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Sometimes I need to check an (American) English description, proverb or phrase. So far, regular dictionaries have helped quite a lot, but sometimes the expressions are tough to find.
But helpfully, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is here, and I also found it on the Internet, by chance actually.
The link itself is a bit out of the ordinary, but no matter; the site works though it's a bit slow. But slow is so much better than non-existent!
Windows Active Directory is a complex thing, and making sure it works properly is even more so.
Luckily, for us software developers, Microsoft has developed ADAM, short for Active Directory Application Mode.
ADAM could be called a light-weight version of the full-blown Active Directory, and ADAM can be installed for example in a Windows XP workstation.
To get started with ADAM, take a look at the Scripting Guys' recent article on MSDN. It's good reading.
Today I had finally the time to install the Delphi 7.1 Update to my Enterprise version of Delphi.
The Update itself installed smoothly (though you will need the original installation CD to do it), but I had a problem with the InterBase Express (IBX) components.
That is, I've developed several components that utilize the IBX components, and once I had installed the Delphi 7.1 Update, I ran into the following error message upon starting Delphi:
Cannot load package 'ibxpress72.' It contains unit 'IBXConst,' which is also contained in package 'ibxpress70'.
Now, the general rule is to compile all custom packages if these kinds of errors occur. But, this time this didn't help!
I was pretty depressed about this, and tried many things to solve the problem.
Finally, I decided to download the latest IBX components (7.08 at this writing) from Borland's CodeCentral (with ID 20257), and installed those components.
Installing this update created the package IBExpress73.BPL, and once this package was available, I was able to recomile my own custom package, and install it properly.
The lesson: updates aren't always as smooth as one would expect.
Eric Sink's article series about software sales in a small ISV is entertaining. Eric has a good insight into how to do proper business -- with an eye towards geeks.
The article, part of MSDN's Longhorn Developer Center is good reading for anybody in the software development and selling business.
Also, what I like in the article is Eric's title: Software Craftsman. That pretty good describes this modern occupation.
Two years have gone swiftly by, as today I got my testimonial for completing the Trade Technician degree at the Institute of Marketing in Helsinki.
It feels good to have the paper finally in my hand, and know that my friend is getting better each day.
I continued my quest to learn ASP.NET with Delphi 8 today, and was checking the properties of the HttpRequest class.
This class has the property called Browsers, which in turn is of the type System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities. This MobileCapabilities class has a property named Type, which returns the type of the browser that the client identifies itself to be.
Now, "Type" is a reserved word in Delphi. First, I though this restriction had been bypassed in Delphi 8, but I was wrong: the compiler complained that a property cannot be accessed as it is a reserved word.
First, I was at loss. But a bit googling gave me the answer: if a Delphi reserved word happens to be a property or method name, one can prefix the reserved with with the ampersand sign & like this:
S := Request.Browser.&Type;
This is all clear, but where in the language guide of Delphi 8 is this stated, I wonder?
I had the chance to attend the Borland Nordic Partner Training 2004 this week in Stockholm, Sweden. There, I learned -- among other things -- what appears to me to be a change in Borland's strategy.
That is, previously Borland has been quite aggressively following new market trends. However, now we were presented Borland's new tag line, which goes basically like this:
"Not the first out there, but the last one standing."
Does this mean that new areas like the 64-bit world, future versions of .NET and mobile platforms will not be followed until there is real business value?
If so, that could drive customers away from Borland's solutions.
While browsing the Internet yeaterday for more information, I came up to a nice Finnish site with a wealth of information.
As somebody else might also be in need for proper information, Q&A secton and peer discussions, I'm sharing the link here.
I was browsing MSDN, and found two interesting articles.
The first one describes Outlook 2003 Alerts, which are basically notifications to the user when something interesting happens. The article can be found here.
The second interesting article is about W3C's XInclude recommendation. This new technique allows you to reference external XML documents so that their contents can be processed the same as it were included in-line.
The article is titled "Combining XML Documents with XInclude".
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