Pimp your WebSite with an Halloween Bat
Time for some Halloween silliness: here is a quick & dirty JavaScript to pimp your website, blog or whatever with a randomly moving vampire bat animation.
Or a dozen. Or a whole flock.
Efficient String Building in Delphi
As a followup to the String Concatenation article, let’s take a look at a less trivial case: what if instead of concatenating a couple strings, you want to concatenate a few hundred?
Sounds like a task at which TStringBuilder should excel, but one should never assume, and always measure.
Efficient String Concatenation in Delphi
You may all know about String concatenation in Delphi, but do you know about the implicit String variables the compiler may create for you?
Along with the implicit variables come implicit exception frames, and a whole lot of hidden stack juggling, which can quickly become hidden complexity bottlenecks.
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MapFileStats v1.3 update
My small MapFileStats utility has been updated to 1.3 (last public release was four years ago…).
The utility provides simple statistics about compiled size, to help you figure out what went into your executable.
This version add as few minor features and improves detection of project file, which could result in missing DFM size.
Time-stepping for Games and Simulations
The built-in time-stepping support for the upcoming release of Chrome Web Apps in Android
Chrome for Android 31 (currently in the beta channel) added the ability to add a web application to the home screen, which iOS fans will notice it had been available for years on their fruity phones.
Upgrading a SmartMS application to allow installing on the Android Home Screen is very straightforward.
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Moving hosts – part 2 – CloudFlare
I’ve now enabled CloudFlare as CDN, is it all it’s hyped up to be? Here is a small unscientific poll to give your feeling on how or if it affected the perceived speed of this website.
Crouching Smileys, Hidden Diacritics
As noted in a recent post, Unicode is not so straightforward. Namely claims of utf-16 being simpler than utf-8, or that you do not have to care about Unicode complexities.
Maybe that was the case ten years ago, but The Unicode jungle is much closer to home these days.
Here are a few dangers lurking in the not-so-dark shadows.
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Moving to new host(s)
This is just a quick notice to let you know that I’ve recently moved this site to a new host (currently pulseheberg), and may move it to other hosts. My previous hosting was running out, and I’m taking this as an opportunity to experiment with various VPS offerings (Linux or Windows), change registrar, tweak DNS, etc.
Hopefully nothing will go wrong and it’ll be transparent, but if not, please let me know.
UTF-8, UTF-16 or both? (poll)
The FreePascal version of DWScript has been stalled for a little while on the incomplete UnicodeString (utf-16) support among other things.
It’s hard to blame the FreePascal team for that, given that Linux is primarily utf-8, and that utf-8 has quite a few advantages over utf-16.