Why no blogging? Alive and kicking :-)

As you may have noticed (or not :), this Blog has been silent since 2008. Several people have asked me recently why I'm not blogging anymore - here is a short explanation.

I was blogging quite actively for a while, but other priorities in my life (family, work, new house, exercising etc) have taken over. There is only so much time.

While I've been silent on the blog for a few years now, I'm still programming in Delphi professionally and I follow the community closely. At work, we have until now decided to stay with Delphi 2007, and I've been lagging behind on digging down into the low-level technical details of newest versions and features.

So there has been less to blog about. Now we're in the process of upgrading to XE2 - and there are regularly issues and points of interest that might spark my interest into blogging again - we'll see....

Also there are many, really good Delphi blogs now - I see less "holes" that needs to be discussed. If I blog, I don't want to blog about topics that others cover well, anyway :-).

Republishing my old The Delphi Magazine articles

As you probably know The Delphi Magazine is no longer in publication. As their web-site indicates the articles and source code repository will only be online for a short while longer, but it is still possible to order the excellent value-for-money 1GB USB stick with all magazine issues and code.

TDM was generally accepted as the best source of technical articles about Delphi and development practices in general. Over the years I submitted and got published almost twenty full articles, in addition to a large number of smaller Delphi tips.

I have now been given permission to republish some of my old articles (thanks, Chris [Frizelle]!). In general I will provide download links to the original PDF files with the article and ZIP files with the code. In addition I will try to write a little about the topic, provide the context of the time, updates and comments.

The list of candidate articles to republish is:

• YAST: Yet Another Stack Tracer!
• Hooking Heapcheck
• The Rise And Fall Of TObject
• Delphi 4 Bugs And Fixes
• Slimming The Fat Off Your Apps
• Knitting Your Own Threads
• Design Patterns
• DelayLoading of DLLs
• Exceptional Stack Tracing
• BorDebug: Return Of The Giant
• Speeding Up A Mathematical Expression Parser
• Tightening The Strings
• WebBroker On Steroids
• Building Strings With An Attitude
• Converting From Interface To Object

Let me know if there is any of these you would like me to prioritize.

Hope you will enjoy them! :-)

Testing WLW Maps

I've just updated to WLW 1.0 beta 2. It has a number of nice (new and old) features. Last time I tried the Insert Map feature crashed the application, so now I'm going to try again.

To avoid attracting stalkers, I will not post a map of my home, but rather the place where I work, Infront AS:

View map

I can't directly upload images to my Blogger.com account, but I don't know if that is why the Insert Map feature only inserts the "View map" link above. It was easy enough the find the relevant place, although it didn't understand all the addresses I tried.

And it was horriedly slow after I pressed Insert - I thought I had to kill WLW for a while there... ;)

So now you know where I work. Right now its raining, but there is going to be a big, free concert right outside our windows now in about an hour. My daughter (12) is going to join me to see the show - featuring numerous pop- and rock stars (mostly Norwegian). Let's hope the rain slows down by then... ;)

Sorry about the old post flooding!

Changing this blog to use a template caused most of the oldest (pre Window Live Writer authored) posts to have "interesting" formatting - with cramped text, code with no end-of-lines, bold headlines in the middle of the text, and so on.

I have been cleaning up the formatting of some of these old posts and this caused the RSS and Atom feeds to include these "updated" posts. It looks there is no way to turn off this behaviour - I'm not sure if it is Blogger.com or WLW's fault.

I have a few more posts to update - so bear with me and just ignore those posts for now (or even read them again - or for the first time ;)).

Blog site transition, phase one done

Welcome to a new and brighter blog! ;)

I've started off with one of the standard templates. I like this one because it wastes less space at the sides, making the articles appear somewhat shorter than they are (he-he).

The code syntax items should still render with the classic TP white and yellow on a blue background, but to be honest I was growing a little tired of it in the text itself. Now the code stands out better, too.

As you can see on the right hand sidebar, I've experimented with adding some of the boxed paged elements that can easily be added in the new blogger template designer. In addition to the usual suspects, there is now also some Google Adsense ads, a selection from DelphiFeeds.com (how is that - syndicating a feed that syndicates me :)), some hopefully relevant Google News and video clips from YouTube.

I expect to play more with these, and turn off the ones I find more irritating than useful or fun. Let me know what you think about the changes.

Summer is here and I'll be gone on a (well deserved?) holiday in a couple of weeks, so don't expect any heavy duty articles here in the nearest future.

Work in progress: Blog design in flux

As you may have noticed, I'm in the process of upgrading my Blogger template to get access to some new design tools they have. This means that colors and code syntax highlighting will be wrong for a little while...

The Five Things Meme

You probably know the drill by now. The good Dr. Bob tagged me with this infectious Five Things Meme and now I'm supposed to tell five things about myself that you probably didn't know. Oh - the excitement! ;) If you fall asleep halfway through the list - come back tomorrow. Ok - here we go:

1. In my childhood and youth I have had part-time jobs as a paperboy, flower delivery, painter (on walls, not canvas), secretary (writing letters based on dictation tapes) and programmer.
   
