-URL into base-URL, base-filename, starting picture number and image-type (not handled yet, but needs to be in place to handle different filetypes, like .png, .tiff, etc).

 Posted by at 01:18

Imagegrabber

 No Responses »
Mar 032005
 

At the moment (well not THIS moment), I am creating an image grabbing (as in: downloading) application/tool. Just for the fun of it. There are a lot of imagegrabbers out there. Mine is simple (for now). It expects you to input an URL of an image (the first one would be nice) of an image gallery, that has images like picture001.jpg, picture002.jpg, etc. Together with this URL you need to specify how many images are there. It will increase from 001 to 002 to 003 etc until it fetched the number of images you specified (it handles gaps (non-existant images) properly).

For internet-communication, I use the Indy components.

To have an “AfterPaste” event, I created a descendant of TEdit (I call it TRaReEdit). It fires the AfterPaste (still OnPaste, but I have to rename that) event when you paste something in the URL-field, either by using the keyboard (CTRL-V) or the mouse (Right-click & Paste). I needed this event to split up the URL into pieces, whereas I assume(d) that when typing (instead of pasting) a user would not mind tabbing between fields.

Images can be saved in a directory the user specifies.

For now, you have to wait until the first batch of images is done, before you can have another go. This will change when I move the downloading part to a seperate thread. Yep, multithreading, with some sort of queueing mechanism filling the thread.

Already in place is a thumbnail of the last downloaded image. This will change when the downloads are actually “remembered” (enter: database backend), because clicking a thumbnail will bring up the actual image (if still accessible). When the image is not on disk anymore, an dialog will ask if you want to download the image again.

Anyone coming up with a neat name for this will have his/her name stated in the credits.

I won’t post a screenshot, since most imagegrabbers know: it is nsfw!

 Posted by at 00:54

Adobe’s Adam and Eve 2

 No Responses »
Mar 022005
 

Thanks, Slashdot, for spotting. With Microsoft’s XAML on the horizon, I guess Adobe felt a little left behind, and now released Adam and Eve2 to the Open Source community. Eve (now at version 2) is a language to create Human Interfaces (GUI’s) and was first prototyped in Photoshop 5.
Adam on the other hand is (as I understand it) an event-engine tying the components you use in Eve2 together. Both libraries are available in portable C++ source format.

 Posted by at 23:25

Borland’s SDP for Eclipse

 No Responses »
Mar 022005
 

There was a discussion on Allen Bauer’s blog some time ago, what Delphi’s future should be. One suggestion was integration with Eclipse (so it would support Objectpascal/Delphi as well as Java). I was surprised by this suggestion, but it seems Borland likes Eclipse. They are releasing plugins for Eclipse to enable Borlands Software Delivery Platform to be used with Eclipse. Together, StarTeam, CaliberRM and Optimizeit now can be used with Eclipse.
Read the full article on BDN.

 Posted by at 10:14
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