"Shake" - see it on dwarfland.com

Berlin, Summer of 2007. Combination of two different tone-mappings of the same 3-exposure HDR.

I've just wasted four hours of my life i will not get back. What did i do you, you ask? Easy: i tried to upgrade my Delphi 2007 test VM to the latest and greatest CodeGear produce.

This is a clean VM we're talking about. Fresh install of Windows XP SP2 with latest Updates. Snapsot. Clone. Fresh Install of Delphi 2007 MK-1. Snapshot. Updated to Delphi 2007 Update 2 some months ago. Snapshot. All had been working fine (or at least, as fine as one has come to expect).

12:00 PM: Booting up. Dragging RadStudio2007Setup.exe over. Running. Entering new Serial; selecting upgrade. OK.

12:05 PM: Noticing my overall system is anything but performant. Indeed, setup inside the VM is managing to drag down the entire 2x4,4GHz, 4GB system with it. Apparently doing nothing.

12:30 PM: Setup (or so foolish me thinks) is finally starting to copy files. At least that's what it looks like - the status panel is rapidly (yet somehow incredibly slowly) showing filename after filename.

12:45 PM: Can't be long now. How many files could setup possibly have to copy, after all?

13:30 PM: Incredibly enough, setup is now starting to download files. What is that you're saying? Wasn't it already installing before? Well, apparently not.

14:30 PM: Setup is still downloading. Setup is also still bigging down the entire system, making it still unusable. Going off to my MacBook to get some stuff done in the meantime

15:00 PM: Checking back for status: Still downloading, and the entire desktop is covered with .7zip files. Of course. Where else would you put temp files, if not on the desktop! How silly of me.

15:15 PM: Apparently done downloading, and installing now (but then, we though it was doing that last week). System still slow as molasses, of course. Teaches me for not buying state of the art hardware.

15:50 PM: Setup done. Repeat: Setup done. Launching!

15:52 PM: Completing Registration and Activaton form. Subitting

15:55 PM: Spash Screen "C++BUILDER". Huh?

15:56 PM: Exception EPackageRegistrationException in module coreide100.bpl at 000DA029.
Registration procedure, Dotnetreg.IDERegister in package c:\program files\codegear\rad studio\5.0\Bin\dotnetcoreide100.bpl raised exception class EOleSysError: Unspecified error, ClassID: {88487704-983C-4811-A96A-3DA723DD97AF}.

Do you want to attempt to load this IDE package the next time CodeGear RAD Studio for Microsoft Windows is run?

Selecting "Whatever"

15:59 PM: IDE comes up, "Delphi for Win32". I thought (from the splash) it launched C++Builder. Weird. Let's restart

16:03 PM: Splash screen "RAD STUDIO 2007". Better! better?

16:03:20 PM: Failure to load "Together" package. Ignore. Whatever. Who Cares! I don't need Together!

16:03:35 PM: Access Violation. process is gone

16:04 PM: Launching again

16:05 PM: Some *OTHER* package failure. Then the XP "Has encountered a problem" dialog

16:06 PM: Pressing "Reset to Snapshot" button in VMware.

So glad i didn't have anything better to do, today.

Many years ago, when i seriously started collecting DVDs, i wrote an application where, being the anal-retentive guy i am, i could maintain all my DVDs and, eventually, CDs and books. I don’t remember how long ago this was, precisely, but the project was written in Delphi and DataSnap, so that should give you some indication that it's been a while.

The program has been and still is working great, and having the database for easy reference of all DVDs is nice; it’s easy to pick a movie to watch, based on – say – genre, without browsing meters of shelf space. Plus (most importantly ;), having scanned all cast info off imdb, the app could instantly calculate the “Kevin Bacon” level of each title.

The downside to all this was that, whenever a new shipment from amazon arrived, the pile was sitting on my desk, waiting to be typed in.

Yesterday, i found a cool tool (once again Mac only, sorry guys) that puts an end to this: Delicious Library.

Delicious Library is an app for maintaining your library of CDs, DVDs and books - but with a twist: rather then manually typing in the info of all your items one by one, all you need to do is swipe their barcode in front of the iSight camera, and Delicious Library will automatically read the code and look up the info – including cover image, IMDB info and all sorts of details, for you:

"Dudes on a Bridge" - see it on dwarfland.com

Taken on the Seine in Paris, France, on our trip to meet with Olivier "OBones" Sannier in April 2007.

Sure thing.

