Augmented reality, I don’t think so

The world used to be a big place, but having worked around europe for a few years – and lately in the US, it appears to me much smaller. But the fact of the matter is, that different nationalities have different tastes and interests.

The world is not as big as it used to be

In the US right now there is a strong interest in virtual-reality. The interest was so strong that Sony jumped on the VR bandwagon early, offering a full VR kit for the Playstation 4. This has been available for two years already (or is it three?). Here in Scandinavia though, VR is not that hot. People buy it, but not in the same volume we see in the US. It is expected to pick up this fall when the dark period begins; Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are largely without sunlight most of the year – and during that time people use indoor hobbies more. But right now, VR is not really a thing up here.

In parallel with VR, Microsoft picked up the gauntlet that Google threw away earlier, namely that of augmented reality.  You probably remember the Google Glasses craze that hit California a decade ago right? Well Microsoft have continued to research and develop the technology which is now available for pre-order.

The problem? Microsoft Holo-lens II is a $3500 gadget that is presently aimed at business only. With emphasis on industrial design and medical applications. I don’t know about you, but forking up $3500 for what is ultimately just a curiosity is way out of my budget. There are much more important things to spend $3500 on to be frank.

Asia, the mother of implementation

While America and Europe are hotbeds of invention, it is ultimately Asia that implements, refine and eventually perfect technology. Some might disagree with that, there are always exceptions to the rule (3d printers and VR systems are very much American made), but what im talking about are “traits and inclinations” in the market. Patterns of commerce if you like.

What usually happens when something new is made, is that it costs a fortune. To push prices down companies move production to Asia, and there materials etc. are swapped out for cheaper alternatives. Some re-designing takes place — and before you know it, a product that cost $3500 when made in the US or the EU, can be picked up for $799 on Amazon. After some time, production volume has reached it’s zenith and the device that once cost an arm or a leg, can now be bought $299 or $199.

But, there are exceptions! When there is a technology that is wildly popular, like augmented reality and VR, Asia is quick to produce their own take on the technology early – trying to get a piece of the proverbial pie. This is often a good thing, especially for consumers. It can also be a good thing for the US and EU based companies – because mistakes and design-flaws they haven’t noticed yet are taken care of by proxy.

With that in mind, I ventured into the Asian markets to see what I could find.

Banggood and Alibaba

Having searched through an avalanche of cheap VR glasses for mobile phones, I finally found something that could be worth looking into. The advert was extremely thin, citing only augmented reality in english – with everything else in chinese (I presume, I must admit I would not spot the difference between chinese, japanese and korean if my life depended on it. Tibetan I can spot due to my Buddhist training, but that’s about it).

When I ran the string of characters through google, it returned this:

“VISION-800 3D Glasses Video Android 4.4
MTK6582 1G/2G 5MP AC WIFI BT4.0 2060P MIC”

Looking at the glasses they have pretty much everything you expected from an Augmented reality setup. There is a camera up front, lenses, audio jacks on both sides, a few buttons and switches – and the magic words “powered by Android  Wearable”. The price was $249 so it wouldn’t break the bank either.

The Vision 800 in all their glory

I should also mention that websites like Banggood and Alibaba have pretty good return policies too. These websites are actually front-ends for hundreds (if not thousands) of smaller, local outlets. The outlets gets a place to sell their goods to the west, and Alibaba and Banggood takes a small cut of each sale.

To manage this and make it viable, they have a rating system in place. So if one of the outlets scams you – you can vote them down. 3 complaints is enough to get the outlet kicked from either site, which I presume is a dire financial loss (considering the volume these websites push on a daily basis). So there is some degree of consumer safety compared to direct order. I would never order anything directly from a tech cornershop in mainland china, because should they rip you off – there is nothing you can do about it.

Augmented? I don’t think so

When the glasses finally arrived i was surprised at how light they were. You might expect them to be top-heavy and tip forward on the ridge of your nose – but since the weight is actually the lenses, not the circuitry, they balance quite well.

But augmented reality? Im sorry, but these glasses are not even in the ballpark.

The device is running a fork of Android – but not the fork adapted for wearables! The glasses also comes with a stock mouse (cordless), and you are in fact greeted by a plain desktop. The cordless mouse does work really well though, but I thankfully had the sense to order a $5 air-mouse (read: remote control for android devices) or I would go insane trying to exit applications properly.

What you can do is download some augmented reality apps from Google Play. These will tap into the camera on the glasses, and you can play a few games. But that’s really it. I noticed that the outlet had changed the title and text for these glasses a few days before they arrived here, so the whole deal is a little bit fishy. Looking at the instruction leaflet, these glasses have been sold as “movie glasses”. I would even go so far as to say they have nothing to do with augmented reality.

Media glasses

Augmented reality aside, there are interesting uses for glasses like this. If the field of view is good enough, they could make for a novel screen “on the road”. I mean, if you plug in a hybrid USB dongle that gives you both keyboard and mouse, there is nothing in the way of using the glasses as a monitor / travel PC. You have the same apps that you enjoy on your phone; a modern browser that gives you access to cloud services etc.

The glasses also have an SD card slot which is super handy – and 2Gb onboard storage. So if you are taking a flight from Europe to Australia and want to tune out noise and watch movies – these glasses might just be the ticket.

The audio works well

I must admit it was fun to install NetFlix on these and kick back. But this is  also when i started to have some issues.

The first issue is that there is no focal lense involved. You are literally looking at two tiny screens. And if you use regular glasses like I do, watching without my ordinary glasses is a complete blur. I had to use contact-lenses (which I hate) to get any use out of these. But if your eyesight is fine, you will no doubt have a better experience.

For me being 100% dependent on my regular glasses, it actually makes more sense to buy a cheap, second-hand Samsung Galaxy Edge, which were designed to be used as a proper VR display, and then permanently fixing it to a set of cheap Samsung VR casing. Even the most rudimentary VR casing offers focal lenses, so you can adjust the focus to compensate for poor eyesight.

The second issue has to do with display resolution. If you have 20/20 eyesight then high resolutions is wonderful. But in my case I would actually see better if the resolution was slightly lower. Sadly the devices seem fixed to what I can only presume is 1600×1024 (or something like that), and there are no options for changing resolution, offset display or skew the picture. Again, these are factors that only become important if you have poor eyesight.

Audio

The way they solved audio is actually quite good. On each arm of the glasses you have an audio-jack out. And the kit comes with two small earplugs. And again – if you are on a long flight and just want to snuggle up in your own world – this works really well.

If you have ear-pods like I do, you can use them via the standard BT interface. But I noticed that there was a slight lag when using these; no doubt the CPU had problems handling audio when playing a full HD movie. The lag was not there when i used the normal jack – so the culprit is probably the BT device cache.

Gaming?

I’m not a huge gamer myself, I mostly play games like Destiny in the Playstation. On the odd occasion that I jump into other games, it’s mostly retro stuff. And I have a house pretty much packed with Amiga, Silicon Graphics, and more arcade hardware than god ever intended a person to own.

Having said that, the device is capable of both native Android games – and emulation. I had no problem installing UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator), and it’s more than powerful enough to emulate an A1200 with AGA (advanced graphics architecture).

I didn’t test the casting option – because the device can display-cast to your living room TV. But somehow it seems backwards using these as a casting source – when you already have a supercomputer in your pocket. Any modern phone, be it a Samsung or Apple device, will outperform whatever is powering these glasses – so if gaming is your thing, look elsewhere.

Final words

These glasses have potential. Or perhaps better phrased – the technology holds a lot of promise. If they had opted for focal-lenses and a wider field of vision, they would have been a fantastic experience. I have no problem imagining this type of tech replacing monitors in the near future – at least for movie experiences.

I must admit it’s really tricky to hammer down a verdict. On one hand they are really fun, you can install NetFlix, browse the web and watch movies if you copy them over to an sd-card (the glasses come with a 16Gb sd-card). You have mouse control, BT and i have no problem seeing myself on a flight to hong-kong enjoying a movie marathon wearing these.

But are they worth $250 ? I would have to say no. A fair price would be something in the $70 region. If they corrected the lenses I would have no problem buying a pair at $99. And if they expanded the field of vision to cover the width of the glasses – I would absolutely pick them up at $150. But $250 for this? Sadly I can’t say they are worth the money.

I was also surprised to find pornhub as a pre-defined shortcut in the browser (I mean, who does that?). It made me laugh first, thinking it was a cheeky joke – but as a parent who could have bought these for a child, it is utterly unacceptable. It’s not the first time I have found smut on a device from Asia. But yeah, a bit creepy.

So, I would have to give them a 3 out of 6 verdict. If you have money to burn and a long flight ahead, then by all means – they will give you a comfy way of watching movies during the flight. But the technology is (for the lack of a better word) premature.

As for augmented reality – forget it. You are better off stuffing your phone inside a $100 Samsung VR casing. The official Samsung Galaxy Edge casing probably cost next to nothing by now. And for $250 you should have no problem sourcing a used Galaxy Edge phone too. Which will be 100 times better than this.

I started this post citing the inherent differences between nationalities in what they enjoy, but I must admit that through these, I can see why VR holds such potential. I can’t see myself strapping on a full suit, helmet and gloves just to play a game or do some work. But glasses like these (but not these) is absolutely in the vicinity of “practical”. Just a damn shame they didn’t do a full width LCD with focal lenses; then I would have promoted them.

Right now: a fun curiocity, good for watching the odd movie if you eyesight is perfect – but for the rest of us, it’s just not worth the dough

 

Leaving Patreon: Developers be warned

As a person I’m quite optimistic. I like to think the glass is half-full rather than half-empty. I have spent over a decade building up a thriving Delphi and C++ builder community on social media, I have built up a rich creative community for node and JavaScript on the side — not to mention retro computing, embedded tech and IOT. For better or for worse I think most developers in the Embarcadero camp have heard my name or engage in one of the 12 groups I manage around the world on a daily basis. It’s been hard work but man, it’s been worth every minute. We have so much fun and I get to meet awesome coders on a daily basis. It’s become an intrinsic part of my life.

I have worked very hard for my MVP title

I have been extremely fortunate in that despite my disadvantage, a spine injury in 2012 – not to mention being situated in Norway rather than the united states; despite these obstacles to overcome I work for a great American company, and I get to socialize and have friends all over the planet.

The global village is the concept, or philosophy, that technology makes it possible no-matter where you live, to connect and be a part of something bigger. You don’t have to be a startup in the san-francisco area to work with the latest tech. Sure a commute from Burlingame to Redwood beats a 14 hour flight from Norway any day of the week — but that’s the whole idea: we have Skype now, and Slack and Github; you don’t have to physically be on location to be a part of a great company. The only requirement is that you make yourself relevant to your field of expertise.

Patreon, a digital talent agency

Patreon is a service that grew straight out of the global village. If the world is just one place, one great big family of human beings with great ideas, then where is the digital stage that helps nurturing these individuals? I mean, you can have a genius kid living in poverty in Timbuktu that could crack a mathematical problem on the other side of the globe. The next musical prodigy could be living in a loft in Germany, but his or her voice will never be heard unless it’s recognized and given positive feedback.

“The irony is that Patreon doesn’t even pass their own safety tests. That should make you think twice about their operation”

My examples are extremes I agree, most people on Patreon are like me, creative but absolutely not cracking math problems for Nasa; nor am I singing a duet with Bono any time soon. But that’s the fun thing about the world – namely that all things have value when put in the correct context. Life is about combinations, and you just have to find one that works for you.

The global village, the idea of unity through diversity

The global village is this wonderful idea that we can use technology to transcend the limitations the world oppose on us, be they nationality, color, gender or location. Good solutions know no bounds and manifests wherever a mind welcomes it. Perhaps a somewhat romantic idea, if not naive, but it seems the only reasonable solution given the rapid changes we face as a species.

In my case, I love to make software components in my spare time. My day job is packed and I couldn’t squeeze in more work during the weekdays if I wanted to, so I only have a couple of hours after-work and the weekends to “do my thing”. So being a total geek I relax by making components. Some play chess, the guitar or whatever — I relax by coding something useful.

Obviously “code components” are completely useless to anyone who is not a software developer. The relevance is further clipped by the programming-language they are written for, and ultimately the functionality they provide. Patreon for me was a way to finance the evolution of these components. A way of self motivating myself to keep them up to date and available.

I also put a larger project on Patreon, namely the cloud desktop system people know as “Amibian.js” or “Quartex Web OS”. Amibian being the nickname, or codename.

Patreon seemed like the perfect match. I could take these seemingly unrelated topics, Delphi and C++ builder specific components and a cloud architecture, and assign each component and project to separate “tiers” that the audience could pick from. This was great! People could now subscribe to the tier’s they wanted, and would be notified whenever there was an update or new features. And I could respond to service messages in one place.

The Tier System

The thing about software is that it’s not maintained on infinite repeat. You don’t fix a component that is working. And you don’t issue updates unless you have fixed bugs or added new functionality. A software subscription secures a customer access to all and any updates, with a guarantee of X number of updates a year. And equally important, that they can get help if they are stuck.

“when you are shut down without so much as an explanation, with nothing but positive feedback, zero refunds and over 1682 people actively following the progress — that is utterly unacceptable behavior”

I set a relatively low number of guaranteed updates per year for the components (4). The things that would see the most updates were the Rage Libraries (PixelRage and ByteRage) and Amibian.js, but not until Q3 when all the modules would come together as a greater whole — something my backers are aware of and have never had a problem with.

Amibian.js running on ODroid XU4, a $45 single board computer

The tiers I ended up with was:

• $5 – “high-five”, im not a coder but I support the cause
• $10 – Tweening animation library
• $25 – License management and serial minting components
• $35 – Rage libraries: 2 libraries for fast graphics and memory management
• $45 – LDef assembler, virtual machine and debugger
• $50 – Amibian.js (pre compiled) and Ragnarok client / server library
• $100 – Amibian.js binaries, source and setup
• $100+ All the above and pre-made disk images for ODroid XU4 and x86 on completion of the Amibian.js project (12 month timeline).

Note: Each tier covers everything before them. So if you pick the $35 tier, that also includes access to the license management system and the animation library.

As you can see, the tier-system that is intrinsic to Patreon, solves the software subscription model elegantly. After all, it would be unreasonable to demand $100 a month for a small component like the Tweening library. A programmer that just needs that library and nothing else shouldnt have to pay for anything else.

Here is a visual representation, showing graphically why my tiers are organized as they are, and how they all fit into a greater whole:

The server-side aspect of the architecture would take days to document, but a general overview of the micro-service architecture is fairly easy to understand:

Each of the tiers were picked because they represent key aspects of what we need to create a visually pleasing, fast and reliable, distributed (each part running on separate machines or boards) cloud eco-system. Supporters can just get the parts they need, or support the bigger project. Everyone get’s what they want – all is well.

The thing some people don’t grasp, is that you are not getting something to just put on Amazon or Azure, you are getting your own Amazon or Azure – with source code! You are not getting services, you are getting the actual code that allows YOU to set up your own services. Anyone with a server can become a service provider and offer both hosting and software access. And they can expand on this without having to ask permission or pay through the nose.

So it’s a little bit bigger than first meets the eye.

I Move In Mysterious Ways ..

Roughly 3 weeks ago I was busy preparing the monthly updates.

Since each tier is separate but also covers everything before it (like explained above) I have to prepare a set of inclusive updates. The good news is that I only have to do this once and then add it as an attachment to my posts. Once added I can check of all the backers in that tier. I don’t have to manually email each backer, physically copy my songs or creations onto CD and send it – we live in the digital age as members of the global village. Or so i thought.

The LDEF assembler was made available on the 8th of february

So I published two of the minor cases first: the full HTML5 assembly program, that can be run both inside Amibian.js as a hosted application — or as a solo program directly in the browser. So here people can write machine-code in the browser, assemble it to bytecodes, run the code, inspect registers, disassemble the bytecodes and all the normal stuff you expect from an assembler.

This update was special because the program contained the IPC (inter process communication) layer that developers use to make their programs talk to the desktop. So for developers looking to make their own web programs access the filesystem, open dialogs (normal system features), that code was quite important to get!

Although published, none of my backers could see them due to the suspended status

The second post was a free addition, the QTX library which is an open-source RTL (run time library) compatible with the Smart Pascal Compiler. While not critical at this juncture, several of my backers use Smart Mobile Studio, and for them to get access to a whole new RTL that can be used for open-source, is very valuable indeed.

I was just about to compress the Amibian.js source-code and binaries when I got a message on Facebook by a backer:

“Dude, your Patreon is shut down, what is happening?”

What? hang on let me check i replied, and rushed into Patreon where the following header greeted me:

What the hell Patreon? I figured there must be some misunderstanding and that perhaps I missed an email or something that needed attention. I get close to 50 emails a day (literally) so it does happen that I miss one. I also check my spam folder regularly in case my google filters have been careless and flagged a serious email as spam. But there was nothing. Not a word.

Ok, so let’s check the page feedback, has there been any complaints? Perhaps a backer has misunderstood something and I need to clear that up? But nope. I had nothing but positive feedback and not even a single refund request.  In fact the Amibian.js group on Facebook has grown to 1,662 members. Which shows that the project itself holds considerable interest outside software development circles.

Well, let’s get on this quickly I thought, so I rushed off an email asking why Patreon would do such a thing? My entire Patreon page was visibly marked with the above banner, so my backers never even saw the updates I had issued.

Instead, the impression people would get, was that I was involved in something so devious that it demanded my account to be suspended. Talk about shooting first and asking later. I have never in my life seen such behavior from a company anywhere, especially not in the united states; Americans don’t take kindly to companies behaving like bullies.

Just Contact Support, If You Can Find Them

To make a long story short it took over a week before Patreon replied to my emails. I sent a total of 3 emails asking what on earth would have prompted them to shut down a successful campaign. And how they found it necessary to slander the project without even informing me of the problem. Surely a phone call could have sorted this up in minutes? Where I come from you pick up the phone or get in contact with people before you flag them in public.

Sounds great, sadly it’s pure fiction

The response I got was that “some mysterious activity had been reported on my page”, and that they wanted my name, address, phone number and credit card (4 last digits). Which I found funny because with the exception of credit-card details, I always put my name, address, phone numbers and email etc. at the head of my letters.

I’m not a 16-year-old kid working out of a garage, im a 46-year-old established software developer that have worked as a professional for close to 3 decades. Unlike the present generation I moved into my first apartment when I was 16, and was working as an author for various tech magazines by the time I was 17. I also finished college at the same time and went on to higher-education (2 years electrical engineering, 3 years arts and media, six years at the university in oslo, followed by 4 years of computer science and then certifications). The focus being, that Patreon is used to dealing with young creators that will go along with things that grown men would not accept.

