Code Crunching

Most of you readers know, that photography is one of my hobbies. Being born in '77 and having real contact with cameras in the mid '90 for the first time, I am a kid of the zooms. I did not even really think about fixed focal lengths. In the last months I have read over and over, that using fixed focal lengths is the best that one can do to improve when taking photography a little more serious.

So searching I learned about the "nifty fifty" from Canon. Why am I writing that? Simply, if you own a Canon and want to learn more about it, think about getting this lens. It usually comes for less than 100 EUR/USD and is a very good glass for that money. Lot's of light and fairly good optics for less than any other SLR lens on the market.

Now, I have taken this step and started on a group on Flickr.com called "Project 50." They encourage you to take 50 photos using a 50mm prime lens. It is fun and it should teach you quiet a lot about photo composition. Below is the fourth photo I've published using the lens and I love it. What do you think?

Taking over... on Flickr.com

I am interested how I'll improve over the coming weeks toying around with that lens. I am already very interested in doing more prime lens photography. But new lenses will have to wait, since they usually are a lot more expensive than 99 Euro in a media market chain store ;-)   

Vor wenigen Tagen hat Olympus die neue Pen Kamera E-P1 offiziell vorgestellt. Jetzt bietet Olympus Deutschland 10 Fotografen die Möglichkeit die neue Kamera zu testen. Sie haben Interesse? Dann bewerben Sie sich doch einfach mal: http://www.olympus.de/digitalkamera/pen.htm#?home

Ich habe mich auch beworben und will die Kamera liebend gerne mit der Canon EOS 5D Mark II vergleichen. Mal schauen, ob es klappt. Schreiben Sie in die Bewerbung, warum gerade Sie der geeignete Kandidat sind und vielleicht haben Sie Glück und können die Kamera testen.   

Ein guter Freund von mir, André Hotzler, veranstaltet am 11. Juli 2009 einen Fotoworkshop, welcher sich speziell an Amateure richtet. In 4 Stunden erhalten die Teilnehmer Einblick in die Zusammenhänge von Blende, Verschlusszeit und ISO-Empfindlichkeit und den daraus resultierenden Ergebnissen. Wenn auch Sie schon immer mal weg wollten von den Standardprogrammen Ihrer Kamera und Ihre Kreativität zum Ausdruck bringen wollen, dann schauen Sie doch mal rein.

Alle Informationen zum Kurs und zur Anmeldung finden Sie auf XING: https://www.xing.com/events/359475/description

Well, in a word: fantastic! The "Delphi-Tage" (Delphi Days), this year in Hamburg, are over. Last Friday and Saturday were great. Lots of sessions, quiet a few things to learn (and give away), fantastic people and friends. It was great. Thanks to all speakers and visitors, as well as thanks to Sabine Rothe from Embacadero Germany and Daniel Wolf of the Delphi-PRAXiS for making the event such a success!!!

Here is a selection of my pictures:

Do you have pictures yourself? Publish them on Flickr.com and tag them with the following tags: Delphi-Tage 2009 Hamburg Delphi Tage myEvents:event=Delphi-Tage myEvents:DT=2009, allowing us to display them on www.delphi-tage.de.

First: thank you Johan and Dr. Bob for inviting me over, I had a great time.

It was interesting meeting so many developers from the Netherlands and from so many fields across the whole development sphere. The SDN group is not solely for Delphi developers, but for all and this makes their events quiet different from others.

Developers have the chance to look outside their box at other options or just get in-depth information on their field of interests. Dr. Bob and Johan already invited me to come back for the large SDN Event in October and I am looking forward being there again.

This event was in Driebergen, close to the city Zeist, where I took this photo the night before the event.

Well, I it has been quiet around this topic for some time. Finally, I have found the time to get back to it and while I have been busy in the last weeks, I took my camera with me almost anywhere I went. So, here are the two prime shots of those last two months.

February '09

Subway Station Marienplatz, taken during the workers strike.

March '09

Netherlands, tide lands. Taken during my visit for the SDN Event in March '09.

