Suredeath blogged about it, so I’ll show my picture of the Saturday storm as well. In this picture you can actually see the front approaching. When the curve was even nearer, the force of the wind was incredible. In the picture you can see some black stripes. These are not dust on the CCD, but they are leaves and twigs floating in the air!
I played around with NexusDB lite, the free version of NexusDB. NexusDB is a C/S database system, that can be used embedded as well. In that case, your exe is both the client and the server.
NexusDB Lite, currently at version 1.07, has 3 restrictions/limitations: you can only open 1 database per application, you can only have 5 tables per database and you can only have 10000 rows per table. That sums to 50000 rows in total. Not a problem for initial setup or serious testing.
All standard datacontrols recognize the nx-components, so you should not have any trouble converting/creating your application.
It’s a little to early to give my judgement, but from what I know now, I can say that the server and the components work pretty smooth. The only thing I have against NexusDB at the moment are the strange datatypes. ShortString, WideString, NullString. Make up your mind. Where my (VAR)CHAR? And why an Int8, Int16, Int32 and Int64? What’s wrong with Shortint, Int, LongInt? Okay, okay, I’ll stop whining. It’s not Oracle. And it is free, so who cares?
PHP 5 has been released, and on the same day a new version of 4: 4.3.8.
Version 5 has several improvements over 4, the most important of them being the completely rewritten XML support and the use of the new Zend-II engine that has real object support (instead of a modified document model to suit OO-programming). Browse to their website, and find out everything there is to know about this new version.
Yesterday I had a good day in my mental/personal(/midlife?) crisis, so I started Delphi just to do some programming. Nothing real, just playing around. A while ago, I downloaded SuiPack, from SuniSoft, so I installed that.
Let me tell you about the installation first. You start the installer, and in less that a minute a message is showed that the installation is complete. Okay, I thought, I haven’t even noticed something.
Starting Delphi again gave me 4 more tabs in the pallette: SuiPack, SuiPack DB, SuiDialogs and SuiUtils. The first one is so filled with components, that it doesn’t even fit on one page. It seems to contain just about any object you already know! SuiPack DB holds the components that are database-aware. SuiDialogs hold some predefined dialogs and then there are some utils.
Working with the components is easy. Converting old projects is easy too. Just drop a converter-component on your form, and suiPack will try to convert all components to the Sui-counterpart. If you don’t use too many third party components, converting should give you no problem. Switching themes on the fly is easy. Just drop a SuiThemeManager on the form, double-click it to select which components will be effected and at runtime change the SuiThemeManager.SuiUIStyle to something else. A predefined theme, or something you load from a file. It’s already in there.
Two thumbs up for this product. Its price is good too. Individual licenses are $59, or $99 with full source. Corporate licenses are more expensive, but still very cheap if you have a couple of developers on your payroll.
This is cool. Some people love vi so much, that they turn MS Word into vi! Check this out.
Like I used to said a couple of years ago: real programmers use vi.
If you need a good paintprogram, with unique features, but don’t have an arm and a leg to spare, try DogWaffle. It is a strange name for a very good program and it has a free version. If you like it, or need the newer features, you can always upgrade to the latest version. For only US$67 you have an awesome, especially aimed at artists (so it’s not really targetted at photographers and photo-editing like PhotoShop, although it will do just fine in comparison). It has a nice feature onion-skin (for old-fashioned animation), a particle engine for sparks/fireworks/rainfall, and lots of other goodies found only found in programs costing ten times as much. Check it out, you won’t regret it.
If you need to control your server, but can’t actually be at its keyboard, RealVNC is lean, mean and … FREE! See the picture I’ve taken, but don’t mind the mess. You can see the real server to the right, and it’s screen in a window on my workstation to the left.
I tried to install PostgreSQL, the 7.5 binary development night-build (since I can’t build it from source). The basic procedure is:
- Unzip in directory, let's assume C:PostgreSQL
- Add C:PostgreSQLBin and C:PostgreSQLlib to PATH
- Add environmentvariable PGDATA and have it point to C:PostgreSQLData
- Now start the following command: initdb -L "C:/postgresql/share"
First problem encountered: PostgreSQL won’t run as admin. So I created a limited-user (I’m using Windows XP Pro) and logged in as that user. The init-command now crashes with an unhandled exception. Can’t see what it is, or what to do about it. Just a message that somebody is sorry for the inconvenience (you know what I’m talking about!).
Let’s wait a while until 7.5 with the real Windows installer is there. In some online documents I read that this Windows support was supposed to be included in version 7.4 already. But hey, who cares about tons of users?
If you have an USB-key or pendrive, then this tool from HP allows you to format it so you can boot from it. Think of the possibilities: as a rescuedisk, as an alternative way of booting Linux, as Symantec Ghost bootdisk, whatever. Great.
Since I participate in the RC-72 contest of Distributed.net, I regularly visit the stats pages. A while ago, the guys switched from Sybase to PostgreSQL as their database of choice. On the statspages the PostgreSQL-logo is displayed, so I clicked it recently.
PostgreSQL looks like a good choice if you are, like me, accustomed to Oracle. I hope version 7.5 will bring a decent Windows version, since Cygwin is not something I like very much. But tablespaces, replication, foreign-keys and subselects are things I do like. I’ll let you guys know when I installed it, and what my findings are.