It’s been a while since i last posted photos. Has, in fact, been a while since i last got around to doing some decent shooting.

I mostly blame Xcode.

You see, when i started up serious photography in 2006, computing as my main hobby of choice had started failing me. Computer work, and programming, had become work, not a hobby, and i no longer felt like doing programming in my spare time. A year later, along came my first Mac (ironically because &ndash among other things – it allowed me to do the post-processing of my photos without having to deal with the scourge that is Windows), and about half a year later came interest in developing with Xcode, which turned around to be such an awesome and fun development environment that it turned around my apathy regarding programming and made me enjoy it enough, again, to do it in my spare time.

So these days, my weekends and evenings are, once again, spent developing cool stuff (like our Bugs 7 application or my OneSpace iPad app). Going out and shooting pictures moved a bit to the back burner. (of course, the cold Winter hasn’t helped, either ;).

In any case, today has been one of the first days of great (for February) weather here in Berlin, along with at times almost clear blue sky, and some great clouds, giving me the chance to whip out my camera and grab a few dozen nice shots for cloudporn.com, my neglected photo blog (SFW).

These images were all shot on my converted D50 and the Nikkor 70-300mm. They are all infra-red, with only really minor retouching (contrast, mostly) in the new Aperture 3. While i’m usually a Lightroom guy, what i like about Aperture is that it allows me to preserve my in-camera calibrated white balance in infra-red short. (in Lightroom, it’d be impossible to get out images looking like these, except by converting to grayscale; the images you see here are not grayscaled).

We’ll see how it goes, but for the new decade, i’ve sworn to find more balance and get out to do more photo shooting, once again…

… Sebastian, and I am the freshman at RemObjects. So please allow me a few lines to introduce myself.

I am a 30 years young software developer from germany (and you don’t know how glad I am to publish this post today and not tomorrow ;-). I got my first computer when I was eight years old and started programming in Basic when I was twelve. At the age of 14 I sold my first commercial application (written in GW-Basic) to a doctor and later in school I learned Delphi (it was version 2 then). After a short hanky-panky with Borland C++ back in the summer of ‘96 I returned to Delphi and stayed there for some years until .NET came up. Since then I program desktop apps mostly with Delphi and web applications exclusively with .NET. My secret passion is everything that has to do with SciFi: I love cool series like Star Trek, Sliders, Stargate or Babylon 5 and, if I find some time for gaming, play EVE online.

Some of you (especially when you’re from Germany too) may already know me from my volunteering work as a moderator at the Delphi community Delphi-PRAXiS as well as the Delphi-Tage community events (the german Delphi-days). Maybe you have seen and heard some of my sessions at previous Basta! Spring and EKON conferences or you possibly could have read one of my articles in some magazine.

Before joining RemObjects I worked as a freelancer and helped my customers design and develop professional, reliable Delphi and .NET applications. Besides that I always liked to share my knowledge, so I wrote some articles for magazines and went to conferences to speak about all the cool the technology stuff I learned and worked as a trainer for Delphi and Delphi Prism. Learning new things is cool, and talking about cool new stuff even more so. ;-)

Since I had my first contact with the predecessor of Oxygene respectively Delphi Prism, I was impressed how the guys here at RemObjects are getting those things done so well. Now I can see and live that in our day to day work and I must say I’m even more impressed right now. My business here at RemObjects will be mainly boosting the developer relations and do some evangelism stuff. Actually, that means I want to
a) talk to you
b) even more important listen to you, and
c) care about your possible itches & whishes.

That is, of course, besides d) a little bit coding with our products, playing around, creating samples, showing off some cool new technology and telling you what I love about the work that is done here in the secret labs at RemObjects

If you have any questions, remarks, whishes, itches or just want to say hello – please feel free to email me here at RemObjects dot com, putting sebastiang right in front of the (at).

Yours Sincerly,

I wish all of our customers and readers a happy and successful new year of 2010. We have great things coming up, so 2010 should be a very exciting year!

