Benz Blog

So I thought I’d start off by explaining why I am currently working with Delphi. Since May, 2006, I’ve been working for the world’s leading provider (I think) of software to the private equity industry. I’ve worked pretty much exclusively in Java for at least the past 10 years or so. The product I work on, a Java-based web application that allows investors to collaborate online to perform their due diligence on investment opportunities, has lost a few clients of late, all blaming the economy and the need to cut costs. My employer could, if they wanted to, save a lot of money and lay me off, but thankfully they’ve asked me to do a tour of duty on our flagship product: a windows based application written in Delphi.

Now notice I said “thankfully” – it should not go unnoticed that I’m very happy to just have a job in these tough times. Also, the team that develops this software are all top-notch individuals, any of which I would ask to join my own company if I had one, and all of which I am honored to work with. Lastly, the application itself is extremely powerful and is used by a very large percentage of the top investors in the private equity world.

It’s just that I haven’t worked with Delphi in 14 years, and it’s not something that I have any desire to learn. These days my heart is in Mac/iPhone development, but unfortunately I’m simply not driven enough to spend all my free time mastering Cocoa and Objective-C. My sole wish is to someday get paid to write Mac/iPhone software.

And then there’s Windows. After working almost exclusively in OS X for the past 4 years, I really just can’t stand working in it. I took one look at Vista about a year ago and was not impressed at all. In fact I thought it was horrible. I know Windows 7 has been getting some good press, and I’m happy about this – competition is good – but I’m so comfortable and productive in OS X that you’d have to hold a gun to my head to go back.

Either that or ask me to do a tour a duty on your employer’s flagship product.

So these next few entries are essentially going to be me venting about my frustrations with both Windows and Delphi. Disclaimer: I’m well aware that many of my Delphi complaints are not without workarounds or solutions, so if anyone ever reads this who is fluent in Delphi – keep in mind that I’m a new comer and I’m just expressing my frustrations, and that I don’t hate Delphi by any means – I just would much rather be digging into my fat Cocoa book than my fat Delphi book. Ok?

Well – here we are. I’ve decided to start blogging, and this time it’s for me. I just wanted a place to vent and to document how I’m feeling, what I’m working on, etc. Although the blog is open to the public, I’m not advertising it.

Initially, I’m going to write about my recent foray into the world of Delphi 2007, which began 2/9/2009. My first Delphi project was created on 2/10, and I’ve been working with it now for roughly 14 days, not counting weekends or my trip to NJ for training. Just yesterday, the Cantu book arrived (“Mastering Delphi 7″), and immediately paid for itself in the first 10 seconds when I opened to a random page and discovered CTRL+SHIFT+C to automatically create a function definition from a declaration. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to add the damn class name to those definitions!

Much more to come. Time to grab some breakfast and clean house.

After discovering another switch blog, I’ve decided to create a Post-Switch category in my own blog, and possibly start blogging again about my most recent switch experience. So much has happened since I last posted anything of any value on this blog, and I’m hoping to document some of it. We’ll see – I’m in the midst of a major job change and I might not have a much time as I’d like.

I just now realized that when I converted from MoveableType to WordPress (on a different hosting provider), the images were pointing to the old site, so when I canceled that service, they disappeared forever.

Edit: I managed to recreate a few of the images, so we’re back in business.

Yikes! Here I go with a new hosting provider and a new blogging tool. I’m now planning on blogging every single minute of every single day of my life: imagine, you’ll be able to find out what I had for breakfast, how long I spent in the can, what I dreamed about? BET YOU CAN’T WAIT???

But seriously, I probably won’t touch this thing for a while because, in the words of the great George Costanza: “I’ve got nothing to say”.

Entourage 2004 is “OK”. It gets the job done for the most part, but it’s simply not up to par with Outlook 2003. Here’s my short list of complaints:

1. If you sync with an Exchange server, you cannot get the Progress popup window to stop popping up unless you HIDE the application. Command+W or clicking the red X doesn’t work. This is ludicrous.

2. Notes and tasks to not sync to an Exchnage server.

3. You cannot force a sync to an Exchange server. You have to wait for it to happen.

4. Can’t mark calendar entries as private.

5. Can’t block read receipts from being sent. I had someone complain that I was deleting their messages without reading them, when in fact I WAS reading every one in the preview pane and then simply deleted the message without marking it as read.

6. I have the USB Overdrive mouse driver and 3rd party mouse with scroll wheel. I have the wheel set to double click. This doesn’t always work in Entourage, but it works EVERYWHERE else.

7. Can’t customize inbox columns. Outlook 2003 handles this much better, switching between a multi-line view and single-line multi-column view as you resize the list.

