DelphiDabbler's Blog

Today is my birthday, I'm 62 today. I'm British and I'm officially a grumpy old man. So am I allowed a little birthday rant? My topic: The failure of software developers to internationalise dates irritates much, much more than it probably should! Well, it is still my birthday in the GMT/UTC time zone. It's 3/1/2021. In a significant chunk of the world it is or recently was 3/1/2021. So why the expletive are Google still sending me stats that say it's the 1st of March (1/3/2021)? On the increasingly rare occasions they send me cheques they're in pounds, not dollars. So why are they still getting the date format wrong for most of the bloody world? Sadly Google are not alone. Some British companies get this wrong too, which is even worse. Here's a list of the countries and the date formats they use. This is according to the gods of Wikipedia (so it must be right!) M/D/Y isn't that popular is it? Maybe the Google developers should start usin...

Following on from my announcement that I'm planning to start work on two new related apps fro 2021 I realised that the MIDIView app I announced will only test reading MIDI files, when the most important part of the main MathsNMusic application with respect to MIDI will be to write MIDI data. Duh! So I've decided to add another little app to the list. This is one that I was originally planning as a web app and abandoned. It's called KeyNote and will display the notes of various musical scales and, crucially for researching MIDI, will play them. There's a new GitHub repo for KeyNote too. It's delphidabbler/keynote . EDIT: There maybe a change of plan - I got distracted! Here's a mock up for the web app that I did several months ago in Figma: And here's a provisional design in the Delphi IDE: The piano keyboard component can wait: can't find an open source one, so it looks like I'll have to build one ... eventually!

The other day I heard for the first time, from Jim McKeeth, about Embarcadero releasing a new version of Dev C++ that they'd forked from Bloodshed Dev-C++ and Orwell Dev-C++. It's an open source, free, C++ IDE. I'm probably late to the party, and most of you know about this already, but I thought I'd share anyway. What's this got to do with Delphi? OK it's a bit off topic, but it's written in Delphi! I've downloaded the portable version to have a tinker with. Now it's C++ (shudder!) and it's, thankfully, been years since I wrote anything in C, but I'm curious. Did I mention I'm an old tight wad and it's free? There are several themes available. I've chosen a dark one: If you're interested you can read more and/or download it on GitHub or on the Embarcadero site. Contributions to the project are welcome.

If you're celebrating new year today, have a happy one. Let's hope it's somewhat better than 2020. First new year's resolution: I'm making myself start on a new application. As discussed in my previous post I was trying to decide whther to write something that helped in creating sample instruments for the Sforzando sampler or whether to write a program to help generate music from mathmatical sequences. EDIT: Should have known I'd never keep a new year's resolution: I got distracted ! The second choice has won out for two main reasons: I treated myself to the industry standard Kontakt (£eek!) sampler for Christmas. This is so much more sophisticated than Sforzando (£0) and I'll be using that to build new sample instruments instead. (As an aside, the fact that Kontakt has a scripting language that uses the := assignment operator pleases me more than it should!) Mathmatical sequences appeal to the dormant mathematician in me. So, there ...

It's been years since I started to develop a new application in Delphi and it's about time I did - I'm feeling the need for an injection of enthusiasm that simply maintaining old code doesn't provide. Now, love making music, so I guess that's the way this application is headed. There are a couple of possibilities that I'm considering. A tool to help generate .sfz open sampler format files used by samplers such as Sforzando . Those little beasts are pigs to code by hand and the few existing tools don't meet my needs. Because this is a coding blog, I guess I ought to show some SFZ code: I'm curious about generating music from mathmetical sequences (yes, really). I suppose this appeals to me because I'm both a maths graduate and an amateur musician The apps on the net I've come across aren't very musical or aren't intuitive to use. Maybe I should have a crack at something like that. To give you an idea ...

The System Information Unit has received a minor update to the TPJOSInfo class to enable detection of the newly released Windows 10 October 2020 update (now officially version 20H2 ). I've not been able to test this new code because I haven't updated my copy of Windows 10 yet. However the code uses the same method of detection as is known to work for other Windows 10 updates, so all should be well. Please let me know in the comments if something's broken. Get the latest version from SourceForge at  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ddablib/files/sysinfo/

A potential vulnerability has been detected in CodeSnip that affects all versions up to and including v4.17.1. This has been fixed in the newly released v4.17.2. Updating is strongly advised. More details and download links over on the CodeSnip blog .