Many developers learnt first to code on isolated machines – DOS ones if they are old enough – or within simple networks. DOS was a single process, single thread environment, almost always on isolated machines. Maybe a modem to connect to a BBS, LAN were much rarer. That meant developers had little to care about “the environment” their […]
Many “news” about the imminent death of PC are appearing around despite its 30th birthday, replaced by smartphones and tablets. What’s true in that? Let’s look for a moment at the past history, and the personal computer revolutions. Before that there was centralized systems from which you could rent some processing time and highly proprietary systems using […]
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Sandon Utensileria 75th anniversary
On April 10th, 2011, Sandon Utensileria, the company established by my grandfather, Francesco Sandon, and his brother Luigi (later joined by the other two brothers, Felice and Fausto), celebrates its 75th anniversary of uninterrupted activity, even when WWII swept across Milano the warehouse was moved in a hayloft outside the city, and orders were dispatched […]
An InnoSetup 5.x library to control services. It gives access to the Service Control Manager functions to query/start/stop/install/uninstall services, and implements some higher level functions (simpleXXXX) to perform standard tasks easily. ANSI version Unicode version Zip file with both versions NB: ANSI version won’t work with the Unicode version of Inno Setup. I didn’t test […]
To this StackOverflow question, I simply answered to forget D2010 Datasnap because IMHO it is only half-backed and lacks several needed features and is not flexible. Two people commented my answer was not helpful, and wrote Datasnap is absolutely flexible (later one comment was withdrawn). I am going to explain in details why the “new” Datasnap is not […]
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Visiting CERN
On December 8th, a holiday in Italy, we woke up early in Geneva to visit the CERN centre. After a rainy day spent visiting Geneva, the Moon was shining in the sky, telling us that beside some remaining clouds, it was going to be a sunny day. The CERN laboratories are nearby Geneva airport, just outside the city, and […]
In the past few days I had many troubles making our application work when the client was installed on a PC outside the application domain. It was due to several Delphi 2007 issues with DCOM. Usually, when a user was outside a domain we used TSocketConnection and the “Borland” Socket Server to establish the connection. “Outside” the domain usually […]
In the past days I hit another DCOM issue: callbacks do not work if “Simple file sharing” is enabled (Settings → Control Panel → Folder Options → View). That’s because the full name of that option is “Simple file sharing and ForceGuest“. When enabled, Windows will ignore incoming calls credentials and will authenticate everybody as “guests”. And of […]
I’ve bought a Logitech STX QuickCam Communicate STX webcam – nothing sophisticated – just needed a simple, good quality webcam to be used in Skype chats. But after installing the camera, the audio in Flight Simulator X was no longer working correctly. Unluckily that camera comes with a built-in microphone, and the usual installer made for […]
Yesterday on the Italian Delphi newsgroup run by Marco Cantù, Delphi&Dintorni, appeared a post asking how to load BPLs without writing them in the system directory or in the application directory. I suggested to use the “App paths” registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths], but while looking for a reference for its proper use I didn’t find a […]