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Advanced Transfers with Android

Jim McKeeth — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:39:45 +0000

Thanks to everyone who attended this session at AnDevCon II in San Francisco and Dessert Code Camp in Phoenix. Here are the updated slides (a PDF) and code samples from this session. Please leave a comment if you have any questions and I’d be happy to clarify things, or point you in the right direction.

You can also get the HTTP Telnet script I used in that session.

Careful with your Keyboard

Jim McKeeth — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:07:11 +0000

One day I was leaving the office and there was one other developer left. He was a much older guy (like in his 70’s – great C++ developer) and he was cleaning his keyboard, having many of the keys already removed. Unfortunately he had a chat window focused with one of our remote developers at the time, so there was all these random keystrokes sent as chat messages over the last few minutes. He hadn’t noticed that the other developer was frantically asking if he was OK, or if he should call the paramedics. Since the keyboard was missing keys he couldn’t respond, so I went back to my desk and explained things to this remote developer. It was quite funny after the fact.

That is why I always make sure I have notepad focused when I clean my keyboard.

SQL Resources

Jim McKeeth — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:59:55 +0000

My session on Intermediate SQL as part of DataRage is scheduled for today - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 – 3:30pm – 4:15pm PDT. It is categorized as Interbase, but is really just a general SQL session. The rest of my sessions are categorized as Delphi, but are also general.

I’ve put up a SQL resources page with more resources coming soon. I’ll have enhanced “interactive” versions of my session up there eventually as well.

Delayed Exception Handling

Jim McKeeth — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:56:20 +0000

My Delayed Exception Handling session is up next for CodeRage III. You can get the code now and follow along. Download the video.

McAfee ScanAlert FAIL

Jim McKeeth — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:01:49 +0000

I was on Carbonite.com and clicked their McAfee Secure Badge to see what McAfee was reporting on them and got the following FAIL. Inspires confidence in McAfee’s ability to secure anything, especially online.

My First PodCast

Jim McKeeth — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:06:06 +0000

I posted my first PodCast for The PodCast at Delphi.org this morning. So far the feedback has been really positive. I am really excited about doing a podcast on Delphi, I just hope I get faster at making the episodes as I go. This episode is 18 and a half minutes long, and it took me over 10 hours to produce.

Be sure to Digg my podcast.

Genius Musicals

Jim McKeeth — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:41:43 +0000

Well more of an evil Genius, but a musical none the less. Check out Dr. Horrible from the mind of Joss Wheaton. It is free online for a limited time, be sure to check it out.

¡ʇǝʎ ǝpoɔıun ɹoɟ ǝsn ʇsǝq ǝɥʇ

Jim McKeeth — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:53:01 +0000

With all the talk about the next version of Delphi fully supporting Unicode, I was pretty excited to find:

¡ʇǝʎ ǝpoɔıun ɹoɟ ǝsn ʇsǝq ǝɥʇ

Well, maybe the best use for those of us who typically only need to use standard ASCII characters. . . .

Free Camtasia and Snagit

Jim McKeeth — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:33:28 +0000

When it comes to screen capturing, Techsmith’s products Camtasia and SnagIt are probably the best, but there are good free alternatives. It would appear if you know where to go (links at the bottom), you can get a legitimate free license for Camtasia and SnagIt (earlier versions at least, that are eligible for a discounted upgrade.)

Camtasia is a screen video capture tool. It produces a video (animated GIF, SWF, AVI, etc.) from a series of screen shots over a period of time, usually with audio. It has a lot of nice extras and a good editing system. DebugMode’s Wink is a great tool for free. While Camtasia is more like a video editor, Wink is more like a slide show editor. It will take a screen shot at a keypress, mouse click or automatically at specified intervals. Then the editor is based on individual screen frames instead of a sequence of video. While it some regards it competes with Camtasia, it serves a different purpose as well. Worth checking out, especially at the price.

SnagIt is a single frame screen capture tool. Typically I just use [Print-Screen] or [Alt] + [Print-Screen] to capture the whole screen, or just the current window respectively. Then I paste it into IrfanView (a great quick image viewer, editor and converter) to make any changes necessary. Honestly though, SnagIt offers a number of additional features that are worthwhile. However I have found that MWSnap has most of the features I need available free. I haven’t done a side by side comparison of the tool, but I imagine MWSnap would hold up quite nicely.

With free versions of SnagIt and Camtasia though, that provides some stiff competition to the other free versions. Granted these are previous versions, which is risky on Techsmith’s part, since the biggest competitor to most products is its previous version – why pay the upgrade fee when the old version still works? If you want an older version of many freeware / shareware titles, check out OldVersion.com.

Camtasia Studio 5 (the version I have) is $300 and has a lot of nice feature upgrades from version 3. You can still download version 3 and then get your free license straight from Techsmith. It appears it was a promotion offered to PC Plus Magazine readers in the UK, but the form lets you specify any country and I don’t see anywhere it says “only” a limited group. Not sure how long the promotion is good for either. [Source]

Check out Digital Inspiration Technology guide for the details on downloading and getting a free license for SnagIt 7.2.5 (current version is 8). It appears to be a free promotion for UK .NET Magazine.

CodeRage

Jim McKeeth — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:41:17 +0000

My source code, some resources, additional information and links from my CodeRage presentation on Advanced Downloads will be available here shortly. Check back.