For more photos from this time, visit my Flickr Stream.

Well, I am back from the SDN Event in Driebergen. It was a fun event, I have met quiet a few people and, after a few years, finally met Dr. Bob again. One of my session was about the Windows 7 Taskbar (an update for the components is in the pipe line, btw). And when talking about Windows 7, one of the question coming up was the user account control (UAC) and how - IF - they have changed it.

While talking about that, I started out to remind them WHY it was implemented in Windows Vista and WHY I have not turned it off, ever. The reason is simple: it was implemented to block viruses from invading your computer and yes, it works. My story for them was as simple as it was obviously surprising for most of them sitting in the room.

About two years ago, I started a small experiment. I set up a computer with a new and clean Windows Vista install. Leaving the UAC on and running updates as Windows reminded me to do just that. The way a user should be working with the PC. However, I have not installed any third party Anti-Virus software, nor any third-party firewall, just the on-board tools Windows Defender and the UAC. I used this PC regularly for internet surfing, writing mails, doing some fun, testing software and so on. I let my girl friend use it for internet surfing - she knows how to use a computer, but by far, she is no geek, or even close to that. She does Excel, Word, mails online, games online, iTunes, etc. Even some peer-to-peer sharing. She had an administrative account and I explained to her what UAC meant and why it was implemented.

Well, end of last year I put on Norton AntiVirus, McAffee and a few other anti-virus tools and ran the big test: All tools reported the same final results: 0 viruses found!

Now my challenge to you: try that with Windows XP in todays Internet world ;-)

Conclusion: yes, the UAC is bothersome at times, and when it pops up to often, it will get the user aggravated, but it has its purpose. With Windows XP's on-board tools you simply where at a large risk when you went online. I am a believer of the UAC and, while it bothers me at times, I support it.

With Windows 7 it shows up less often. So some settings will be changed easier than under Windows Vista without the user confirming that. But as far as I have seen, none of the changes (except setting the computer time of course) will survive the next reboot of your computer. And if you don't mind, under Windows 7 you can move up the UAC messages to the Windows Vista level again. And yes, if you still mind, you can turn it off as well, but I know, I won't.   

Basically, this is a note to myself, but it may help you anyway. So, I publish it here.

Creating a little more complex query today, I got the error message "Insufficient key column information for updating or refreshing" when trying to apply changes to the data set.

Solution: Set CursorLocation to clUseServer and CursorType to ctKeySet.

Technology: ADO, SQL Server

During the recent days I was looking for a solution on how to access properties of my Wacom tablet within a Delphi application.

Using the Pen & Ink API of Windows is one possibility, however that offered much more than I needed, not thinking about the time getting into that one as well. On the Delphi-PRAXiS I found a link to Centaurix, a company offering an easy to use Delphi component, which gives me access to the properties I just needed. The component is freeware and comes with source code.

Great!

Download here.

Today, I show you the second set of screen shots from the Windows 7 Taskbar components. Since Windows 95 - which introduced the last real change in how the user handles multiple running applications on Windows - we all know the notification area. Sadly many programs have abused this area, so that on some users computers this really grow into a monster featuring easily 30 and more icons. Never on my computer though ;-)

Windows 7 stops this Taskbar spamming in a really effictive way. The notification icons will not be shown anymore, at least on default. They are all hidden away. Even when your application wants to show a (bubble) hint, the user will not see it unless the user approved your application first. Now, since sometimes showing a state can be really important, Windows 7 introduced overlay icons in the Taskbar entry for running processes. This way the application can show some information without the need for more screen real estate - the application already has an entry in the Taskbar anyway - at least in most cases.

Click on images to view full size version.

Windows 7 automatically hides all notification icons unless the user wants them to show.

Showing the tasks state in the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Note the overlay icon in the second screen shot. Maybe the application is performing a search. A side effect of this is, that the designers should start creating application icons and overlay icons that work with each other well. Overlay icons are shown only if the user uses large icons in the Windows Taskbar (default setting).

