Now is a good time to be a Giganews customer!
Giganews just announced the Giganews Accelerator, a small application that sits between your newsreader and the Giganews servers and speeds the download of headers up to an amazing 10 times the normal speed!
The accelerator does this by requesting the Giganews servers to compress the headers data sent through your Internet connections and decompressing them before passing them to your newsreader. As far as your newsreader is concerned, nothing is changed. It receives headers just like before, but at turbo speed!
Our initial tests show a tremendous speed increase when downloading headers, anywhere from 5 to 8 times the usual rate. For example, on our 512 Kilobyte per second Internet connection, headers were coming in at more than 2.5 megabytes per second! That’s almost 5 times faster than our Internet connection and it’s all due to compression. On some other tests we reached an amazing 4 megabytes per second, which is closer to the advertised 10x increase. Note that your own results will vary based on your connection and Internet traffic.
We are happy to say that this application is not an optimize your connection type of gimmick. It’s a very real application that you run on your computer to provide the speed increase.
The TLNews crew is happy to offer you the chance to try the very first public version of Giganews Accelerator!
Read about and download the FREE Giganews Accelerator by clicking here.
If you are not a Giganews subscriber, this incredible new offering should be tempting enough!
Get a free 3 days trial on Giganews and download up to 1 full gigabyte!
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Vista is secure! Vista is easy to use! Vista searches faster! Vista is great, praise be to Vista!
After getting the above shoved down my throat until I choked, I realized that Vista was not “All-That”. While I won’t bore you with why I want off the Vista bandwagon, here is a list of the first 5 things I do whenever I install or re-install it.
Warning: this post is hardcore and not for the faint of heart!
Read the rest of this entry »
March 31st, 2007
5:11 am
Delphi
Over the past few days I read a few blog posts regarding pirated copies of Delphi 2007 and Delphi for PHP. Most of them were fakes however, especially those you could find on the web. Probably trojans or web-traps of some kind.
Real this time, a pirated copy of Delphi for PHP v1.0 build 414 has been released complete with the proper crack. This sucks big time… Anyone pirating a product they find useful is in fact hindering the development of the very tool they love and use! How insane is that?
This is just more proof that nothing will stop pirates from working their trade. Remember the old Amiga company Aegis that produced a sound editor called Audiomaster (and other cool stuff too)? Remember their motto:
“Spread the word, not the disk. ”
I never could get that bit of wisdom out of my head!
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!
I was working on my UI skills today as a I played with (the amazing) Virtual TreeView, popup menus and actions.
I was totally amazed to discover that if I pressed the shortcut key for a menu item (or the shortcut of it’s associated action), the OnPopup event of that menu would actually fire before the menu item’s OnClick event!
Here’s a concrete example: I set a TPopupMenu on a treeview. In that menu, I have a “Refresh” item that reloads the treeview content and assign the “F5″ shortcut to it. Now, everytime I press F5 while the treeview has the focus, the TPopupMenu’s OnPopup event handler will fire before the “Refresh” menu item gets triggered.
But this behavior goes further than just calling the OnPopup event handler of popup menus. First, this behavior extends to the TMainMenu where it’s the OnClick events that gets triggered. Second (and this is the kicker) the OnClick event of every parent of a menu item will be triggered before that menu item’s own!
That means that if Menu Item 1 in nested deep within other menu items, pressing the shortcut key for menu item 1 will trigger all OnClick events defined for the menus under which Menu Item 1 is placed!
This is very handy when you need to make sure certain things are properly setup before items in your menus are used.
And to think that this behavior has probably been around for ages! One thing is sure, I’ll be damn careful on how I structure my menus from now on!
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!
March 23rd, 2007
3:04 pm
Movies
My brother sent me the link for the new Transformers movie’s preview yesterday, without telling me what it was about. In fact, he hid it under an alias on purpose!
I was utterly blown away by what I saw! I enjoyed the original show quite a bit (SoundWave was my favorite, his voice was amazing!), but it’s Beast Machines that I just can’t get out of my head!
In Beast Machines the Transformers were reformatted with “technorganic” bodies, looking more like animals than machines. The end of the short-lived series had Megatron absorbing the sparks of every transformer and growing in power. Optimus Primal finally defeated him by reformatting the whole planet and saving Cybertron and all transformers.
The only thing I could think as I watched Megatron absorb the sparks was: boy, this show isn’t for children! Think of the implications, dude!
The new Transformers movie looks pretty damn good. Given my unhealthy fascination with science-fiction (as well as Batman!) there’s no way I’ll miss this one. The only thing that worries me a bit is the cast. They look pretty young and I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a family, love & let’s-all-stand-together-in-adversity type of B.S.
Check it out:
http://www.transformersmovie.com
Boy, these new transformers look dark and nasty! This has better not be a shallow drama!
Now, where did I drop my jaw…
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!
March 22nd, 2007
3:49 pm
Delphi
Delphi 2007 has a lot of improved features, but one that really makes designing forms quicker is the faster Object Inspector.
In BDS 2006, scrolling the object inspector using the mouse wheel was really slow. I mean it, on those components which implement every conceivable properties, scrolling from top to bottom was Microsoft-Fixing-Bugs-In-Windows kind of slow. In most instances you would spin the wheel and wait for the object inspector to play catch-up.
With Delphi 2007, scrolling the object inspector is lightning fast! The scrolling now follows the mouse wheel so precisely we lazy types don’t need to go through the extra step of scrolling with the scrollbar! I can now zip through those properties as fast as my fat-but-nimble index finger lets me!
Kudos to CodeGear for this great little improvement that makes using Delphi 2007 a great experience!
Introduction
In this article I will be presenting a several facts about exceptions that most casual exception users might not be aware of. Sure enough, I was unaware of many of them until I took the time to do some proper research.
