DelphiDabbler's Blog

While rummaging around a while back I stumbled across a stack of old copies of The Delphi Magazine . And of course I started reminiscing. When I was a lad Did you know that information was once distributed on paper?! That was back at a time in prehistory before the web. It took forever to solve a programming problem, especially for those of us without a network of programming friends. What did we do before Stack Exchange? We struggled that's what. We browsed magazine back issues, we ordered library books and, more often than not, we never found an answer. Back to first principles But did that isolation have one advantage ? If you were facing  a problem you might just have to get creative and solve it yourself. Of course, it probably meant reinventing the wheel. Your solution might be far from the commonly accepted solution. It might even be laughably sub-optimal. But if it worked, it was an achievement. It was creative. I'm just wondering if we might have lost some of that? I k

Just noticed a minor bug in v5.21.0 of the  System Information Unit . that I released yesterday. This bug will only bother you if you need to detect builds from the Windows 11 Insider Canary preview channel. Anyhow, the fix has been released in v5.21.1. Go and get this new release from the project's GitHub  releases page .

We're back to the monthly update cycle for this latest release of my System Information Unit . Once again it's just the operating system detection code that's been updated. There were no significant Windows releases in the month since the previous release, so this release just adds detection a few new Windows 10 and 11 public patches along with the latest release preview, beta, dev and Canary channel builds. Go and get this new release from the project's GitHub  releases page . Source: Wikipedia

What? Have I written a really bad program? Well that's not for me to say. What I intended to write was a little new Windows command line program that creates a file of a specified size that's full of garbage. It's called gbg .  This just scratches an itch I had while testing the BDiff/BPatch programs from my website. I wanted to stress test them diffing and patching two large, almost completely different files. I just needed something to create some test files of exactly the right size. Now there's probably already a program out there that does just that, but that's no fun. So I scribbled one down in my shiny new copy of Delphi 11.3, just for fun. I've just put out gbg v0.1.0. It's very much the first attempt, so don't expect too much! It's extremely simple to use. You just pass it a file path followed by a file size in bytes. Press enter, and it's done. Well almost: if the file size is quite large, you'll be asked to confirm first. The lar

The web site I usually use to download the Windows build of the Info-ZIP zip/unzip pair of programs is looking a little long in the tooth and I'm a bit concerned it might go away. Added to that Chrome is getting increasingly hysterical about the site's lack of support for https.  So, I decided to put copies of zip v2.32 & unzip v5.52 on my Google Drive, along with the required license / copyright statement. And since the license permits it, I've shared the link . And just in case that link gets moved, I've added a section to my website that won't move, and will always point to wherever the download link might move. See https://delphidabbler.com/extras/info-zip .

When I released the recent hotfixes to Version Information Editor I think I mentioned that I was part way through developing the next point release. Well here it is. It adds more fields to insert components of the current date, like hour, month etc let string information fields cross reference each other. Support for saving .vi files in UTF-8 was added to work around some problems saving characters outside the default ANSI encoding. There were quite a few bugs fixes, one of which fixed a potentially serious bug that could. or rare occasions, cause a stack overflow. See the full list of changes in the change log . Because of the bug fixes, updating is recommended . 👉 Get v2.15.0 from GitHub .