Posts

My next new best friend

http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/ck/2009/02/06/p251 Read the comments I posted to see why I like it!

Unemployed

My employer's support contract has finally come to an end which means I have to look for another job, haven't had to do that in a while! Drop me an email if you have any positions vacant, in the meantime it's time to do a little "networking".

Unity - contexts

The outcome of this fairly long exchange on codeplex has made me very happy!

The BNP need my help

It seems they are unable to spell the word "money", because every time they send me their drivel of a newsletter they always want money. Usually it is for their "Van of truth" (which amuses me immensely) but this time it is to help them to become "the most technically advanced political party in the UK". So, what are they going to do to earn this esteemed title? Set up our own BNP call centre Set up the party campaign central office Purchase 18 computers/screens/software Activate our brand new central database platform Recruit more staff to cope Train all staff in new systems Set up central mailing and telephone points for party Open our new logistical distribution warehouse Riiight. Call centre – Surely other parties have these? Central office – I am pretty sure other parties have these! 18 computers / screens / software – Screens? Are they going to watch TV on them? MONITORS! At least we are talking I.T. now though. Central database

No Silverlight?

I'm trying to view this page in Firefox. When it loads the browser tells me I need Silverlight, so I download and install it and then restart my browser only to be told I need to install Silverlight. That's not impressive at all!

Delphi flickers

My app has a wizard approach, the current control appears within a panel with Align set to fill the hosting panel. My first wizard step control merely had an image on it which resizes with its parent control. When I resize the form the host panel resizes, which resizes the wizard control, which resizes the image; and boy does it flicker! I just had to spend some time upgrading my old Delphi DIB controls to D2009 just to get an image that doesn't flicker, crazy! By the way, I tried the same thing in VS2008 and there was no flicker at all, and I thought Delphi was supposed to be the tool that produced fast UI apps.

Synchronising downloads and updates (2)

There was a potential deadlock in the last piece of code. When you obtain any kind of lock you will mostly use a try..finally block to ensure the lock is released when you have finished with it. The using() command expands to a try..finally block so the original code might look okay, however if you mentally expand the code you will see the problem. using (FileLockingService.FileReadLock(product1.ID)) {     //Some code here } This becomes var disposable = FileLockingService.FileReadLock(product1.ID); try {     //Some code here } finally {     disposable.Dispose(); } So why is this a problem? In a single threaded application it isn't, but this is a website so there are multiple threads running at the same time. Now take into account the fact that a web request has a timeout, what if the thread is aborted after the lock is obtained? Ordinarily this isn't a problem because the acquisition is followed immediately by a "try", but if we expand this code further it is ev