November 2006

Here are the articles that were published in November 2006.

Vista vs. Julian. Round 1.

published: Thu, 30-Nov-2006

It did not start well. I downloaded the Windows Vista Ultimate RTM iso image overnight about two weeks ago, shortly after it was made available to MSDN subscribers. I have a DVD writer on a different machine, a hefty Dell desktop alongside my svelte Toshiba M200 tablet, and as I was transferring the iso image from the svelte to the hefty I suddenly heard this series of ki-chunk, ka-chunk, ki-chunk sounds, as some USB device on the Toshiba mounted and unmounted in quick succession. Read more...

The Delphi Magazine to close

published: Fri, 24-Nov-2006

This is a sad day. Chris Frizelle, the editor and owner of The Delphi Magazine, after trying extremely hard to maintain and publish a magazine devoted entirely to programming in Delphi (although I did manage once to get an article about Chrome in it!), has decided that the subscriber base and the interest just isn't enough to keep it going with the same high quality for which it's renowned. Read more...

Linked List Patent

published: Fri, 24-Nov-2006

OK, this is hilarious and points out the complete idiocy of the US Patent Office in judging any kind of algorithmic patent: someone has patented (and it was granted in April 2006, no less) a linked list that uses several pointers so that you can iterate the items in the list in one of many orders. And, to make the patent even more delicious, the inventor, Ming-Jen Wang, lives in Colorado Springs. Oh, please Ming-Jen, get in touch, so I can buy you a beer and shake the hand of such an amazing inventor! Read more...

Old Maps on Google Earth

published: Mon, 13-Nov-2006

In my review of The Prestige, I stated that the Aldwych in London is semicircular (just about), whereas the one we see in the movie is straight. Well, the mini-goof is actually a little more than that... Read more...

The Prestige (the movie)

published: Mon, 13-Nov-2006

As I promised myself a while back, I went to see the movie version of The Prestige by Christopher Priest today. The flight back from Barcelona yesterday (I was there with Developer Express for TechEd Europe) was very long — three legs and 22 hours of travel — so I took the day off today to relax and catch up. Read more...

Lulu, one month later

published: Thu, 2-Nov-2006

On Tuesday 3 October, I finally ticked the checkbox on Lulu that released the reprint of my book, The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures. In the week following that event, I wrote three articles (one, two, three) describing the publishing process and how it went for me. Now that it's been a month, I'd like to make a couple more points. Read more..