DelphiDabbler's Blog

This has been a  l o n g   time coming. For several years a nasty access violation bug has been lurking inside  CodeSnip . It crashed the program when the computer was resumed from hibernation, but only sometimes. Because the bug was intermittent and required numerous hibernation / resume cycles to be run before it finally cropped up it defied diagnosis for a long, long time. Until now. Or up until someone finds my fix doesn't work for them! ⮞  Get the fix from GitHub . For an explanation of what was causing this little horror of a bug, see the longer post on the CodeSnip Blog .

Here we go again. I've found another repo with some outstanding issues and part completed code. So once again things have been finished off and the result is the release of Version Information Editor (VIEd) v2.17.0. The release is pretty much a tidying up exercise. The code, like me, is old and not pretty. So too make it less embarrassing there's a lot of refactoring been done. Some dialogue boxes have been tarted up too. The only reason that this release gets a minor version bump instead being a patch of v2.16 is that a new -open command line option has been added to open the program with a specified file already loaded. For a list of changes see the change log . ➤ Download this release from GitHub . Here's an image showing the  -open  command being used to start VIEd with its own version information file loaded.

As part of my current manic programming streak, I've been poking around in some of my neglected repos (I really do have too many). I noticed that last year I'd been doing some work on PasHi  , my Pascal source code highlighter console app, but had never finished it. So I finished it, and the result is this v2.4.0 release. A few more command line options have been added and one bug has been fixed. A couple of command line parameters were deprecated. I won't list the changes here. Go look at the change log if you're interested. PasHi comes with an installer that gives the option to a install a GUI front end if you want it. That is PasHiGUI. It interfaces with PasHi to save you having to go anywhere near the command line. PasHiGUI is pictured below ⮞ Get the download from GitHub .

My busy streak of programming continues! v0.5.0 of GBG , my little utility that creates files filled with pseudo-random bytes of  G ar b a g e, is now available. Previous releases would fill up a 10MiB buffer of random stuff and then repeatedly output that until a file of the required size had been generated. So, for files smaller than 10MiB all the data was random but for larger files the data did eventually repeat. It struck me that having repeated data could be useful, but only if there was some control over the length of the repeated blocks. Conversely having a file of entirely random data may also be handy. So, I've added a new command line option with which a repeating block size can be specified. For e.g. to create 100 byte random block you would pass the -r:100 option to the program. To get a file that is full of entirely random bytes you can use -r:all . Now, when generating large files in can be tedious typing in long numbers of bytes and having to calculate (or remember...

What I hope is the last v0.x release of my Fractions unit has just been released. If all is well v1.0 should finally be out in May 25, just 12 years after it first appeared. This unit provides an advanced record, TFraction , that encapsulates an immutable fraction and a whole bunch of methods for manipulating them. There are also a lot of operator overloads that make it easy to perform arithmetic and comparisons. You can cast from integers and to and from floating point values. TFraction is well documented online if you want to check out what operations it supports. Finally there are comprehensive DUnit tests for every method and operator. ⮞  Get it here . Here's the properties, methods & operators (with various directives deleted): property Numerator : Int64; property Denominator : Int64; property WholeNumberPart : Int64; property FractionalPart : TFraction; function IsProper : Boolean; function IsWholeNumber : Boolean; function Sign : TValueSign; function CompareTo (const ...

Following a bug report I've updated DUSE , the Delphi Unit Scope name Expander program, to allow Delphi 12 unit names to be imported easily. That's it really. If you use DUSE and Delphi 12 this is worth the update. 🠞  Get DUSE v0.3.1 from GitHub .

v2.2.3 of the DelphiDabbler Code Snippets Collection has just been released. It includes bug fixes, so you should updated For details see  this post on the CodeSnip blog .

There may have been a broken link to the releases page on GitHub for the new Meany program. That link should now work - see  https://github.com/ddabapps/meany/releases . The web page is finally up too: https://delphidabbler.com/software/meany .

This is a pretty big update to the System Information Unit : a piece of code I keep promising is on its way out! Following a feature request on GitHub to provide access to the computer's UUID I hopped off down a rabbit hole BIOS related code and documentation. Once I discovered I needed to dig the UUID out of the BIOS I found a hole host of goodies sitting there. So, instead of just adding a UUID method to TPJComputerInfo I ended up adding a whole new class, TPJBiosInfo , that gives access to some the the information stored in the BIOS. Well, providing your BIOS complies with the SMBIOS reference specification v2.0 or later it does. Otherwise the class does sweet FA. Three of the methods of TPJBiosInfo duplicate (sort of) three methods of TPJComputerInfo . I say sort of because the TPJBiosInfo methods get their info directly from the BIOS, while TPJComputerInfo relies on the information being duplicated in the registry. In my case both approaches work, but I've read that the ...

I've just released v0.1.0 of Meany , a mathematical averages calculator. Why? Well I recently added a bunch of averaging functions to the DelphiDabbler Code Snippets Collection . When trying to find data to test the functions I ended up using average calculators on five or six web pages. Some pages calculated just one type of mean, while another did a collection of different means or modes etc., but no one site did it all. This app lets you use all the new averaging functions in the collection in one place. Here's the UI: Click the button for the function you want. Enter a list of data in the  Values memo control. For a weighted average enter the required weights (one per value). For power means you also need to enter a power. Then click calculate. Data can be entered as whole numbers, decimal numbers or in scientific format. Numbers can be separated by spaces, new lines or a list separator character. You must use the correct decimal point and list separator for your current l...

v2.2.2 of the DelphiDabbler Code Snippets Collection has just been released. This version adds lots of new mathematical function, mainly related to statistics and number bases. For details see this post on the CodeSnip blog .

Happy New Year from West Wales, or Blwyddyn Newydd Dda as they say around these parts. I've just released what may be the last version of the System Information Unit that is updated with the latest releases of Windows. There may  be a new major version one day, and there could  be a couple of methods added to one or more classes, but this is probably (never say never 😉) the last update of the Windows version detection code. This release has updates that detect the various release, pre-release, dev, beta etc etc builds of Windows 10 and 11. It also detects Windows Server 2025. 🠊 Get version 5.31.0 from the GitHub release page . System Information Unit FMX Demo Program