Wow, check out this site. Real up-to-date Delphi news, announcements of components, and some more. Don’t miss out on this one!
May 252004
May 242004
I didn’t want to blog about it yesterday, but after tightening the antenna on the Linksys Ethernet Bridge (54g) the connection seems okay again. Some strange zero-bytes-per-second periods still, but when it works, it works great. See this DU-meter screenshot:
May 222004
In case you downloaded and installed the Delphi 7.1 update, go and download this one as well, since it seems to fix the bug that cause the “persistent field size mismatch exception”.
May 212004
Today I cleaned the CCD of my Fuji S2 Pro. I was annoyed by the same spot on every picture. At first I thought my Nikon 28-105 was the suspect. So I shot this image:
But both the 28-105 and my Tamron 90/2.8 gave the same image, obviously the spots where CCD-related and not lens-related.
The procedure for cleaning the CCD is simple, but…you need to take precautions. First you need to be in a clean room. Second, the camera need not be used recently. Third, you need to hook up the camera to AC-adapter. And fourth, you need special swabs and cleaning fluid. The second precaution was a simple one: the camera was used this afternoon, not recently. The first one, well, if I consider my computer room clean, then this condition is met too. Third condition was a difficult one: I don’t have an AC-adapter for my camera. Fourth condition, well, none of that present here too.
I thought, what the heck, let me just look at the CCD and try to blow of the dust. Pressing the Flash-settings and LCD-light button whilst turnin on the camera was the first step. I removed the lens, pressed the shutter, and the mirror stayed up. A nice redish CCD was looking at me, rather innocent, but with one big dustspot on it. I blew (no canned air, just my lungpressure) into the camera, to find that it would not remove the dustspot.
Scratch, scratch. Wait, I’ll get some Q-tips.
After removing the spot, the CCD-image looked like this:
So, I followed the procedure to flip up the mirror again and wiped the whole CCD area, no matter if I saw dust or not. The resulting image:
Clean enough for me!
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT THE PREFERRED WAY OF CLEANING THE FUJI S2 PRO CCD. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR CCD IF YOU FOLLOW THIS PROCEDURE. SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OR AN OTHERWISE MALFUNCTIONING CCD MIGHT BE THE RESULT IF YOU FOLLOW THIS PROCEDURE. DO NOT TRY THIS CHEAP PROCEDURE IF YOU CAN NOT AFFORD A NEW CCD WHEN THINGS GO WRONG.
May 192004
If you run IIS on Windows XP, and you test your applications with it, you will suffer from the maximum connection limit of 10 users sooner or later. It can be altered to 40, but that’s a not so documented feature. Download MetaEdit from Microsoft, and change the inner-settings of IIS. The MaxConnections can be found under LM\W3SVC.
May 182004
The other day I thought I was remembering things inaccurately, but now I know for sure: ASP.NET is repeating its articles WITHIN THE SAME WEEK! Get your act together, and create some new stuff, or change your motto:
ASP.NET Articles — Updated daily with stuff you already know!
May 182004
I don’t get it. Just as a practice, and for personal use, I want to create a simple Syndicator (RSS-Reader). To keep it simple, I downloaded the sample RSS 2.0 file, and started XMLMapper. I selected all fields and created the toDp.xtr. Next I reversed the transformation and created toXML.xtr.
On an empty form, I put a TXMLTransformProvider, a TClientDataset, a TDataSource and a TDBGrid. All nicely linked together, and the TXMLTransformProvider gets the properties toDp.xtr, toXML.xtr and SampleRSS20.xml.
When I try to activate the CDS, Delphi (6) hangs. Only CTRL-ALT-DEL will get me out of Delphi.
When I create toDp and toXML based on clinics.xml, things work great. I can’t see what’s the difference, except that an RSS-2.0-file is a more complicated/nested XML-file.
May 172004
I don’t know why, and I don’t know how long, but obviously there has been a power-outage here today, since some of the hardware here was off, and some clocks show incorrect time.
And I thought the Linksys was to blame 😉
May 162004
What a week! I told it before, and I’m telling you now: what a week. I got a call from my sister this evening, in which she told me she and her boyfriend are splitting up. She wouldn’t reveal the real details, but in the end it boils down to “him not wanting her anymore”.
For the time being she lives with my (our) dad, but that’s only for so long. She could stay with me, I told her, but it’s a 200km drive from here to her work, so I guess that’s why she refused the offer 😉
May 152004
If you’re still wondering what Linux distro to choose, I’d say: go for SuSE. I am a SuSE user since 6.0, and must say that it has become a smoother install every time. This 9.1 Pro does take a long time to install on my dual PPro-200 machines, so after the first CD (more than 2 hours installation) I just powered-down the system with the powerbutton (no shutdown!). That was yesterday. When I turned the system back on today, the installation just went on where it left of. Ain’t life great? Now try that with one of Bill’s products.
What I like about this new version (I hear that it is with more newer distro’s) is the automatic detection of devices, like we got used to with Windows. Not only are they detected, they’re configured properly as well. And reconfiguring just takes a little waiting for sysconfig (or whatever) to finish, no rebooting whatsoever.
If I find the time tomorrow, I’ll try to get Mono up and running to serve ASP.NET. Now where’s that Kylix CD I had lying around?