TURBU Tech

I got a request at work yesterday to look at an issue one of our clients was having.  A certain service didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, with no failure messages in the server logs.  After asking a few questions and checking out the log, I determined that the initialization code for that service had never run when the server started up, so I pulled up a local copy on my dev system to figure out why. Continue reading ‘Always Review Your Code’ »

Jolyon Smith has been posting a lot of really rosy stuff about Oxygene lately.  And he even commented on a recent blog post of mine,  in response to my frustration about Embarcadero blatantly ripping off paying customers by not including Android support as part of the baseline Delphi installation:

[Oxygene is] a better Pascal even than Delphi these days and fully supports Android (and iOS) development using the platform native frameworks, so you get to learn “proper” Android development (portable skills) without having to swallow the Java pill.

Thing is, I’ve been doing some serious looking at Oxygene too lately.  I haven’t reached all of the same conclusions he has, though.  But then again, I’ve been trying to do different stuff. Continue reading ‘First look at Oxygene for Android development’ »

If you haven’t seen Gabr’s latest post about Delphi language features, it’s worth looking at. I don’t agree with everything he posted, but he’s got some good points.

But he’s also got some annoying problems in the comments department.  Some obnoxious troll is spamming up almost half of the (extremely large) set of comments under the post with a bunch of preaching about how Python is soooo much better than Delphi because it’s less verbose.  His thesis seems to be that since you can write equivalent functionality with (as he claims) one-tenth the lines of code, that Python is ten times more productive than Delphi. Continue reading ‘Delphi and Productivity’ »

This isn’t the post I was planning on writing. I was really looking forward to this latest release.  I really wanted to like it.  I really wanted to use it, and I really wanted to be able to talk on here about how awesome it is.  Afterall, this release was going to finally bring Android support to Delphi, which has been something it’s needed for several years now.

Unfortunately… it doesn’t.  I just got my SA download and installed it, and there’s no Android support anywhere to be found.  Apparently that’s not part of Delphi; it’s an “add-on pack” that costs 140% of what I already paid for SA this year!  All that’s in Delphi XE5 itself is the Desktop development stuff I already have, which has scarcely changed at all since XE2.  With pricing that high, you’d almost think someone in Embarcadero marketing is deliberately trying to drive users to Oxygene! Continue reading ‘Delphi XE5: Promised Android support not included!’ »

I went to visit my family over Labor Day.  We hung out, talked, watched some TV, and went out for dinner at a local restaurant.  We took my car, and on the way back, because my stepfather’s always commenting on how cool it is, I let him drive.

He was really impressed by the handling and also by the cool electronics, and that was without even showing him the voice control feature.  He even joked that he was going to borrow it and take it to the next football game so he could back in and watch all the action on the backup camera.  But the thing that really amused me was when he said it was “like driving a Cadillac.” Continue reading ‘The cool thing about technology’ »