The Red Cross has setup a relief fund that they taking donations for. Amazon has put together a donation button that allows you do donate directly to Red Cross. Brian Sullivan's has adopted that code so that it can be easily posted to a blog. I am now passing the opportunity to you so that you may make a difference by donating now.
As software developers I believe we are all dedicated to our projects. Personally I consider any code I write as a personal artistic expression that contains a bit of me when I am done. I don't know that I have been as dedicated to a project as Ron Avitzur as described in his "The Graphing Calculator Story"
This is the story of how one programmer, originally working as a contractor, took a project that was canceled, and saw it through to a shipping project. It is a riot to read, and will really make you think about what it means to be dedicated to a project.
Diebold, a company who should want its name to be synonymous with security and maintained technology, was pointed out to still be running the eight year old Windows NT 4 Server as Microsoft prepares to end support for the operating system effective December 31st, 2004. If you are not familiar with Diebold, they make ATM equipment for banks, and recently ventured into electronic voting equipment. With all the negative reaction from their voting equipment it really makes me think twice about using one of their ATM's again.
Update: As Jake pointed out, it is Diebold, not Diabold. I guess I had bought into the diabolical image projected on them by all the folks out on Slashdot. I can't update the post title or Blogger will move the page since that is what makes the post page name.
Charlie Calvert published his favorite software of 2004. I love lists so I thought I would pass his list on to you.
Read his opinion piece for the details and his reasons. He also lists some favorite hardware.
Personally I would rate Firefox 1.0 way up there as well. It is a great browser. I haven't really used many of the other items on the list, with the notable exception of Delphi 2005 and Open Office.
Delphi which is a truly amazing development tool, and this version really shines. Open Office is a great productivity package. It is a leap ahead of any other development tool I have seen. Use it for a little while and you will have a hard time using other tools.
Even when I have MS Office installed I find myself still using Open Office instead. It is too bad they made it so much like MS Office. That was the downfall of Word Perfect as well. They almost need a version for MS Office drones and a version for people who want to be productive.
Others I would add to the list:
As if a 25% Discount wasn't enough, Borland just released Update 1 for Delphi 2005 [Readme]. I guess it mainly addresses memory consumption issues. There is another update in the future as well. Not sure if that one will include C++ support or if that will be separate.
I still have a few 25% off coupons for Delphi 2005. They expire at the end of December in like 9 days! Email me if you are interested and I can give you the code and all the information you need! This an incredible product and a great opportunity to get a deal on it!
Update: I added a contact link on the side so you can send me an email. I suggest including your email address!
Here are the prices if you are interested:
| Product | List | Discounted |
|---|---|---|
| Architect New User | $3,000.00 | $2,250.00 |
| Architect Upgrade | $1,999.00 | $1,499.00 |
| Enterprise New User | $2,500.00 | $1,875.00 |
| Enterprise Upgrade | $1,500.00 | $1,250.00 |
| Professional New User | $999.00 | $749.25 |
| Professional New User | $399.00 | $299.25 |
I found this site "IT Conversations". It is a collection of listener-supported audio programs, interviews and important events related to the large world of IT. If it related to a computer profession, they have an interview on it. This is great stuff you may not find elsewhere, plus it is in audio format, so you can download it to your MP3 player or burn it to a CD and listen to it in your car.
Beyond exclusive interviews they have recordings of conferences like JavaOne 2004, OSCON 2004 or Bloggercon III. Actually hearing a live interview with a famous person is so much more powerful then reading the dry text of one that was probably conducted via email. You can actually catch their personality.
Ed Foster's Gripelog covers what he says could be a Fatal Blow to Shrinkwrap Licensing.
The Settlement Agreement provides to the General Public of California, amongst other things, the right of consumers to return applicable Symantec, Adobe and Microsoft software for full monetary refunds even if the shrink-wrap has been opened ... In addition, Symantec, Adobe, and Microsoft agreed to provide EULAs for the applicable software products on their web site and notices on their respective software packaging of the web addresses to such EULAs so consumers can review such EULAs prior to purchase of the software.' CompUSA, Best Buy and Staples 'agreed to provide such EULAS to consumers upon request prior to sale of the above software at their retail stores in California and to provide notices to consumers in such stores to effectuate the above.