But what really piss me off, was that they never even bothered to explain what this “mysterious behavior” actually was? I write about code, clustering, Delphi, JavaScript and bytecodes for christ sake. I might have published updates and code wearing a hoodie at one point, in a darken room, listening to Enigma.. but honestly: there is not enough mystery in my life to cover an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Either way, I provided the information they wanted and expected the problem to be resolved asap. Two days at themost. Maybe three, but that was pushing it.

It’s now close to 3 weeks since this ridiculous temporary suspension occurred, and neither have I been given any explanation to what I have done, nor have they removed the ban on the content. I must have read their guidelines 100 times by now, but given the nature of their ruling (which are more than reasonable), I can’t see that I have violated a single one:

• No pornography and adult content
• No hate speech against minorities or forms of religious extremism
• No piracy or spreading copyrighted material
• No stealing from backers

Let’s go over them one by one shall we?

Pornography and adult content

Seriously? I don’t have time to loaf around glaring at naked women (i’m a geek, I look weird enough as it is), and after 46 years on this planet I know what a woman looks like nude from every possible angle; I don’t need to run around like a retard posting pictures of body parts. And if you are talking about me — good lord is there a marked for hobbits? Surely the world has enough on it’s plate. Sorry, never been huge on porn.

And for the record, porn is for teenagers and singles. The moment you love someone deeply, the moment you have children together — it changes you profoundly. You get a bond to your wife or girlfriend that makes you not want to be with others. Not all men are into smut, some of us are invested more deeply in a relationship.

Hate speech and religious extremism

Hm, that’s a tough one (sigh). Did you know that one of my best friends is so gay – that he began to speculated that he actually was a liquid? He makes me laugh so bad and he’s probably the best human being I have ever met. I actually went with him on Pride last year, not because i’m gay but because he needed someone to hold the other side of the banner. That’s what friends do. Besides, I looked awesome, what can I say.

As for religion I am a registered Tibetan Buddhist. I believe in fluffy pillows, comfy robes, mother nature and quite frankly I find the world inside us far more interesting than the mess outside. You cant be extreme in Buddhism: “Be kind now, or ill hug you until you weep the tears of compassion!”. Buddhism sucks as an extreme doctrine.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and say nuuuu to both.

Piracy and copyrighted material

Eh, I’m kinda writing the software from scratch before your eyes (including the run-time-library for the compiler), so as far as worthy challenges go, piracy would be the opposite. I am a huge fan of classical operating-systems though, like the Amiga; But unlike most people I actually took the time to ask permission to use a OS4 inspired CSS theme-file.

The Amibian.js project is well organized and I have worked systematically through a well planned architecture. This is not some slap-dash project made for a quick buck

Most people just create a theme-file and don’t bother to ask. I did, and Trevor Dickinson was totally cool about it. And not a single byte has been taken or stolen from anyone. The default theme file is inspired by Amiga OS 4.1, but the thing is: the icons are all freeware. Mason, the guy that did the OS icons, have released large sets of icons into GPL. There is also a website called OS4Depot where people publish icons and backdrops that are free for all.

So if this “mysterious activity” is me posting a picture of a picture (not a typo) of an obscure yet loved operating-system, rest assured that it’s not violating anyone.

Stealing from backers

That they even include this as a point is just monumental. Patreon is a service established to make that impossible (sigh); meaning that the time-frame where you deliver updates or whatever – and the time when the payout is delivered, that is the window where backers can file a complaint or demand a refund.

And yes, complaints on fraud would indeed (and should!) flag the account as potentially dubious — but again, I have not a single complaint. Not even a refund request, which I believe is pretty uncommon.

And even if this was the case, shutting down an account without so much as a dialog in 2019? Who the hell becomes a thief for 600 dollars? Im not some kid in a garage, I make twice that a day as a consultant in Oslo, why the heck would I setup a public account in the US, only to run off with 600 bucks! I have standing offers for projects continuously, I havent applied for a job since the 90s – so if I needed some extra money I would have taken a side project.

I even posted to let my backers know I had a cold last month just to make sure everyone knew in case I was unavailable for a couple of days. Truly the tell-tell sign of a criminal mastermind if I ever saw one ..

Sorry Patreon, but your behavior is unacceptable

Hopefully your experience with Patreon has not been like mine. They spent somewhere in the range of 5 weeks just to register me, while friends of mine in the US was up and running in less than 2 days.

We are now 3 weeks into a temporary suspension, which means that most of my backers will run out of patience and just leave. It sends a signal of being whimsical about other people’s trust, and that people take a risk if they back my project.

At this point it doesn’t matter that none of these thoughts are true, because they are thoughts that anyone would think when a project remains flagged for so long.

What should scare you as a creator with Patreon though, is that they can do this to anyone. There is nothing you can do, neither to prove your innocence or sort out a misunderstanding — because you are not even told what you allegedly have done wrong. I also find it alarming that Patreon actually doesn’t have a phone-number listed, nor do they have offices you can call or reach out to.

The irony is that Patreon doesn’t even pass their own safety tests. That should make you think twice about their operation. I had heard the rumors about them, but I honestly did not believe a company could operate like this in our day and age. Especially not in the united states. It undermines the whole spirit of US as a technological hub. No wonder people are setting up shop in China instead, if this is how they are treated in the valley.

After this long, and the damage they have caused, I have no option than to inform my backers to terminate their pledges. I will have to relocate my project to a host that has more experience with software development, and who treats human beings with common decency and respect.

If I by accident had violated any of their guidelines, although I cannot see how I could have, I have no problem taking responsibility. But when you are shut down without so much as an explanation, with nothing but positive feedback, zero refunds and over 1682 people actively following the progress — that is utterly unacceptable.

It is a great shame. Patreon symbolized, for a short time, that the global village had matured into more than an idea. But I categorically refuse to be treated like this and find their modus-operandi insulting.

Stay Well Clear

If you as a developer have a chance to set up shop elsewhere, then I urge you to do so. And make sure your host have common infrastructure such as a phone number. Patreon have taken the art of avoiding direct contact to a whole new level. It is absolutely mind-boggling.

I honestly don’t think Patreon understands software development at all. Many have voiced more sinister motives for my shutdown, since the project obviously is a threat to various companies. But I don’t believe in conspiracies. Although, if Patreon does this to enough creators on interval, the interest rates from holding the assets would be substantial.

It could be that the popularity of the project grew so fast that it was picked up as a statistical anomaly, but surely that should be a good thing? Not to mention a potential case study Patreon could have used as a success story? I mean, Amibian.js didn’t get up and running until october, so stopping a project 5 months into a 12 month timeline makes absolutely no sense. Unless someone did this on purpose.

Either way, this has been a terrible experience and I truly hope Patreon get’s their act together. They could have resolved this with a phone-call, yet chose to let it fester for almost a month.

Their loss.

Mirroring groups on the MeWe network

Following my Administrator woes on Facebook post I have had a look at alternative places to run a forum. I realized that Facebook is getting pretty intrinsic in society around the world, so I know everyone won’t be interested in a new venue. But honestly, MeWe is very simple to use and have an UI experience very close to the Facebook app.

This picture was flagged as “hateful” on Facebook, which has rendered my account frozen for the next 30 days. While I agree to the strict rules that FB advocates, they really must deploy more human beings if they intend to have success in this endeavour. And that means really investigating what is flagged, reading threads in all languages etc. Because the risk of flagging the wrong guy is just too high. Admins get flagged all the time for kicking out bullies, and the use of reporting tools as a revenge strategy *must* carry a penalty.

MeWe is thankfully not like G+ which (in my personal opinion) was counter-intuitive and damn right intrusive. We all remember the G+ auto-upload feature, where some 3 million users had their family photos, vacation photos and .. ehrm, “explicitly personal” photos uploaded without consent.

Well, the MeWe app is very simple, and registration is as easy as it should be. You make a user name, a password, and type in your email; then you verify your email and that’s it!

Besides, my main use for Facebook or MeWe is to run the groups – I spend very little of my time socializing anyways. With the amount of groups and media i push on a daily basis it’s quite frankly their loss.

The MeWe group functionality is very good, and almost identical to Facebook

The alternative to MeWe is to setup a proper web forum instead. I have bought 6 domains that are now collecting dust so yes, I will look into that – but the whole purpose of a social platform is that you don’t have to do maintenance beyond daily management – so MeWe saves us some time.

So head over to MeWe and register! Here are the two main groups I manage these days. The main groups are on facebook, but i have now registered the same groups on MeWe.

• Delphi Developer on MeWe
• Amiga Disrupt on MeWe

MeWe doesn’t cost anything and takes less than 5 minutes to join. Just like G+ and Facebook, MeWe can be installed as an app for your phone (both iOS and Android). So as far as alternatives go, it’s a good alternative. One more app wont do much harm I imagine.

Note: I will naturally keep my Facebook account for the sake of the groups, but having experienced this 4 times in 9 years, my tolerance of Mr. Suckerberg is quickly reaching its limits. If I have blurted something out I have no problems standing for that and taking the penalty, but posting a picture of software development? In a group dedicated to software development? That takes some impressive mental acrobatics to accept.

HexLicense, Patreon and all that

Apparently using modern service like Patreon to maintain components has become a point of annoyance and confusion. I realize that I formulated the initial HexLicense post somewhat vague and confusing, in retrospect I will admit that and also take critique for not spending a little more time on preparations.

Having said that, I also corrected the mistake quickly and clarified the situation. I feel some of the comments have been excessively critical for something that, ultimately, is a service to the community. But I’ll roll with the punches and let’s just put this issue to bed.

From the top please

I have several products and frameworks that naturally takes time to maintain and evolve. And having to maintain websites, pay for tax and invoicing services, pay for hosting (and so on), well it consumes a lot of hours. Hours that I can no longer afford to spend (my work at Embarcadero must come first, I have a family to support). So Patreon is a great way to optimize a very busy schedule.

Today developers solve a lot of the business strain by using Patreon. They make their products open source, but give those that support and help fund the development special perks, such as early access, special builds and a more direct line of control over where the different projects and sub-projects are heading.

The public repository that everyone has access to is maintained by pushing the code on interval, meaning that the public “free stuff” (LGPL v3 license) will be some months behind the early-access that patrons enjoy. This is common and the same approach both large and small teams go about things in 2018. Quite radical compared to what we “old-timers” are used to, but that’s how things work now. I just go with flow and try to do the most amount of good on the journey.

Benefits of Patreon

The benefits are many, but first and foremost it has to do with time. Developer don’t have to maintain 3-4 websites, pay for invoicing services on said products, pay hosting fees and rent support forums — instead focus is on getting things done. So instead of an hour here and there, you can (based on the level of support) allocate X hours within a week or weekend that are continuous.

Patreon solves two things: time and cost

Everyone wins. Those that support and help fund the projects enjoy early access and special builds. The community at large wins because the public repository is likewise maintained, albeit somewhat behind the cutting edge code patrons enjoy. And the developers wins because he or she doesn’t have to run around like a mad chicken maintaining X number of websites -wasting more time doing maintenance than building cool new features.

 

And above all, pricing goes down. By spreading the cost over a larger base of interest, people get access to code that used to cost $200 for $35. The more people that helps out, the more the cost can be reduced per tier.

To make it crystal clear what the status of my frameworks and component packages are, here is a carbon copy from HexLicense.com

For immediate release

Effective immediately HexLicense is open-source, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3. You can read the details of that license by clicking here.

Patreon model

In order to consolidate the various projects I maintain, I have established a Patreon account. This means that people can help fund further development on HexLicense, LDEF, Amibian and various Delphi libraries as a whole. This greatly simplifies things for everyone.

I will be able to allocate time based on a broader picture, I also don’t need to pay for invoicing services, web hosting and more. This allows me to continue to evolve the components and code, but without so many separate product identities to maintain.

Patreon supporters will receive updates before anyone else and have direct access to the latest code at all times. The public bitbucket repository will be updated on interval, but will by consequence be behind the Patreon updates.

Further security

One of the core goals on Patreon is the evolution of a bytecode compiler. This should be of special interest to HexLicense users. Being able to compile modules that hackers will be unable to debug gives you a huge advantage. The engine is designed so that the instruction-set can be randomized for a particular build. Making it unique for your application.

The LDEF assembler prototype running under Smart Mobile Studio

Well, I want to thank everyone involved. It has been a great journey to produce so many components, libraries and solutions over the years – but now it’s time for me to cut down on the number of projects and focus on core technology.

HexLicense with the update license files will be uploaded to BitBucket shortly.

Sincerly

Jon Lennart Aasenden

 

 

Getting organized: register a Delphi user group or club!

It’s been a hectic week at Delphi Developer, but a highly productive one! I am very happy that so many developers have responded and help with the organizational work. Because Delphi and C++ builder developers must get organized. If you want to see lasting, positive results, this has to happen. There are wast quantities of individuals, groups and companies that use Delphi and C++ builder around the world. Yet we all sit in our own bubble, thinking we are alone. It’s time to change that.

“we have decades of experience and technical expertise. And that is worth protecting”

In 2016 I was contacted by a Norwegian HR company (read: head hunters) and offered a Delphi position as at a local business. Turned out the business had struggled to find Delphi programmers for over six months. When I told them about Oslo Delphi club and showed them the 7500 members we have in Delphi Developer on Facebook, they were gobsmacked. The human resource company was equally oblivious to the sheer number of Developers just in Norway, let alone internationally.

Part of what I do today as an Embarcadero SC, is to front human-resource companies with clear information as to where they can look for competent Delphi developers. But in order to deliver that effectively, we first have to establish a map.

Put your local club or interest group on the map!

Last friday (24.08.2018) I published an open document on Delphi Developer. This is a document open and available to everyone, with the sole purpose of making it easier for developers to find clubs and interest groups in their region (jobs are often found through acquaintances, so connecting to a local group is important). It will also simplify how we as a community can approach human resource companies. Our document is growing but we still need more! So please take five minutes to add your local user group.

The Delphi and C++ builder community is large, but we need representation with HR

Delphi and C++ builder is seeing a stable and healthy growth. It has taken a lot of hard work and effort to get where we are today, both by Embarcadero and developers that use RAD Studio as their business backbone.

My hope is that everyone who read this can allocate few minutes, just five minutes to add to our document. So if you know of a Delphi or C++ builder user group, perhaps a club or organization? Then please check the document (Note: The document is pinned as an announcement on top of the Facebook group feed, but members can also reach it directly by clicking here) and add the club if it’s not already there.

Note: Please make sure that the information is correct. Call the club or group if possible. Remember, this document is for everyone. We want to maintain the document and keep it available 24/7.

Building bridges

The work members are doing for the community is quite important. It determines where we can go next. In fact, I will contact each and every club to establish communication and co-operation. There is much to debate, such as capacity for tutoring, courseware, primary contact for new users and more. If need be I will personally travel so we can meet face to face. I am deadly serious about this, because there is no other way to build critical mass. Our group alone have thousands of members whom have invested a lot of money in software, components, formal training and education; we have decades of experience and technical expertise. And that is worth protecting.

Getting organized to safeguard our education, our language of preference, our jobs and ultimately to nurture our future is a worthy cause. I hope I have everyone’s blessing in this — but I can’t do everything alone. It is impossible for me to know if there are 3 Delphi clubs in Venezuela, 4 in Canada and 15 in India. We need to get them pinned on a map and formulate a strategy for lasting, positive results.

The past is experience, the future is opportunities

I want to thank each and every one that has added to the document. Thank you so much, this will help our community more than you think. It might seem as a small step, but that first step is the most important of them all. All great things start as an idea, but when you apply force and determination – it becomes reality.

I am extremely lucky because this work is now a part of my job. My work includes a bit of everything: studies, authoring, coding, consulting and presentations. But the part I love the most is to connect people.

Real life results

If you think the document in question is a waste of time, think again!

Last week we had 3 rather frustrated members that desperately needed a job. After calming the situation down I made some calls and was able to find remote work for all of them.

It is a wonderful feeling when you can help someone. It is also what community is all about. The more organized we get, the better it will be for everyone. LinkedIn is great but networking without an infrastructure that responds can bear no fruits. And that is where Delphi Developer comes in. We are very much alive and kicking.

So with less than a week of organization behind us, we found and delivered jobs as a direct consequence of the Delphi Developer Facebook Group.

 

Power for pennies, getting a server rack and preparing my ultimate coding environment

One of the benefits of doing repairs on your house, is that during the cleanup process you come over stuff you had completely forgot about. Like two very powerful Apple blade servers (x86) I received as a present three years ago. I never got around to using them because I there was literally no room in my house for a rack cabinet.

Sure, a medium model rack cabinet isn’t that big (the size of a cabin refrigerator), but you also have to factor in that servers are a lot more noisy than desktop PCs; the older they are the more noise they make. So unless you have a good spot to place the cabinet, where the noise wont make it unbearable to be around,  I suggest you just rent a virtual instance at Amazon or something. It really depends on how much service coding you do, if you need to do dedicated server and protocol stress testing (the list goes on).

Power for pennies

Sellers photo. It needs a good clean, but this kit would have set you back $5000 a decade ago; so picking this up for $400 is almost ridicules.

The price of such cabinets (when buying new ones) can be anything from $800 to $5000 depending on the capacity, features and materials. My needs for a personal server farm are more than covered by a medium cabinet. If it wasnt for my VMWare needs I would say it was overkill. But some of my work, especially with node.js and Delphi system services that should handle terabytes of raw data reliably 24/7, that demands a hard-core testing environment.

Having stumbled upon my blade servers I decided to check the local second-hand online forum; and I was lucky enough to find (drumroll) a second-hand cabinet holding a total of 10 blades for $400. So I’ll be picking up this beauty next weekend. It will be so good to finally get my blades organized. Not to mention all my SBC / Node.js cluster experiments centralized in one physical location. Far away from my home office space (!)

Interestingly, it comes fitted with 3 older servers. There are two Dell web and file servers, and then a third, unmarked mystery box (i3 cpu + sata caddies so that sounds good).

It really is amazing how much cpu fire-power you can pick up for practically nothing these days. $50 buys you a SBC (single board computer) that will rival a Pentium. $400 buys you a 10 blade cabinet and 3 servers that once powered a national newspaper (!).

VMWare delights

All the blades I have mentioned so far are older models. They are still powerful machines, way more than $400 livingroom NAS would get you. So my node.js clustering will run like a dream and I will be able to host all my Delphi development environments via VMware. Which brings us neatly to the blade I am really looking forward to get into the rack.

I bought an empty server blade case back in 2015. It takes a PSU, motherboard, fans and everything else is there (even the six caddies for disks). Into this seemingly worthless metal box I put a second generation Intel i7 monster (Asus motherboard), with 32 gigabyte ram – and fitted it with a sexy NVidia GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI.

