There’s an exclusive club in Sweden that holds but a few precious members. They consist of the people at the computer/projector table, who have done the Oasis conference Saturday mass twice.

The Oasis conference stays two years at every location. And the highlight of the conference is always the big mass on Saturday. The powerpoint schedule for this mass is complex, to say the least; there are songs, psalms, hymns, choruses, confessions, prayers, Our Father Who Art In Heaven, and a ton of other things that must be projected onto the big displays at some point in the meeting, usually in a pretty hectic pace.

When the soldiers in the U.S. Airborne Divisions “graduated” from training and were considered real paratroopers, they were given a Parachutist Badge, better known as “jump wings”. This was the culmination of two years of intense training and labor. They had trained for combat, trained for parachute insertion into battlefields, and they had done at least five parachute jumps. Only then were they considered paratroopers. To many, it was the culmination of their training, that they now had the right to call themselves “real soldiers”.

I’m mentioning this because today, I’ve graduated. I’m sitting here writing in the aftermath of the Saturday mass, which I have now done… twice. Today, I get my jump wings. I’ve joined the exclusive club, and it can never be taken away. Next year, I sit in the ranks of veterans, and can watch a new batch of trainees sweat to pull this off.

Truly, it’s a badge of honor.

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 code away. (And a few bugs away.) And you have the opportunity of tailoring the program specifically for the environment where it will work.

The downside of writing new software all the time is that funny feeling in the stomach five minutes before launch time. Will the darn thing work? Have you checked and tested everything? Will it suddenly freeze up in mid-session, to the endless surprise and amusement of the entire conference public?

I found myself reciting Al Shepard’s prayer: “Dear Lord, please don’t let me f— up.”

But the program worked. It’s a huge relief to find that the program performs flawlessly under intense circumstances. In the 10am meeting today, the worship leader suddenly decided to abandon the program altogether, which caused a brief panic over here in the computer group, as we scrambled to search for the songs he played. How lucky we were to have had the foresight to build a search function into the program. (Maybe God knew we’d need it.)

I’ve already decided to make a branch and start working on the 1.1 version. I have a lot of ideas.

Currently writing this from my mom’s place in Skövde. I’ve relocated my base of operations here temporarily, because Oasis, the big annual conference, is due in a few days.

I’m nervous. I’ve planned the whole thing from Skärhamn this year so I really haven’t talked to my team yet so far, and I’m worrying about all the things I may have missed and all the little details that will turn out to be so important later on.

I can’t remember if I wrote about this last year, but it sort of resembles a military squad going into action. High anxiety before, calm and focused while the action lasts… and let’s hope there’s no post-traumatic stress to deal with. There’s not much to do at this point, just go along where the chopper takes you, remember your training, and keep your M-16 ready for action.

The highlight this year is probably going to be the same as last year: The worship. Lisa Lerman did a marvelous job last year. I have a feeling she’s going to do the same again.

Yeah, like TObject is some kind of special, custom object that you can’t find.

I want Visual Studio.

I have a dark secret. It’s one of those secrets you pray that people really won’t find out about; that you hide in dark closets and only bring out late at night when (supposedly) everyone is asleep. Whenever I engage in this dark, mysterious secret of mine, I worry if the neighbors can hear me and what they will think of me. For the awful, horrible truth is….

…I like Barry White.

Yes. It’s true. I’m sitting by my laptop right now and kind of moving along with those 70’s disco moves. Good ol’ Barry. I find that there’s nothing quite like having that dark, smooth voice come out of those loudspeakers, and you imagine those disco lights flashing through the smoke, and hearing the music start playing. Your body just wants to move along with it (after properly making sure that all the curtains are down).

It’s like I imagine myself sitting in the couch with an arm around my loved one, and then suddenly this amazing music comes out of nowhere, and I look her in the eye and say….

“I’ve heard people say that… too much of anything is not good for you, baby… (Oh no!) But – I don’t know about that….”