Photo shot in Berlin Friedrichshain at the Frankfurter Allee, tonight at 12:43 AM.

my new Droid:

If your internal body clock has gotten attuned to our regular release cycle here at RemObjects (or even if you just did the math ;), you might be expecting our new set of Fall 2009 releases right around this week.

No worries, these Fall releases are in the works, but this time around, we have decided to grant ourselves another two weeks and ship them to you in the second week of September, instead. This has several reasons:

For one, as you might know, we also shipped a new major release of Delphi Prism this month, which is making its way to customers (and available as trial) now. Originally, RTM for Delphi Prism was planned for a few weeks earlier than when it actually happened, for a variety of reasons, so Delphi Prism has kept us busy a bit longer than we had anticipated. We did not want the other products to suffer from that and see a rushed release, so we made extra time.

For another, Embarcadero also just shipped a new version of Delphi/Win32, and we wanted to get final and official support for that into the new releases, as well. Of course we’ve been testing our products with pre-release versions for a while now, and had begun to get ready for Delphi 2010 early on (and there weren’t really any complications, either), but while that is all fine and well in the proverbial lab, there was still a lot to do and test once we received the final binaries and could install those on the build servers that crank out the shipping products. We could have done it in time, but once again, we did not want to rush things and give more than a good week of testing to builds coming off our build machines with D2010 support (and ship a beta or two of those to our external testers, as well). So two extra weeks came in really handy here, as well.

If you’re detecting a general theme here, you are not wrong. We’ve been asking our customers (that’s you) what we can improve, and one consistent feedback we got was: Quality. New features and bug fixes are great, but (understandably), you have told us that you need to rely on new releases to be of high quality and on upgrades to be as risk-free to install as possible. And while i believe we’ve made great improvements over the past year or so in that regard, there’s still room for more improvement, and we intend to leverage that.

So we have scaled down the scope of both this upcoming Fall release and the next Winter release (due in November), in order to focus more of our resources onto better quality assurance. More unit tests. Way more unit tests. More automated non-unit tests. But also way better infrastructure to exercise these unit tests. Over the past month, we’ve started to set up a sophisticated infrastructure for Continuous Integration (and i’ll blog more about that in a separate post, soon); we’re setting up enhanced infrastructure for automated testing and reporting based on our internal Afterhours testing framework. We’re also reworking programs such as our beta tests, and TeamRO, to provide a better experience for everyone involved, more frequent beta builds (with more details about them) and tighter feedback loops.

I hope the upcoming Fall release, two weeks from now, will show the first, tentative, fruits of this shift, and that there will be a noticeable impact on quality with the Winter releases.

Of course this does not mean that the upcoming releases will be entirely without new goodies. Two IMHO very exciting new features we will be shipping are integrated support for Roles in RemObjects SDK (i’ll write more on this, soon), and the Delphi port of our new PCTrade sample suite for Data Abstract. We’ve also been working on a new component for Data Abstract for .NET, the “Local Data Adapter” which will work similar to its Remote counterpart, but allow easy access to data from within the middle tier.

The LDA will not ship in the Fall releases (another factor of our renewed focus on quality-over-features), but i’ve been using it myself in a couple of internal projects for a while now, and it is shaping up nicely. I’ll be talking more about the LDA, and other things we have in the works for November, soon.

In the mean time: new beta builds of the upcoming Fall release are available for all active customers, on beta.remobjects.com. If you want to get an early peak, or are desperate for Delphi 2010 support, make sure to grab those; they are pretty stable, at this stage, and we’ll be updating them frequently as we near release. Or, sit back and relax for the next two weeks, until the official Fall 2009 releases will be available, September 12.

yours,
marc

I’ve started a new blog dedicated to my favorite kind of photography: clouds. The site will mainly be a photo blog format, providing frequent posts of photos of awesome cloudscapes, but it will also contain the occasional bit of prose, such as the Introduction to Infrared i just posted earlier this evening.

