This is just a message to tell you that there will be some interruption to the connection to this server. Monday 19th I will change ISP (bye Demon, hello TweakDSL), so I need to change my DNS settings and they will have to be propagated. That will take some time.
For your information: the linespeed will change from 6016/1024 to 10240/1024. Some, more downloadspeed for me. And more money, since TweakDSL is cheaper than Demon is.
Oracle released beta 2 of their XE for Windows. It solves the following issues:
Get it here.
Microsoft is giving away the Express 2005 editions of Visual Webdeveloper, Basic, C#, C++, J# and SQL Server 2005. For a year. That means: if you download and register one (or more) of these products before November 6, 2006, you don’t have to pay for them, and you can use them forever without paying a dime. You can find all the information on this page. Go to the manual downloads if you want ISO-images of installation CD’s, all other downloads are socalled websetups.
Don’t take my word for it, but read Borland’s roadmap for Delphi yourself. The .NET 2.0 framework will be supported in Delphi 2006 (to be released somewhere in 2006, at earliest 2 months away). Avalon and Indigo are planned for 2007 (Delphi Longhorn).
Tom wrote about free courses for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. Be quick, the offers is supposed to end at November 17.
Late and recent Borland (the company) developments made me think about writing it again. Delphi2005 was very unstable and slow on my systems, and with some patches and third party solutions in speeding things up, you could (no, I did not use the word: should) have a decent development environment. Delphi2006 is here, and Borland is asking for another upgrade. They are not supporting .NET 2.0 in any way: that will be in their next release, probably Delphi2006.5, or D2007. That basically means how many upgrades until it finally works?
I am a Borland Delphi customer and was very happy with the product until they decided to support .NET. It’s out of their league. Of all .NET IDE’s I’ve tried, Delphi is the one I was least satisfied with. I produced E-Sync in VS.NET in less time with less trouble than I could have done with Delphi, even when being less familiar with C# than with Delphi (Object Pascal).
My advice to the Delphi community. Do a crashcourse C#. You’ll see it’s much like Pascal. Or Java, for that matter. Then buy VS.NET. Convert your Delphi-code to C#, and create new applications in C#. In the end you’ll save yourself a lot of time, you’ll be able to support .NET better and more stable, and you will have satisfied customers. How does that sound? Sounds good to me.
I just bought a datacable for my cellphone. It’s an USB-cable that converts the USB connection to a serial-connection (since the cellphone has a serial port). When you connect the cable, and the cellphone is “on”, you will have an extra com-port, that you can select in the software. Connecting the cord resulted in an extra com-port and removing the cord removed the extra com-port from the device-list. But the software did not detect the phone (please connect your phone first). USB is supposed to be plug&play, but as a last resort I restarted the PC, and to my surpise: the software recognised the cellphone. So the advice “I all fails, just reboot your machine” even works when connecting plug&play devices…
Oracle has release beta versions of the Express Edition (XE), a free (yes!) 10g release 2 database server with HTML_DB preinstalled. XE has some limitations over the real 10g database, but these are things like high-availability, advanced replication (basic is there), Java/JSP support, automatic storage management, etc. Things for the big players. XE is obviously targetted at developers and end-users currently looking at/using SQL Server Express.
OracleXE 10g limitations:
– it runs at the speed of a single CPU on multi-CPU machines
– the database cannot exceed 4GB
– only one installation and one instance (you can create more, but start only one) per machine
But: Oracle 10g XE is FREE!
Sorry I missed the announcement, but OpenOffice 2.0 is no longer beta. Read the press release, or go to the download page immediately (via bittorrent).
If you are looking for a house in the eastern part of the country, perhaps I can help you out. My house in Enschede is for sale. It’s located in the centre part of the city, so on walking distance from a lot of pubs, restaurants and shops. As well on walking distance you’ll find schools, public transport, the hospital, churches, the “Volkspark” (literaly translates to: the common peoples park).
Need more info? Contact me!