Cornelius Concepts custom software development for small business

The amount of information available and the proliferation of video over the last few years is nothing short of astounding. Watch this video and ask yourself, are you ready for the future?

OK, this might almost convince me to learn Java--if you can do something this cool on the web! There's a new site, Wordle.net that takes any text you type in and creates a "word cloud" or an image of words jumbled together based on the words entered. Words that appear more frequently in the text submitted show up larger. For example, here's a worlde of this blog:

The Internet is 40 years old today. Or thereabouts depending on what you define as the actual birth of the internet. Here's a neat video that explains the origins of the what we know today as the Internet:

Adding theme support to your application can give your program a whole new look (if you use standard Windows controls) without changing anything else. This works because the controls will actually use a different set of DLLs behind the scene. In Delphi 2007, this is accomplished with a simple checkbox in the project options. (Visit the Delphi Wikia page and search for "Adding Theme Support" for more information.) The DateTimePicker is one of these and I just discovered its new capabilities when themed on Vista or Windows 7.

Consider the following psuedocode fragment:


for each FieldValue in RecordList do begin
  if ValidSearchValue(FieldValue) then
    found := Search(FieldValue)
  else begin
    ShowMessage('Invalid search criteria: ' + FieldValue);
    Continue;
  end;
end;
 
if found then
  ...


In Delphi, a warning will be generated near the bottom of this code where it says "if found ..." saying:

Variable 'found' might not have been initialized

To prevent that warning, you would initialize "found" just inside the "for each" loop with something like found := False;

But then, Delphi emits the following hint:

Value assigned to 'found' never used

My last blog entry was a suggestion that when deciding what operating system to get for a new computer, Vista was now ready, but Windows 7 would probably be better. Now that I've had a chance to play with Windows 7 a little more and seen some of the new features demonstrated at a recent OCCA meeting, I am now whole-heartedly recommending that EVERYONE should get Windows 7 as soon as it is available (or earlier if you're subscribed to a something like MSDN or Action Pack)! It is very cool!

I got this request from a friend recently:

"Well, I'm finally going to finish building my quad core PC. It may be overkill as I don't play games, but I'm sick of having a slow computer! About the OS, it seems like I have a few options: pre-order Windows 7 upgrade, get Windows XP-64, or get Windows Vista Ultimate. I'm looking for some quick, brief advice, and I respect your time and opinion. I don't have experience with anything beyond regular XP... What are the advantages and disadvantages of Vista? Are there UI improvements that make Vista really worth the upgrade? Are there enough improvements in Windows 7 that make it worth waiting for?"

Every time I turn around, there are new modules, new themes, and more people using Drupal, a solid content management framework for building a huge variety of web sites.

I was visiting a client recently who asked about a new feature for their web site. Sure enough, not only was this module available for Drupal, there are several different ways to do it and some related modules for additional functionality the client will be delighted to hear about.

Although you can drop to PHP and customize as much as you need to, there's getting to be less reason to do it because there is so much power and flexibility in the base product.

I've recently acquired the latest Pascal language compiler from RemObjects, Oxygene. Embarcadero, now the owners of Delphi, decided not to continue development of Delphi for .NET, but instead license this compiler plug-in for Visual Studio from RemObjects. So if you get RAD Studio 2009 from Embarcedero, which includes Delphi 2009 for Win32, you also get a special single-language version of Microsoft Visual Studio with the Pascal compiler from RemObjects. If you buy this from Embarcadero, it's called Delphi Prism. If you buy it from RemObjects, it's called Oxygene.