ThoughtsOnThinking

Good Ideas Last A Long Time

Great quote:

"If you feel compelled to clean house on your bookshelf every five years, trust me on this, you’re buying the wrong programming books."  - Jeff Atwood

Quoted here by Nick Hodges, as part of an interesting post on the programming books business.

(...and Ray Konopka, I second the motion on calling your agent.  Your Developing Delphi Components Book is WAY too good to be so low profile these days.  It's just about all I've been reading this week.  Get it out there! : )  )

Thoughts On Code, Post 1

We are coming to realize that computing is not like any single other thing people do—it’s a little like science, mathematics, engineering, a little like art, architecture, writing, horticulture, and a lot like a long, unplanned journey.

...

Research requires a kick, at times, to get the soul dancing.

            - Richard P. Gabriel

On Corporate Transparency -- Kudos to DevExpress

Just a quick shout-out to the crew at Developer's Express for their recent, and seemingly transparent-as-they-can-be, road map post.  Julian Bucknall, the author, left an insightful comment on my Delphi upgrade perspective post a while back.  I found it especially interesting because it shows in part the implications of non-transparency, especially among mutually-dependent firms.  It's nice to see some of the major players in the community laying out their intentions more openly.  Frankly, I think there's enough risk in technology development investments as it is --- why do we need to add to it with non-visible intentions?

I remember not that many years ago, when DevExpress was an absolute black box when it came to such matters -- you really, as a customer, had no idea where they were going to invest their efforts.  Thankfully, those days are no more, for an increasing number of vendors.

Thanks for that, Julian and the rest of the DevExpress team over there -- it's appreciated.

Upgrades and Downgrades - an Update

Just as a follow-up to my earlier lament re: Windows Vista (side note: What a book cover!) and upgrading to Delphi 2007: I ended up acting on both. 

Vista / XP / Toshiba: Called Toshiba to see if they would downgrade my Satellite notebook to Windows XP, and though the tech I talked to very much understood and could empathize with my situation, I was informed Toshiba had no plans to offer XP on that machine.  I thought about downgrading manually, but I knew drivers would be a nightmare.  The showstoppers for me with Vista were network incompatibilities w/VMware (the wi-fi adapter wouldn't show up as a virtualize network adapter, which could be a hardware issue, regardless of OS), and various specific-software incompatibilities that were just getting too annoying (namely, some graphic-intensive stuff, and a few older apps that I use regularly).  I ended up bying a Dell Inspiron, which offered XP as a free downgrade, and which had more RAM to boot (but less hard drive space).  I'm running happy as a clam now. 

Not, though, that I basically agree with Joe Stanton's point: "From my POV, this all sounds just like the when XP SP0 was released, everyone hated it and stuck with Windows 2000 until SP1 and SP2 came out. Now XP is the old reliable mule?" 

Truth is, I found XP pretty darned annoying when it came out too, for many of same reasons.  In general, I find Microsoft's propensity for wheel-reinvention and eye candy  frustrating... but maybe that's just me.  Given the choice, give me improved functionality over useless glam any day of the week.  (Not to say that beautiy is not important -- in fact, I think it's one of the key indicators of elegance.  It's just that I prefer it built-in, not bolted on).

OK.... man I've got opinions about UI stuff.... sheesh.... "shut up already, Cass".... <g>

Delphi 2007 / CodeGear RAD Studio:  CodeGear had a special  running until December 31 that enticed me to go ahead and take the plunge.  Since I run my development environment on virtual machines, I've been able to run parallel with my Delphi 6 setup while getting D2007 up to speed.  More on all that later, but suffice it to say I compiled my first real project two nights ago, and overall my impression of Delphi 2007 is good.

Lastly, Rob touches on some of the why-use-third-party components issues.  Short answer: If I have the choice between writing-from-scratch, or instead dishing out a few hundred dollars for say, 250,000 lines of world-class, fully-tested code -- with source -- I'll take option B every time.  ; )   That said, it's still harder to upgrade from one version of Delphi to another than it ought to be.  Like I said, more on that later...

Win32 on Mac without Parallels or Boot Camp

Interesting post from a Delphi developer re: one of his customers deploying his app on a Mac with Crossover.  Hmmm...... sounds pretty cool...

Database in the Cloud(s)

This looks interesting / promising:  Amazon expands its web services offerings to now include SimpleDB -- a mechanism for storing structured data on their amazingly-scalable/available server cloud.  Would be cool if someone would develop a Delphi TDataSet descendant or -interfaced component for it.  THAT could be fun to play with.

...but I'll probably play with it at some point, even without that....  ; )

Question for you Ruby-heads out there

What do you think of Komodo?

VBA is about as consistent as English...

The kind of language sloppiness that drives you (OK, me...) crazy if you're a Delphi developer mucking around in an Access app.  Agh... 

(I may have to do some Object Pascal work for fun this evening, just to cleanse my brain...)

Independent Games Festival

I didn't even know this existed until just now: The Independent Games Festival.  Too late to go this year, but sure looks like fun.  It bills itself as a sort of Sundance Film Festival of games development.   

Though I don't play them much these days, as a programmer I've got a soft spot in my heart for video games.  Simple ones in particular I think; because that realm is where I cut my "coding teeth" as a kid.  (As it turned out, writing video games was also the main reason trigonometry became interesting enough for me to want learn it back when I was in high school.  How tall is this tower?  Have far is it across the river?  Yawn...  How to you map the coordinates of a spaceship onto a two-dimensional plane, given its direction of travel and speed, while also checking to see if it's crashed into something?  Now that's worthing figuring out... <g>)

Visual Web Developer

Anyone played with this?  If you have, let me know what you think of it....  thanks! : )