In my previous blog post, we took a quick first look at developing Mac a application using Chrome and Mono. Since that post was written, a lot of things have happened. We’ve shipped Chrome 2.0.3, which not only introduced a new project template for Cocoa#, but also provides advanced IDE integration to auto-generate code based on the UI defined in NIB files – making it easy to access the controls you have dropped, and implement the event handers you defined, without having to manually declare them in code. Post 2.0.3, we’ve made some further improvements to he build experience that will ship in our next release in October: we’ve created some custom MSBuild magic that will allow you to generate a finished .app right from within Visual Studio. Which is pretty cool.

That’s all fine and well, you say, but what about our other products? After all, Chrome is but a small part of our product portfolio, and we’re saying we’re focused on enabling cross-platform development across the board.

So, eating our own dog food, i set out last weekend to give three more of our products a spin in the Mac arena: Data Abstract, RemObjects SDK and Internet Pack for .NET.

The result is what you see below, one of a handful of new (and related) sample applications that we are working on and will ship in a future release of DA. The common theme between all the the projects is that they use Data Abstract to access a database middle tier that we’re running on one of our servers. This database server provides info that many of our customers have been dying to get their hands on: namely, direct read-only access to (selected, public) parts of our internal bug databases.

So in addition to providing a useful and real-life sample project that illustrates some of the concepts of DA, you’re also getting useful application(s) you can use to browse for known issues in our products, see their status and what version they were or will be resolved in.

</rathole>

Getting back to the Mac: besides the obvious targets, WinForms, ASP.NET and Delphi clients, i’ve decided to also look into creating a Mac version of the BugDb client – not so much out of real need (i suspect the majority of our users are running Windows machines, for now), but more to put the new Cocoa# support in Chrome to use (and in the process streamline it some more) and to see how well Data Abstract and it’s supporting products, RO and IP, would fare on the Mac.

The answer is: surprisingly well. Of course, we’ve long been supporting and testing for Mono, so i suppose there should be no surprise at all that it “just worked”, but it was still amazing how easy it was to see live DA data show up in a native Mac OS X application.

I started with a plain MonoChrome Cocoa# project, designed the UI in Interface Builder to show one large NSTableView filling the main window. I then added a standard .NET “Component” class to my project and used the familiar WinForms design surface to build my DA client – drop the Remote Data Adapter and related components, right-click it to generate a Strongly Typed DataSet, add a call to Fill() to populate it, all standard stuff a DA user does in her sleep.

Finally, a mere two simple methods needed to be implemented on my ApplicationController, and the NSTableView showed populated with live data retrieved through Data Abstract:

I’ve got some more wrapping up to do to have a finished application – like providing a login/preferences dialog, maybe saving to a local briefcase file and adding an option to reload data - but the core data access was implemented and working in no time.

Four of our .NET products working in unison, creating a true Mac OS X app!

Figuring a bit of non-tech content would do this blog some good, i've decided to start a weekly post series, titled "Photo of the Week" (how original, indeed ;). Once a week, i’ll try to post a highlight (or so i hope) from my photo collection – which might be a new picture taken/developed that week, or an oldie that was published before or caught my attention while browsing my local Lightroom library.

For more of my photos, visit my page on flickr (don’t be shy to leave a comment or add me as contact) or my personal photography website at dwarfland.com.

"20064 #1" - see it on dwarfland.com

This first one is an HDR rendered from 3 exposures, taken on August 1st in Berlin, just outside the Volkspark Friedrichshain. Yes, the number 20064 refers to the shutter clicks, so this is the 20064th picture i’ve taken with my current camera. For what that's worth.

You can find more HDRs in my HDR Set.

I came across a cool writing tool today that i fell instantly in love with - WriteRoom by Jesse Grosjean.

At heart, WriteRoom is a very simplistic text editor for plain and rich text – but herein lies the beauty: rather then cluttering he screen with a plethora of UI and toolbars and options as most modern word processors WriteRoom presents itself with what is almost a step back into the 80’s – but in a good way. WriteRoom comes up as an entirely black screen with just your text and a green blinking block cursor. The idea is – and it works quite nicely, i must say – is that it blocks out all the distractions and allows you to fully concentrate on the writing task at and. No jumping IM icons calling you away and trying to steal your focus, no mail icon in your tray beckoning you to check if an important mail came in (don’t worry, it didn’t).

If you spend any part of your day writing text (and, run a Mac – sorry ;) make sure to check it out, at http://www.hogbaysoftware.com.