For your Delphi application, simply drop a the TdwOverlayIcon component on your form, connect it to an image list (16 x 16 pixels for bitmap size) and set the image index used. Set it to -1 for displaying no overlay icon.

You have asked for it, so here are the first images for you. Today I want to show you a few screen shots of displaying the progress of a rather lengthy task in the Windows 7 Taskbar. You should not that Microsoft does not encourage you to use this for shorter tasks which usually finish within a few seconds. But this is up to you in the end ;-)

For all of you Delphi 7 users, the first screen shot shows Delphi 7 running on Windows 7 using those components. So, this works as well.

Click on images to view full size version.

Delphi 7 running on Windows 7. The demo application is loaded in the IDE, the components are shown in the tool palette.

The marquee shows a task in progress with undeterminable end - like connecting to a server.

The progress is coming along just fine.

The application may be waiting for some user interaction, the current task is paused.

Further, you can cancel a task, coloring the progressbar red as well.

For those of you not knowing Windows 7 just yet and wondering why some application icons have a border in the taskbar and some do not: Windows 7 allows you to pin applications to the taskbar. This way, they will always be in the same order/place. The framed ones are actually running, others are just waiting to be started.

Over at the Delphi-PRAXiS we had an interesting thread going on the last two days where one user asked for what reason it could have, that his Delphi compiler is so slow. It took about 45 minutes to compile just over 20.000 lines.

The source of the problem was a piece of software, which in my mind never earned to be called software. The network version of the Norton anti-virus software. The user asked his admin to exclude PAS, DFM, and DCU files to be excluded from the check list of files being checked with every access.

The compile time went down to 8 seconds. That is just 0,3% of the original compile time. Sadly though, that will not be working anymore...

Well, as written here before, I have toyed around with Windows 7 and created a few Controls that you can simply place on your Form to support some of the most obvious Windows 7 features. Currently available are:

• Jump Lists - right click your application entry on the taskbar to see those
• Overlay Icon - show the state of your application right in the taskbar (notification icons are hidden by Windows 7 by default, finally)
• Progress indicator in the taskbar button
• Taskbar Thumbnails - you application can be controlled directly from the taskbar preview window

Please note, that if you have Aero turned of, or your Windows 7 is running in a VM, most of the features are not supported by Windows 7 (atm?).

The installer provides packages for Delphi 7, Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007, and Delphi 2009.

Further, those are just the first version in early Alpha State, but they are for free ;-) If you want to use them to create your own controls, those MUST be placed under GPL. For use in your applications you can choose freely between GPL, LPGL and MPL, whatever suits your needs.

In the coming days I'll post a few screen shots and/or short videos demonstrating those controls in action.

If you have suggestions, improvements, or anything else regarding those controls, do not hesitate to contact me ;-)

Download the installer (1,5 MB)

Note: the installer only copies the files to your local hard drive (default folder: User Documents\Delphi Win7 Support). You must open the corresponding project group/package and install it into your Delphi IDE.

Have fun,
Daniel

Probably tomorrow, I will publish my first attempt to create controls tailored towards Windows 7. Naturally, those controls will run on older Systems (tested on XP and Vista), but the new Windows 7 functionality will be available on Windows 7 only, silently failing on older systems.

Currently, I am setting up a VM with Windows XP and Delphi 2006 to test them. Wait a little more and enjoy ;-)

The packages for Delphi 2006, 2007, and 2009 will be included.   

During the last days I have taken the time to get familar with Windows 7, at least a little. So far, I do like it, though it is far from stable on my machine at the moment - at least, Windows Vista was better in that respect.

The new Taskbar and the start menu are pretty amazing. I like the feature to show progress and states on it, as well as add buttons to the window preview panes. Also, the Jump Lists are quiet nice, so I started importing those features into Delphi, all available as a small component set. Those will be available soon, with more details about what and how they will work.

However, so far I have seen many sample videos, read quiet a few blog entries on how to program those jump list, but they all habe one thing in common: they are missing the code samples. If you are looking for those samples, download the Windows 7 SDK Beta and look into the installation folder. For me, those are at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Samples\winui\Shell\JumpList.