All my Delphi work, Smart work and various legacy projects I maintain, all in one neat rack

This little monster (actually it takes up 2 blade-spots) allows me to run VMWare server, which gives me at least 10 instances of Windows (or Linux, or OSX) at the same time. It will also be able to host and manage roughly 1000 active Smart Desktop users (the bottleneck will be the disk and network more than actual computation).

Being a coder in 2018 is just fantastic!

Things we could only dream about a decade ago can now be picked up for close to nothing (compared to the original cost). Just awesome!

 

Paypal, enough is enough

I used to love PayPal. Really, it was a brilliant solution to a global problem.
As a software developer living in Norway, where I spend most of my time with people who live and work in the United States, India or the Arab Emirates – commerce can sometimes be a challenge. It’s a strange situation to be in, where you have lunch with people thousands of miles away. You call up your friends in NYC after work just like you would a friend down the street; and in the weekend you share a cold beer over video chat, or team up on Playstation to enjoy a game together.

I have become, for all means and purposes, an american by proxy.

As a software developer part of what I do is to produce software components. These are intricate blocks of code that can be injected into programs, thus saving other developers the time it takes to implement the functionality from scratch. This is a fantastic thing because one person cannot possibly cope with “everything”. Buying components and libraries is a fundamental part of what a software manager does when prototyping a new product. It is a billion dollar industry and it’s not going away any time soon.

The reason is simple: if you hire someone to research, implement and test something you need in your product, the wages you pay will be 10-100 times higher than if you just buy a pre-fabricated module. I mean, allocating 2 developers to work full-time for a month to make a PDF rendering component (as an example of a complex component) will cost you two months salary. This also leaves you with the responsibility for bugs, updates – the whole nine yards.

“PayPal has a policy where it completely ignores the voice of merchants. They automatically side with the customer and will thus remove funds from your account as they please”

Lets say you have two junior developers making $6000 a month each, coupled with an estimate of 8 weeks to finish the functionality (which is always wrong, so add a couple of weeks for Q&A), that brings us to $12000 + $6000 = $18000. OR — you can just buy a ready to use component for $500 and have PDF support up and running in a day. This also delegates bug-fixing, documentation and updates onto the vendor.

When I wanted to set up shop, I figured that PayPal would be an excellent platform to use. I mean, it’s been around for so long that it’s become intrinsic to international, online economics. It’s available everywhere, and their percentage of sales is reasonable.

Well, that turned out to be a mistake. PayPal is not cool at all when you move from consumer to merchant. Which takes weeks by the way if you live outside the US. You have to send in photocopies of your passport, credit card receipts and social security information; which is illegal in Norway and a serious breach of privacy.

It’s only your money if we allow it

We live in a world where there are a lot of terrible people. People that sell broken goods, that lie, steal and is willing to do just about anything if it benefits them. Honesty is almost regarded as a burden in online business, which I detest and refuse to take part in.

“The second and third calls [to PayPal] resulted in 45 and 90 minutes of “please hold”. They literally exhausted their own merchant to make the case go away.”

UPS is on my door more than the average American household. This is the new reality.

Lord knows I have been victim to some extremely unjust sales representative in my time (havent we all). And the experience has often been that you are helpless once you have received a product. It doesn’t matter if the product you received was faulty, the wrong size – or even the wrong bloody product! As a consumer you often have to calculate how much it will cost you to fight back. And more often than not, fighting back costs more than just accepting that you have been ripped off. I mean, nobody is stupid enough to return the wrong goods to China (for example), because you will never hear from them again.

Well, once I switched from being just a consumer to selling goods and becoming a PayPal merchant – I was shocked to discover that it’s the same situation on the other side! But not from small, semi anonymous scam artists; no it turned out to be PayPal.

PayPal has a policy where it completely ignores the voice of merchants. They automatically side with the customer and will thus remove funds from your account as they please. This happens without a dialog with you as a merchant first. They just waltz in and help themselves to your funds. It’s like something out of a 12th century trial where you are guilty by default and thus there is no room for documentation or evidence to the contrary.

“PayPal didn’t even bother to contact me for verification or comments. They just helped themselves to my registered credit card – which in Norway would have landed them in jail for theft.”

In my case where I sell software components, which by nature is digital and delivered via e-mail, that leaves me as a vendor completely without a voice.

Just weeks ago I got a strange e-mail from a customer who claimed he had not received my software. I naturally took that very seriously so I checked, double checked and triple checked that the software had been sent. I also checked the log on my server to see if the download ticket had been activated (it is marked as active when a full download has been completed. It remains open for 12 months which is the duration of the license).

Well the ticket was active, so there was no doubt that the customer had indeed downloaded the product. And it was downloaded in full. The server picks up on partial downloads so it doesn’t activate should the customer have network problems.

But hey, accident can happen, maybe the customer managed to delete the file or his hard disk was damaged. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and informed him that the ticket has been activated, but he can download as many times as he wants for the duration of 12 months.

In return I got an email saying: “He he, its all good. Thx!“

Well, it sure was all good for him, but not for me. Not only had this man downloaded and made use of my product, he sent a false claim to PayPal stating that he never received the software. And since PayPal can’t deal with packages that are not shipped through their explicit channels (which is made for physical goods, not digital), that was that.

PayPal didn’t even bother to contact me for verification or comments. They just helped themselves to my registered credit card – which in Norway would have landed them in jail for theft.

“A parallel is of a man entering a store, buying an ice-cream, slowly removing the wrapping and starting to eat – while walking over to the store manager claiming, he never got an ice-cream to begin with.”

Had PayPal bothered to contact me, which both Norwegian and European law demands, I could easily document that the customer had indeed downloaded and activated the product. I have both the e-mails between the customer and myself, as well as the ticket logs from the hosting company I use.

There is no doubt that this ticket has been spent, only hours before this scam artist sent his false claim to PayPal.

International vs. national law

Norwegian law gives a merchant 3 chances to rectify a situation. This law applies where the customer has not received what they ordered, where they have received a broken item – or where there has been problems with delivery.

When you sell software however, there are two types with very different rules attached to them. The second method is rarely used outside the world of engineering:

• Compiled proprietary software, which doesn’t avail how the product is made and the customer does not have access to the source code.
• Source code for proprietary software, where the customer receives the actual source code for the product and are allowed to adapt the code. But there are strict rules for not sharing or re-selling this – since it’s very much intellectual property and once shared, cannot be un-shared.

The latter, source code packages (which is what my customer bought), also falls under “spoilables”, meaning that once the customer has received the package, they cannot return it. This applies to other goods too, such as underwear. Since the merchant cannot know if the product has been used (or copied in the case of source-code) – there is never any return policy on such goods once delivered. If the product has not been delivered however, normal return policies apply.

Since PayPal is an American company, I can understand there is some aversion for adapting their services to every known framework of law known to mankind. But I cannot imagine that American legislation on this topic can differ much from Norwegian law. Selling compiled code vs. source-code are two very different things. Comparable to frozen goods and fresh goods. You dont have a 3 week return policy on fruit for obvious reasons.

A parallel is of a man entering a store, buying an ice-cream, slowly removing the wrapping and starting to eat – while walking over to the store manager claiming, he never got an ice-cream to begin with.

There is no way in hell that this would fly with an american store manager. A friend of mine in San-Diego was so upset on my behalf that he called Paypal directly, but they refused to comment without written consent from me. Which I then sent, only to magically disappear.

The second and third calls resulted in 45 and 90 minutes of “please hold”. They literally exhausted their own merchant to make the case go away.

PayPal, trust is a two way street

This episode has shocked me. In fact it has forced me to close my PayPal merchant account permanently. And I will avoid using PayPal as much as possible until they can show normal, human decency for law-abiding citizen, regardless of what country they come from.

Would you run a business with a third-party that can just help themselves to your accounts? I can’t imagine anyone would.

I have no problem giving a customer his money back, provided the delivery ticket is un-spent. Had the customer been unable to download or somehow gain access to the product – then of course normal money back rules apply. I’m not out to cheat anyone, nor am I hard to talk with.

But when there is no dialog at all – and your “bank” ignores the fact that some people are willing to do anything to cheat his fellow-man, that’s when I pack up and leave.

Delphi developer on its own server

While the Facebook group will naturally continue exactly like it has these past years, we have set up a server active Delphi developers on my Quartex server.

This has a huge benefit: first of all those that want to test the Smart Desktop can do so from the same domain – and people who want to test Smart Mobile Studio can do so with myself just a PM away. Error reports etc. will still need to be sent to the standard e-mail, but now I can take a more active role in supervising the process and help clear up whatever missunderstanding could occur.

Always good with a hardcore Smart, Laz, amibian.js forum!

Besides that we are building a lively community of Delphi, Lazarus, Smart and Oxygene/Remobjects developers! Need a job? Have work you need done? Post an add — wont cost you a penny.

So why not sign up? Its free, it wont bite you and we can continue regardless of Facebook’s up-time this year..

You enter here and just fill out user/pass and that’s it: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/sharetronix/

Amibian + Smart pascal = A new beginning

In the Amiga community there is a sub-group of people with an agenda. They hoard and collect every piece of hardware they can get their hand on – then sell them at absurd prices on ebay to enrich themselves. This is not only ruining the community at large, ensuring that ordinary users cannot get their hands on a plain, vanilla Amiga without having to fork out enough dough to buy a good car.

“We also have a working Facebook clone – but we’re not
going into competition with Mark Zuckerberg either”

Thankfully not everyone is like that. There are some very respected, very good people who buy old machines, restore them – and sell them at affordable prices. People that do this as a hobby or to make a little on the side. Nothing wrong with that. No, its people that try to sell you an A2000 for $3000, or that pimp out Vampire accelerator cards at 700€ a piece thats the problem.

As for the price sharks, well – this has to stop. And Gunnar’s Amibian distro has already given the Amiga scalpers a serious uppercut. Why buy an old Amiga when you can get a high-end A4000 experience with 4 times as much power for around $35? This is what Gunnar has made a reality – and he deserves a medal for his work!

And myself, Thomas and the others in our little band of brothers will pick up the fight and stand by Gunnar in his battle. A battle to make the Amiga affordable for ordinary human beings that love the platform.

Amiga as a service

Yesterday I did a little experiment. You know how Citrix and VMWare services work? In short, they are virtualization application servers. That means that they can create as many instances of Windows or Linux as they want – run your applications on it – and you can connect to your instance and use it. This is a big part of how cloud computing works.

WinUAE running in my basement, streamed live to Amibian.js HTML5 desktop at my office!

While my little experiment is very humble, I am now streaming a WinUAE instance display from my basement server pc, just some old bucket of chips I use for debugging, directly into Amibian.js (!). It worked! I just created the world’s first Amiga application server. And it took me less than 30 minutes in Delphi !

Amibian, Amibian.js, appserver, what gives?

Let’s clear this up so you dont mix them:

Amibian. This is the original Linux distro made by Gunnar Kristjansson. It boots straight into UAE in full-screen. All it needs is a Raspberry PI, the Amiga rom files and your workbench or hard disk image. This is a purely native (machine code) solution.

Amibian.js – this is a JavaScript remake of AmigaOS that I’m building, with the look and feel of OS 4. It uses uae.js (also called SAE) to run 68k software directly in the browser. It is not a commercial product, but one of many demos that ship with Smart Mobile Studio. “Smart” is a compiler, editor and run-time library sold by The Smart Company AS. So Amibian.js is just a demo, just like Amos shipped with a ton of demo’s and Blitzbasic came with a whole disk full of examples.

Amiga application server (what I mentioned above) was just a 30 minute experiment I did yesterday after work. Again, just for fun.

I hope that clears up any confusion. Amibian.js is a purely JavaScript based desktop made in the spirit of the Amiga – it must not be confused with Amibian the Linux distro, which boots into UAE on a Raspberry PI. Nor is it an appserver – but rather, it can connect to an appserver if I want to.

Generation Amiga post on Amibian.js earlier when I added some look & feel

With a bit of work, and if everything works as expected (I don’t see why not), I will upload both source and binaries to github together with Amibian.js.

There is only one clause: It cannot be used, recreated, included or distributed by Cloanto. Sorry guys, but the ROMS belong to the people, and until you release those into public domain, you wont get access to anything we make. Nothing personal, but pimping out roms and even having audacity to fork UAE and sell it as your own? You should be ashamed of yourself.

Are you in competition with FriendOS?

This question has popped up a couple of times the past two weeks. So I want to address that head on.

I make a product called Smart Mobile Studio. I do that with a group of well-known developers, and we have done so for many years now. The preliminary ideas were presented on my blog during the winter 2009, early 2010 and we started working (and blogging) after that. Smart Mobile Studio and it’s language, Smart Pascal (see Wikipedia article), takes object pascal (like freepascal or Delphi) and compiles to JavaScript rather than machine code.

The Smart compiler is due for OS4 once i get the A1222 in my hands

One of the examples that has shipped with Smart Mobile Studio, and also been available through a library called QTX, is something called Quartex Media Desktop. Which is an example of a NAS server front-end, a kiosk front-end (ticket ordering, cash machines etc) or just an intranet desktop where you centralize media and files. It is also node.js powered to deal with the back-end filesystem. This is now called amibian.js.

In other words – it has nothing to do with Friend software labs at all. In fact, I didn’t even know Friend existed until they approached me a few weeks ago.

The Quartex Media desktop has been around for ages

Amibian.js is just an update of the Quartex Media Desktop example. It is not a commercial venture at all, but an example of how productive you can be with Smart pascal.

And it’s just one example out of more than a hundred that showcase different aspects of our run-time library. This example has been available since version 1.2 or 1.3 of Smart, so no, this is not me trying to reverse engineer FriendOS. Because I was doing this long before FriendOS even was presented. I have just added a windowing manager and made it look like OS4, which also happened before I had any contact with my buddies over at Friend Software Labs (why do you think they were interested in me).

Early 2017 Linux bootloader by Gunnar

So, am I in competition with Friend? NO! I have absolutely no ambition, aspiration or intent for anything of the sorts. And should you be in doubt then let me break it down for you:

• Hogne, Arne, David, Thomas, Francois and everyone at Friend Software Labs are friends of mine. I talk almost daily with David Pleasence who is a wonderful person and an inspiration for everyone who knows him.
• Normal people don’t sneak around stabbing friends in the back. Plain and simple. That is not how I was raised, and such behavior is completely unacceptable.
• Amibian.js is 110% pure Amiga oriented. The core of it has been a part of Smart for years now, and it has been freely available for anyone on google code and github.
• For every change we have made to the Smart RTL, the media desktop example has been updated to reflect this. But ultimately it’s just one out of countless examples. We also have a working Facebook clone – but we’re not going into competition with Mark Zuckerberg for that matter.
• People can invent the same things at the same time. Thats how reality works. There is a natural evolution of ideas, and great minds often think alike.

Why did you call it Amibian.js, it’s so confusing?

Well it’s a long story but to make it short. The first “boot into uae” thing was initially outlined by me (with the help of chips, the UAE4Arm maintainer). But I didn’t do it right because Linux has never really been my thing. So I just posted it on my retro-gaming blog and forgot all about it.

Gunnar picked this up and perfected it. He has worked weeks and months making Amibian into what it is today – together with Thomas, our spanish superhero /slash/ part-time dictator /slash/ minister of propaganda 🙂

We then started talking about making a new system. Not a new UAE, but something new and ground breaking. I proposed Smart Pascal, and we wondered how the Raspberry PI would run JavaScript performance wise. I then spent a couple of hours adding the icon layout grid and the windowing manager to our existing media desktop – and then fired up some HTML5 demos. Gunnar tested them under Chrome on the Raspberry PI — and voila, Amibian.js was born.

And that is all there is to it. No drama, no hidden agendas – and no conspiracy.

I should also add that I do not work at Friend Software Labs, but we have excellent communication and I’m sure we will combine our forces on more than one software title in the future.

On a personal note I have more than a few titles I would like to port to FriendOS. One of my best sellers of all time is an invoice and credit application – which will be re-written in Smart Pascal (its presently a mix of Delphi and C++ builder code). The same program is also due to Amiga OS 4.1 whenever I get my A1222 (looking at you Trevor *smile*).

Well, I hope that clears up any misunderstanding regarding these very separate but superficially related topics. Amibian.js will remain 100% Amiga focused – that has been and remains our goal.

Ode to our childhood

Amibian is and will always be, an ode to the people who gave us such a great childhood. People like David Pleasence who was the face of Commodore in europe. A man who embody the friendliness of the Amiga with his very being. Probably one of the warmest and kindest people I can think of.

Francois Lionet, author of Amos Basic. The man who made me a programmer and that I cannot thank enough. And I know I’m not alone about learning from him.

Mark Sibly, the author of BlitzBasic, the man who taught me all those assembler tricks. A man that deserves to go down in the history books as one of the best programmers in history.

And above all – the people who made the Amiga itself; giants like Jay Miner, Dave Haynie, Carl Sassenrath, Dave Needle, RJ Michal (forgive me for not listing all of you. Your contributions will never be forgotten).

That is what Amibian.js is all about.

Patents and greed may have killed the actual code. But we are free to implement whatever we like from scratch. And when I’m done – your patents will be worthless..

 

Ghost of xmas past, or better known as the folder where old projects and abandoned ideas end up

I think everyone has a folder where they stuff old units, test projects and well – all those ideas that seemed awesome at the time, but you either discovered that it was crap, not enough time, or just forgot all about it. It happens. What can I say.

Yeah, I have one of those as well. And I also have those duplicate folders. You know, that time when you decided to make backups for everything – but then you got a new PC and now you dont have a clue which version to keep? And when you finally sit down with beyondcompare to get this sorted, you have managed to add to both copies.

Well, needless to say I had a day I just went apeshit about a year ago and sorted everything. And whatever did not fit into my neat new code-folder(s) was mercilessly stuffed into the dark, obscure folder known only as “stuff” or “misc”.

My first basic compiler, awwwww how cute

Well its not all rubbish! I did find a special version of my kitchen-sink research IDE, the IDE I use when trying out new code for DWScript, PaxCompiler and FreePascal. I think it has 4 compilers in it or something, yet its under 30 megabytes in size! Pretty neat 🙂

Visual Basic to Smart Pascal, awww…. just want to snuggle it 🙂

It also features a unified file-system! You can mount packages, FTP folders, network paths or local folders – the IDE could not care less, it is completely abstracted from the actual filesystem and relates only to symbols and identifiers. The actual storage is dealt with by the filesource classes.