I don't think this is a fatal blow. Software vendors simply need to make sure that users can read the license before they open the package.
It is ridiculous to expect people to read multi-page EULAs and consult a lawyer for every piece of software they install. What I would like to see is a condensed version of the EULA, maybe with symbols like you find on the care tags in your laundry. Something like Creative Commons offers. They should form some sort of software developers organization, who would then decide on all the various clauses you can have in your EULA. Then publishers would simply select from that predefined set, and put the associated symbols and explanation text, in their EULA. Then we as consumers could look at see exactly what we are getting into.
Seems like I remember reading something about this somewhere a while ago. If you remember the link please let me know!
Have you seen Google Suggest yet? It is just like normal Google, but it offers suggestions to complete your search query. It is really cool, especially for a web interface. They offer a similar feature from the address book in Gmail. Just in case you were wondering how they did that, Chris "Server Side Guy" Justus has dissected it for us!
I agree with Joel that this is the kind of thing that raises the bar for web applications!
Update: Another Preliminary Analysis of Google Suggest.
Tamir Khason has some interesting research on why C# will fail! This news may also be detrimental to the razor industry, at least among software developers (not that they were a big market to begin with.
Based on this information we can expect great things from David I. I think he may have been born with a beard. Not only has he had one the entire 19 years he has been with Borland, he had a good one already in 1976. Allen Bauer is another of the bearded greats who proves the rule. Some of the other Borland R & D's, past and present, have had beards. Thanks to Dr. Bob (beardless, but great non-the less) for the pictures.
Some of you may like to point out that Anders Hejlsberg was also one of the chief architects behind Delphi. This is true, but he has left it, and it is now in great hands!
Programmer humor! We programmers are a funny lot. Usually our humor is only funny to ourselves. Most people just don't understand the humor in the way we name our variables or obfuscate code. This compilation of Hello World programs designed by various categories of developers is a little more mainstream! Although I think only someone who can find themselves in the joke will laugh the hardest.
So I get an instant message from Paul Krill of Infoworld magazine wanting to talk to me about the C++Builder open letter. After a short email interview and a few instant messages he published my comments in an article on InfoWorld.com.
Like a phoenix from the ashes. Or I guess you could say the reports of C++Builder's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Either way this is great news for C++ developers.
Borland just published an Open Letter to the C++Builder Community where they announced "The next version of C++Builder will be part of the Delphi IDE family." Allen Bauer has an addendum to this as well. This continuation of the C++Builder product line should make a lot of people happy, especially for all those developers who signed the community letter to Borland [PDF] back in October.
So we will have a single IDE that does Delphi.Win32, Delphi.net, C++, C# and any other .net language. I wonder if there are plans to add Java into the mix. It would be nice if Borland added specific support for other languages, maybe Python.
Don't know if anyone else remembers Charlotte, but it was a language Borland started developing back in 2002 specifically for web services. Someone asked about the status of the language a while back, turns out it has been shelved in favor of the .net work (I think that was the reason.) I would suspect with this trend if they bring it back it will be in the same IDE too. Probably be called Charlotte.net. Iin the immortal words of the Wombat "All is one!"
I am sure most of you have used components you thought were useless, but what about a component that goal was to be truly useless?
David I is looking for useless componet ideas. He sites a few examples of past useless comonents, and offers some suggestions for new ones.
My idea for a useless component would be one that demonstrated the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.Well at least that demonstrates the common understanding of it that the activity of observing changes the observed(link to very funny comic on the subject). So every time you read a property it changes what it is by an amount.
That in and of itself doesn’t really describe any functionality of a component. If you just had a component with propery that's value changed everytime you read it then it would esentially be a random number generator, which would be usefull.
Maybe you might make some sort of DataSet component that does that.So just reading the values out of the DataSet changes the values stored in the table. I guess we could call it the Heisenberg uncertainty dataset™.
I think that would be truly useless, or at least very anoying!
