Just a little note to those of you who keep track… NiftyCMS 0.9 (“Händel”) is now finished. Or at least entering a beta stage. I plan to continue with the 1.0 (“Chopin”) release in a short while. The roadmap can be found here.
Category Archives: Software Development
July 1, 2008
18:45
18:45
June 3, 2008
08:49
08:49
A Problem with the Windows Model
My services.exe process was consuming a lot of CPU resources this morning, for no apparent reason. If I examined this process, I saw that it had created three different threads that were equally busy in working on some unspecified task. No I/O performed, no network activity, just a lot of CPU resources on three different [...]
May 2, 2008
12:29
12:29
Old Pictures
Going through the archives, and I found a couple of oddities that I think I might save… The above is a design I made for a remoting layer in our switchboard application. It provided the means to transparently switch search facilities from a local, threaded approach to a remoting approach, each using the same database [...]
April 30, 2008
09:34
09:34
I {heart} PHP
Reasons why I love PHP: It’s quick. You can build your own framework. (Or use someone elses.) The whole PHP distribution can be compiled into one single, distributable binary. It’s got a rather sweet mix of raw power, raw utilities, caches, add-ons, and dangerous things you can do with it. If you know what you’re [...]
February 11, 2008
12:10
12:10
February 5, 2008
09:21
09:21
Waking Up the Caveman
It’s sometimes been said, by many people, that turning the computer off at night and starting it up again is bad, because it puts an undue wear on the processor and components inside when you switch on or off the electric current. This is almost entirely, completely false. However, I think, some day, it should [...]
December 5, 2007
10:54
10:54
Threading is Bad
Threading, as a software method, is bad. The idea is good in itself: Make the program execution split up in several threads, which all run independently; creating an illusion that the program is doing several things simultaneously – and, if you have multiple cores, processors or hyperthreading, the program actually does several things at once. [...]
October 31, 2007
09:58
09:58
Small Is Beautiful
A colleague sent me an attachment today, a MindManager map file. MindManager is a tool that has become popular recently; it’s a program that allows you to build mindmaps. A lot of people here like it. I’m not intending to plug the program here, I use Notepad to make my mindmaps and it works well [...]
October 30, 2007
10:26
10:26
Using Junctions to Host IIS Ftp Home Folders
So, the problem I faced was that I was trying to set up the IIS ftp service to handle multiple users. However, in its User Isolation mode and with using Local users, the IIS expects the folders to be named “LocalUser\username” within the ftp-root. It’s not difficult to set that up, if you have a [...]
October 23, 2007
13:22
13:22
A Brief History of Cacls
In the beginning was cacls.exe. This little command-line utility could edit access control lists in the NT filesystem. It was deemed by some to be inefficient and underpowered. So when Windows Server 2003 came along (and Vista, mind you), Microsoft shipped an updated version called icacls.exe which was more competent in some areas, and less [...]
October 13, 2007
20:50
20:50
On Tickle Tests
Tickle is a pretty fun website with tons of tests. If, for some unexplainable reason (yeah right) you have nothing to do on a Saturday night, it’s a fun way to goof off. I took a “work quiz” and came upon this question. At first, I didn’t understand the question. And then I had to [...]
October 11, 2007
14:35
14:35
CSS And Tables
I found chart the other day, obviously humorously intended, depicting the average amount of time spent on different activities during web design. It’s more accurate than you think. I’ve done a lot of time trying to build css-only sites, only to give up and fall back to good ol’ tables. Tables have a way of [...]
October 6, 2007
14:13
14:13
Generics
Wish Delphi had it. (Yeah, the Win32 one, too.)
September 11, 2007
10:13
10:13
I Have Fought the IIS… and Lost
I have fought the good fight. I have stood on the high ground and battled with the enemy. And I have lost. It’s not that much of a battle, you know. I’m just trying to make Microsoft’s Internet Information Server to accept a new IP address. I have fought the configuration dialogs, I have wrestled [...]
August 13, 2007
15:54
15:54
Visualizing Software Design
I’m starting to use a new method to understand how to write software. It’s something I’ve starting doing just by myself, so I don’t know if it’s an established practice. I think it isn’t. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m looking at the running software. I see the main form as it is [...]
August 10, 2007
22:45
22:45
Living Systems
Why aren’t computer systems alive? Why can’t I add fields at will to a database without also changing mapping xml, classes and other stupid definitions… and then having to recompile? Why can’t I add methods to classes while the program is running? Why is data so locked up in proprietary formats? Why is XML the [...]
July 25, 2007
12:19
12:19
Behold, I Make All Things New
I wouldn’t be true to form unless I wrote a new program this year as well for the Oasis conference. The upside of writing new software all the time is that you get to stay on the bleeding edge of features. Anything you could possibly want in a program is just a few lines of [...]
July 20, 2007
17:14
17:14
Delphi WTF
Yeah, like TObject is some kind of special, custom object that you can’t find. I want Visual Studio.
July 12, 2007
14:29
14:29
Delphi Builds Suck
Well, I never throught I’d write a post with that title. I’m trying to script builds of Delphi programs in PowerShell. We now have an excellent script for interfacing with Vault and getting latest versions of source code from that. It’s sweet. But building Delphi programs from the command line remains a mystery. There simply [...]
June 24, 2007
13:28
13:28
Things I Never Knew Could Be Done With Cmd.Exe
I spent a part of yesterday looking through all the commands in Cmd.Exe (the Windows command shell, inheritor of the old COMMAND.COM). It’s interesting how they’ve added switches and stuff to improve on it since the early days, but how almost nobody seems to use it. Admittingly, it’s a far cry from bash, the Unix [...]