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Joseph MItzen

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Posts posted by Joseph MItzen

  1. Posted

    8 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

     That must not be the actual reason for ending ones MVP status. Being an MVP needs a significant amount of time which not everyone is able or willing to invest.

    Jeroen Wiert-Pluimers lost his MVP status because he kept posting articles about the security flaws on Embarcadero's website that he repeatedly informed them of and they declined to fix. Joanna Carter believed she lost her MVP status when she posted about the cost of Delphi being too high. About ten years ago there was a discussion in the comment section of a blog post from Jolyon Duranko-Smith and Joanna Carter, David Intersimone and Nick Hodges all ended up taking part. Joanna mentioned her belief about losing her MVP status. Hodges and Intersimone kept insisting this wasn't the reason. When Carter asked why then, the response was "You know why!" She insisted she didn't. They said they couldn't say because of privacy issues. She said she'd waive any privacy issues and post the reason. They refused again and continued to decline to tell her why she was removed as an MVP. It was rather bizarre.

  2. Posted

    I just installed the Delphi Community 10.4 version into a 64-bit Windows 11 VM. I only installed the Windows target. When I create a project; the only target option presented is Windows 32-bit.When I select the "managing platforms" option, the only Windows option is "Delphi Windows Community". I seem to recall that the standard options here used to include Windows 32-bit and 64-bit listed separately. Have they removed the ability to create 64-bit targets in the Community Edition or am I missing something?

     

     

    emb2 Screenshot_20220318_231737.png

    emb1 Screenshot_20220318_231610.png

  3. Posted

    18 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

    At least they can add four items to the bugs fixed list while actually only fixing one :classic_biggrin:

    You joke about this, but they really think that way! Several years ago when Google Plus still existed, someone in the Delphi group (it wasn't you, was it?) posted a graph they'd made showing bugs closed over time... or maybe it was showing how long until bugs were closed; I forget which. Marco Cantu made a rather aggressive reply to the post that the chart was all wrong because of something (I don't remember), and he was going to post the real graph on his blog. The original poster was very gracious, apologizing for their mistake and looking forward to Marco's blog post.

     

    A blog post shows up from Marco purporting to show bugs closed over time and the trend for how long bugs stay open, each looking really nice for Embarcadero. I realize that his chart is conflating actual bugs with bugs closed because of duplicate, feature request, won't fix, can't reproduce, etc. I (and some others) used the blog commenting option to explain this to Marco. Marco declined to approve any of these comments. Instead, he appended a few sentences claiming to summarize what some people had written about the subject. At least in my case, I felt his summary was inadequate and skipped several problems I'd pointed out. His only "fix" was to keep the chart up and just change the word "Bugs" to "Issues" in the title. :classic_blink:

     

    Now, I was working in data analysis at that time. I was able to back into the actual closed bug counts based on information from his blog post (but not the correct data for average time to close a bug). I made my own chart with the revised numbers; the trend was the opposite from the one on Marco's blog. I shared a link to that chart for him; of course he never approved that comment either and his summary didn't mention that when you took the other non-bugs out the chart trended in the exact opposite direction as the one he posted. Ironically, he claimed to be showing a more accurate version of the data than the chart on Google Plus but his was far less so.

     

    Ultimately I realized the purpose of his blog wasn't to actually determine the trend regarding bugs and bug fixes in Delphi over time but to perform damage control over the chart presented in Google Plus. 😞 There's no other explanation for leaving his charts after being made aware of why they were inaccurate and how they skewed the results.

     

     

    • Confused 1

  10. Posted

    12 hours ago, tinyBigGAMES said:

    I made CPas becaue I found using C/C++ build system is too complicated. I just want to "use" the library and not mess about trying to figure out how to compile it.

    Nice! I'm reminded a bit of the cppyy package for Python, which solved some of the same types of problems by the unorthodox method of embedding cling, a C++ interpreter built on top of clang.
     

    Quote


    automatic, run-time, Python-C++ bindings generator.... Run-time generation enables detailed specialization for higher performance, lazy loading for reduced memory use in large scale projects, Python-side cross-inheritance and callbacks for working with C++ frameworks, run-time template instantiation, automatic object downcasting, exception mapping, and interactive exploration of C++ libraries. cppyy delivers this without any language extensions, intermediate languages, or the need for boiler-plate hand-written code.

     

     

     

  15. Posted

    OK, just checking in to say that I've gotten a Access Violation error in rtl280.bpl when trying to install with the latest version of WINE. The fun thing is when one does a Google search on "rtl280.bpl" one gets back five pages of results, basically all of them about error messages from Delphi. :classic_sad: I'm going to try fiddling with things some more.

     

    19 hours ago, dummzeuch said:

    So, chances are, that the Delphi 11 installer will need the same workarounds.

    Not those workarounds. Those workarounds would have you setting up a 32bit prefix, which won't work for Delphi anymore. It also has other tricks like installing IE8 (which you can't readily do from a 64bit prefix) and installing .NET 3.5. I got to the point I'm at by using a 64bit prefix, installing corefonts and, per one error message, installing .NET 4.5.

