A few notes from the last week.

• A couple of weeks ago I ordered a second hand copy of Delphi COM Programming through one of the Amazon affiliates and it arrived yesterday, it cost $7.50 to buy and $12.50 to ship to New Zealand. It was written for Delphi 3-5, but I'm hoping it will still contain much relevant stuff. I'm wanting to improve my DataSnap knowledge which uses COM extensively. I haven't been able to find much good documentation on COM/DataSnap, just a few articles here and there. Hopefully I'll be making some movies on DataSnap with my new found knowledge - possibly to improve our Customer application. But first I think it needs to be ported from XML based files to a real database - Blackfish perhaps?
• Last night while walking the dog (at about 11pm) I had the privilege of calling the fire brigade again - a small fire in the same place as last time.
• My copy of the Delphi 2007 Handbook has been shipped from Lulu, hopefully it'll turn up next week or two and I'll be able to review it. Have you ordered your copy yet?
  

Emergency Services

I have found my self dialing 111 a lot lately (111 is the emergency number in New Zealand, although I think 911 works also). Last night I was walking my partners dog (Shiva - that's the name of the dog not my partner) and I spotted a small fire, unfortunately I didn't have my phone with me so I went home and dialed. Fortunately I returned to the scene with a bucket which the firemen used to put out the fire (the fire wasn't very accessible to the firetruck and I don't think they wanted to unravel their nicely coiled hoses).

A few nights earlier Jackie (my partner) and I were walking and spotted a tagger (graffitist?) and called the police, we got to watch (from a distance) as they hauled him away to the clink - actually I think they just took him home - he was pretty young. Over the last few years we've called the police a few other times and the fire department at least twice. I guess it comes from living in a less desirable neighbourhood and walking the dog after 10pm every night.

What has this got to do with Delphi, nothing.

Getting Amazon Ads working how I want them

I've been learning some JavaScript and PHP so that I can make the Amazon book ads display how I want them on CodeGearGuru. Basically I want only books that I choose to be displayed (books that I've read and think are good or would like to read). Once I've worked out a nice elegant solution for this I'll make a movie on it, but it's still quite messy. Currently I'm using the ads in three places:

1. A link in the top left corner, when you move the mouse over it, additional information is displayed.
2. An enhanced ad in the bottom left corner.
3. A cluster of enhanced ads at the bottom of movies (only #20 currently has it).

Of course there is also the Google ads displayed on the right. I've updated the colours on this so that blends in better with the site.
My next step is to include more books in my accepted list, and work out how to wrap up the current PHP code into a Joomla module or component.

Need a tag line

I need some sort of slogan for the web site. Something like "Be the guru" or "Making you the guru" or some like that, suggestions welcome.

The Delphi Community Rocks!

I'm very impressed with the support and comments of appreciation I'm getting from the Delphi Community. It certainly inspires me to make the effort to create more movies. If you also know how to get my site infront of more people who will find it helpful - let me know.

Learn Geography with Google Analytics

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it's a way of analyzing your website visitors - a free offering from Google. All it requires is some Java-Script on each page to track a user journey though your site. One of its features is to display on a map where your traffic is originating, right down to the city. Currently I don't have many people visiting my site, but it's absolutely fascinating to see where they're from.

YouTube 10 Minute Rant

You'll be pleased to know that my rant is not 10 minutes long, it's the 10 minute length limit on YouTube. They introduced this 10 minute time limit some time ago to cut down on people uploading TV shows and stuff. Reducing piracy is all well and good, but why does it almost always have some sort of significant negative impact on legitimate activity. My last Delphi training movie (viewable here) was 22 minutes and hence rejected. I have been playing around with Revver and MySpace which don't have any such limits, but the number of people watching my videos is small compared to the volume on YouTube.