Package, ftp, socket, local folder – the IDE could not care less

The Basic dialect here is essentially classical Visual Basic. The way you would write classes and deal with instances before dot net came along and forced all languages to look the same. I kinda like old visual basic, it had soul. It was completely useless except for scripting, and Delphi made it look like a joke – but as far as basic dialects go, it’s probably one of the cleanest and easiest to read.

DWScript, QTX Pascal (a custom fork of DWScript with a lot of cool features, some that Eric has added afterwards), Basic – and even freepascal! Thats the mother of all kitchen sinks!

The loss of QTX Pascal is a bit sad. I spent a couple of months doing my own fork of DWScript. Most of the features I added have now been included (although in another form) by Eric. But the codegen produced faster javascript. One of the things I spent some time on was optimization. Like getting rid of “variable = 0” type initialization if an assignment followed. I also added BeforeDestruction() and AfterConstruction() calls. This made an RTL a lot easier to write, but also more overhead. I was about to do conditional testing (so these would only be called if you actually used them) when I had to stop and work on Smart Mobile Studio again.

N++, exotic and functional!

This was one of my favorite language research projects. And dare I say, it is way ahead of it’s time. The idea is simple: with the future of computing being distributed, cloud based and powered by a multitude of computing modules from the US to South Africa — what would a programming language look like if built for 100% asyncronous, distributed execution?

Consider for instance, the execution of a procedure. Simple right? Well, in a truly distributed system – that procedure could execute anywhere. The whole point here is to utilize the combined power of each module (pc); which means a tasks could execute on different computers. A procedure could also be split up by the runtime environment and once again, be executed all over the place – with the dispatcher keeping track of when it’s done and whatever the result was (if any).

Only a spesific and generated on-demand “runtime context” would follow the task. This would contain things like variables it needs to execute, public symbols, basicaly just enough for the code to run successfully. This also includes resource forks (a term i used for accessing resources regardless of where they may be on the network).

The language design was actually done using Smart Mobile Studio (you can read more about the initial ideas here), and the first test modules ran on node.js (so no fancy graphics available sadly).

But it was incredibly fun to play with! But also time consuming to design a language for an execution model that havent really been invented yet. You can read more about some of my ideas for the execution model here.

I dont even think this execution model is out of the MIT labs yet — but it will once quantum compute models become commercially available (click here for a Berkley University published introduction to the basic computational models used in quantum information theory).

An N++ procedure (actually a microservice that consumed a WSDL service and calls it) looks like this:

program("service_test") {

  handshake {

    input {
      /* Consume WSDL Web-Service Endpoint */
      service1 @ service[URI:"http://www.test.com/SOAP/myService/WSDL/",
                 serviceType:SoapService];
    }

    output {
        myProcess @ process("self");
        stdio @ pipe("stdout");
      }
  }

  /* Execute RPC call */
  execute (stdio,service1)  {
    stdio:writeln("Calling webservice");
    execute (*)  {
      var int32 result = 0;
      set result = service1:getUserId("quartex","secret");
      stdio:writelnF("UserID on server={0}", result);
    } fail (e) {
      stdio.writelnF("Calling soap service failed: {0}",e);
      proceed;
    }
  }

  /* Exit code for process */
  set myProcess:exitCode = 0;
}

RML, Reduced markup language parser and runtime

Dont you just hate it when you lose the source-file for a programming language you made in a day, so now you dont have a clue what the syntax really was? I know, I know, but I honestly dont have the syntax or examples. It does with a disk ages ago.

RML was written to simplify generating HTML documents. There are a few things that you can optimize when it comes to HTML. First of all you know that the browser will read the document from top and downwards. This might not mean much at first glance, but it actually means that a language doesnt need the abillity to call emitter-code that has already executed (above). Think of it as being able to omit calls to procedure behind you in the source. That would be a mess for a language like delphi – but it doesnt impact a language that execute linear without any forms of jumps!

I seem to remember it looked something like this:

createobject(TRMLObject)
{
   writestr("testing");
   if(a=12)
   {
       readstr("mer testing");
   }
}
createobject(TRMLHeading)
{
   settitle("testing second object");
   if(a=12)
   {
       writestr("heading object successfully done");
   }
}
createobject(TRMLObject)
{
   writestr("testing third object");
   if(a=12)
   {
       readstr("mer testing from da third object");
   }
}

The idea is ofcourse that you have some pre-defined objects, a bit like custom-controls in Smart Pascal, and you create and populate these in a top-down fashion.
Once defined, generating quite advanced HTML documents can be done extremely fast. Much faster than ASP, DWS or php since no jumps are involved.

Here is how you compile and run a small debug session (drop a memo and button on a form first):

  var
    FContext: TRMLParseContext;
    FText:  String;
  begin
    FText:= 'createobject(TRMLObject)'
    +       '{'
    +       '   writestr("testing");'
    +       '   if(a=12)'
    +       '   {'
    +       '       readstr("mer testing");'
    +       '   }'
    +       '}'
    +       'createobject(TRMLHeading)'
    +       '{'
    +       '   settitle("testing second object");'
    +       '   if(a=12)'
    +       '   {'
    +       '       writestr("heading object successfully done");'
    +       '   }'
    +       '}'
    +       'createobject(TRMLObject)'
    +       '{'
    +       '   writestr("testing third object");'
    +       '   if(a=12)'
    +       '   {'
    +       '       readstr("mer testing from da third object");'
    +       '   }'
    +       '}';

    // double the code, just to get some payload
    FText := FText + FText;

    memo1.text:='';

    If RMLAllocContext(FContext,FText,[TRMLObject,TRMLHeading]) then
    Begin
      try
        if RMLCompile(FContext) then
        Begin
          caption:='Compilation was a success';
          If RMLExecute(FContext) then
          Begin
            Caption:='Executed successfully';
            memo1.text:=FContext.pcOutput;
          end;
        end else
        caption:=Format('compilation failed [%s]',[FContext.pcError]);
      finally
        RMLDisposeContext(FContext);
      end;
    end;

And here is the full code for the parser and runtime (still a few tidbits to work on, but its childs play). If you can make sense of it, knock yourself out 🙂

  unit rml;

  interface

  uses sysutils, classes, dialogs;

  type

  TRMLObject  = Class;

  TRMLClass     = Class of TRMLObject;
  TRMLOperator  = (opLess,opMore,opEquals,opNotEquals);
  TRMLDataType  = (daString,daNumber,daBoolean,daCustom);
  TRMLEntryType = (etAssignment,etMethod,etRepeat,etCreate,etIf);
  TRMLObjProc   = Function (Const EntryData:Pointer):Boolean of Object;

  (* represents a single condition in an IF statement *)
  PRMLCondition = ^TRMLCondition;
  TRMLCondition = Packed Record
    coSource:   String;
    coTarget:   String;
    coOperator: TRMLOperator;
  End;

  (* represents a parsed code declaration *)
  PRMLEntryDeclaration = ^TRMLEntryDeclaration;
  TRMLEntryDeclaration = Packed Record
    cxToken:      String;
    cxCondition:  String;
  End;

  (* represents a compiled parameter *)
  PRMLParameter = ^TRMLParameter;
  TRMLParameter = Packed Record
    prType:   TRMLDataType;
    prValue:  Pointer;
    prSize:   Integer;
  End;

  (* represents a compiled code entry *)
  PRMLEntryData = ^TRMLEntryData;
  TRMLEntryData = Packed Record
    edtype:         TRMLEntryType;
    edDeclaration:  TRMLEntryDeclaration;
    edObject:       TRMLObject;
    edParent:       PRMLEntryData;
    edMethod:       TRMLObjProc;
    edContext:      Pointer;
    edConditions:   Array of PRMLCondition;
    edParameters:   Array of PRMLParameter;
    edSubEntries:   Array of PRMLEntryData;
  End;

  PRMLParseContext = ^TRMLParseContext;
  TRMLParseContext = Packed Record
    pcSignature:  Integer;
    pcCol:        Integer;
    pcRow:        Integer;
    pcPos:        Integer;
    pcLen:        Integer;
    pcData:       String;
    pcError:      String;
    pcOutput:     String;
    pcRoot:       TRMLEntryData;
    pcClasses:    Array of TRMLClass;
  End;

  TRMLReadProc  = Function  (Var OutData;var Bytes:Integer):Boolean of Object;
  TRMLWriteProc = Function  (Var InData;Const Bytes:Integer):Boolean of Object;
  TRMLProcEntry = Function  (Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean of Object;

  PRMLObjectIndex = ^TRMLObjectIndex;
  TRMLObjectIndex = Packed Record
    oiMethods:    Array of record
                    omName:   String;
                    omSyntax: Array of TRMLDataType;
                    omEntry:  TRMLProcEntry;
                  end;
    oiProperties: Array of record
                    oiName:   String;
                    oiRead:   TRMLReadProc;
                    oiWrite:  TRMLWriteProc;
                    oiType:   TRMLDataType;
                  end;
  End;

  TRMLObject = Class(TObject)
  Private
    FIndexData: TRMLObjectIndex;
    FIndexPTR:  PRMLObjectIndex;
  Private
    Function    DoWriteStr(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
    Function    DoReadStr(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
  protected
    Procedure   Output(Const Context:PRMLParseContext;Const Value:String);
    Procedure   RegisterProperty(Const Name:String;Const DataType:TRMLDataType;
                Const _Read:TRMLReadProc;Const _Write:TRMLWriteProc);
    Procedure   RegisterMethod(Const Name:String;
                Const Syntax: Array of TRMLDataType;
                Const Entry: TRMLProcEntry);
  Public
    Property    ObjectIndex:PRMLObjectIndex read FIndexPTR;
    Constructor Create;virtual;
  End;

  TRMLHeading = Class(TRMLObject)
  Private
    FTitle:     String;
    Function    DoSetTitle(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
    Function    DoReadTitle(Var OutData;var Bytes:Integer):Boolean;
    Function    DoWriteTitle(Var InData;Const Bytes:Integer):Boolean;
  Public
    property    Title:String read FTitle write FTitle;
    Constructor Create;override;
  End;

  Function  RMLAllocContext(var Context:TRMLParseContext;
            Const Source:String;Const ClsBase:Array of TRMLClass):Boolean;
  Function  RMLDisposeContext(Var Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;
  Function  RMLCompile(Var Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;
  Function  RMLExecute(Const Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;
  Function  RMLParseEntry(Value:String;
            var Declaration:TRMLEntryDeclaration;var Error:String):Boolean;

  implementation

  //###########################################################################
  // TRMLHeading
  //###########################################################################

  Constructor TRMLHeading.Create;
  Begin
    inherited;
    RegisterMethod('settitle',[daString],DoSetTitle);
    RegisterProperty('title',daString,DoReadTitle,DoWriteTitle);
  end;

  Function TRMLHeading.DoSetTitle(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
  var
    FTemp:  String;
  Begin
    result:=length(Entry^.edParameters)>0;
    If result and (Entry^.edParameters[0].prType=daString) then
    DoWriteTitle(Entry^.edParameters[0].prValue^,
    Entry^.edParameters[0].prSize);
  end;

  Function TRMLHeading.DoReadTitle(Var OutData;var Bytes:Integer):Boolean;
  Begin
    Bytes:=Length(FTitle);
    If Bytes>0 then
    move(FTitle[1],outData,Bytes);
  end;

  Function TRMLHeading.DoWriteTitle(Var InData;Const Bytes:Integer):Boolean;
  Begin
    SetLength(FTitle,bytes);
    if Bytes>0 then
    move(inData,FTitle[1],Bytes);
  end;

  //###########################################################################
  // TRMLObject
  //###########################################################################

  Constructor TRMLObject.Create;
  begin
    inherited;
    FIndexPTR:=@FIndexData;
    RegisterMethod('writestr',[daString],DoWriteStr);
    RegisterMethod('readstr',[daString],DoReadStr);
  end;

  Procedure TRMLObject.Output(Const Context:PRMLParseContext;
            Const Value:String);
  Begin
    Context^.pcOutput:=Context^.pcOutput + Value;
  end;

  Function TRMLObject.DoReadStr(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
  var
    FText:  String;
  Begin
    result:=True;
    With Entry^ do
    Begin
      FText:='Token: ' + edDeclaration.cxToken + #13#10;
      FText:=FText + 'Condition: ' + edDeclaration.cxCondition + #13#10;
      FText:=FText + #13#10;
      Output(edContext,FText);
    end;
  end;

  Function TRMLObject.DoWriteStr(Const Entry:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
  var
    FText:  String;
  Begin
    result:=True;
    With Entry^ do
    Begin
      FText:='Token: ' + edDeclaration.cxToken + #13#10;
      FText:=FText + 'Condition: ' + edDeclaration.cxCondition + #13#10;
      FText:=FText + #13#10;
      Output(edContext,FText);
    end;
  end;

  Procedure   TRMLObject.RegisterProperty(Const Name:String;
              Const DataType:TRMLDataType;
              Const _Read:TRMLReadProc;Const _Write:TRMLWriteProc);
  var
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    //FCount:=high(FIndexData.oiProperties) - Low(FIndexData.oiProperties) + 1;
    FCount:=Length(FIndexData.oiProperties);
    SetLength(FIndexData.oiProperties,FCount+1);
    FIndexData.oiProperties[FCount].oiName:=Name;
    FIndexData.oiProperties[FCount].oiRead:=_Read;
    FIndexData.oiProperties[FCount].oiWrite:=_Write;
    FIndexData.oiProperties[FCount].oiType:=DataType;
  end;

  Procedure   TRMLObject.RegisterMethod(Const Name:String;
              Const Syntax: Array of TRMLDataType;
              Const Entry: TRMLProcEntry);
  var
    FCount: Integer;
    FTemp:  Integer;
  Begin
    //FCount:=high(FIndexData.oiMethods) - Low(FIndexData.oiMethods) + 1;
    FCount:=Length(FIndexData.oiMethods);
    SetLength(FIndexData.oiMethods,FCount+1);
    FIndexData.oiMethods[FCount].omName:=Name;
    FIndexData.oiMethods[FCount].omEntry:=Entry;

    //FTemp:=high(Syntax) - Low(Syntax) + 1;
    FTemp:=Length(Syntax);
    If FTemp>0 then
    Begin
      SetLength(FIndexData.oiMethods[FCount].omSyntax,FTemp);
      for FTemp:=low(syntax) to high(syntax) do
      FIndexData.oiMethods[FCount].omSyntax[FTemp]:=Syntax[FTemp];
    end;
  end;

  //###########################################################################
  // RML util methods
  //###########################################################################

  Function RMLContainChars(Const Value:String;const Chars:String):Boolean;
  var
    x:  Integer;
  Begin
    result:=True;
    for x:=1 to length(chars) do
    Begin
      if pos(chars[x],Value)<1 then
      Begin
        result:=False;
        Break;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function  RMLScanFor(const Value:String;Const Target:CHAR;
            Const Breakers:String;var Len:Integer):Boolean;
  var
    xpos: Integer;
  Begin
    result:=False;
    Len:=-1;
    xpos:=1;
    while xpos<=Length(Value) do     Begin       If Value[xpos]=Target then       Begin         Len:=xpos-1;         Result:=True;         Break;       end else       Begin         if pos(Value[xpos],Breakers)>0 then
        Break;
      end;
      inc(xpos);
    end;
  end;

  Function RMLisNumber(Const Value:String):Boolean;
  const
    CHARSET = '0123456789';
  var
    x:  Integer;
  Begin
    Result:=True;
    for x:=1 to length(Value) do
    Begin
      if pos(Value[x],CHARSET)<1 then
      Begin
        result:=False;
        Break;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function RMLIsBoolean(Const Value:String):Boolean;
  var
    FTemp:  String;
  Begin
    FTemp:=lowercase(trim(Value));
    result:=(FTemp='false') or (FTemp='true');
  end;

  Function RMLisString(Const Value:String):Boolean;
  var
    x:      Integer;
    FLeft:  Integer;
  Begin
    result:=False;
    FLeft:=0;
    (* check left side *)
    for x:=1 to length(Value) do
    Begin
      if Value[x]='"' then
      Begin
        FLeft:=x;
        Result:=True;
        Break;
      end else
      if Value[x]<>#32 then
      Break;
    end;
    (* check right side *)
    If result then
    Begin
      for x:=Length(Value) downto 1 do
      Begin
        if Value[x]='"' then
        Begin
          If x>FLeft then
          Break else
          Begin
            Result:=False;
            Break;
          end;
        end else
        if Value[x]<>#32 then
        Break;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function  RMLParseEntry(Value:String;
            var Declaration:TRMLEntryDeclaration;
            var Error:String):Boolean;
  var
    xpos: Integer;
  Begin
    fillchar(Declaration,SizeOf(Declaration),0);
    Result:=RMLContainChars(value,'()');
    if Result then
    Begin
      Result:=RMLScanFor(value,'(',')',xpos);
      if result then
      Begin
        Declaration.cxToken:=trim(copy(value,1,xpos));
        delete(value,1,xpos+1);
        Result:=RMLScanFor(value,')','(',xpos);
        if result then
        Begin
          Value:=TrimRight(Value);
          Result:=xpos=(length(value)-1);
          if result then
          Declaration.cxCondition:=trim(Copy(Value,1,xpos));
        end;
      end;
    end;
    If not Result then
    Error:='Invalid entry <' + value + '>';
  end;

  Function  RMLAllocContext(var Context:TRMLParseContext;
            Const Source:String;Const ClsBase:Array of TRMLClass):Boolean;
  var
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    If Context.pcSignature=SizeOf(Context) then
    RMLDisposeContext(Context);

    fillchar(Context,SizeOf(Context),#0);
    Context.pcSignature:=SizeOf(Context);
    Context.pcLen:=Length(Source);
    Context.pcData:=Source;

    FCount:=High(clsBase) - low(clsBase)+1;
    If FCount>0 then
    Begin
      SetLength(Context.pcClasses,FCount);
      for FCount:=Low(clsBase) to high(clsBase) do
      Context.pcClasses[FCount]:=clsBase[FCount];
    end;

    result:=True;
  end;

  Procedure RMLDisposeEntryData(Const Data:PRMLEntryData);
  var
    FTemp:  Integer;
    x:      Integer;
  Begin
    (* dispose of condition data *)
    FTemp:=length(Data^.edConditions);
    While FTemp>0 do
    Begin
      Dispose(Data^.edConditions[FTemp-1]);
      dec(FTemp);
    end;
    SetLength(Data^.edConditions,0);

    (* dispose of parameter data *)
    FTemp:=length(Data^.edParameters);
    While FTemp>0 do
    Begin
      If length(Data^.edParameters)>0 then
      Begin
        for x:=Low(Data^.edParameters) to high(Data^.edParameters) do
        If Data^.edParameters[x]^.prSize>0 then
        FreeMem(Data^.edParameters[x]^.prValue);
      end;
      Dispose(Data^.edParameters[FTemp-1]);
      dec(FTemp);
    end;
    SetLength(Data^.edParameters,0);

