By Administrator, 20 August, 2007

Codegear the never ending sale

CodeGear CEO Jim Douglas has answered Marco Cantù regarding his open letter to Todd Nielsen. What Marco disclosed is available here

As usual, "The rationale behind those comments relates with shareholder expectations." Which means that shareholders hoped to get more money, even if it means to kill the milk cow or buy some subprime mortgages <G> 

By Administrator, 18 August, 2007

Delphi the cash cow: no milk enough for Mr. Nielsen

Marco Cantù posted an open letter to Borland CEO Tod Nielsen after he blamed CodeGear for earning just $1.3 millions in the second quarter, and therefore not helping enough to cover the $12 million loss of the "solid revenues" from the ALM business, now that ALM tools became the main company products and the "commodity" IDE business was spun off.

By Administrator, 16 August, 2007

mwpugln is a spam user targeting Drupal sites - delete it!

Many Drupal sites are being accessed by a user named mwpugln. And googling a bit, I saw many administrators wondering what user it is. Well, it's not difficult to find out it's just a bot used to spam Drupal sites, adding comments containint links to the usual spam-advertised products. It looks to be a bot because it uses several different IPs scattered around the world:

By Administrator, 10 July, 2007

Are "zealots" a damage to Delphi?

In the past months I've seen an increased number of Delphi "zealots", I mean those developers who worship their tool no matter how good it is actually. Some was swearing Delphi 2005 was not an a slipped alpha release, others were sure Delphi 2006 was a good release while every day it crashes several times and gobs hundreds megabytes of RAM, and keeps on wiping out my type libraries. I didn't tried Delphi 2007 yet, because its new features didn't justify an upgrade (for us) - but the increased stability, if true - I am very careful to listen to the "zealots" now.
By Administrator, 18 May, 2007

Why Windows hasn't multiple desktops?

If there is something I always liked in Linux desktop managers is their multi-desktop feature out of the box. A user can have more than one desktop, and have a set of application running in each of them. A simple keystroke switch among desktops.

By Administrator, 20 April, 2007

Hotmail blocks messages without notice

Recently some friends of mine using Hotmail accounts complained that I was no longer writing them, or replying to their mails. I checked my mail server logs, and found nothing. At my "home office" I have an ADSL router and I got a fixed IP address. This allows me to run some services (FTP, CVS, etc. ) to access some data while working remotely, and a mail server I setup years ago to keep spam and viruses under control, and use my own domain mail addresses.
I started to trace the connection to Hotmail, and found nothing wrong. Hotmail accepts the message, but it is never delivered.

By Administrator, 17 March, 2007

Lazy programmers, bad applications

A while ago, I had a discussion on a newsgroup about the reasons a programmer should call the correct API even if the same information were available elsewhere, in that case it was the paths of some special Windows folders, like Document & Settings or Program files. It was impossible to convince some programmers that calling the API SHGetSpecialFolderLocation() or the newer SHGetFolderPath() was the correct thing to do, instead of accessing the registry.
By Administrator, 11 March, 2007

When innovation is not real innovation: the WinHelp case.

Microsoft didn't include the WinHelp32 application in Windows Vista. The official reason is its code does not meet Vista standards. Later it has been made available as a separate download (probably to avoid a lot of users complains!), anyway developers "are encouraged to transition their Help experience to an alternative Help file format, such as .chm, .html, or .xml". This is a clear case when innovation is not real innovation, instead is just adding bloated applications where noone needs them. WinHelp has everything one could ask to an help system: loads very fast, is not intrusive, is easy to use yet powerful enough, is easy to develop.
By Administrator, 24 February, 2007

CodeGear: still on the wrong track?

Recently, CodeGear released its first new Windows products, Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP, after more than one year without anything new. Delphi for PHP is based upon Qadram Qstudio, and, despite it's name, it's not a new PHP personality within the Delphi/BDS IDE (Galileo). It's a separate product with its own IDE, although it was designed after the Delphi IDE.