Older blog entries for Kay (starting at number 49)

I18N with Lazarus

It's pretty difficult to find information about how to write a multi-lingual application with Lazarus. I've been through this and I hope that this article helps others to get on the right way. I'm not 100% sure the way I found is the right way but at least it works great for me. So it can't be totally wrong.


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Syndicated 2008-12-31 16:36:23 (Updated 2009-01-11 10:07:52) from K's cluttered loft

Lazarus

Currently I'm again involved in developing GUI software for Windows. In the past I always did this with Delphi so I thought it would be nice to use it again. I searched for a free version of it which was quite hard. How the hell is it called today? Borland Delphi? Code Gears Delphi? Turbo Delphi? Which is the newest version? Delphi 2006? Delphi 10? Where are the Personal Editions? Is there still a Kylix out there for cross-platform development? Wasn't there an announcement that Borland will switch to Eclipse for Delphi development? Very confusing situation...


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Syndicated 2008-12-25 14:00:00 (Updated 2009-01-01 11:34:50) from K's cluttered loft

Nice GTK1 fonts in Ubuntu

I noticed that GTK1 applications have a rather large and ugly font on my system. I searched the internet for a solution and found references to files like .gtkrc-1.2-gnome and .gtkrc-mine and some font definitions I have to put in there. But none of these solutions worked out for me. I found another reference to the program xfontsel and with all these partial information I was able to find a nice working solution. I hope it will also work for others.


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Syndicated 2008-12-15 09:05:24 (Updated 2008-12-15 09:59:19) from K's cluttered loft

FreeReport is the free version of a commercial reporting software for Delphi. It is very powerful but it has a problem: It needs the VCLDB-Package which is not included in the Personal Edition of Delphi (At least Delphi 6 Personal, maybe Delphi 7 Personal is also affected).

Because I want to use FreeReport with Delphi 6 Personal, I have written a VCLDB-Dummy-Package. It implements a Dummy-API with all stuff which is needed by FreeReport. So if you install this dummy package you are able to compile FreeReport and can use all of it's components except the DB-aware stuff.

I'm currently not very active in software developing. Too much to do at work (Which is not worth mentioning here (Because it's Windows programming, yuck!)). But I found some time to do some geek stuff: I built a simple rubber band pistol as a replica of the IMI Desert Eagle with my old Lego bricks. Pictures and building instructions (Created with LeoCAD) can be found on my Loft.

Finally the iPAQ's touchscreen problem is fixed in the current CVS version of XFree86. Thanks to Jim Gettys and Keith Packard.

I have extracted the fix and created a patch for the current stable version 4.2 which can be downloaded from my patch repository.

Currently I'm learning how to use Allegro. It's a nice game programming library which also comes with some basic 3D functionality. Time to get back to work on my 3D engine.

Because of a question I got via email this morning I have created a small Open the Chassis of the Toshiba 3200 SXC howto.

Generating good statistics on Windows is a real pain. Expensive software like Webtrends is hard to maintain, hard to use and the generated statistics are graphical bull shit which are only useful to managers and marketing guys ("Wow! Those graphics looking great!!")

Webalizer, which is my first choice in the unix world, is also available for Windows but it does not support the W3C extended log file format (which is used by Microsoft's IIS) natively and tools like rconvlog are not working correctly. I wonder what has happened to the W3C patch which is mentioned on the webalizer web site. Since 2000 this patch (which I can't find) is not included into webalizer.

Well, because I was in need of a solution I patched webalizer myself to introduce W3C extended logfile support. The patch can be downloaded here.

I already tested the patch on a windows server. Seems to work. I'll produce a win32 binary package of webalizer tomorrow and publish it on my website.

Finally I managed it. I installed FreeS/WAN together with the X.509 Certificate patch on my personal router and on the company router and my VPN is now running with IPSec and no longer with vtun.

Originally I preferred vtun because it is much easier to install and to use than FreeS/WAN but after I have upgraded to 2.4 kernels I had a lot of trouble with these TUN/TAP devices. So I had the choice: Use IPSec or solve the TUN/TAP problem. I think it was a good choice to switch to IPSec, which is running great with the X.509 certificates.

Another reason why the choice was good: Some co-workers nagged me because they also want a VPN connection to the company. They are using windows and they are now able (Thanks to the X.509 certificates) to connect to the company by using an IPSec client like SSH Sentinel.

I've read that Windows 2000 comes also with an IPSec implementation. I'll give it a try but that doesn't sound like fun...

Today I played a little bit with mathematics. my goal was to calculate the coordinates of stars in a fictive galaxy with spiral arms. The result was a nice looking 2D galaxy with two spiral arms. But this result was mainly achieved by trial and error because I am not a mathematician. So I searched the net and found a nice DOS program from Ben Motz complete with source code. I borrowed the algorithm and converted it to a python script which generates a 2D view from the 3D galaxy and writes it to a PNG. This algorithm is nice because it can be configured in many ways (i.E. the number of spiral arms, arm width, number of stars in the disk and core, etc.)

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