Well a week has passed and I ended up going back to Delphi, mostly because what I was working on is for my father. With a lot of Web searching and time in forums I have managed to solve most of the problems I was having. It may be my past experience but working with Delphi is still a lot easier than with .NET under Visual Studio. It comes down to the way objects are defined.
For those not familiar with an object it is a bit like a ball is an object. It had a name, “ball” and a set of properties. If we consider the ball type: tennis then these properties might be green, furry, can bounce with width of three inches. It is the same idea when programming. A text box for example will also have a name, something all object have, but a lot of different properties like read-only, visible, and enabled and so on. Objects also have methods or things that they can do or things that can be done with them. For the tennis ball these could include bounce, serve, drop and pick-up. For our text box it could be create, destroy, fill with text, clear text etc. Objects can also have event. For our ball these could include After Served, Before Dropped, Bounced. For our text box, when changed, on enter, on exit, on clear.
Thinking about things as objects became the normal programming paradigm a while back. Of course .NET has objects as do most modern programming languages. There are different ways to implement them however. Consider getting data from and to a table. For .NET this requires a connection object, a binding course, and a table object. Delphi requires the same thing but in many cases you can get away with just the connection and say a query. In Delphi the datasource (binding equivalent) is very simple with the intelligence kept with the connection and the table or query. For .Net there are a huge number of bits and pieces that need to be manipulated to get the same results that makes it all so much more complicated unless you are very familiar with it all.
Nothing to report on Mass Effect 3 this week, I have been too busy with other stuff.
I did download some bits and pieces to start looking at some Android development. I have a decompression algorithm a friend of mine devised, for SCUBA diving, that I want to implement on my Galaxy S2 to help with dive plans. It is not a high priority but it would be cool to get it done sometime.
Sp what do you do if you are bored and happen to have a bunch of old floppy drives lying around? Well you could go here https://github.com/SammyIAm/Moppy, follow the instructions and start playing tunes using the sounds made by a floppy drive as it moves the heads back and forwards. People with way too much time on their hands have created classics like the Star Wars Imperial March, the theme from Star Trek The Next Generation, Mario Brothers and other with the gamer, sci-fi focus.
Industry News
Working hard to increase its name as the world’s most evil empire Apple is pushing for more patent decisions, in its favour of course. One of the latest concerns touch keyboards and the US Patent and Trademark Office in all of its iGnoble glory has granted Apple a patent being a "Method, system, and graphical user interface for selecting a soft keyboard." This apparently covers a keyboard on which letters are changed to numbers or symbols when the right button is pressed. The patent gets a little strange after that and goes on to describe buttons that are separate from the keyboard e.g. floating above it. You might think that this is some kind of sci-fi stuff that is far removed from our current keyboard technology but remember that Apple attacked Samsung for having icons with rounded corners that ‘copied’ Apple’s look and feel. Expect lots of law suits to come out of this, somehow.
Drat there may not be a colour e-ink Kindle model out this year, well at least according to a Reuters source. What is coming out in the next month or so is a built in light for those dark nights or when reading in the closet. Had to happen of course as Barnes & Noble has announced a new version of their Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, similar to the Indiglo-style watch illumination. There is a rumour of an 8.9in Kindle Fire coming in Q4. This will coincide with a new competitor from Google, stay tuned.
So how does Siri respond when asked “what’s the best cell phone ever?” According to one report Nokia's Lumia 900. This suggests two things, one that so far the iPhone is not filtered by some mega corporate watchdog, yet. Also it turns out that Siri uses the Wolfram Alpha database for answers and the Nokia Lumia is the phone that Alpha offers to customers. The response is apparently based on a massive four reviews posted on the Best Buy website. Moral of the story is no matter how much you may like Siri’s dulcet tones she may not always be giving you the best responses.
Ultrabooks seem to be trending towards SSD drives for the future or at least the hybrid versions that are faster than regular drives. The problem is that tablets boot up faster because they are all SSD and as always the punters want more speed. Seagate loves this idea of course. With an expected doubling of the SSD market this year the cost per GB will fall and ultrabook prices will drop below the $1000 mark. An Ultrabook is more versatile than a tablet so if they can get the prices down it will attract those in the $800-$900 price point. The kind of technology we can expect to see soon is a hybrid drive with 320 GB and 20-32 GB of NAND, plenty for an OS and some apps.
Finally for this week some more future stuff. Everyone knows that smaller is better for electronics but getting it smaller has thrown up a lot of problems lately. Apparently it is hard to get a “ballistic" electron to follow a consistent path. According to a group from University of New South Wales, University of Oregon, Niels Bohr Institute and Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge if you remove dopants from the silicon substrate this will help the problem. I know, I know you always thought that might have been the problem but who was listening to you, right? When they solve this things will be able to get smaller and you will be able to brag about your new quantum level device, in the nice red colour.
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