NAS for the mass(es)

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Jul 012004
 

Tom has an (again) excellent article about a very affordable NAS-solution. It plugs right into you controller and in about 5 minutes you have yourself a NAS.

The system is based on Open-E’s license-free NAS operating system, and comes in an Enterprise (NAS Enterprise), a normal (NAS 2.0) and in a small (in features) version (NAS SOHO). With prices ranging from approx. 200 euro to about 600 euro, the solution is much more cost-effective than a real NAS, since you would have to buy an extra disc for the operating system, the operating system itself and perhaps some client licenses as well! The concept of Open-E’s NAS is to buy the hardware, and you’re done buying.

 Posted by at 13:54

Visual C++ Toolkit: Free C++!

 1 Response »
Jun 222004
 

If you’re into C++, but can’t afford a decent compiler, then look at Microsoft’s latest initiative: they give away the C++ compiler and the whole shebang. All you need is a propert code-editor or IDE and you’re all set up to create Win32 and .NET programs in C++. The edition has no real restrictions and is the same as the compiler found in the Professional edition of Visual C++ or Visual Studio.

 Posted by at 09:04

Microsoft .Net magazine for Developers #5

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Jun 082004
 

The Microsoft .NET magazine for Developers #5 (what a great title for a Dutch magazine!) has an article about Delphi 8 for .NET, written by Bob Swart. As one can expect from Bob, the article is clean, without prejudice and after reading it you can only think: why don’t I have a copy yet?! 😉

No link to the article, since the magazine is not an e-zine, but an old-fashioned paperstyle magazine.

 Posted by at 23:46

Laptop is 54-g now

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May 282004
 

Yesterday I bought a Linksys 54-g card for the laptop. The installation is very simple: just do a setup with the supplied CD, reboot and insert the card. Windows then recognizes the card and uses it. But when I switch to using WEP (since the AP is), it would not connect to the AP. After much trying and changing settings, I found that you just have to wait a little longer than I expected. A proper reboot after changing the settings and then waiting until the connection is made did the trick. After that first wait-till-I-get-my-settings-confirmed-with-the-AP, things are smooth. Reboot until network-up-and-running is faster than with the 3Com card. And the link quality is a lot better: signal strength and link-quality in the 90%-range.

Great, now we can surf the internet downstairs again, without bugging the connection to the computerroom upstairs.

 Posted by at 11:58

WPTools

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May 272004
 

Yesterday, I converted the application I’m building for a client from using TRichView to WPTools, after succesfully using both next to eachother in one window.

Although WPTools is only $45 (225 vs. 180) more expensive, it offers not only more components to make your programmers life easier, but it has better RTF-compatibility as well. TRichView (as confirmed by the author when I asked him about it) has problems with very thin table-lines (if you set the border to 1 or so). And it can’t handle headers and footers well, as I blogged about before.

In a couple of hours playing with the WPTools-components, I had more functionality in my application than ever before with TRichView. And when I asked the author a question in the middle of the night (actually, it was about 01:00), the answer was already in my mailbox this morning (at about 06:55). And I thought I had little sleep!

If one is interested, I can draft an article that shows the differences in more detail then described here. So drop me a line/comment if you would like to see such an article.

 Posted by at 08:59

WPTools

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May 142004
 

Yesterday I installed the trial version of WPTools for Delphi 6. Dudez, this thing rocks! By dropping 4 (yes, four) of their components on a frame, you more or less have a full-blown Wordprocessor (not only a text-editor). Fonts, alignments, rulers, images, tables, whatever, it’s there.

The native format of the edit-component is RTF, but by including WPWordConv in the uses-clause, the open-file-dialog lists all the file-formats that you have installed on your PC. So you cannot build a Word replacement if you don’t have Word installed (since it needs the Word DLL’s to convert to RTF).

Apart from this tiny drawback, this thing rocks! Oh, I already mentioned that.

I will be using this component in a tool I’m writing for a client that uses an application that generates RTF-reports/documents based on templates. But TRichView that I used, can’t handle the header and footer properly (the header contains a table and an image, which I think is not so special) and it does something to the gridlines of a table. In the application, they can view the generated RTF-file, but they requested that they could edit it as well, so they wouldn’t have to switch to the full-blown application everytime. Because of the quirks of TRichView, I created a button to start MS Word to edit the document. But if I give them the new version with the WPTools components, they will never have to use Word again. Great!

 Posted by at 09:12

Office Component Suite?

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May 122004
 

Please have a look at these components. When I look at the sample Delphi code found in the FAQ, I can’t help but thinking: why is this company selling something that’s already present in Delphi? Why do we need a Word or an Excel component? It’s already there in the “Servers” tab. Geez…

What I was looking for was something in the line of RichView (that I have licensed). RichView doesn’t handle headers and footers in RTF/Word documents very well, so I was looking for something else. WPTools seems to do the trick very well, but being a small company, €225 is a lot of money if you don’t know if it will pay for itself. Especially since I already bought TRichView.

Any comments?

 Posted by at 16:42

InterBase vs MySQL

 1 Response »
May 122004
 

Nick blogs about InterBase. He’s fond of it. And so should you be, according to Nick. He points to an article by Bill Todd that compares InterBase 7.1 to MySQL. Of course InterBase is the winner in the article, but in the comparison of features the PRICE of Borland’s InterBase is left out of the equation. MySQL costs next to nothing: a pro-license is US$440. Interbase has more features (the comparison was done right) but it is licensed on a per-user basis. Unlimited users will cost you about US$4000. If you want to start small, say 20 users, it will still cost you about US$2000. MySQL + online backup option (price taken from the article) ~= 440 + 1150 = 1590.

How about putting that into the equation guys??? Lot’s of people choosing MySQL do that because they don’t need a hot-backup and they want to use a fast RDBMS for free. Since you don’t HAVE to buy a pro license. With InterBase you MUST buy a license.

 Posted by at 11:14

Of course…

 No Responses »
May 102004
 

Please turn off register_globals in your php.ini or make sure your webserver is setup to obey .htaccess files.

This is what I get, when I try to run Issue Tracker. *sigh* I wish I could make IIS obey .htaccess files.

 Posted by at 20:46
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