We had a pretty good turn out. There were 22 people who confirmed via RSVP, plus some people showed up who didn't RSVP. In the end we only had about 20 people there. There were some people from NETDUG as well as from BSDG, plus a few new faces and once we hadn't seen in a long time.
Since we didn't want to run out of pizza we ended up with plenty of pizza for everyone. I hope everyone got full.
Ander's presentation consisted of a PowerPoint which covered the main points, then he would jump into Delphi 2005 for actual demonstrations. Lots of neat features! It was obvious that most everyone in the room was impressed with what they saw. After each feature was introduced everyone would lean to the person next to them and excitedly talk about it.
Ander's ended up giving away two copies of Delphi 2005. One Professional and one Architect. The Professional edition went to Anthony Fuller - I think this was his first time attending. Maybe he will come back after a door prize like that. The Architect edition went to Kelly Simper from the .NET group. Congratulations guys! I herd a few people offer them cash for their prizes. I picked up a couple extra T-shirts and 25%-off coupons. The coupons are good through the END OF THE MONTH, so get with me before then to get one. I will be out of town tomorrow evening through the end of the week.
If you couldn't make it, or want more information on the features, then you can check the following sources online:
And since I know both Kelly and Anthony are fairly new to Delphi programming, or for anyone else who has Delphi 2005 (or downloaded the free trial), here are some links for learning Delphi.
That should be enough to get you over the initial learning curve.
If you are really interested in reviewing this book, and can get me one quickly, then I will let you read it first. I'll bring it to a future meeting and you can let me know.
I just got an email from Steve Cellini. He runs the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference or PDC. (Not to be confused with Primary Domain Controller, a very common misconception!)
They just announced that they will be holding PDC 2005 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, CA from September 13 to the 16 (Pre-conferences September 11 and 12). You can sign up for updates and more details from the PDC site.
I generally hear good things about PDC, although I have never been.
This is in follow up to my original post.
I previously mentioned NMock for .net mock objects, both as part of my top .net tools and when I was introduced to them back in August. David I just posted to his blog about mock objects, specifically EasyMock for Java and JUnit.
He has some good information about mock objects as well as a number of good links on the subject. Most of the information refers to Java, but we all know that C# and .net is just like Java, only by Microsoft. In other words, the information is easy to adapt. Links of particular interest include the c2.com Wiki and the Mock Objects Wiki.
In the comments David Hervieux pointed out the commercial package POCMock for .NET (also in French).
Our meeting location is in the Washington Group International headquarters location in the Washington Group Plaza (formally known as MK Plaza) at 720 Park Blvd. in Boise, Idaho. Here is a map:
The red star represents about where the fountain is that marks the main entrance on Park Blvd. Myrtle St. turns into Park Blvd when it crosses Broadway Ave.
Here is an aerial photo of the immediate area with some landmarks marked.
The north-south street to the west is Broadway Ave., and to the south-west (over the river) is The BSU stadium. Park Blvd. runs in front of the MK Plaza, while Front St. runs behind it. The yellow circle is around the fountain at the main entrance. Park just east of the fountain, or most anywhere else in that general area where there is space.
Here is a photo of the sign on Park Blvd. indicating the main entrance. It says Washington Group Plaza now, instead of MK.
Here is a photo of the fountain. Although it runs year round, it will be covered with ice during the winter months.
To the left of the fountain above you can see the large glass entrance behind the flags. This is where to enter the building. Someone will meet you at the security desk and escort you to the meeting room.
James Avery from MSDN magazine published his list of Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now. It looks like some useful ones for .NET developers. Most of them would work with Delphi as well, in fact NUnit is included with Delphi 2005. Although I doubt Snippit Compiler will compile Delphi code. I'll need to try that. The switchers are decidedly specific for VS.NET. You don't need anything like that to switch versions of Delphi.
His list:
I would add the following tools:
Notice I don't see Visual Studio.NET or Source Safe anywhere on this list? That is because they are the tools you use when you really don't have a choice.
What would you add to this list?
Chris covered SharpDevelop, the open source .NET IDE.