The site has the fitting title (and domain) of cloudporn.com. And yes, it’s entirely SFW.

So, WWDC09, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, is over, and i’m sitting in my room at the excellent Hotel Monaco getting ready to leave San Francisco.

For every conference i go to, i plan to blog more extensively about it, but of course that never happens, because there’s just too much good stuff going on throughout the week to find the time to sit down and write about it; WWDC has been no different.

I know most people following WWDC from afar only see the keynote on monday, but of course that is only the start of a full week of info straight from the firehose, and – while fun – pales in comparisson to the real meat of the conference.

This year, there has been lots of exciting news from the developer tools front. Xcode, the development IDE for both Mac and iPhone, is getting vastly expanded, with things such as deep integration of the Clang Static Analyzer (which admittedly i had been playing with for a month now, so it was not brand new for me, this week) and a new and vastly better Clang-LLVM based compiler to replace GCC (which still is the default, though). And that’s just the tip of the eisberg. And the rest of the tool suite, such as Instruments, is seeing significant improvements as well.

Due to the work i do at RemObjects, i always find myself in some sort of a “meta-developer” position at conferences like these. While most attendees see, say, new improvements in Instruments and think “that’s great, how can that help me write apps?”, i think “great, how can we leverage this to help our customers write their apps?”.

And i think there’s great potential here for deeper integration of RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract with tools such as Instruments, to make your life easier (and the same goes for GCD).

In addition to the tool chain, there’s also lots of good stuff happening in the OS and libraries, to benefit developers. Of course this is all largely under NDA, so i cannot say too much, but just take Grand Central Dispatch, for instance.

While GCD was already announced (not in the public keynote, but to developers) at last year’s WWDC, this week went into much more detail, and it’s amazing to see just at what level of both the OS and its applications, but also the developer APIs, GCD is being employed. Having a great technology as GCD made available is one thing (and the Parallel Framework on .NET offers something comparable), but seeing how virtually every of the OS’s APIs has been revised to make use of it, and seeing – first hand – the sort of performance improvements Apple has been able to get out of the technology by consistently applying it to all of their code as well, is mind blowing.

With this, and the great enhancements to the entire tool chain, i feel once again ensured that this is a great platform (or actually, two great platforms) to invest in.

And to think the entire tool chain, from Xcode to all the professional tools it comes with, comes free with the system (remember that, the text time someone wields the Apple Tax myth).

In any case, i should start to pack and catch my flight. It’s been a great week of learning and meeting great people, and i, for one, already can’t wait for WWDC 2010…

yours
marc hoffman
Chief Architect

ps: a couple of great food recommendations in San Francisco:

• OSHA Thai Restaurant on 2nd, between Howard and Mission. Awesome food.
• John’s Grill on Ellis, between Stockton and Powell. Home of the Maltese Falcon and great steaks and seafood

“It’s Raining Again” — see it on dwarfland.com

HDR from 11 exposures shot with the D300. That’s Xcode running on the MacBook; lying next to it is my old (now IR-converted) D50 with the Sigma 300mm attached. Shot today.

Ever since i got my D300 last December, my old Nikon D50 has been burning a hole in my pocket, as they say. A couple weeks back, i finally decided to send it off to be converted to a pure infrared camera. Today it came back, so i took it on a trip thru some of my favorite parks in Berlin. Some 15km and 250+ photos later, here are some initial highlights (with light post-processing in Lightroom 2 only):

From the “Life on Mars” set — see more on dwarfland.com

Below are a couple of new “RemObjects Software” wallpapers i’ve created over the past few months (all 13″ MacBook size, 1280×800, for now – i may provide larger versions depending on demand). Click the images to download full-sized versions.

— These guys were captured last December at the Spree river in Treprower Park, Berlin.

— This, believe it or not, is sunlight reflecting off a layer of ice frozen my balcony railing. Shot in early January 2009 at 300mm.

— This one, finally, was shot today in Volkspark Friedrichshain using the awesome lensbaby.

Enjoy.