2. I had my first computer experience at age 11 - my uncle had bought a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K RAM (later upgraded to 16K). I was awed after playing chess against the machine and quickly wrote my first "game" - Guess the Number. I've been bitten by the programming bug ever since.
   
3. At age 19 I participated in a youth exchange program organized by Lions. To keep costs down I traveled with two other Norwegian youths by train (Interrail) from Oslo to Istanbul - a three-and-a-half day journey. It was very interesting to live in an "ordinary" Turkish family (albeit a relatively rich one) and to get to know other youths from throughout Europe.
   
4. I served my military service in the Navy as a radio-operator. We performed the work deep inside the nuclear bomb-safe mountain Jåttanuten outside Stavanger, Norway.
   
5. I'm an active member of a local community group called GLA'Nordstrand. We are lobbying to improve the traffic conditions and reduce the number of pass-through cars that drive our local resident roads to get away from the queues at the national roads. It is a struggle the be heard and noticed by the municipality politicians and bureaucrats. One day I was interviewed by the regional TV news station about the traffic conditions, when two cars crashed just behind me - almost hitting a child on his way to school.

Wasn't that a thrill? Now you know why I stick to technical issues related to programming and Delphi in mt blog ;-).

Eh? I'm supposed to tag some more people to keep the ball rolling? Well, are there anyone left that hasn't been tagged yet? I dunno - but I'll have a go at Jon Shemitz, Dan Miser, Chuck Jazdzewski, Lars Fosdal and Ingvar Nilsen.

Blog feed: atom2rss converter down

As one of my diligent readers made me aware of, the free service I've been using to convert Blogger's Atom-only based XML feed to the more widespread RSS format has stopped working for some time now. The service I used is documented here:

http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss

When I initially created this blog, I included a link of the following format

http://www.2rss.com/atom2rss.php?atom=http://hallvards.blogspot.com/atom.xml

to an XML icon () that used to be listed under the Syndication header in the sidebar. I've decided to comment out that link for now.

So for those of you who are sourcing the RSS feed instead of the Atom feed (and thus will not be able to read this :)), please switch to the Atom feed instead:

http://hallvards.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Comment moderation turned on

I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but in an attempt to eliminate comment spam I've had to turn on comment moderation for this blog (in addition to the word verification that was already there). This means that whenever you enter a comment, I have to manually approve and publish it. When you click on the "Post a comment" link below, you will be informed about this new policy:

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

Please don't post duplicate comments - your comment will be published soon, as long as it is not spam.

Blog description updated

FWIW, I've updated the blog description in the header of my blog, to better reflect what I'm actually writing about ;). The new description reads: "Confessions of a Delphi hacker - hacks, programming tips and Delphi stuff." Oh, btw, I've just returned the corrected proofs of my upcoming Delphi Magazine article to the editor - it looks good! Make sure you have that subscription updated... ;).

Roy Nelson is blogging - and Brian Long too

If you are looking for more hacks, you should be subscribing to Roy Nelson's blog. Roy is a great asset of technical info and hacks - in this case he was helping out another great spelunker and Delphi expert, Brian Long.

Why blogging - a waste of time?

There have been various discussions about the blogging phenomena and some worries that too much sensitive company information could bleed out to the public. Other people worry about the time "wasted" in writing and reading blogs. As Captain Jake put it over in delphi.non-tech:

> Who has the time to write it all?

Good point, actually. I'm geeky enough to (admit that) I use a laptop on the tram back-and-forth to work. That's about 1 hour per day. For some time now, I've spent that tram-time (and some evenings, I must admit) in writing TDM articles and tech editing Xavier's and Jon's books. As Jon was taking a hike in the Grand Canyon (great pictures! - well worth a look), I had some idle time between chapters.

I wasn't up to writing a complete magazine article, so I decided to try and join this blogging craze. This means that as new chapters start dropping into my inbox, the rate of my blog articles will most certainly decline. Still, I like the persistence of a blog and the fact that I can write anything I like (within the limits of law). And the conformity of RSS and Atom feeds means that it is easy for readers to know when there is something new to read, without having to poll a web page manually.

Newsgroups are nice, but the signal-to-noise ratio for interesting information is irritatingly low. It is much more productive to monitor a selected list of relevant and high quality blogs. I was talking to a friend, showing him the hack to gain write access to the Screen.PixelsPerInch property. He just shook his head and said;

"Hack is your middle name".

Thus the idea of writing about some of the hacks I've played with over the years materialized. Hopefully, I'll find the time to write about less suspicious programming techniques and more about higher level topics some time in the future... :-).

First blog post

The blogmania never seems to stop, so now even I have been enticed into trying this new fad... :)