While the demo was great, and there were a number of features and advantages over Visual Studio.NET the overall conclusion was that you are better off using a commercial IDE for most of your projects. Might be a nice additional tool to have in your toolbox.
Randy talked about job descriptions, skills and pay rates. We discussed ways to increase our earning capacity. Pretty interesting discussion.
We finally covered chapters 5 though 8 in Design Pattern's Explained. The book is really easy reading so we are stepping up the pace. Next month (January) we are covering 9 through 17. We will devote more time to it at the meetings.
Didn't get a chance to get to news, so here is what I had left to cover:
Turns out Remco is the person I have been exchanging with about the inline warnings. He isn't too thrilled that he needs to use the {$IFDEF WINDOWS} directive. That is understandable. Most developers dislike the dreaded IfDef compiler directive.
What else can he do? Especially with his "do not use not used units" policy?
You have two other options to get rid of this warning without adding Windows to the uses clause (even though it is already included in your compiled application because you use SysUtils that uses Windows). What the warning is telling you is that although you (or another developer) specified that the function should be inlined, but because of your uses clause it cannot.
You can just tell the compiler to turn of inlining all together with the {$INLINE OFF} compiler directive. This ignores all those Inline directives on your functions. Remove all benefit and annoyance of this new feature.
The other option is the {$INLINE AUTO} compiler directive. This tells the compiler that you trust it to inline functions based completely on its judgment. This also ignores the Inline directives on your functions, but instead of disabling Inlining the compiler just makes all the decisions on its own. Interestingly, if I don't have a carriage return between $INLINE and AUTO then the error insight and Structure panel flags it as an Invalid compiler directive, but it compiles fine. Adding a carriage return fixes it.
Either directive removes the hint about not having the correct unit in your uses clause. {$INLINE ON}is the default compiler directive. This compiler directive is site specific. In other words you would need to added it to the top of each unit you want to change the behavior in. Alternatively you could just surround the procedure that makes the inline call in question with OFF and ON directives. Don't know if that is better then IfDef though.
Back on More Coding Peeves someone asked me about the warning:
'AnsiSameText' has not been expanded because unit 'Windows' is not specified in USES listI looked in SysUtils and AnsiSameText is declared as:
function AnsiSameText(const S1, S2: string): Boolean; inline;
So it is in fact an Inline function. The help for the warning explains:
Lets take a look at what exactly function inlining is. When you call an inline function what happens at the compiler level is that the actual code of function is expanded at the location of the call instead of a call being made to a function. A call translates into variables being pushed onto the stack, a jump being made, variables being popped off the stack, etc. So if there isn't a lot of code in a function then it makes sense to inline it.This situation may occur if an inline function refers to a type in a unit that is not explicitly used by the function's unit. For example, this may happen if the function uses inherited to refer to methods inherited from a distant ancestor, and that ancestor's unit is not explicitly specified in the uses list of the function's unit.
If the inline function's code is to be expanded, then the unit that calls the function must explicitly use the unit where the ancestor type is exposed.
AnsiSameText calls AnsiCompareText which is also Inline. If your are running under Windows then AnsiCompareText calls CompareString which is in Windows.pas. When these inline functions are expanded your call to AnsiSameText is actually becomes a call to CompareString from your unit.
Julian Bucknall has a rant about how the fact that Inline is only a hint to the compiler that your function is inlined. This is why inlining is only a hint. Your unit may not be able to have the expanded code in it because of a type or call that is declared in another unit that your unit does not use.
What does all this mean to you and your "No Hints or Warnings Policy"? Since Windows is used in the SysUtils unit you do not gain anything by excluding it from your uses clause. So put Windows back at the beginning of your uses clause and the warning will go away, and your program should not be any different. If you want to be cross platform compatible then do something like:
{$IFDEF MSWINDOWS}
Windows,
{$ENDIF}
{$IFDEF LINUX}
Types,
Libc,
{$ENDIF}
Excluding the Windows unit from your uses clause is important if you are going for cross platform compatibility, but if you are trying to reduce code bloat then you aren't accomplishing anything since SysUtils calls it directly, in fact that uses clause is directly from its uses clause.