DelphiDabbler's Blog

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 .

While working on a revision to my Version Information Editor I stumbled across a potential buffer overrun error in some clipboard access code. By the look of the horrible code the bug has been there for years - possibly 20+ years. I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that the program is a bit niche and not at all widely used! Anyhow, I fixed it and pushed out a hotfix. And of course that appeared to break something else. So, within a couple of hours, out came today's 2nd hotfix. If you do use the program you really do need to update to v2.14.2 ASAP. 󠁨󠁱👉 You can get it from GitHub .

Just released  CodeSnip  v4.21.1 that fixes some nasty bugs in v4.20.0. Updating is strongly recommended. Full details of this release are discussed in detail over on the  CodeSnip blog . ⏬ Download the new release from the  v4.21.1 release page  on GitHub.

Happy April Fools day. I've broken my regular monthly update cycle for my System Information Unit project from my DDabLib Code Library. It's been 3 months since the previous update on 1st January. Once again it's all about updates to the TPJOSInfo static class and changes to Windows 10 & 11 releases since the beginning of the year. I've added detection of various public patches, release previews and Dev channel builds. Detection of the new Windows 11 Canary channel builds has also been added. Go and get this new release from the project's GitHub  releases page .