aehimself

I'm using String for string everywhere with no noticeable performance penalty (although, I never had to write performance-critical programs so far). If I know that encoding is in the game (e.g.: receiving data from a web browser) or I'm working with binary data I'm using TBytes. Pretty happy until now.

Damn it. First of all, have the highest possible levels of my admiration. As for the location... damn it again. I should re-structure my IT equipment at home.

If you mean you physically remove and transport disks between houses on a regular basis for years, you have my highest possible admiration. I'm just too lazy to do that, I give up after a month or two. I still have so much to learn 😞

First things first, I am horrible in UI design. With that said... Considering the fact that one main step can not change without all the sub-steps complete, my main UI would only show the currently active step. "Project XY is in Pending Signoff state" list of substeps below, with a fancy green checkmark right next to the substeps already accomplished. Don't make a dfference between optional and required ones - the main step will change anyway if all required ones are completed. This applies to the user and admin interface too. I don't really care when the previous main step's substeps were completed if my only purpose is to approve something / check how my thing is progressing. Have a history, as a side menu option. But then again, I am really, really bad in UI design. It's just how I would do it. Edit:

That is a really valid point. So you need 2 fireproof safes. 1 for the library, 1 for the server 🙂 That is not possible. How are you writing data on a media, which is not physically in a drive? Again, I am strictly talking about home-use "hacky" but safe-enough solutions. I have trust issues. I'll not buy critical equipment (like a fire extinguisher or car tires) second hand. If I want my data safe - brand new safe. If not - no safe at all. 400 EUR is a bit off the hobby limit in my opinion. But then again - how much one is willing to and how much one can spend on their hobby is a subjective factor.

I'm not. I'm not even using mag tapes, they (and the drives + libraries) are too expensive for a hobby. I'm just accepting the opinion of smarter people than me, who still describe the ONLY valid (local) backup medium as tapes. I'm not that good in physics, but the industry standard have its tests. I'm only strictly against calling flash-based devices as backup. They are not that reliable. End of story. Never said that. Cloud backup is a valid option. I never did - and will never - discourage people of Cloud-based backup. I just have trust issues, but that's my own business. I'll bet almost anything that at least half of the people here (and majority of IT geeks around the globe) do this. We are happy to spend the price of a house on a backup server for our company but private life is different - if it is still a hobby. People usually pay because they need GUARANTEE. What happens if your house and your friends house catches fire at the same time?

Yes, it does (but I don't know since when): Type TMyClass = Class public Class Var Counter: Integer; Constructor Create; ReIntroduce; End; Constructor TMyClass.Create; Begin Inc(Self.Counter); End; Procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); Var v1, v2: TMyClass; Begin v1 := TMyClass.Create; v2 := TMyClass.Create; ShowMessage(IntToStr(TMyClass.Counter)); // Will show 2 End;

That's actually quite impressive, I didn't know ICS has these functions built-in! Simple question - does it (or offers a way to) handle backlogs? What happens if an E-mail could not be sent because no connection could be made and the application shuts down?

...which would immediately make it a non-ideal backup solution.

Well said. That would be my last concern too, especially since I have offsite replication of my upstream git repositories 🙂 <OFFTOPIC> If there are no swarm of mosquitos, it's quite pleasant to have your morning coffee / lunch / dinner outside. On the downside - a house will ALWAYS keep you busy. There is no such thing as "I'm bored" it's only "I'm lazy to do this and this" 😄 <EVENMOREOFFTOPIC> I had a landlord once. She was a living creature from hell. Even though I had good relations with the neighbors and paid on time, after a couple of months I was already afraid she is going to poison my dog so I decided to cancel our contract and move out to nowhere. That was the last nail in the coffin - I do not trust people ever since and I do everything in my power not to depend on anyone. </EVENMOREOFFTOPIC> </OFFTOPIC>

My wife already looks suspicious when I tell her we take the car to the mechanic and it's going to be expensive. I don't even want to imagine convincing her why I need a fireproof safe, which costs triple the amount than our car. At home you'll quickly get bored of rotating backup mediums and locking them away. You'll want your backup equipment INSIDE the safe so it can do everything automated. As safes SHOULD act as a perfect Faraday-cage, unless they include a fireproof RJ45 socket wired from the outside in... I'm not saying anything more. I'll trademark this stuff 😄

It was outside of the IT area, a real-world thing. Unfortunately I can not remember (happened a long-long time ago) but for example: - I have a personal problem with John Doe, and he writes an application - Since I don't like him, I start to talk sh*t and discourage people from using his product - Everyone is still using it. Then, it turns out it has a bridge to some inconvenience I faced for years - I start to use it because of that minor thing and it turns out the application is pretty good - Now, try to explain to everyone you discouraged why exactly you are now a user too - ??? - Profit Fortunately, the only thing I achieved is my own humiliation, no legal stuff. It was still a remarkable experience.

