Posts

The best tool for the job

If I had to write a large business app which accessed a DB, or a website, I would use .NET without hesitation. When it comes to small apps (less than 10MB) that will be downloaded by home users what should I use? I have such a project coming up soon, my boss has bought D2009 and wants me to use that because he is paranoid about people reverse engineering the binaries. I'm a little hesitant but I must admit that I think in this case Delphi 2009 probably is the best tool for the job, and I like to use the best tool for the job rather than the tool I like to use best for my job. Hopefully things will go smoothly, it will be nice writing apps in two different languages.

Music to fight to

An odd title for a coding blog I know, but I love martial arts too, especially competitive ones. I'm just putting together a CD for my car. The tunes on the CD music really make my adrenaline pump, so I am putting together a compilation of tunes which make me want to win a fight...with style! Nirvana – Smells like teen spirit. Fat boy slim – Right here right now. William Orbit – Adagio for strings (Ferry Corsten Remix with first 2 mins cut off). The Prodigy – Breathe. The Prodidy – Firestarter. Chemical Brothers – Block rockin' beat. Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun.

PayPal doesn’t do discounts

I can't believe it, I really can't! I'm writing a shopping cart for a website. One of the features required is to give the user an X amount discount off their next order when they buy a specific product. So let's say the user has a £20 discount on their next order, how does PayPal let me apply that? Simple answer, it doesn't! You can't send a cart line with a negative price "Discount for 20 GBP", nor can you send a cart line with a positive price but a negative quantity (that was desperation). The way to do this apparently is to send a cart total. YES! By sending the entire order aggregated into a single order line. NOOOOOOO!!!!!! So PayPal wants my user to order £100 of goods, click Check-out, and then be presented with "Total for your order £100 (£20 discount)", that's it? In my opinion, that's not very good. In fact, considering PayPal is probably the largest Internet payment organisation in the world I consider this to be

More Balsamiq madness!

Someone pointed this link out to me today: http://www.screensketcher.com/examples.html It's another application along the lines of Balsamiq. This app does seem very "sharp", it has very snappy response times etc, which is nice and everything BUT I still don't like these kinds of apps! I do prefer the name though, it suggests "I sketch screens" rather than "I am a bottle of vinegar ".

This is just a test

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I've just spotted a "Publish to Blog" option in Word 2007. So I thought I'd give it a spin and see what happens. If it works then Blogging is going to be a much more pleasurable experience. My spelling is atrocious. I find complex formatting on BlogSpot is terrible. I will no longer have to edit HTML just to get my code to look right. Talking of code, I had better try that out too...     public class PreSaveConstraint     {         public readonly IObject Instance;         public readonly string Name;         public readonly Func<bool> CheckIsValid;           public PreSaveConstraint(IObject instance, string name, Func<bool> checkIsValid)         {             if (instance == null)                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Instance");             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(name))                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Name");             if (checkIsValid == null)                 throw new ArgumentNullException("Che

Proof of the existence of God

Finally there is proof that God exists. The proof has come in the guise of a product named Balsamiq . Balsamiq allows you to create mock GUI when specifying an application. Rather than having graphics that look like real forms etc it uses a pencil drawing lookalike approach. Here is my reasoning. It does nothing you can't do for free in the IDE you undoubtedly already have. The result looks far worse than a mock up you can create in your IDE. Once you have the mock up you can't do anything useful with it except export it as an image or print it. You can't, for example, actually use that for a real form later in the project's life cycle. The result looks crap. Not poor, crap! It looks like a 7 year old has drawn it with a wax crayon....a blunt one. Balsamiq brought in revenue of over 100,000 US Dollars in its first 5 months. Now the way I see it is this. Lots of people are sending money to a guy to buy software that does something they can already do much better f

ASP.NET Development server and PayPal instant payment notification

I am currently developing part of a website where I pass cart information to PayPal to accept payment. PayPal will call back a "secret URL" on my website to allow me to confirm the cart details haven't been tampered with. I hate installing software I don't need. This is especially the case with software like IIS which just feels so intrusive, which is why I use the ASP.NET Development Server when creating websites. The problem with this server is that it only accepts connections from the local machine. My computer is behind a hardware firewall and my web server wont accept remote connections, so how can I test my PayPal IPN call back? Simple. Obviously I have to open a port on my firewall and direct it to my machine. So I opened port 80. Then I used this tool to list on port 80 and redirect all traffic to port 10101 (the port my ASP.NET development server was listening on). The result is that a remote computer can now make a HTTP request to my computer, and I