I should mention that this article is not a guide on how to use exceptions. Its purpose is simply to describe some of the more obscure aspects of exception handling I have come across.
I will start from the more basic concepts and venture into the trickier stuff. Hopefully you will be able to learn a thing or two in the process, or at least kill some time if you’re at work and bored.
This is a long post, ready?
Read the rest of this entry »
I recently got a book from a well known publisher. Huge publisher. The book was about application design and I ordered it online after reading the table of content and getting positive feedbacks from co-workers.
Am I the only one who is annoyed beyond reason by the politically-correct practice of switching between “his” and “her” every other paragraph? Each time there’s a change of pronoun my brain comes to a complete halt, trying to cope with what just happened. I was utterly unable to move past the second chapter of this book. The gender-bending made it so infuriating that I tried, and failed, to get a refund for the book. I ended up giving it to someone.
And what about Harry Potter? Damn, he’s a boy… I propose we rename the character to simply H., that way he could be a boy or a girl! We should also cover the character’s face in movies with a hood and constantly change the pitch of his voice. And then, maybe we could start talking about H. Potter as “it” instead of “him” or “her”!
Seriously though, where will this madness end? I have no problem reading a book entirely written with “her”. But damn it, pick one and stay with it!
I’m pretty sure this insane attempt at making books more accessible to women didn’t originate from the authors but instead from the publishers. Especially those with a broom handle stuck somewhere. However, I see this as an opportunity for self-published authors to capitalize on, especially those using on-demand printing services such as lulu.com.
Imagine being given the choice of getting a “his” or “her” edition when buying a book online! Two copies of the electronic version of the book would need to be created, but with proper up-front planning this should be possible. And there’s always the handy search & replace function of your word processor, for that smaller document!
There you have it, another useless look at my deeply troubled psyche!
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!
Every time I read a post where someone talks about the memory his application allocates and mentions Task Manager, my eyes start to water and the vein on the side of my forehead gets ready to pop!
Dude, I said to such a guy, friend of mine, you know that the numbers you get from the Task Manager in Windows are not what you think they are? He looked at me (he’s got a high-speed Internet connection) and I could see that he thought I had escaped from the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
True, I continued undisturbed, the “Mem Usage” column in Task Manager is what is known as the “Working Set” . You see my incredulous friend, Windows decide how much memory your application will use, not you. So it’s possible your software will use more memory that what you yourself have allocated. The amount of memory allocated to your application, by Windows, is called the Working Set.
As he was about to interject and denounce me as an heretic (he had garlic in one hand and a crucifix in the other), I explained that this scheme allowed Windows to take memory away from applications that are not currently in use and give it to applications that are more active. It’s a pretty complex scheme, and “a wee bit” more complicated, but using these simple words made me realize he was starting to get it. Things are not what they seem in the world of Windows, I wisely added!
“So, he asked, partly numb from this atrocious discovery, how can I find out how much memory my application has allocated?” As I was gloating (silently as I am, at core, compassion incarnate) I told him about Process Explorer from SysInternals, which has recently been acquired by The Collective.
Process Explorer is the most amazing tool I have seen that really tells you what is happening on your computer. It’s Task Manager on steroid, anti-depressant, Panax, Ginseng and Viagra. Yes, it’s THAT powerful, and then some. While it may take a while for you to get accustomed to the display, and even more time to really understand all you can do with it, you will eventually have it running 24/7. And, roll drum, it’s free!
The memory your application allocates is referenced in Windows as the “Private Bytes” . This is the total number of bytes your applications has allocated. This is what you can use to check for memory leaks, for example.
If you want to really understand how Windows memory manager works, what are the various counters available or want to know what the so-called “Memory Optimizers” really do, I highly recommend watching the SysInternals Videos with Mark Russinovich.
This guy is a freaking genius when it comes to Windows, and he even gives seminars to teach Microsoft employees about how Windows work internally! The videos are not free, but you can at least preview some samples and choose those you really need. The one about Process Explorer should be viewed by all programmers!
And no, I have no connection whatsoever with SysInternals or Mark Russinovich. I simply think these tools are fantastic and I happily spread the word, free of charge!
After leaving my friend’s (virtual) office that day I got back to my computer, and he had sent me an email that simply read: “Dude… thanks!”. Yep, my job was done for the day and I could put my feet up and relax. Best of all, it was only 9:15 AM!
Download link: Process Explorer @ SysInternals.
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!
Now that I’ve wasted your time in part one by expanding the simple fact that I really enjoy Delphi into an endless diatribe, let me introduce my blog using three more pages of endless boring text. Or not.
In this blog I’ll talk about programming in general, application design both from a code and UI point of view and I’ll talk about Delphi, of course. But I’ll also often digress from these topics and cover other things which I find just as important.
One topic you are sure to hear about are games. I don’t like giving myself tags, but I’m pretty much a gamer. Get ready for a buttload of stuff on Bioshock and yes, I’ll say buttload whenever I feel like it!
I’ve added a few of the best blogs I visit each day. If you’re following what’s going on in the Delphi world you may already know most of these. Worth noting are the blogs of:
Nick Hodges, Delphi Program Manager. A must-read blog.
David Intersimone. I think this guy came with the offices when Borland opened shop.
Steve Trefethen. Here’s one guy that knows what he’s talking about!
Jacob Thurman. Creator of the amazing Castalia Addin for Delphi.
Channel 9. Hate Microsoft too? Learning about the people working there helped me.
As for the name of the blog, Bridging The Gap, I lied! I’m not going to explain it just yet. You’ll read about it eventually! That’s it. Thanks for stopping by and stay tuned!
L8R M8!
Remember to salt the fries!