When company does not want to spend money for training… they spend more money for fixing

Two weeks ago, a buggy project landed in my hands, to repair. The bug report was really unclear – it was just stated a piece of code that was supposed to upload some Json files to the Azure cloud was not working on some PCs. The code was something like this – well actually was […]

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Formatting tricks for StackOverflow and GitHib – Reinventing the text editor

Back in the early 90’s people invented a program called rich text editor. In it you could format text to be bold, italic. Paragraphs were also available. Then years went by, the rich editors got better and better until they culminated with really powerful and eye candy editors like MS Word. In parallel Linux came

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One function to rule them all – Saving the whole GUI one single procedure call

We all created at one point some small utility to do some dirty job for us. It started as a 100 liner then became bigger and bigger. And then we decided to publish it so the whole world can enjoy it. And this is when disaster hits: the users start to ask more and more

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Running a single instance of our program – Passing command line from one instance to another instance

Some of my programs need to run as single instance. This means that if an instance of my program is already running and the user is trying to start another instance, the second instance should not run. However, before closing the second instance, I want to pass the command line parameters from that second instance

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How to see who wakes up the harddrive (HDD) from sleep?

Usually I have my D: drive sleeping because it is too loud.But sometimes, without obvious reason somebody wakes it up. To see who does that, you need to  install the Sysinternals Process Monitor (Microsoft website).At startup you need to cancel the filter dialog that will be presented. In the program, under the Filter main menu,

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PaintShop Pro won’t save images as JPG (Fixed)

Today I was not able to save anymore images in PainShop Pro as jpg (png will work). PainShop Pro will simply freeze if I try to do this. The issue: a clipboard monitor called PureText was conflicting with PainShop Pro. Closing the program solved the issue.   I have no clue why the programmers of PainShop

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Can you tell if the machine on which you are running is a virtual machine installed secretly by some malware/hacker?

Somebody asked me: can you tell if the machine on which you are running is a virtual machine installed secretly by some malware/hacker? I thought about that question and the answer is SURE. Without any doubt. A virtual machine will consume some resources by itself (quite a lot). If you observe these missing resources you

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KSDev released this year CrossVCL – a framework that allows you to build multi-platform applications. What is the difference between Firemonkey and CrossVCL? If you want to make your current app multi platform, you need to port it to Firemonkey. With CrossVCL you don’t need anything!!! Embarcadero should fear them! And learn a lesson form

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Cool features and functions in Delphi

  List of IDE features that are cool (when they work) Search backwards – Ctrl+F to do a search in your code. F3 to go to the next position Shift+F3 to go to previous position. Move/Relocate/Rename project’s files directly from Project Manager Navigate to recently modified code – Ctrl+Shift+F7 and Ctrl+Shift+F8 Search for usage –

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Fix Firefox v57 (Firefox Quantum) high memory utilization (for computers with 4GB RAM or less)

When Firefox Quantum was launched everybody praised it as the next best thing (browser).But if you look closelly you will only see modest speed improvements into the browser. HOWEVER, you will see massive slowdowns in Windows. At least I did in mine. Why because instead of taking 600-900MB for regular browsing the new Firefox takes

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False antivirus reports on installers created with WinRAR

I recently observed that Setup files created with WinRar have a high false positive detection rate from antiviruses.Here are the conclusions of some test I made, in order to reduce the false positive rate: RAR version    SFX module     Detection ratioWinRar 3.11      32bit             1/66WinRar 4.2       32bit?            3/66WinRar 5.50      32bit             6/67WinRar 5.50      64bit             1/67 Notes:The detection ratio

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Yet another EurekaLog bug. How many until now?

I stepped last week in a multiple-bug situation with EurekaLog for Delphi. I again wasted MORE than a day with this buggy “exception tracer tool”. My DRP file is like this: PROGRAM MyProgram; uses   {$ifdef win32}fastmm4,{$endif}   EurekaLog_units_come_here This worked fine until I compiled the program to 64 bits. On 64 bit, EurekaLog refused

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How to configure EurekaLog to send bugs via email

Email sender settings in EurekaLog v7   SMTP Server [1] Simple MAPI MAPI Shell (MailTo)  SMTP client [3] Can attach the ELP file Yes Yes [2] Yes [2] No Yes See sender’s email No [4] Yes Yes Yes No Email client software* Not required Required Required Required Not required Chance of success Highest chance among

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Another bug in EurekaLog 7

I wanted to send an email (“Send via SMTP client”) from EurekaLog v7.4.8.0 RC 1 but I was getting this error: FAILED: Error code = -2146885613 The revocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline  EurekaLog 7.4.8.0 RC 1 Testing send with TELMailSMTPClientSender Options: _BugAppVersion=”21.0.17707.5020″ _BugID=”73D40000″ _BugIDSource=”bds.exe   My email

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Total Commander – the ultimate file manager for Windows (and recently for Android too)

Total Commander (aka Windows Commander) is the ultimate file manager for Windows (and recently for Android too). Who can use it? The regular Windows user that used all his life Windows Explorer will find Total Commander interface AT LEAST awkward. The interface concept and user experience is totally different in Total Commander. This doesn’t mean

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The best and most reliable 3GB hard drive

I need a 3GB internal harddrive. Looking through statistic data from BackBlaze, it seems that Seagate is the worst solution because of it HUGE failure rate. Yes the prices are good for this drive but you don’t want a cheap drive that will fail after 2 years. Right? The next brand with high failure rate

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Embarcadero finally decided to fix SOME bugs in Delphi

In the new road map, Embarcadero finally decided to fix SOME bugs in Delphi. It seems good news but hold your horses: 1. They not always keep their promise related to the road map. 2. There are not so many bugs 3. They won’t do all the fixes at once, but until 2018 4. Until

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Is (Embarcadero) Delphi’s code optimized for speed? No? Here is how to optimize string speed

The short answer is a big NO! No the long answer: Today I needed a function that will wrap a string (a contiguous block of characters with no spaces) after 80 characters. Not only that I have found SysUtils.WrapText unsuitable (it can only wrap text IF the text contains spaces) but it is also terrible

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Three software programs that [used to] plague our computers: Acrobat, Java, Flash

There used to be three programs that really made our computer miserable. They were slow, bloated, intrusive and a  lot of security holes opened with them when you installed. Java – Probably Java is the nastiest of all Until few years ago you could not browse some web sites because some derailed ‘web developers’ decided

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List of microcontrollers that can be programmed in Pascal (and Pascal-like) language

By micro-controller Arduino Lazarus? DK-Basic (8bit arduino) Pascal Compiler for AVR Cortex-M3 and M4 ARM LPC – 39euro on Amazon Oberon     Astrobe  (Windows)    8051   Turbo51 (Windows) PascalLite – unspecified price MicroPascal Pic 10 to Pic 18  Pic Micro Pascal ATMEGA MicroPascal Pro XMEGA/XTINY from Atmel MicroPascal Pro Raspberry Pi projects (ARM v6/ARM11) Lazarus

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