    (* dispose of sub entries *)
    //Ftemp:=High(Data^.edSubEntries)-Low(Data^.edSubEntries)+1;
    FTemp:=Length(Data^.edSubEntries);
    While FTemp>0 do
    Begin
      RMLDisposeEntryData(Data^.edSubEntries[FTemp-1]);
      Dec(FTemp);
    end;
    SetLength(Data^.edSubEntries,0);

    (* dispose of script object *)
    If  not (Data^.edtype in [etIf,etRepeat,etMethod])
    and (Data^.edObject<>NIL) then
    Data^.edObject.free;

    (* dispose of entry *)
    Dispose(Data);
  end;

  Function  RMLDisposeContext(Var Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;
  var
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    Result:=Context.pcSignature=SizeOf(Context);
    If Result then
    Begin
      Context.pcSignature:=0;
      Context.pcData:='';
      Context.pcError:='';
      FCount:=Length(Context.pcRoot.edSubEntries);
      //FCount:=High(Context.pcRoot.edSubEntries)
      //- Low(Context.pcRoot.edSubEntries) + 1;
      While FCount>0 do
      Begin
        RMLDisposeEntryData(Context.pcRoot.edSubEntries[FCount-1]);
        dec(FCount);
      end;
      SetLength(Context.pcRoot.edSubEntries,0);
    end;
  end;

  //###########################################################################
  // RML core methods
  //###########################################################################

  Function  RMLImplements(Const MethodName:String;
            Const obj:TRMLObject):Boolean;
  var
    FTable: PRMLObjectIndex;
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    Result:=Obj<>NIL;
    If result then
    Begin
      (* get object inex *)
      FTable:=Obj.ObjectIndex;
      //FCount:=High(FTable^.oiMethods) - low(FTable^.oiMethods) + 1;
      FCount:=Length(FTable^.oiMethods);
      Result:=FCount>0;
      If Result then
      Begin
        for FCount:=low(FTable^.oiMethods) to high(FTable^.oiMethods) do
        Begin
          Result:=FTable^.oiMethods[FCount].omName=MethodName;
          If Result then
          Break;
        end;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function  RMLGetMethodEntry(Const MethodName:String;
            Const obj:TRMLObject;var outEntry:TRMLObjProc):Boolean;
  var
    FTable: PRMLObjectIndex;
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    Result:=Obj<>NIL;
    If result then
    Begin
      (* get object inex *)
      FTable:=Obj.ObjectIndex;
      //FCount:=High(FTable^.oiMethods) - low(FTable^.oiMethods) + 1;
      FCount:=Length(FTable^.oiMethods);
      Result:=FCount>0;
      If Result then
      Begin
        for FCount:=low(FTable^.oiMethods) to high(FTable^.oiMethods) do
        Begin
          Result:=FTable^.oiMethods[FCount].omName=MethodName;
          If Result then
          Begin
            outEntry:=TRMLObjProc(FTable^.oiMethods[FCount].omEntry);
            Break;
          end;
        end;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function  RMLCreateObject(var Context:TRMLParseContext;
            Const Objname:String;var outObject:TRMLObject;
            var Error:String):Boolean;
  var
    FCount: Integer;
  Begin
    FCount:=High(Context.pcClasses) - Low(Context.pcClasses) + 1;
    Result:=FCount>0;
    if Result then
    Begin
      For FCount:=Low(Context.pcClasses) to high(Context.pcClasses) do
      Begin
        Result:=lowercase(Context.pcClasses[FCount].ClassName)=lowercase(objName);
        If result then
        Begin
          outObject:=Context.pcClasses[FCount].Create;
          Break;
        end;
      end;
    end;
    If not Result then
    Error:='Unknown class <' + Objname + '>';
  end;

  Function  RMLAddEntry(var Context:TRMLParseContext;
            Var Declaration:TRMLEntryDeclaration;
            Root:PRMLEntryData;var NewEntry:PRMLEntryData;
            var Error:String):Boolean;
  var
    FCount: Integer;
    x:      Integer;
    FTemp:  String;
    FLen:   Integer;
    FPar:   PRMLParameter;
  Begin
    Result:=Root<>NIL;
    If result then
    Begin
      (* create new entry *)
      new(NewEntry);

      (* Reset entry record *)
      NewEntry^.edType:=etAssignment;
      NewEntry^.edObject:=NIL;
      NewEntry^.edMethod:=NIL;
      SetLength(NewEntry^.edConditions,0);
      SetLength(NewEntry^.edParameters,0);
      SetLength(NewEntry^.edSubEntries,0);

      (* Set basic values *)
      NewEntry^.edParent:=Root;
      NewEntry^.edContext:=@Context;
      newEntry^.edDeclaration:=Declaration;

      (* insert entry into parent *)
      FCount:=Length(Root^.edSubEntries);
      SetLength(Root^.edSubEntries,FCount+1);
      Root^.edSubEntries[FCount]:=NewEntry;

      (* tokenize *)
      If declaration.cxToken='createobject' then
      Begin
        NewEntry^.edtype:=etCreate;
        Result:=RMLCreateObject
          (
          Context,declaration.cxCondition,
          NewEntry^.edObject,Error
          );
      end else

      if declaration.cxToken='if' then
      Begin
        NewEntry^.edtype:=etIF;
        NewEntry^.edObject:=NewEntry^.edParent.edObject;
      end else

      if declaration.cxToken='repeat' then
      NewEntry^.edtype:=etRepeat else

      Begin
        (* method call? Make sure entry object supports this *)
        Result:=NewEntry^.edParent.edObject<>NIL;
        If Result then
        Begin
          (* check if object supports the method name *)
          Result:=RMLImplements(declaration.cxToken,NewEntry^.edParent.edObject);
          If Result then
          Begin
            (* Query object for method entry *)
            Result:=RMLGetMethodEntry
              (
              declaration.cxToken,
              NewEntry^.edParent.edObject,
              NewEntry^.edMethod
              );

            If result then
            Begin
              NewEntry^.edtype:=etMethod;
              NewEntry^.edObject:=NewEntry^.edParent.edObject;

              (* now parse the parameter conditions *)
              x:=0;
              While x<Length(declaration.cxCondition) do               Begin                 inc(x);                 If (declaration.cxCondition[x]=',')                 or (x=Length(declaration.cxCondition)) then                 Begin                   If x=Length(declaration.cxCondition) then                   FTemp:=FTemp + declaration.cxCondition[x];                   FTemp:=trim(FTemp);                   If length(FTemp)>0 then
                  Begin
                    (* create a new parameter *)
                    FLen:=length(NewEntry^.edParameters);
                    setlength(NewEntry^.edParameters,FLen+1);

                    New(FPar);

                    If RMLIsString(FTemp) then
                    FPar^.prType:=daString else
                    if RMLIsNumber(FTemp) then
                    FPar^.prType:=daNumber else
                    if RMLIsBoolean(FTemp) then
                    FPar^.prType:=daBoolean else
                    FPar^.prType:=daCustom;

                    Case FPar^.prType of
                    daString:
                      Begin
                        Delete(FTemp,1,1);
                        Delete(FTemp,length(FTemp),1);
                        FPar^.prSize:=Length(FTemp);
                        FPar^.prValue:=AllocMem(FPar^.prSize);
                        move(FTemp[1],FPar^.prValue^,FPar^.prSize);
                      end;
                    daNumber:
                      Begin
                        FPar^.prSize:=SizeOf(Integer);
                        FPar^.prValue:=AllocMem(FPar^.prSize);
                        PInteger(FPar^.prValue)^:=StrToInt(FTemp);
                      end;
                    daBoolean:
                      Begin
                      end;
                    daCustom:
                      Begin
                      end;
                    end;

                    NewEntry^.edParameters[FLen]:=FPar;
                    FTemp:='';
                  end else
                  Begin
                    //Invalid parameter error
                  end;
                end else
                FTemp:=FTemp + declaration.cxCondition[x]
              end;

              {
              Validate parameter datatypes here!
              If  (Length(NewEntry^.edParameters)>0) then
              Begin
                for x:=Low(NewEntry^.edParameters) to
                high(NewEntry^.edParameters) do
                Begin
                  newEntry^.edObject.
                end;
              end;  }

            end;

          end else
          Begin
            // property assignment test here
          end;
        end;
      end;

      (* Failed to tokenize? *)
      If not Result then
      Begin
        (* dispose of entry data *)
        Dispose(NewEntry);
        NewEntry:=NIL;
        SetLength(Root^.edSubEntries,FCount);
        Context.pcError:=Format('Invalid token "%s"',[declaration.cxToken]);
      end;

    end else
    Error:='AddEntry failed, root can not be NIL';
  end;

  Function  RMLParseObject(Var Context:TRMLParseContext;
            Const Root:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
  var
    FChar:        Char;
    FTemp:        String;
    FDeclaration: TRMLEntryDeclaration;
    FNewEntry:    PRMLEntryData;
  Begin
    Result:=Context.pcSignature=SizeOf(Context);
    If result then
    Begin
      (* update cursor *)
      inc(Context.pcPos);
      inc(Context.pcCol);

      while Result and (Context.pcPos<Context.pcLen) do
      Begin
        FChar:=Context.pcData[Context.pcPos];
        Case FCHAR of
        #13:
          Begin
            inc(Context.pcRow);
            inc(Context.pcPos);
            Context.pcCol:=0;
            Continue;
          end;
        ';':
          Begin
            Result:=RMLParseEntry(trim(FTemp),FDeclaration,Context.pcError);
            If result then
            Result:=RMLAddEntry
              (
                Context,
                FDeclaration,
                root,
                FNewEntry,
                Context.pcError
              );

            If Result then
            Begin
              inc(Context.pcPos);
              inc(Context.pcCol);

              If FNewEntry^.edtype=etIF then
              Result:=RMLParseObject(Context,FNewEntry);
            end;
            FTemp:='';
          end;
        '{':
          Begin
            Result:=RMLParseEntry(FTemp,FDeclaration,Context.pcError);
            If Result then
            Begin
              Result:=FDeclaration.cxToken='if';
              If result then
              Begin
                Result:=RMLAddEntry
                  (
                  Context,
                  FDeclaration,
                  Root,
                  FNewEntry,
                  Context.pcError
                  );
                If Result then
                Result:=RMLParseObject(Context,FNewEntry);
              end;
            end;
            FTemp:='';
          end;
        '}':
          Begin
            inc(Context.pcCol);
            inc(Context.pcPos);
            Break;
          end;
        else
          Begin
            FTemp:=FTemp + FChar;
            inc(Context.pcCol);
            inc(Context.pcPos);
          end;
        end;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  Function RMLExecute(Const Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;

    Function RunEntry(Const Item:PRMLEntryData):Boolean;
    var
      FSubCount:  Integer;
      x:          Integer;
    Begin
      result:=True;

      Case Item^.edtype of
      etCreate,
      etAssignment:
        Begin

          FSubCount:=Length(Item^.edSubEntries);
          for x:=1 to FSubCount do
          Begin
            result:=RunEntry(Item^.edSubEntries[x-1]);
            If not result then
            break;
          end;

        end;
      etMethod:
        Begin
          {result:=RMLGetMethodEntry(Item^.edDeclaration.cxToken,
          Item^.edObject,FEntry);
          If result then
          result:=FEntry(Item); }
          Result:=TRMLProcEntry(Item^.edMethod)(Item);
        end;
      etRepeat:
        Begin
          //FSubCount:=Length(Item^.edSubEntries);
        end;
      etIf:
        Begin
          FSubCount:=Length(Item^.edSubEntries);
          for x:=1 to FSubCount do
          RunEntry(Item^.edSubEntries[x-1]);
        end;
      end;
    End;

  Begin
    Result:=Context.pcSignature=SizeOf(Context);
    If result then
    Begin
      result:=length(Context.pcError)<1;
      If result then
      result:=RunEntry(@Context.pcRoot);
    end;
  end;

  Function RMLCompile(Var Context:TRMLParseContext):Boolean;
  var
    FChar:        Char;
    FTemp:        String;
    FDeclaration: TRMLEntryDeclaration;
    FNewEntry:    PRMLEntryData;
  Begin
    Result:=Context.pcSignature=SizeOf(Context);
    If result then
    Begin
      Context.pcCol:=0;
      Context.pcRow:=0;
      Context.pcPos:=1;
      Context.pcError:='';

      while Result and (Context.pcPos<Context.pcLen) do
      Begin
        FChar:=Context.pcData[Context.pcPos];
        Case FCHAR of
        #13:
          Begin
            inc(Context.pcRow);
            inc(Context.pcPos);
            Context.pcCol:=0;
            Continue;
          end;
        '{':
          Begin
            Result:=RMLParseEntry(FTemp,FDeclaration,Context.pcError);
            If Result then
            Begin
              Result:=FDeclaration.cxToken='createobject';
              If result then
              Begin
                Result:=RMLAddEntry
                  (
                  Context,
                  FDeclaration,
                  @Context.pcRoot,
                  FNewEntry,
                  Context.pcError
                  );
                If Result then
                Result:=RMLParseObject(Context,FNewEntry);
              end;
            end;
            FTemp:='';
          end;
        '}':
          Begin
          end;
        else
          Begin
            FTemp:=FTemp + FChar;
            inc(Context.pcCol);
            inc(Context.pcPos);
          end;
        end;
      end;
    end;
  end;

  end.

Overclocking Raspberry PI 3, part 2

If you havent read my first installment then head back and read it here.

Right. Overclocking is not something that should be taken lightly. I have seen people get cpu-burn and basically kill their brand new Intel i7 CPU’s – effectively throwing well over a thousand dollars worth of gear straight out the window.

My idea of overclocking is not to push the cpu to the bleeding edge. Moderation is the keyword here. Its like when we were kids and bought trim-set’s for our mopeds and dirt-bikes. Filing down the intake on the cylinder and pumping more gasoline in could get that 50cc engine yielding 70 KPM rather than the default 50. But if you filed even 5mm too much, you could pretty much throw the whole cylinder in the thrash. And if you didn’t get a dedicated cylinder with better cooling — the whole engine would burn out.

The test

You can get some heavy-duty performance test-kits for Linux, but for moderate overclocking I find that practical, hands on testing works just as well. In my case I have used a simple JavaScript demo (actually a port of a JS68k demo to Smart Pascal) that I compiled on my PC and dumped on my server.

On my Raspberry PI I just start Chromium and let the demo run.

Without overclocking I get the following performance factors:

• 1-2 frames per second
• 46-57% CPU usage in task-manager

Preparing the hardware

I bought a simple, cheap set of 3 heat-sinks for around $2. So first order of the day is to get that attached to the 3 chips that more or less make up the Raspberry PI 3b.

Heatsinks + fans all humming nicely!

My son managed to play a cheap graphics card to death earlier, which just happened to have a small fan. So I took that fan and attached it to the heat-sink with a double-sided tape pad, then connected the power cords to the GPIO pins. This ensures a reasonable degree of cooling. Not top of the line liquid stuff – but a lot better than just heatsinks alone. And hey, it’s a $35 SoC, so heat sink pluss fan is pretty much giving it the royal treatment.

That’s one pimped up Amiga 500! 🙂

The settings

Next is to adjust the config file to perform the actual overclocking. Again, I stick to safe values. You could probably push this further by adjusting sdram read and write frequencies — but you may end up burning the whole thing to pieces. Also, the keyword here is “safe”. To much overclocking and the amount of computational errors actually renders the whole thing useless.

Not running out of SD card slots any time soon!

Start a command-line prompt and do:

cd ..
cd ..
cd boot
sudo nano config.txt

Now scroll down until you find

#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.

Replace the values there with:

#uncomment to overclock the arm. 700 MHz is the default.
arm_freq=1350
over_voltage=5
sdram_freq=500
gpu_freq=500
core_freq=575

Next, hit CTRL+X, press Y, then enter to save the file. Now type:

reboot

Performance test

Now simply start Chromium again and run the demo. The performance have now gone up quite considerably:

• 8-9 frames per second
• 42% CPU usage in task-manager

From 1-2 FPS to 8-9 is actually a MASSIVE speedup

Now let’s check the temp. From what I read, the core will blow at around 80 degrees, so no matter what you decide to do – make sure it stays well below that.

Open up a command-line prompt and type the following:

/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

Keep an eye out on the temp, let it run for a while and make sure all is safe

Let’s do some maths

Since the JavaScript demo is a “per-pixel demo”, meaning that it uses the canvas to draw stuff, with a secondary callback cycle applying an alpha clear to give the impression of fading pixels out ( fillrect(0,0,width,height, rgba(0,0,0,0.3)) ) running out of sync — the demo is actually processing millions of bytes per frame.

Just for sake of argument, lets say the chrome window is “1024 x 1024” in 32 bit mode (which is an understatement, but let’s go with that). We then get:

• 1024 * 4 (four bytes per 32 bit pixel) = 4096 bytes per scanline
• 4096 * 1024 = 4,194304 million bytes per frame

There is also a stride offset, but I will ignore that since it probably amounts to about 1kb or less. Right, since we are now drawing 9 frames instead of 2, this gives us:

7 * 4194304 = 29360128 – a boost of 29.3 million bytes per second

Final words

Im sure you can overclock the shit out of this if you really want, but honestly — I would rather have a piece of kit I can trust, that is stable, that dont renders the device useless in six months time – and that gives me that little extra I need for my embedded work (or Amiga emulation for that matter).

Well, that’s it for now — Remember to practise safe hex!

Geek, Wish and Banggood – Scam alert!

Got ripped off? Where is a GIF of wonderwoman to make you feel better

When shopping electronics in our day and age, with our global economy, it’s super important that you can actually trust the companies involved. No matter if they reside in the US, Norway, France or in the far east – trust is a bond that is the basis of commerce.

One of the most read articles on this blog, and that should say something considering I have been blogging on a weekly basis for years now – is my post about the Assassins Creed hoodie scam. If you read the comments you will notice how many have fallen for this scam and that they keep changing name whenever they get too much heat. Thankfully my blog has pretty good coverage, so I have helped save a lot of people out of getting ripped off — which I consider my duty regardless of where you live.

I therefore feel its my duty to warn you about these online vendors as well, namely: Geek, Wish and Banggood. Because having used their services for the past year, they represent probably the worst experiences I have ever had when ordering goods abroad.

Geek and Wish

These two are actually one and the same. It doesn’t matter if you download the Wish app or the Geek app — it’s the same asian online mall, and where you get the impression that you are ordering from a single store (or at least someone who ensures a reasonable degree of responsibility), its actually hundreds of individual stores all cooked together into a single, massive catalog.