Proper backup solutions require the backup area (including servers and libraries) to be physically separated to different buildings. Thus, production center burns - you still have backups and vice versa. I also run a machine with extremely low power consumption kilometers away from my house. It's only job is to replicate the data from my prod server, when network is up.

By any chance you are running it in a virtual machine?

Incredible! If it runs on WIndows 2019 Core, finally I can fire up that 15-year-old leporello printer to have some good use of it!

That is true; more that true actually. I remember back in the 2000s browsing Torry's Delphi Pages for components and I was not really able to choose from the incredible amount. Oh, and I remember how many were free! Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to judge anything I have no experience with. Been there, done that, burnt myself, never again. I just gave an unpleasant grin to the "marketing".

Ah yes, We used to compost floppy disks 😐 I already imagine the next-gen "uSD libraries" in data centers. At least the replacement drives would be cheap to order from Wish.

The amount of numbers HDDs failed on us more is because SSD is much-much younger than HDDs are; but I already experienced SSD issues too. I still have an SSD in my laptop and in my dev server (with OS drives of guests on it) and they are still error free. I love them too; we all love them. But their lifespan is shorter than a HDDs - especially if we don't let that HDD to stop 🙂 Edit: online backups are nice and should be safe enough. I just happen to be paranoid enough not to trust any big company.

Ahaaaa, makes sense. This is how IRC worked. To have a "private" chat, you have 2 options: 1, Look in the source of the OnReceive event of the server. Instead of sending the received message to everyone, if the message contains a special flag, send it to one recipient only. For example, if you start your message with "@IP" then it will look for all connected clients, and where the IP address matches - send the message only there 2, A more secure way is if you initiate a DCC-like (again, IRC did it this way) channel. If the message starts with @IP DCC, the server will send your IP address to @IP. Then, on your client, you open up a server socket and wait for a connection from @IP. Long story short, wither your message will travel around the network twice (thus, more vulnerable) or you have to establish a client-server connection directly between the TWO CLIENTS:

That's the one, thanks! I did not use it since Windows 7 though, since then I'm writing my own manifest files 🙂

I know, it was only my very personal opinion and yes, I can be wrong. I guess - unless a component is really badly written - I doubt that it can cause slowdowns (there can be specific high-end cases where the design can cause a bottleneck but that's an other story). Back to your question. Usually there's not much to set a TCP connection up. You need a server (listener) component and a client (which is connecting to the server) component. Set the port number to the same, set the server and the client to active and it should work. Sending data is a completely different topic. Are you using text-based or binary communication? For text, most components have a .SendText method which will accept a string parameter. For binary - I don't think we want to go there just yet. Now look for events of said components. There should be something like... onReceiveBuf, onReceiveText, onDataAvailable... something like this - you have to handle those. And within that event handler, you have to read the data out of the socket with... socket.Read socket.ReceiveText, socket.receivebuf or something. Unfortunately that's all I can say, as I never used this component. Did you look at the Demo folder? There seems to be a chat application - just the one what you are looking for.

Why it always turns me off when I read something advertising itself as the best, the fastest, the smallest or the ultimate...? 😐

There is a component for this... XP something. It's not on any of your forms, right? Also make sure you remove it's unit from the dependency list.

Well, I mean, this is an option. If you don't want to hassle with "problems", look into DevExpress. I'm sure one of their components can do what you want.

Yes and yes. Since I have a dev environment at home I just added 2 extra hard drives mirrored (with daily automatic health check and warning E-mails). I do my development on my PC then syncing it upstream on a Git repository stored on this mirror. I have a physical RAID controller with a battery backup (salvaged a HPE P400 with 2 failed battery packs. Turns out it is using 4 AAA rechargeable batteries inside, so the quick fix was a matter of a bit of soldering) and the server is on a high capacity UPS. All this hassle for home, you are free to call me paranoid and I'm not going to argue 🙂 P.s.: I'm not considering any flash-based (including SSDs) devices suitable for backup. Their write cycles are low and sometimes you recognize something failed when you are reading information back. And that's too late if it's used for backup. Minimum a mirrored HDD (which is always on, so not USB-attached which "I keep safe in the wardrobe and only use when necessary". It's good for power consumption, but it's bad for lifespan) but the best is still a tape drive - IN MY OPINION. I have personal privacy and safety concerns when it comes to "cloud" data storage.