ksymeon

What a nice surprise, when my Linux Format arrived today with a copy of Debian 6! My favourite distro's latest incarnation. :-) No time to waste, I've got a VM running with a dual-core CPU and a gig of RAM, and the installation started. A couple of moments later (after following my own instructions to setup ssh etc.) and I have a perfectly functioning Debian install on my desktop. Now, on to my apt-get list of useful things to install: sudo apt-get install make sudo apt-get install gcc Install VMWare tools and then, fire up the Software Centre from System -> Administration -> Software Centre and choose to your heart's content. sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo apt-get install mercurial sudo apt-get install git sudo apt-get install curl sudo apt-get install zip Got Google Chromium browser (synchronised my bookmarks), even installed the Free-Pascal compiler and Lazarus (what a good job they've done). In general Debian 6 did not s...

That's it. I've done it! I have just ordered a bunch of new kit from ebuyer and dabs. I'm building a new workstation. I know, all these macs and sh*t, however, with a mortgage and a kid there's no money for a Mac. So back to basics: Windows and a custom-built PC. In other words get as much umpf as possible for your pennies. My only requirement was memory tbh. I wanted lots. I wanted 32GB of RAM or something like that. Then I had a look at the prices. So I settled for 6! With another 6 at christmas... :-) OS? Well, not much choice, I will start with  64-bit Windows 7, but I might give Ubuntu a partition. Problem is I need to run LightRoom and PhotoShop, so not much room to argue really. My problem now is... the moment I placed the order,  it occured to me that I'm gonna have to literally PULL THE PLUG from my old PC. You see, I'm bloody emotional, I can't let go that easily. All my previous computers (and I've built a few) were built side-by-side wi...

Thanks to my dear friend from NYC and his... accomplice :), I have had an iPad delivered a couple of days ago. I haven't actually managed to do much on it yet, I have spent my minimal free time in the evenings having the iPad lying on my desk connected to my desktop, while I was trying to find any decent specialized iPad apps in the AppStore, which is not as easy as it sounds. Quickly let me get through what everybody else has already said: looks stunning, feels sturdy, screen is amazing and bright, battery life exceptional. That all we all know. Here is my take on the rest - a very quick first impressions review... Ergonomics Sturdy feeling generally and the thick bevel allows you to handle it very easily. On the desktop surface is perfectly usable. It's like a normal notepad instead of a pen you use your fingers. Admittedly you can write faster than you can type on one hand, but for casual use it's perfect. In bed lying on your back it's unusable, too heavy. Lyin...

So Apple releases a new "Terms and Conditions" prohibiting Flash developers from using Adobe's tool for cross-compilation of Flash code to native Objective-C and I wonder: Why such hatred? In my eyes Adobe was one of the very few companies publishing their software for Macs when the Mac had a close-to-zero market-share, it made the Mac user synonymous to the Photoshop or AI user and put simply it supported the Mac during the dark ages of Windomination. Now that the Macs are cool and have a (still comparatively small) market share, why does Apple turn their back to a company that invested millions in making their software work for their platform? When you are a platform maker what you really want is people to write software for you, and people who make tools that create software to make them available to your platform. You are the creator of an ecosystem and you want software to populate it. I understand that running Flash directly on the iPhone, as a Safari plugin let...

It's been a couple of months now, that I have been designing the next version of ToolBox and last night I managed to finally get a beta version out on my web-site. It's been hard work trying to refactor code (clean it up/modernize it along the way), then build new functionality and incorporate a few libraries and technologies I've been playing with these past few years (for example a new image manipulation engine, a new TileGrid component). This beta has the potential of becoming a release soon, I had to draw a line on new features and stop there, otherwise I wouldn't be able to release it soon enough. The new version has many changes underneath, but in terms of user interface it allows you to fully customize a ToolBox. For the first time users can choose to display text below an icon and also create a secondary text comment for each icon and display that on the ToolBox. What is more, the primary icon text that is displayed is now decoupled from the hint, which can be...

I am a bit sentimental I admit it. For years and years and years I've been writing and teaching Pascal, Pascal OOP and Delphi (not since 1999 though). Ever since the early days I had a certain fondness ofn the Pascal enumerated types and the Ord() function. The Ord function returns a cardinal number (integer) for any given ordinal type. Ordinal Types are cardinal numbers like byte, integer, shortint etc., chars (!) and enumerated types. So Ord(0) = 0, and Ord('@') = 64 as 64 is the ASCII code of the '@' char in the order of the ASCII characters. Nice. In the same category as Ord(), are the functions Pred(), Succ() and procedures Inc() and Dec(), which increase and decrease ordinal numbers. Things like Inc ('A', 32) is a valid thing in Pascal, and increases the ordinal value of 'A' by 32, making it an 'a'. Thus making the nicest of capitalisation routines that you can find in any computer language: if (c in ['A'..'Z']) then // ...

I've been always wanting to sit down one day and solve this problem; test the speed of manipulating pixels on a Bitmap using the three options: - the convenient but understandably slow Pixels[], - the "interesting" Scanline property and - the Windows API GetDIBits and SetDIBits. I have been traditionally using Pixels for quick work and the Get/SetDIBits for low-level pixel manipulation such as the filters used in ToolBox . Never really used the Scanline property in anger, I was always thinking, DIBits "had" to be quicker. Little I knew... I have been experimenting with two tools that I've written and never released to the public domain. The first is the BMPCreator which I wrote in order to create 256-level grayscale bitmaps, the other is the IconCreator which uses a grayscale bitmap and applies color maps to it, giving you the ability to create different colored versions of the same icon (like in my database visualization tool VirtualTreeNavigator ). Yesterd...