In short, asian retailers can register and get their goods included in the single webshop, but they can reside in completely different regions (even nations).

And the rating system that is supposed to protect you is a complete scam as well. I spent the better part of an afternoon looking up electronics, and I found the same comments with different names on completely different products. In some cases they havent even bothered to clean up the text, but had a review for bath-robes on super-nintendo compatible handheld consoles, bicycle lights on green laser products (and so on). So you essentially had a few hundred comments that were utterly fake, rotated and adapted to different products. Some comments were real ofcourse, but you dont exactly trust a store that you know includes fake feedback comments and ratings.

Sadly I noticed this after I had aleady ordered and paid.

As for getting what you actually ordered, well – I am still waiting for my two touch screens to use with my Raspberry PI. It’s now been almost two months since I first ordered, and my email’s to the shop is not even replied to. And the tracking ID for the packages I got in my order-confirmation email are invalid (I tried to use them and they dont work) — so this was me throwing money out the window.

When it comes to what you order and what you get, that is rarely the case. I ordered 2 handheld consoles which was advertised as being SNES and Mame compatible. Quad Core CPU, 1 gigabyte of ram and support for normal TF cards. What I got was a useless handheld that just barely supported Gameboy roms – and it struggled to even start them (!) The menu system was sluggish. So sluggish it was almost impossible to navigate the games that were built into the device. When trying to return this and launch a complaint, the store-salesman replied in chinese to everything. On purpuse, because when I first contacted them they replied in english. It was only when I brought up the complaint that they switched to chinese to brush me off. Basically he just did not care that what I received was not what I ordered. And he made no effort to clean up his mess. In other words: a scam.

When I contacted wish, that has a european contact number – rather than being helpful they just argued against what I had to say. It is by far the worst experience I have ever had with regards to online ordering.

Banggod

This is another, similar concept as wish and geek. The sneaky part is that they have translated webpages that gives the impression that you are ordering from a local branch -or at least within the EU. But on closer examination it is yet another asian mall front. Stores can register and there is no system in place to kick stores out based on feedback – or give them negative feedback that actually sticks.

Here I paid with my credit card, yet they managed to send me a bill via a Norwegian invoice company. And just like wish and geek – they have no interest in your case, they just want to get rid of you.

Stay away

I don’t base my warning on a single case. In all cases I have ordered multiple products, and I have also given each system a second chance. In which they all failed and was useless to me as a customer. As for customer service they exclusively took the store’s side (which is absurd when you have ordered a quad-core cpu based product, and you get something running of a cpu that couldn’t even control a dish-washer).

So you should stay away from these, because you will be ripped off one way or another.

Use AliExpress instead

The only asian store-front I have good experiences with is AliExpress. They have a real comment system in place, and they also have a working feedback system. If a store get’s to many negative responses they are actually kicked out. As such the emphasis is on positive feedback and being honest. A negative score is enough to lose hundreds of sales so naturally they work very hard to make sure things work.

When ordering via AliExpress I have never once gotten something else, I have always gotten exactly what I ordered – and there is also a refund system that will refund you should a store try to cheat you. In fact, money is held in escrow until the package has been tracked to your address and is marked as delivered.

You then have 14 days to demand a refund, in which you have to send the package back and give AliExpress the new tracking number. Once the package has been verified as delivered, you get your money back.

For components I suggest RC electronics. I just dont order that much from china any more because (and I am sad to say this) they have to many scams and you cant trust them. But when I order from asia, its via AliExpress. I have yet to have a bad experience there.

 

The never ending story, PirateLogic evidence claims

Seems like this train never really stops. Despite me telling my side of the story, people still have a hard time believing that Pilot Logic have been so blatantly bad when it comes breaking the law. Not just with my libraries but also with code belonging to Embarcadero.

Back up my claims? Fine.

Fine. I have just uploaded two compare files (out of several) which shows a 1:1 compare between Embarcadero owned VGScene and PL_Orca. If you still think my colleagues and myself lack evidence, then you simply need to download Codetyphon and all its available packages (especially those >= 2 years old) and look at it yourself. Hopefully this will be enough to prove my point.

No wonder they got upset when we started to dig into their codebase. This is just one of many where license violations is the new standard.

You can download two HTML reports from our file-compare analysis here: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/piratelogic/piratelogic.rar

Orca = VgScene = Firemonkey

Needless to say, several people have taken an interest in this case. I am happy that most of those are positive and understand both why I got upset with PilotLogic and also why I wanted to inform the Freepascal and Lazarus forums about the dodgy practices. PL has close ties to the FPC community after all. Why sit and watch a disease infect a healthy codebase?

Considering Orca is a VGScene renamed and 99.9% of the codebase is pure VGScene without change — Sternas is lying his head off. This is a clean copyright violation of Embarcadero IP.

And no, I did not set out to defend this or that – but when people call me a liar without even considering that I may be telling the truth, then I must be given a chance to defend myself. And my motivation was absolutely not to “eliminate the competition” (like some people amazingly declare). What competition? I use Delphi for native work and Smart Pascal for JavaScript. What the hell would Codetyphon have to offer? And why on earth would I be against it when I advocate both freepascal and Delphi pretty much 24/7. The more object pascal compilers and systems the better!

How would you respond when you submit a complaint about your code being taken, and the moderator laughs at you and start to post the address of where you children live? Is that ok in your book? I would imagine most men would respond rather “instinctively” when faced with such actions.

I am so tempted to post the whole nest of pigs, but I will leave it with this. If you have any more questions, just download and investigate the codebase yourself. They have no doubt covered some of their tracks by now – but not all of them.

When the response you get from the lead-coder of Codetyphon when posting valid questions about illegal use of your software, broken licenses and piracy is “close and delete topic” – then I guess that says it all.

You are a bully Sternas. But when you hit me, I will hit back. Bullies don’t seem to like that very much huh?

Piracy kills more than companies, it kills the spirit

With regards to the notion that I somehow sent my complaints to PilotLogic because I was coding a new IDE, I have this to say:

Do you know how long it takes to write a usable IDE? It’s not something you slap together over the weekend. The more complex the behavior you want to deliver, the more work needs to be invested. Lazarus have gone through what? A decade of work before it’s finally reaching a point where it’s polished and stable? Smart Mobile Studio is almost five years old, and the designer still needs plenty of work. The fact that we do live rendering of the UI in separate processes makes it much harder than a vanilla “Delphi” like designer.

It takes time to develop a professional IDE. You know why? Because you have to go through the whole evolution of thought. You end up refactoring as the approach, ideas and concepts mature. The alternative is, like Pilot Logic has done, to take the shortcut: to steal the code rather than go through the evolution themselves. To really work on it and figure it out yourself.

If I removed all moral reservations, ignored and disrespected the months and years invested by others, by friends and companies synonymous with object pascal and the community I am part of and love so much – I could probably make an IDE more or less identical to Delphi in a couple of months. If I could just steal code from TMS, Developer Express, Elevate Software and Lazarus and completely ignore the energy and time their products represent – then life would be much easier. Or would it?

But I can’t do that. I’m not wired like that. Sure I have used a pirated copy of something in my life. Im not even going to deny that. But I have always saved up, months if I have to, and bought every single one.

How could I look these people in the eye at some Delphi meetup or congregation knowing that I have robbed them of weeks, months and years? I would not be able to hold my head up straight in shame. Because when you buy a source-code license, it’s not just a “use and throw away” thing. It is a contract of trust, and a legal and moral obligation to use the technology they have offered you within the bounds of their wishes.

I still remember how tired and utterly exhausted I was after releasing Smart Mobile Studio 1.0. I had worked night and day for over a year. Weekends, nights; I’m pretty sure that product broke my marriage to be honest. I even took out a second mortgage on our house. And I was so proud that despite all the challenges involved, despite all the negative people who said it was impossible we found a way and made it happen!

And I was heartbroken when only weeks after the release I found a cracked version of Smart on DelphiFan.com. They must have taken them a couple of weeks at least to crack it, because they had given up on writing a keygen. HexLicense uses non-linear numbers so ordinary brute-force attacks are rarely successful. On closer inspection I noticed that they had disassembled the whole executable and painstakingly isolated enough code, even padded the executable to make the checksum match. So nothing is un-crackable.The only thing you can do is to buy a window of time before it happens. That window is what makes or breaks your income.

What really gutted me was discovering that people I talked with quite often was responsible for this (one of the hackers was a member of Delphi Developer). Over a year of testing, prototyping, co-operation between Eric Grange and myself – not to mention all the work Jørn Angeltveit from Optimale Systemer had done. He also helped finance the project for 12 long months. We even set the price as low as we possibly could just to make sure piracy would not become an issue. Then a prodigy coder from asia, one that talked friendly with me on a weekly basis, a person I had helped with his Delphi code – decided to allocate time just to destroy our solo release. For what? Five minutes of fame? I would have given him a free copy if he asked me. In fact, I have given away almost as many copies as we have sold. Primarily to kids and people who are in a bad financial spot but who wants to learn pascal.

I can understand that people use pirated software, no problem. But when you see up front the amount of damage it does, especially for a small company – you have to be heartless to continue.

Two weeks is what we got. I lost my house, everything. I had to start from scratch. But it was worth it, every bit of it. Because they said it could not be done.

And that my IDE work, both public and in the labs should in any way pose a threat to Lazarus or Codetyphon, is ridicules. I have a full-time job, two kids and my girlfriend, Smart Mobile Studio on the side – and I have recently started my own company. Not much time left for plotting evil schemes. Darth Vader very thin on the ground. But just why would I want to? What kind of place do you come from where people ruin other people’s work like that? It’s not how I was raised that’s for sure. I just wanted the copyright header in my own code to remain. And it would be nice if you asked rather than just misrepresent my work it as your own. I can’t even believe this is a debate.

Add to that the injury i got 3 years ago when i broke my spine in two places. This has impacted my ability to commute. I have had to say no to several high profile jobs because I would not be able to give 100%. So I declined rather than being a burden. So what kind of person would I be if I sat here plotting to destroy something for others, just to win myself. That is against everything I believe in. And the amount of code, papers and help I have issued over the years should at least give me the benefit of the doubt. Because I havent charged a dime for any of it.

Nor do I sit here and pity myself like a child. If you want it, you will find a way! I was not supposed to walk either – but I’m walking. Funny how the impossible seem to happen around people who refuse to give up. Yet curses rip to pieces the man that fears the dark. Shoot me, stab me, but I will still come after you. No force in nature is stronger than the will of a person who believe in himself. Except the same force in reverse for those that lack vision. All the power of the world is in your own mind. And I will keep doing the impossible until the day that I die – because I can.

End of case

I did not want Pilot Logic’s tendencies to infect Lazarus or freepascal, which it would almost certainly have done had we not blown the whistle on this. So in a way we did succeed. But at a personal cost we should not have had to pay.

Hopefully this time it will stick and the drama factor mellows out.

Apparently I am the devil

This has been quite a week for me. Apparently my post on C# hit a nerve and I have so far gotten around 34 hate-mails. That’s a first even for me. I have been out a rainy day before as we say in Norway, but hate mail over programming? If facts hurt you that much then please seek professional help. With great haste I might add.

Jon is the devil

But the biggest shock was getting a phone-call today. From a friend of mine who runs a Delphi company. They have recently started to use Smart Mobile Studio for some light mobile clients, projects where Delphi would be overkill or to demanding.

A while back he hired a guy from the FPC / Lazarus team (both products that I love by the way!). When this coder, who shall remain anonymous, found out I was a personal friend on Facebook — he bloody went and quit his job!

Just way to go! Group-hug, starbucks on the house and pat on the back

Apparently he could not find it in his heart to work for a company that regarded me as a friend. Because, in his words, I was lucifer himself. Why? Because I pose (in this deranged individual’s mind) a threat to Freepascal and all the work they had done.

I’m not sure what to even respond to this. My natural instinct is to lay down on the floor and laugh until I cant feel my legs, but at the same time I feel a bit sad. Sad that grown men, adults, people who probably pretend to be role models for their kids, can even do shit like this.

That FPC forum again

The freepascal community is widely known as the most unfriendly community in the history of mankind, but this particular case really is the mother-load of insanity. We are bordering on fundamentalism here. You are one AK-47 away from being the first hands on pascal terrorist. With a manifest written in pascal of course. Death to the JavaScript infidels! Node.js must die! Did you see the fangs when Jon smiled? He’s a witch!

Sadly, my involvement with Freepascal and Lazarus is insignificant at best. But they dont like people who hit back when bullied, and this has festered into the conspiracy nutters they represent today.

I once had plans to help freepascal by writing an alternative IDE. Something roughly 100+ other developers also wanted by the way. I also helped out by submitting code to get special folders on Windows, Linux and Unix through a common set of functions. And that’s about the extent to my involvement with their codebase.

Quartex IDE uses both smsc and fpc as its compiler. I never finished it because the fpc guys were utter nutballs about it. But it works, and it works very well!

I also warned them, together with two others, both respected members of the Delphi community, that a popular fork of Lazarus was breaking every possible GPL rule known to mankind (!) — And I did this in order to protect Lazarus/fpc from getting caught in the middle of a potential lawsuit.

If protecting Lazarus from harm is a diabolical, hellish act of evil – then I guess am guilty as charged. And I would do it again because Freepascal and Lazarus deserves to be protected. It is a cornerstone of the pascal community.  It’s only so damn sad that many of its representatives (especially the self-proclaimed ones who couldn’t code a compiler if their life depended on it) practically molest and insult new users for no good reason. So much so that people avoid FPC and Lazarus because of it.

I heard he said that she said that maybe he meant that .. oh for the love of god pick up the phone and get the facts!

But people quitting their job because I supposedly am Lucifer incarnate, that’s a new high. Or low, or whatever comes natural. Coming face to face with mental illness on this scale is new to me, so I need some time to digest this.

But dude, seek help. Professional help. Call your doctor and get a huge glass of Valium, take two pills and contemplate every possible meaning of the phrase “social refactoring“.

You need to set some serious break points in your reasoning. Because quitting your day job over a misunderstanding on a web-forum, that my friend is reason in ruin.

You see, if I was full of shit; If I produced crap code, or indeed – if my predictions and analysis of trends were wrong (which they rarely are) – then you could sink me quite easily. But when that is not the case, when in fact I write pretty good code, when I share my knowledge and help people the best I can, when I keep up to date and invest back in the community I love so much; then the situation is very different.

Mom! Jon made a basic compiler that emits object pascal! That is just evil!

You will discover that I can bite back and be just as nasty as you. But I choose not to, because you don’t treat people like that. If growing up has a perk it’s that you understand the value of kindness and companionship, of community and helping each other.

So why not solve this like a civilized, normal human being? just ask. Give me a call, get the facts. Dont sit there like a 14-year-old girl and base your assumptions on rumors. If in doubt, just call me up and ask. Then we can put whatever misunderstanding there may be to rest. You might even discover that I’m actually a nice guy!

Now back to the Delphi community where people are friendly, positive, creative and easy going!

Why C# coders should shut up about Delphi

When in Rome

Those that follow my blog or know me personally – also know that I don’t go out of my way to be confrontational or disrespectful. I try my best to follow the middle-path, to see positive in all things. But sometimes you face a level of stupid that begs a response. A verbal one. And this is one of those cases.

Lately I see more and more Delphi developers getting into debates with C# developers, and they are confronted with an attitude and belief-system that quite frankly is utter nonsense. It’s not based on history or facts but disputes rooted in childish “isms”. A mix of old habits and an unhealthy obsession with the notion that new means better.

It is nothing short of an intellectual emergency.

Old is bad?

If that is the case then C/C++ should be utter shit, because C is 3 years older than Pascal. Pascal was created to replace C and get away from (amongst other things) the absurd and time-consuming header file practice, not to mention the recursive hell that still occur when headers reference other headers and conditional symbols pile up.

Do you know how curly brackets came into being? Jump into your nearest Tardis and set the destination to the mid 1960’s. Not 1969 like Wikipedia will tell you, but a few years earlier. Back when mainframes were the size of Portugal and 1024 bytes of memory made professors all girly inside. You see, back then memory was sparse and pretty much all the languages (or toolkits) needed to save space. So the { } curly’s were used as replacements for words like “begin” and “end”. Why? Because one ascii byte is better than five ascii bytes when there’s only 1024 of them around.

Ps: when I use the word toolkit here I really mean a random soup of asm snippets dipped in venom. The bones collected to make C was actually a mix of homebrew toolkits made by different engineering teams at the time. And each of these toolkits had their own fanclub /slash/ legal representation; because all of them, miraculously, had invented the exact same thing at the same time before everyone else. These guys kept on fighting over who owned what well into the Watcom era. It’s probably the longest standing demonstration of a grown-up tantrum since the roman emperor caligula outlawed clothes.

Fast forward to 1970 and the amount of memory on mainframes had already doubled a few times just like Moore had predicted five years earlier. The C standard that Dennis Richie had painstakingly wrangled from the cold, greedy hands of grumpy old technicians was due for an upgrade. Tests were done by very dull, very serious men in grey clothing – and in their horror they discovered that human beings would interact with english words and phrases faster than symbols and glyphs. So a word like “begin” would be picked up by the brain faster than {. It is just knockout stuff isn’t it.

You cannot praise Anders as a genius architect and at the same time throw his life work in the thrash. Perhaps you should ask yourself why Anders loved object pascal so much that he dedicated half his career making sure universities had access to it.

Living on the edge with a red tie, Nicolaus Wirth rocks the scene!

Enter Niklaus Wirth, a man so clever and academic that he doesn’t catch exceptions; He is the exception. But next to his colleagues over at Berkley our dear Niklaus is the proverbial rock-star. He decided that in order to make programming more accessible for students, easier to learn and above all, establishing a standard for safer code, that they should take science to heart and include that in a programming language design. So he put on his gravest lab coat and began to implement “a better C”. Nine months later pascal was born, and to celebrate Niklaus used colored socks that day. A risky bit of business that could get him expelled from the university and cost him his seat at the strangely brown sorority club, in which he was master of ceremonies. But hey, Nikolaus is a rebel and this was the swinging 70’s after all.

My point? This is why pascal uses “begin” and “end” as opposed to { and }. Science. Real science.

Whimsical satire aside: with the knowledge that C is actually older than pascal, not to mention that it is identical in features, depth and complexity– what is it going to be? Do you still cling to the notion that older have to be of less value than new? Or could it in fact be that you havent really looked closer at object pascal to begin with? Have you even installed a modern version of Delphi and given it a worthy test drive? Or do you just speak out based on what you like and know, as opposed to what you don’t know and havent even tried.

