DelphiDabbler's Blog

The v0.4.0 update to my gbg garbage file generator program has just been released. It adds two new pairs of command to control the behaviour of the program in certain circumstances, as follows: By default gbg puts up a prompt to ask the use to confirm whether a pre-existing file should be overwritten. Two new options can be used to prevent this prompt from appearing: -o can be used to force the program to stop with an error if a file with the requested name already exists. -O is used to forcibly and silently overwrite any pre-existing file with the same name as the requested file. Similarly, a prompt is displayed asking the user whether to proceed when a file larger than 500Mb is specified. The following options can be used to prevent the prompt from appearing: -l can be used to force the program to stop with an error if a file larger than 500Mb is requested. -L is used to ignore the 500Mb size limit and to silently write a file of any size. From this version the compiler has bee...

Over a year since the first beta of v1.0.0 or the  BDiff / BPatch Utilities was released comes the 2nd beta. This release imposes some sensible constraints over parameter values of commands that can be passed to the BDiff file differ. It also restricts the maximum file size that can be diffed to the largest file size supported by the binary diff file format (2GiB - 1 byte), although you may get out of memory errors if you diff files this big! There a few other changes and fixes that can be found in the change log for this release. I've moved from Delphi 11 to 12 for compiling this code and Delphi 12 is the minimum supported compiler version. Get the latest release from GitHub .

My little command line Windows program, compfiledate , has had a bit of an overhaul. The program take two file names and compares either the creation date or modification dates of the files. Various comparison operators can be specified. Normally the program operates silently and returns 0 if the operator returns false and 1 if it returns true. Operators can be specified either in English or as mathematical operators. See the docs for a full list of operators and options. I've finally stopped compiling it with Delphi XE and moved to Delphi 12.1. Taking advantage of the move to Delphi 12.1 there's now a 64 bit version of the program in addition to the previous 32 bit exe. I've also fixed a bug that meant that "file not found" errors were returning a 0 to the OS instead of the desired error code (104). Other than that the release build process has been moved from Make to MSBuild. If you want a copy go to the GitHub release page . Here's a look at some command l...

In my determination to keep the old SWAG Pascal archive alive I've just released the first update to the SWAG viewer program that I originally released last year. It's still only at v0.2.0, so it's a bit rough around the edges. But, providing you install the SWAG archive properly, it works well enough. The program is targeted at 64 bit Windows, but there's a 32 bit build available if you need it. Now I know program is rather niche, so I'm not expecting a lot of interest, but if you want it you can  download v0.2.0 from GitHub . The Object Pascal source code is available on GitHub in the  ddabapps/swagview project. I've used Delphi 12.1 to compile it. If you've not used the program before you'll need to download the SWAG archive separately then install it from within the program. There's a help page that tells you how to do that. Here's what's changed in v0.2.0: A new feature to copy the displayed SWAG "packet" (code snippet) to t...

In the unlikely event that anyone wants to get in touch with me via Twitter / X this is just to say I've closed my account. Why? Well I've been spending less and less time on there as the platform has been turned into even more of a cesspit of hatred and misinformation. But now that the owner has personally tried to stir up far right racial hatred and violence in my country (the UK) I kind of object and I'm out of there.