October 2008


Delphi… VMware… Windows… The agony!

David Carney, 27 October 2008

So I’m working with Delphi 2007 under a Windows XP VMware session running on an older Linux workstation and connecting to it from my Mac Mini via VNCViewer (or sometimes X11 forwarding).

Anyone else feeling pangs of suicidal depression? If not, let me further explain that I had been running it on my rather zippy laptop…until the VMware image grew to take up all remaining space on my disk. I tried running VMware using a network-mounted drive and, when that proved to be a ludicrously bad idea, an ntfs-3g mounted partition…which was only *slightly* better than atrocious.

Since then, I’ve been stuggling to find a way to get performance back to a reasonable level without formatting my laptop’s hard disk. It’s neither quick nor fun. If people have tips on how to improve VMware’s performance (aside from freeing up disk space, defragging things once in a while, and ensuring that the CPU is otherwise idle) then please let me know. I’m losing my mind.

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MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford Engineering Everywhere

David Carney, 20 October 2008

Most people I know aren’t aware that schools (such as MIT and Stanford) are getting in the habit of publishing a gargantuan number of lectures and course materials online, all freely available under the Creative Commons license:

It’s incredibly generous of institutions such as these to open up and freely share their knowledge and resources. I, for one, have already benefited from a number of “refresher” courses on topics such as algorithm analysis and whatnot.

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Do you use libtool? Then you want Dolt.

Peter McCurdy, 7 October 2008

I saw a brief mention of this in the Mono 2.0 release notes (PS: Mono 2.0 is out, it also looks nice), but it seems important enough to bear repeating.

Dolt is a high performance replacement/wrapper for libtool. And when they say high performance, they’re not kidding; the release announcement shows full project compile times being cut in half. I don’t know whether to be elated at the speedup, or depressed that it took so long to do something so simple-looking. Either way, if you’re using libtool in your project, you really want to get yourself some Dolt action.

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Apple Finally Relaxes iPhone NDA

Peter McCurdy, 1 October 2008

Apple has finally announced that released software is no longer covered under its developer NDA.  This is excellent news for the iPhone software ecosystem; now developers will actually be able to talk about the various tips and tricks they use to get the most out of the iPhone, and will help raise the bar for iPhone software.  Not to mention letting people publish iPhone development books.

Not letting people talk about their development environment never seemed very sensible to me, so it’s nice to see Apple turning around on this.

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