     

    Now I need to proceed to bear it with a stick. I'm sure the IDE relies upon 76 ancient, proprietary bits of Microsoft software that aren't documented anywhere.....

  16. Posted

    19 hours ago, aehimself said:

    Everything more complex than a single form caused AVs and other funky things.

    So it performed identically to running on Windows? :classic_biggrin:

     

    I've got a cutting edge Linux desktop; tomorrow I'll give the trial of Rad Studio 11 a go with the latest version of WINE staging (a series of patches on top of WINE) and Valve's Proton fork of WINE if necessary and see if I can get working. I've got a reasonable amount of experience poking Windows software with a stick until it runs under Linux.

    • Haha 1

  19. Posted

    On 1/22/2022 at 7:03 PM, Darian Miller said:

    One VM and all versions working again

    I'm going to have nightmares about your VM tonight. This feels like a worthy goal and a horrible nightmare waiting to happen. Too much Delphi mixed all together can't be good. You know that old urban legend where you say "Bloody Mary" three times in a mirror in a dark room and a ghost appears in the mirror? I fear that if you add three more copies of Delphi to your VM and turn out the lights you'll see a faint image of David Intersimone burned into your monitor.

    • Haha 3

  20. Posted

    On 1/21/2022 at 10:07 AM, Stano said:

    When I found SQLite and found how complicated it was to work with dates, I quickly rejected it.

    Is it really complicated? SQLite can store datetimes as ISO8601 (string) , Julian day numbers (real), or Unix time (integer). It has functions for working with all three of these types. Most SQLite drivers I've seen in various languages automatically convert between one of these and the language's own datetime type, and some offer the user the choice of storing the native datetime in any of three types.

     

    For those who are interested, SQLite very recently added static type support, which may be of use to those for whom this was a dealbreaker.

  22. Posted

    33 minutes ago, corneliusdavid said:

    . It's quite frustrating but just walking out isn't always the best choice if there are no other jobs in the area or if other parts of the employment are good enough to keep you there. I was eventually able to leave that company but it took me a while to line up something else.

    What, you don't want to be like me and walk out the door with nothing lined up a few weeks before the Great Recession hits? 🙂 Sorry that post came off a bit too negative... I was just about to go edit it and saw you'd already replied. You're right of course.

     

    On the other hand, several years ago one of the employees at EMBT's Romanian facility (back when they had one) showed up in the comments section of a Delphi blog entry about the Romanian unit. After establishing he really worked there, he explained that the wages EMBT were offering were low, even for Romania. He said that Chinese companies also off-shored there and they offered better pay. Because of this, the only people EMBT could get to work for them there were people who had just graduated college (and who studied C++ and Java but not Delphi). He said that these new programmers only took the job to get one year of experience on their resumes, which was enough to get a job with one of the Chinese firms. Hence the folks working on Delphi in Romania didn't care about poor code quality or bugs because they didn't expect to be around long enough to have to fix it. 😞

     

    Another time two of EMBT's Delphi developers showed up in the old forums. Someone began explaining to them the details of some bug that was a complete showstopper for their company and that had no signs of being fixed anytime soon. One developer replied, "See, this is why we don't like to come here." A TeamB member took people to task for bombarding them with their issues but uncharacteristically also told the Delphi developers that their dismissive attitude towards users with problems wasn't appropriate either. The two developers never showed up again.

     

    So that's some of what informed my initial response; those working on Delphi haven't always been hard-working and singularly dedicated. On the other other hand 🙂 a source on the U.S. Delphi team at the time told tales of employees having substandard monitors and inadequate server power which led to exceedingly long build times when they wanted to test changes, so they do have a lot to put up with as well.

     

    Anyway, I apologize again for my tone; some of that came off targeted at you personally, which was inappropriate.

    • Like 2

  23. Posted

    On 11/18/2021 at 5:07 PM, corneliusdavid said:

    the hard-working team behind the complex and powerful development tools we use.

    You criticize others for maintaining insight they don't really have, and then you do the same thing in the same sentence. What we do know about their parent company is that several times in the past after acquiring companies they fired most of the programmers and outsourced the development work to China and other countries with cheaper labor. They also tend to gain new products via acquisition rather than internal development.  Embarcadero is privately owned and doesn't have to answer to shareholders.

     

    Quote

    I'm also fairly certain they didn't have a choice and are also not allowed to voice those internal issues.

    Again, you're being as clairvoyant as those you criticized, but if management doesn't even allow developers to say "this doesn't work" then things are even worse than feared. Things wouldn't even be fixable if people who see problems can't point them out.

     

    Quote

    Personally, I feel sorry for them and the pressure they must be under, especially when they read these posts and can't do a single thing about it.

    They can quit and keep their integrity. I've walked before rather than have my name associated with a doomed project when management ignored my concerns. If you don't quit, "I was just following orders" isn't an excuse if you knew better and went ahead and did it anyway.

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