My 8-year-old daughter is like that. She makes up her mind about food before she has even tasted it. Surely a trained engineer can do better?

And I say that because — if we follow your line of reasoning, C/C++ should be incapable of producing C#. How can something old and outdated possibly produce something new and exciting? You do know that C# is written in C and assembler right? And that Java and all the other high level languages out there didn’t spontaneously self assemble. They are all written in C, assembler or pascal. And there is a reason for that.

Just like nature have different levels, from particles to minerals, from minerals to bacteria, from bacteria to plants, from plants to insects (and so on) — so does a computer. Each of these levels have laws and no matter how much you want to introduce something from a higher level into a lower level – that’s just not how reality works.

The fact that I have to explain this in 2016 demonstrates how education and academia has degraded after C and Pascal was replaced with Java.

The law is very simple: each level can only emit complexity upwards. So assembler is used to produce C and pascal, C and pascal is used to produce C++ and object pascal, C++ and object pascal is used to bring about every other single piece of tech you take for granted.

So when you criticize Delphi but use C#, you are actually saying “I want a T-Rex to inhabit the mineral world”. It’s just utterly divorced from reality.

It’s like saying Visual Basic 5 is cooler than assembler. You don’t debate with people like that, you just look at them with pity. I don’t know how many years a software engineering  degree is elsewhere, but if you just spent 3 years in college and 2 years at a university followed by one or two additional years getting your diploma – and this is the level of insight you graduate with then I pity you. And I pity your employer because sooner or later you will bring about the apocalypse.

If we apply rational logical thought to the proposition at hand, we cannot but conclude that the notion of “new is always better” is false. It is to mistake marketing for facts and capitalism for science.

Your teacher should have taught you this: “In a computer, like nature, the past is always alive“. Look closely at your brand new pc: Bios, Vesa screen modes, non linear memory, hardware interrupt vectors and a cpu that supports no less than 3 instruction sets. Do you think Windows or the Linux kernel can just ignore this? Why not call up Linus Torvalds and ask him why he’s not using C# in his line of work; or NVidia why their GPU pipeline only ships with C headers and not C++ classes. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that call.

C# is better than Delphi?

Anders Hejlsberg, the father of many languages

Actually, it’s not. What today is known as .net, from its CIL intermediate language right down to the global assembly cache is Delphi. Yes you read that correctly the entire .net product family is Delphi. It was described on Borland’s news-servers years before it magically appeared as Microsoft’s flagship product.

Anders Hejlsberg created and prototyped these technologies while he was working at Borland. And indeed, the father of C# and entire dot net stack is none other than the father of Delphi.

At Borland (in the borland.language newsfeed I vividly remember) these technologies went mentioned under the codename “portable Delphi”. I followed the thread on the news servers for quite some time. It was no secret that Borland was tinkering away on the next big thing, and I believe it was ultimately Borland’s response to Java. Because at the time Java had eaten quite a chunk of Borlands educational seat licenses. And had Anders continued working for Borland, Delphi and C++ builder would perhaps be bytecode based today.

So when you, the C# fanboy, propose that Delphi is somehow inferior to dot net, or that object pascal is outdated and technically behind C# you are not just shooting yourself in one foot, but both feet at the same time. Keep on reading and you will understand why.

But just to make this crystal clear: Anders Hejlsberg is not just the father of C# and dot net: he is also the father of Delphi. And before that he gave birth to Turbo Pascal.

Borland, land of the free

Borland, the company Anders worked for, was put out to pasture by Microsoft. Bill Gates and his thugs launched a financial onslaught that few companies on the planet could have endured. The reason was that Microsoft really had the worst developer tools on the market, while Borland represented the very best. So for a long time Borland was a direct threat to Microsoft. And they were winning every single time.

When Borland later began to flirt with Linux (Delphi Kylix) it must have made the R&D department at Microsoft piss themselves. Delphi is responsible for thousands of desktop applications synonymous with Windows – and if Linux users got their hands on RAD tools like Delphi, they were in a real position to hurt Microsoft. You have to remember that this was before cloud computing. Microsoft didn’t have a fallback strategy and depended on desktop and server sales. Linux could do everything Windows could, but it lacked the desktop applications, the user friendliness and features Borland made simple. But that is a whole different story so let’s not deviate from our timeline.

Weird Science, a fun but completely fictional movie from 1985. My point? People who don’t know how computers worked were actually afraid this pseudo-garbage could one day be real. Just like C# and Java programmers believe they are top-dog, they are in fact standing on the shoulders of giants. C/C++ and object pascal is holding you up.

What Microsoft did was, basically, to buy out Anders from Borland and at the same time attack the company from every angle. Drowning them in bullshit lawsuits, patent claims and all the nasty, cowardly practices Microsoft is renowned for.

Bill Gates called Anders up personally and gave him “an offer I could not refuse” as Anders dubs it in various interviews over the years.

So to put this myth to rest and be done with it: C# as a language and dot net as a technology did not originate with Microsoft. It has Borland written all over it and its architecture is intimately joined at the hip with Delphi and C++ builder. Companies like Microsoft dont innovate any more, they buy competence and re-brands it as their own.

Dot Net framework, you mean the VCL?

If that is not enough, take a long, hard look at how the .net framework is organized. Pay special attention to the features and methods of the base-classes and RTTI. What you are looking at is the VCL, the visual component library, Delphi and C++ builder’s run time library.

There was never any secret where this came from, but it’s not advertised either so I don’t blame people for not recognizing it. But when people start to behave nasty over what should be either a passionate hobby or a professional discipline, then truth must be told. The very foundation of the dot net framework is taken straight out of the VCL.

And why shouldnt it? The whole platform was whispered about under the codename “portable Delphi” to begin with, it was even designed by the same author – so why should it come as a surprise that it’s basically Delphi reincarnated with a different syntax parser? Either way a few bells should start ringing in your head – telling you that you may have been wrong about Delphi and object pascal in general. Probably because you know very little about Delphi to begin with.

So, what you perhaps believe sets C# apart from Delphi, what you imagine gives dot net an advantage over Delphi – is in reality the opposite: it is Delphi. It originated in Delphi, was inspired by Delphi and flows straight from the inventor of Delphi himself. Anders is responsible for two distinct object pascal development platforms prior to working for Microsoft. Take some time to reflect on that.

You cannot praise Anders as a genius architect and at the same time throw his life work in the thrash. Perhaps you should ask yourself why Anders loved object pascal so much that he dedicated half his career making sure universities had access to it.

Strength in diversity

The fact that C/C++ is alive and well today serves to prove my point: age has no meaning when dealing with fundamental technology. These languages embody the fundamental principles of computing. It’s like a force of nature. Electricity was never invented, it was there all along as a part of nature – we just had to learn the principles in order to tame it. And archetypical programming languages is almost the same thing. They don’t grow old because they represent a fundamental level that can never be replaced.

Things are the way they are for a reason. And programmers before you established standards that address things you might not have to deal with, but that’s because they dealt with it before you. Just because you don’t see the plumbing doesn’t mean it’s not there.

These are the compilers responsible for the foundation on which all other languages, operative systems, applications and services rest. Remove those, and the whole house of cards come crashing down.

So C/C++ and object pascal continue to exist, thrive even, precisely because they interface with the hardware itself, not a virtual machine or bytecode format. Delphi as a product is naturally tailored for operative systems, as is C/C++. But that is because we use programming languages to create applications. There is nothing in the way of someone using compilers like freepascal and writing an operative system from scratch.

Ultibo is an ARM operative system written purely in object pascal

By contrast, C#, Java and Visual Basic are context dependent languages. They exist purely in context with an operative system or run-time environment. They can’t exist without these and lack the depth C and pascal brings to the table. The depth to span many levels, from the lowest all the way up to cloud and domain driven programming.

Just look at Android, an operative system written in Java right? Well that’s not really true. The Android operative system depends on a native bootstrap, a piece of code that establishes the run-time environment for Java applications. So when you fire up your Android phone, tablet or set-top box, the first thing to boot is a loading mechanism written in vanilla C. This in turn mounts a filesystem and continues to loads in bunch of native drivers. Drivers for the display, storage, wi-fi and all the hardware components that ultimately make up your SoC (system on a chip).

Its only after this long process that the environment is capable of hosting the Java virtual machine. Then and only then is the device capable of executing Java.

Notice the “C” part of the Java NDK? Wasnt that exactly what Java was supposed to solve? All that hype and here you are, back at where you started!

So Java, which for the past decade or more have bombarded us with advertising like “platform independence” is a total flop! Its like communism and looks good on paper, but once you start testing these ideas in real life – they just don’t work.

Turned out that the java virtual machine when running on small devices like phones and tablets, choked the CPU. Which in turn used more electricity to keep up, which in turn rendered the battery life of these devices null and void. Talk about irony. All that hype and Java couldn’t even deliver its most basic promise: platform independence. And you removed C and pascal from our universities for this? It’s a disaster en-par with the burning of the great library of Alexandria.

There is more than a drop of ego and arrogance in this material. Young people especially like to believe they are smarter than those who lived before them. It’s a very selfish idea that really need to be addressed. Take someone like Alan Turing for example, the inventor of what we call computers today. This man assembled and created the first computer by hand. He even hand carved the wheels that made the mechanism run (which was mechanical during the second world war). I would happily bet $1000 that Alan could out program the lot of us had he gotten the chance. He has been dead for many years, but to imagine yourself smarter or more capable than him would be the definition of arrogance.

PS: This is where we come into the realm of wisdom versus knowledge. The difference may be subtle, but it’s so important to distinguish between them.

C# would have been a sad little language without the work of this man, Miguel de icaza

Either way without the native context to support it Java turned out to be a blundering behemoth. And its the exact same with C#. This is why Miguel de Icaza work on Mono has been so instrumental to the success of dot net and C# in particular. It was Miguel and his team that pushed C# into native compilation versus JIT for mobile devices. C# would never have been allowed on IOS or Android otherwise.

So that is the difference between archetypical languages and context based languages. Hopefully you now see why this negative attitude towards Delphi and object pascal doesn’t make sense. It really is just as stupid as these cults that believe in dinosaurs and that human beings once lived side by side with a T-rex. Anyone with a highschool diploma should instinctively know better.

The problem is when people in great enough numbers start to believe in this nonsense, because then they can actually damage important mechanisms of our eco-system. Insane beliefs really is dangerous both socially and technically.

Grow up!

I have no problem using C# and consider it a valuable tool in my toolbox. Same with Delphi. But when it comes to kick-ass desktop applications for Windows and OS X, Delphi has no rival. It gives you a productive edge that I havent found in any other language. And I don’t base that on preference. I base that on engineering and the years of development invested in Delphi by both Borland and Embarcadero.

I just find it odd that C# developers seem to lack the ability to speak well about Delphi, because it’s a tell-tell sign of immaturity to be incapable of that. Object pascal and C++ is identical in every way (except multiple inheritance, which even C++ programmers shun like the plague so no loss there). Why then should educated programmers find it reasonable to praise C but thrash pascal? It’s like saying that one car is faster than another – but when you pop the hood they have the same engine. The exact same machine code generator even.  It is psychological masturbation. We are coders, we shouldnt do things like that. We should examine the system carefully and then make up our minds.

And what is a programming language anyway? It is the ability to describe the solution to a problem. The ability to define and control how a series of activities execute. Each language represents a methodology for solving problems. A mindset. Nothing more.

Languages like C, C++ and object pascal will always exist, they will always thrive, because they are instrumental to everything else (desktop, operative system, services, everything that makes a computer capable of what it does). It doesn’t mean that Delphi is the solution to all problems, far from it. And that is ok.

Context based languages are more often than not designed for a purpose. Java was initially designed as a network language. This makes Java infinitely more suitable for dealing with that line of work. You can do the exact same in C but you would have to add a few libraries and establish a platform. Which is exactly what C and pascal is good at, implementing fundamental technology. Object pascal is a language you would use when creating other languages. C is more popular for virtual machine development, no doubt there, but there is nothing in C/C++ that you wont find in object pascal.

Interestingly, languages that many believe is long since extinct, like Cobol, are actually alive. Cobol was created to deal with large stacks of numbers and to push associated data through formulas. That is its context and no other language is better suited for the banking sector than Cobol. Which incidentally is the one place where Cobol is used to this day. And why not? Why waste millions trying to hammer in a nail with a hacksaw? Why not use a language especially designed for that purpose? SQL is likewise a language especially tailored for its tasks. I don’t hear anyone bitching about how old and outdated that is. It wont grow old because it embodies the principle of relational data.

And just what exactly is old about Delphi? Generics? Posix support? Weak and strong references? Garbage collection? Attributes? class, record and enum helpers? Dependency injection? Model view controller frameworks? The ability to write assembler side by side with pascal? The ability to link with C/C++ objects? Cross compilation for Windows, OS X and mobile platforms? What manner of logic are you using where you praise other languages for these features, but for Delphi the same features makes it old? Stop repeating what someone once told you like a mindless parrot and investigate. You are an engineer, a field of science; start acting like one.

In my work I use several languages: JavaScript, Delphi, Smart Pascal, Mono C# and even Python. I have also fallen in love with LUA believe it or not.

For web-pages I prefer Smart pascal which compiles to JavaScript (node.js is fantastic). Then you have shell scripting, a touch of x86 assembly code, a dash of bash on my Linux box and .. well, there is strength in diversity.

It all depends on what is best for the customer and what language yields the most robust solution. Sometimes C# is better suited for my clients infrastructure, other times Delphi makes more sense. But if I was to pick a single language to cover all of them, it would either be object pascal or C++ (gcc). These really have no rivals and will never go away.

These are the compilers responsible for the foundation on which all other languages, operative systems, applications and services rest. Remove those, and the whole house of cards come crashing down.

So using many languages is actually an enriching experience. It brings more depth to our way of thinking and (consequently) affect the quality of our products.

Anyways, I believe congratulations are in order, because if your favorite language is C#, you have in fact been using Delphi without knowing it. There is so much Delphi in C# and they both originate from the same author. So why not pay a visit to C#’s older brother?

So go download Delphi, Smart Mobile Studio, Lazarus and Remobjects Oxygene – enjoy the decades of research and excellence these dialects represent. It wont hurt you, it will probably do you a great deal of good.

The case for Raspberry PI, FPGA and AmigaOS 4.1

First, thanks for so many good comments on the whole Amiga retro-emulation concepts. I think there is a sort of resurgence today of the whole retro gear thing. On Facebook the Amiga forums and groups are growing, and there is really a sense of community there. Something I havent experienced with the Amiga for well over a decade (or was it two?).

To those that grew up without an Amiga we “old timers” must seem nuts. But that is to be expected by generations growing up with 24/7 internet connections. I’m not dizzing young programmers in any way, absolutely not; but I will make a case that you are missing out on something very valuable in terms of learning and evolving your skill.

“It’s just that it’s based on pre-existing hardware, not an imaginary instruction-set that
assaults the stack while raping the instruction cache”

The term “personal computer” (PC) doesnt really have any meaning today. I see that with my son as well. He has no personal relationship with his computer at all. The computer is a means to an end for him and his friends – a portal if you like, to the reality on the internet. Be it steam, Photoshop express, chatting or whatever. Young coders sort of have a split reality, where their friends online that they have never meet plays a bigger role in their lives than, well, their best friend across the street.

Classic Amiga Workbench running under Amibian

People who grew up without the internet had only their computer to deal with. It was the center of music, demos, games and creativity. Be it coding, graphics, sound or whatever was the interest. The result was naturally that you created bonds to that computer that, to other people, could seem odd or silly. But the phrase “personal computer” is not just a throwback to the time when you no longer needed a campus mainframe or terminal. It also hints to a more personal approach to technology. Which is easy to forget in an age where you switch mobile phones once a year, and the average phone has more computing power than was on the planet in the 1970’s.

Amiga emulation; why it’s a good thing

If we forget the visual aspects of the grey “classical” Amiga OS for a moment and put the looks on the backburner — why on earth should a modern programmer or computing enthusiast even consider Amiga OS? What could a 30-year-old tech bring to a modern world of high-powered CPU and GPU driven monsters?

In a word: efficiency.

AmigaOS thrives with just one megabyte of memory. Stop and think about that for a moment. The core operating system itself resides in a 512kb (half a megabyte) ROM – and the rest fits nicely on a couple of 720kb disks. So if we say that a full desktop experience can fit in 4-5 megabytes (if we include the programs, accessories and extras), what does that tell you?

It should tell you something about how the code is written. But secondly it should tell you about how we write code today (!)

“You think Linux is a fast and efficient operating system? You don’t have a clue”

An average Microsoft Windows installation is what? 16 gigabytes? You can probably trim it down to 8 gigabytes by removing services, graphics and drivers you don’t use. There is also a huge difference in the size of executables and the amount of information stored in the binaries — but ultimately it comes down to a shift in mindset that occurred back in the late 90’s: rather than forcing coders to write efficient programs, the emphasis was placed on the hardware to deliver enough power to run crap and bloated code.

Now being a programmer myself I have no illusions that if AmigaOS, this time the modern and latest 4.x version, was ever re-compiled for x86 it would naturally result in bigger binaries. Depending on the amount of drivers, you would probably end up with at least 512 megabytes to 1 gigabyte of software. Add presentation and media to that and we are quickly breaching the 1.5 to 2 gigabyte boundary. But that in itself would be revolutionary compared to the size of Ubuntu or Windows. Yet the core of the operating system is so small that many young developers find it hard to believe.

And yes I know the Linux kernel and base packages can be squeezed down. But in all honesty, Amiga has much more interesting system. Some of the stuff you can do with shell scripting and Arexx on the Amiga, the lack of cryptic complexity, the ease of use and control you as an end-user had; im sorry but Linux is anything but user-friendly.

Why Raspberry PI

By any modern measure, the Raspberry PI is an embedded board at best, and a toy at worst. It exists there between the cusps of single-function boards and a modern computer. But is it really that bad? Actually, its bloody smashing. It’s just that people havent really been able to run anything written specifically for it yet.

Amibian, a debian based distro that boots straight into UAE (Unix Amiga emulator) and runs classical 16/32 bit Amiga OS, presently performs at 3.2 times the speed if an Amiga 4000\o60. So for $35 you will own the most powerful Amiga ever devised. If you take it one step further and overclock the PI (and add a heat-sink so you don’t burn out the SoC) it emulates the Amiga operating system roughly 4 times the speed of the flagship high-end Amiga of the late 90’s and early 2k’s. You also get 32bit graphics, HDMI output, USB device access through the Linux sub-layer, built-in tcp/ip (and WiFi built-in on the model 3b). And naturally: a hell of a lot more ram than the Amiga even needs (!)