And then, as I stand up, the light changes and tones down, and disco lights flashing; and as I take her hand and start dancing, smoke rises softly up from the floor… “It was a magical night.”

These are the things that none of my friends must never know about. My reputation probably couldn’t survive it. If anyone asks me, I tell them I’m listening to Chopin or Saint-Saëns. But, sometimes… when no-one is watching… I turn into the 70’s disco beast.

These are some practical guidelines for telephone courtesy that you should know about. They seem to work very well. Some come from our company, some from myself.

• Answering machines have a purpose. They are there to answer when I either can’t or won’t. Calling five times in a row and every time getting the answering machine – yet without leaving a message – is discourteous, if not downright annoying; and it prevents me from screening calls. Americans seem to understand the finer points of leaving messages – Swedes generally don’t.
• Leave short messages. When I listen to messages on my machine, I don’t want to wade through a five-minute essay. Keep it short and sweet, saying what you want and give me a phone number to call.
• And that goes for the answering machines too, by the way. Short and sweet. I’m a busy person.
• It’s also good practice to reply to sms’s with a simple “ok” or “thank you”. So the recipient knows you’ve seen the message. Otherwise the whole communication is kind of in a limbo.
• If you revoke my call on the cell phone by clicking it away, call me back as soon as you can. Actively refusing a call on the cell phone is a rather rude behavior, but it’s okay if the generally accepted meaning is “I saw your call, can’t answer now, but I’ll call you back ASAP.”

The last rule is heavily enforced at my company. If you refuse a call and don’t call back later, you will hear about it.

I find myself from time to time putting on headphones, and then I forget to turn on music. And then I realize that I’ve spent the last 30 minutes in bed, surfing the net, with big clunky headphones on, in the deepest silence.

This is a great mystery.

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 are no tools for doing that. Yes, you can run “dcc32″ from the command-line, but if you want to auto-update the build number, well… sorry, can’t be done. Yes, it’s written down in the .dof file, but it’s not used by dcc32, as .cfg isn’t used by bds. All those options are fetched from the compiled .res file, but there is no way to make the .res file manually, it is maintained solely by the IDE.

How is this possible? Who thought this up? Delphi has existed now for… how many years? Doesn’t anyone think?

No, I don’t want to use FinalBuilder, I want to use Powershell, because it’s free and I can write my own scripts without using a clumsy IDE for that as well.

So now I have to write a number of hacks for maintaining this: One that builds a default dcc32.cfg file from the loaded bpl packages, and one that updates the resource files.

Thanks, Borland/CodeGear.

I put together a little symbol reference for the excellent war-game The Operational Art of War (TOAW).

It’s available here.

There was a very good quote in the last issue of Der Spiegel:

Die Europäer haben oft geklagt über die amerikanische Dominanz, das selbstbewusste, manchmal auch einfach nur arrogante Auftreten der Vereinigten Staaten, aber insgeheim waren sie häufig ganz froh, in der zweiten Reihe zu sitzen.

The Europeans often complain about the United States being the “world police” and how they constantly intervene all around the world. But as the quote explains, the Europeans have been secretly happy to play the second violin and watch America rummage around the world, and instead keeping its own forces at home in peace.

“Amerika braucht einen Regimewechsel”, sagt der frühere Sicherheitsberater Zbigniew Brzezinski, “aber Europa braucht ein Regime.”

Whenever the Europeans actually manage to agree on doing something, the actual commitment is often insufficient and clouded by political bickering. Perhaps the old colonial powers – mostly England and France – know all too well the problems associated with handling the Third World and find themselves dragging their feet, and settle on arguing instead which EU nation that gets to commit the bulk of the effort.

The alternative to a world dominated by American intervention is a EU that steps up to the challenge. And if so, Sweden might find itself being forced to commit not just a mechanized company, but entire battalions and brigades to the peacekeeping missions. – And then we would become the world police, much to the amusement of everyone else.