8. Entourage always seems to add my signature to everything: including replies. On a long e-mail thread, my signature appears many times.

9. If you uncheck the “Display the Reminder” option in Outlook 2003 (which is buried under Tools/Options/Other/Advanced Options/Reminder Options – DUH), and you Snooze when the reminder comes due in Entourage, at some point, Outlook 2003 CLEARs the reminder, which propgates back to the server, and thus to Entourage, causing Snooze not to work. Since when does DISPLAY THE REMINDER mean CANCEL THE REMINDER.

10. As I’ve already pointed out in this post, there is some very sloppy UI work in Entourage. Here’s the screen shot again:

JUNK! It went back to the store within hours of purchasing it. I can’t stand the micro-second delay after the mouse turns off. I’m being picky – yes, but I find it very annoying.

Clicking the mouse wheel requires too much effort.

Clicking the left mouse button requires too little effort. My father-in-law has trouble with accidental clicks on his single button Mac mouse. He has big hands, so I thought this mouse might be a good fit for him, but when I accidentally clicked on something myself, I immediately knew it wasn’t going to work.

Using MICROSOFT’S remote desktop to access a Dell box running MICROSOFT Windows using the MICROSOFT mouse with MICROSOFT’S IntelliPoint software is next to impossible. I found myself scrolling documents just by moving the mouse with my fingers nowhere near any of the buttons.

Last but not least, I did not like the jittery movements of the mouse pointer in general. It did not appear to move smoothly across the screen, regardless of the settings used.

I’ve been preparing to make one last huge entry (or a series of short entries) to sum up my Switch experience, which has been overwhelmingly positive, but until I can find the time, I have to share with you an addiction – package tracking. <LOL> Isn’t this lovely? Can anyone guess what this is?

Edit: well, of course, the image is no longer available. It was a UPS shipment log for my Powerbook.

Many thanks to Alf who in this blog entry pointed out (among other things) that you can configure Firefox to allow tabbing into all form fields. Simply enter about:config in the address bar, and change the tabfocus settings to either 3 or higher. According to this page, the default is supposed to be 7, but mine was set to 1 for some reason.

I thought I had a good backup solution in place with BounceBack Express, which came with my Seagate external hard drive, so I upgraded to the Pro version for about $40. Within the first few days, my scheduled daily backups started crashing, and eventually I lost my file selections and exclusion list. I contacted tech support, and 4 days later they responded and asked me to make sure I shut down all other apps before backing up, including any apps that seem like “benign background apps”. Here was my response:

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Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, it took 4 days and it was not the response I was looking for. Allow me to explain…

I’m a recent convert to the Mac, and I was hoping to find a backup solution that would allow me to schedule nightly backups and have them run reliably regardless of what apps are running. If I could use the built-in Backup program in Windows XP to do this, surely I could find something on the Mac to do the same. If I have to go through the trouble of shutting down my apps before doing a backup, even background apps, then I might as well run the backup manually.

I have since re-installed the software twice, and I suppose I’ll give the scheduled backup one more try before starting to look for another solution. There are two things I still don’t understand, though:

1. Why the crashing didn’t start until the first scheduled backup after installing Pro. (Note that at that time I did not uninstall the previous version, which is the version I received with my Seagate external hard drive).

2. Why I can keep all my apps open and run a backup manually with no problem.
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I decided to try out Retrospect, which did not make me feel too comfortable after seeing this dialog (hint: where’s the Cancel button?)

Edit: sorry – image no longer available

After figuring out the rather non-intuitive user interface (e.g., you don’t “delete” things, you “forget” them), I performed a manual backup of my home directory with no problem.

I’m sure Retrospect will work just fine, but I got to thinking that the Mac should really come with something out of the box that can do backups. Well – it does – sort of. There’s rsync, which looks great but doesn’t handle resource forks, which if I understand correctly will still be around for a while even though Apple is moving away from them. ditto seems to handle resource forks, but I don’t think it can backup just changed files or delete files from the backup that are no longer on the hard drive.

It was then I discovered psync, a command-line/Perl-based utility, and a nice GUI tool that sits on top of it: psyncx. My first full backup of my home directory was MUCH faster than Retrospect, and I was able to easily schedule a backup to run with no problem. I think the developers of BounceBack need to look at the “man” page of psync – after listing the backup times for several backup trials, they’ll find this:

Note screensaver was on with some other background programs. I used this program happily with my PowerBook G4 (Ti) while I am surfing the web and listening to iTunes at the same time letting SETI@Home search for cosmic programmers With MacOS X, background backup is no problem

Needless to say, I think I’ll stick with psync and make a donation for psyncx if it all works out.