AmigaOS 4, not exactly technologically impaired

Now remember, this is emulated on 68k instruction level (!) It is practically the same as running Java or CLR bytecodes (!) Which is a good parallell. People ask me why i bother with 68k; My reply is: why the hell do you bother with Java bytecodes if you don’t have a clue what a virtual machine is! An emulator is a virtual machine in the true sense of the phrase. It’s just that it’s based on pre-existing hardware, not an imaginary instruction-set that assaults the stack while raping the instruction cache (yeah I’m looking at you Java!).

Imagine then for a second what the situation would be if Amiga OS was compiled for Arm, running natively on the Raspberry PI with direct access to everything. You think Linux is a fast and efficient operating system? You don’t have a clue.

I mean, the PI was initially created to deliver cheap computing power to schools and educational centers, not to mention third-world countries. It made big waves as it blew the ridicules “$100 one PC per child” campagne out of the water (which was more an insult to the poor living in Africa than anything resembling help). Yet at the end of the day – what do these third world countries have to work with? Raspbian and Ubuntu are usable, but only superficially.

Try compiling something on the PI with a modern compiler. What would take less than a second to compile under Amiga OS can take up to 45 minutes to build under Linux on that SoC. If a kid in Africa starts learning C++ with Linux on a PI, he will be 59 years old before he can even apply for a job.

AmigaOS 4 is a sexy desktop

If AmigaOS 4 was ever compiled and setup to match the SoC firmware (which is also a benefit about the PI, the hardware is fixed and very few drivers would have to be made), it would revolutionize computing from the ground up. And I think people would be amazed at just how fast programs can be,when written to be efficient – rather than the onslaught of bloat coming out of Redmond (not to mention Ubuntu which is becoming more and more useless).

The benefit for Hyperion Entertainment, which has done a phenomenal job in upgrading AmigaOS to the modern age, are many:

• Increased sales of the operating system
• Sale of merchandize surrounding the AmigaOS brand
• Sale of SDK and associated development tools
• The establishment of a codebase for OS 4 that is modern

If we take it one step further and look at what would be the next natural step:

• Team up with case producers to deliver a more “normal size” case for the PI with keyboard
• Team up with Cloanto to ship the old ROM files for the built-in 68k emulation layer

The point of all this? To build up money. Enough money for Amiga Inc, Commodore or Hyperion to buy time. Time enough for the codebase to grow and become relevant in the marketplace. Once established, to further sale of a dedicated Amiga HW platform (preferably ARM or X86) and secure the investment the owners have made over the years.

FPGA, the beast of xmas future

FPGA (field programmable gate array) is the future. I don’t care how proud you are of your Intel i7 processor (I have a couple of those myself). Mark my words: 20 years from now you will be blazing behind your FPGA based computer. And I have no doubt that games and applications will adapt the hardware to their needs – with possibilities we can’t even dream about today; let alone define.

Mist. A low-cost FPGA computer capable of becoming an Amiga (and about 10 other platforms). The closest thing to new Amiga hardware to be created in 20 years.

Todays processors are fixed. They have a fixed architecture that is written silicon and copper. Once cooked they cannot be altered in any way. Nanotubes is just about to drop, but again the nature of fixed systems – is that they cannot be altered once cooked.

FPGA however is based on gate logic. Which means (simply put) that the relations that make up the internal architecture is fluid, like a million doors that can be opened or closed to create all manner of living space. In many ways its like a virus, capable of absorbing existing blueprints and becoming “that blueprint”. If we dip into sci-fi for a moment this is the computer variation of a xenomorph, a shape shifter. A creature that can adapt and alter itself to become any other thing.

As of writing this tech is in its infancy. It’s just getting out there and the prices and speed of these spectacular devices bears witness to its age and cost of production. If you want a FPGA with some kick in it, you better be prepared to take out a second mortgage your house.

The Vampire 2 accelerator for Amiga 600. This takes over and gives the Amiga so much power that it can play movies, modern music and 3d games faster than ever imagined. At the same time! In fact, I bought an A600 just to get this!

One of the cool things about this hardware is how it’s being used today. One of the first hardware platforms to be devised for FPGA was (drumroll) the Amiga. And you have to understand that we are not talking just the 68k cpu here – but the whole bloody thing: paula, agnus, deniese, fat agnus and the whole crew of chips that made the Amiga so popular in the first place. All of it coded in gate-logic and uploaded to a cpu that with a flick of a switch can turn right around and become an x86 pc, a PPC Mac, a Commodore 64, a Nintendo 64 or whatever tickles your fancy.

Lets stop and think about this.

Today we use virtual machines to mimic or translate bytecode (or pre-existing cpu instructions). We call these solutions by many names: virtual machine, emulator, runtime – but its all the same really. Even if you slap a JIT (just in time compilation) into the mix, which is the case of both emulators, Java and .NET compilers — it still boils down to running an imaginary (or pre-defined) platform under the umbrella of a fixed piece of kit.

Now what do you think would be the next logical step in that evolution?

The answer is naturally being able to sculpt virtual machines in hardware (read: fixed hardware that gives you a non-fixed field). Fixed processors is a costly process. Yet primitive when we really look at it. We may have shrunk the brilliance of the 1800’s and early 1900’s and made all the great inventions of the past fit on the head of a pin — but its all based on the same stuff: physical implementation. Someone has to sit there with a microscope and hammer the damn circuits out (although “hammer” is maybe the wrong word on particle level).

This is also the problem with western culture: the use and throw away mentality that creates mountains of technological garbage – and powers child labour and sickness beyond belief in poor parts of the world. You have six years old kids that work with melting out copper and quicksilver. A waste of life, tech and nature. So yeah, a bit of morality in this as well.

FPGA represents, really, the first actual breakthrough and paradigm shift since the invention of the first electric circuit. For the first time in history a medium has been created that is not fixed. It has to be created of course, and it’s not like its wet-wire technology or anything — but for the first time anyone with the skill to code the gates, can shape and adapt the hardware without the need to cook the chips first.

And they can be infinitely re-used, which is good for both people and nature.

Think about it.. then go “holy cow”.

And that my friend – is the thought of the day!

 

Booting into UAE on ARM/RPI2

I was just about to go to bed, but this info is to important to just leave hanging, so I have to scribble it down here for all to enjoy.

If you own a Raspberry PI and find Linux to be less than welcome, especially in the startup department, then you are not alone. And trying to get the linux gurus to shed some light on how the heck you can alter the boot process is like talking to wizards, pondering the mysteries of kernel callbacks or whatnot.

Ah! The awesomeness! Look at the bones, look at the bones!

But thankfully today, Chips, the author of UAE4All2 (Amiga emulator for ARM) helped me out and gave the full low-down on how to boot straight into UAE with no Linux desktop getting in the way! Meaning: You can now transform your PI into a dedicated Amiga emulator! Once that doesnt start the Linux desktop at all. How cool is that!

For systemd based distros

How to boot directly to uae4arm FOR RASPBIAN JESSIE (and other linux based on systemd). First if you boot to desktop, let’s disable this by entering following line in a terminal:

sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

Then reboot and check: you should autologin with pi user so without any authentication…

Now enter startx to continue customization:

We will add uae4arm at each bash launch (basically each time you enter command line mode):

Enter following line in a terminal in order to edit bashrc:

leafpad ~/.bashrc &

At the bottom add lines to execute uae4arm (update directory as your installation):

cd ~/uae4arm-rpi/
./uae4arm

Next reboot you should enter automatically uae4arm

Initd based systems

How to boot directly to uae4arm FOR RASPBIAN WHEEZY (and other linux based on init)!
Below instruction apply for pi user but you can subtitute for any other user you created.
I prefer to edit files under desktop but you can use any other way too…

First if you boot to desktop, let’s disable this by entering following line in a terminal (raspi-config could be used to… to be confirmed):

sudo update-rc.d lightdm disable 2

Now reboot and check: you should not go anymore to desktop but instead should be ask for login in text mode. So login as pi (user then password) then enter startx to continue customization.

Now open a terminal and edit /etc/inittab by entering following line:

sudo leafpad /etc/inittab &

And add a # at the beginning of the line that ask for login, as below

#1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 tty1

And instead we will auto-login, to do this add the following line just below the commented line

1:2345:respawn:/bin/login -f pi tty1 </dev/tty1 >/dev/tty1 2>&1

Now save and reboot and check: we should autologin with pi user so without any authentication…

Now enter startx to continue customization:

We will add uae4arm at each bash launch (basically each time you enter command line mode):

Enter following line in a terminal in order to edit bashrc:

leafpad ~/.bashrc &

At the bottom add lines to execute uae4arm (update directory as your installation):

cd ~/uae4arm-rpi/
./uae4arm

Now reboot: you should enter automatically uae4arm

For Raspbian jessie, it is completly different since it use systemd instead of init during booting sequence…

Vacation over, let’s get cracking!

My blog has been silent for the past 2 months or so now. Not because I have secluded myself to a cave to ponder the mysteries of Delphi, but because I’ve moved into a cool new flat, been on holiday and spent time with my kids and friends. It’s been hectic, painful (slipped disc), fun, exciting and well worth every second!

Norwegian summers.. some may call it “mild winter”

As always is the case during the summer there is Norway Cup, which is an international soccer arrangement held up here. My son’s club was there and as expected they did exceptionally well (we have an ex pro player as coach). Very proud of my boy which scored 4 goals in a total of 5 games 🙂 It’s a great international event with soccer teams traveling from as far away as Korea, Brazil, Spain and the UK.

Norway cup, memory for life!

This year however they managed to put an amusement park right next to the soccer event, which may have been a good idea on the drawing board – but caused havoc for parents with more than one child. Trying to support my son’s games while keeping track of my daughter, who naturally wanted to visit the amusement park, turned out to be a full contact sport in itself. But I managed to make them both happy using every trick in dad’s book (yeah we went to the amusement park after the matches). And what better way to enjoy people scraming than a spot of sushi!

Sushi time!

Since our landlord doesnt allow cats or dogs as pets, I came up with a novel solution. We are now the proud owners of to chickens. Yes, chickens. I grew up in the countryside with horses, cows and god knows what around me all day long, so a couple of chickens is a must. My daughter seem to enjoy petting them — and hey, free eggs in the morning 🙂

Chicken #1 “Citrus Nicole Hercules”

Oh and I now live 100 meters from the beach! Which reminds of a cliché programmer’s advert back in the 90’s, where you see a coder sunbathing while coding on his laptop. But at least we dont have to deflate the kid’s bathing toys when we go home, we just walk straight into our own garden and that’s it 🙂

2 minute walk for a nice view of the ocean and bathing!

And of-course, a visit to the sanatan dharma temple outside of Oslo was in order!

Haribol!

Well — it’s been a great summer! But now vacation is over — so back to work, back to Delphi and let’s get cracking!

ThISzz Izz Shparhtha!

QTX IDE for freepascal

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks that’s for sure. I’ve been called the death of freepascal, a devil with anterior motives, a civil war monger and much, much more. It’s quite dramatic don’t you think? I mean “civil war” (insert dark voice here) and all that. We are talking about programming languages, not the borders of Bosnia. Yet drama these guys spin like spiders on drugs.

And killing the guy that raises the red flag, when did that become popular? So when I go “yo — there is something wrong here, be careful”, they just respond “Why did you say that, I don’t want to know there are bad things in the world!”. Guess I should be glad we’re not in the army together huh? That could get messy.:”Me: Guys there are mines here, go around, seven o’clock!” — “FPC/Lazarus: Everyone into the minefield and twirk like mad! That’s an order!”.

So the entertainment is priceless. Just wonderful to watch people allergic to the words “im sorry i thrash talked you, my bad, you were right to tell us” squirm around like vipers being cooked alive on a chinese barbeque .. pride can be an ugly thing.

Be very careful when using CodeTyphon, wait until it’s clear of all GPL and copyright violations. I wouldnt go near it personally.

Well, despite all the bad news, the slandering and negativity – I remain cheerful through it all. Why? Because rather than stealing code from others or trying to bypass laws and regulations, I put my time into writing the Quartex IDE from scratch without the help on anyone. And I did that exactly to avoid the awful mess PilotLogic and freepascal now find itself in.

It’s really simple:

• If i need help, I ask politely
• If i want to use a component which is free, I ask politely
• If i want to use a full GPL piece of code, I still ask politely!
• I dont remove author names, but instead put them in the About box to respect the authors, thanking them for their work
• I try to solve things first myself before asking for help
• I use standard packages like SynEdit and Jedi exactly to avoid GPL/copyright problems

Incidentally I was trying to stop problems from happening, but everyone needs someone to blame so if blaming me for pointing out copyright theft and GPL violations — whatever makes you happy I guess. I honestly don’t care any more what happens to these systems. I should not have wasted my time trying to help FPC/Lazarus and CodeTyphon. I guess there is a reason these groups have a bad reputation – sadly I have them the benefit of the doubt.

The best comment on the FPC forum must have been “Who has given you the right to prosecute pilotlogic!” — well, in that case: who has give you the right to make FPC better? Because protecting FPC was what I was doing. So who the hell made you king and decided that you could fix bugs? Do you think you’re better than anyone else?  Huh? — that’s the kind of insane thinking I’m faced with. It’s just unbelievable.

QTX for freepascal

That would be a no I think. Since people actually believe that I am a devil incarnate in all of this, it would only serve to make their insanity a self-fulfilling prophecy. And QTX will render Lazarus useless, so … dont think they would be to happu about that either. They would no doubt scream “I told you so, he was plotting this all along!”. Which is fun because I’m not that diabolical even on my best of days, I couldn’t because there is a limit to how much evil scheming I get done with 3 kids, homework, brownie baking and a full time day job as a C# programmer.

Freepascal is a great product, but the forum is full of “characters” which do more harm to the product then good.. All projects get’s nutcase “groupies” but usually the leaders have the sense to get rid of them. This has sadly not been the case here

So, I guess the plans to support freepascal has to be canceled. Which is really a shame because I truly believe in FPC/Lazarus as a universal platform. QTX would sort of be the icing on the cake. And even if you don’t like it – it would still be good to have it, because the more alternative we have the better.

But nope, I will not be supporting freepascal or lazarus after all. If people want it they can ask of course, I might change my mind in a couple of years; but right now I wont go near that copyright mess with a 10 foot pole. Nor would I support people who verbally abuse supporters when trying to help them (months in advance btw). They can blame themselves. A user group that hostile serves little or no purpose what so ever.

Alternatives

But there are always solutions for those that look; in heaps and buckets. QTX is designed to be a transcending platform, meaning that it compiles to an intermediate format (LDEF) which in turn can be represented in other languages through a code-generator API. A bit like .net but on source level rather than binary.

This means that I will be focusing on vanilla C++, shipping QTX with the free GNU C++ compiler, which is the fastest most widely developed and used compiler in the world. And I do believe it has the widest support for hardware out there as well, so it’s not bad news at all.

So to sum up:

• You write object pascal just like Delphi or FPC
• The compiler compiles to LDEF
• LDEF is compiled into C++
• C++ is compiled to machine code using the free GNU C++ compiler
• Voila, you have a free path on both Unix, Linux, Windows, OS X and pretty much every platform out there

What have you been doing lately?

That is a good question. I have been very busy with my day-job coding in C# so there has been limited time for personal projects. But last weekend I added a new cool feature to QTX, namely a second way of opening units by cursor.

QTX is still young, but packs a mean punch

You know that you can CTRL + Click on a unit-keyword and the IDE opens the file automatically for you right? Well, what if that unit is a part of a package? Wouldnt it be great if the IDE not just opened the file – but mapped the file to the treeview so you can see all the files? This is optionally of course, but it will save you a lot of time when writing packages yourself or porting packages from Delphi/FPC.

This is a humble change I agree, but sometimes making the ground-level functions rock solid is valuable. It’s exactly those functions that have been crashing Lazarus for ages. Lazarus is really only perfect on Linux, on Ubuntu for instance it’s just bloody brilliant and really hits the mark. But on OS X and Windows it’s often the small functions, those you take for granted that crash and burn.

So I’ll be spending a few extra months before alfa release just doing those functions really well. The advanced stuff can wait. I’m going for stable and rock solid over super-modern and unstable.

Is native outdated? Debate!

I sort of subscribe to the chaos theory

Life has its ups and downs, but this one is a case that really makes me stop and think. They say the moment you reach 30, you lose your immortality. In the sense that you no longer regard yourself as immortal, infallible and a list of other power-words. It’s the age when you realize that you are no longer in the front-seat of all things new and bright, and that in fact you are heading for death.

With that gloomy intro, here is the pickle that has made me really question what programming and being a “native” developer means: Is native code outdated? I write that because the more young programmers I meet, the less native code I encounter. And it’s really scary! I mean how do you build a custom server? Not just a server that does something different, but a truly custom, never before done, truly unique and brand new – without the speed power that native code provides?

But these kids have a completely different take on it, which makes me feel so very, very old. But it also makes me want to educate them about the differences, with limited success so far.

Once in a while I meet up with younger programmers, some at work and others through IRC or Facebook to check out the latest developments. It’s mostly open forum so everyone posts ideas, links, code, references – and we all bitch and moan about what we don’t like (or envy I guess, people do that as well online).

What throws me is that native code is taking up less and less space in the minds of young programmers. Programmers who, unlike our generation I presume, have primarily grown up with free development tools and open-source libraries. So in their mind paying for anything related to programming is just not where it’s at. Perhaps this is why Microsoft has suddenly transformed into the sugar daddy of high-tech? Time will tell perhaps.

But either way, the majority of these free tools must be running on what ultimately has be, it bloody has to be (!) native code. I accept that the platform itself can be script based, perhaps generating bytecodes or p-code. But native must by virtue of how the hardware is designed, remain relevant. Right?

The p-code thing

If you don’t know the difference between byte-codes and p-codes,  they are essentially the same thing. But instead of representing your commands as bytes and small records, like say java or dot net does; P-codes have bytes which represents offset values into a runtime library. So instruction $0001 would execute command #1, and $000F would execute command number 15 (or 16 if you count from zero). The downside of p-code compilers is that they are extremely fragile. If you alter even a single byte the whole system can crash, so modern implementations use CRC and checksum validation before executing.

Since a p-code represents an offset into an array of pointers, they execute extremely fast. In many cases it can be hard to distinguish native programs from well written p-code programs. It depends wildly on the language at hand naturally, but all in all p-codes just pounds every ounce of clock cycles out of the processor.

The downside is that it’s fragile like hell. A single altered byte in a p-code program can crash the program with spectacular access-violations. Hence modern implementations are often cluttered with CRC checks and identifiers. But they are fast, much faster than translating byte-codes.

Right, now back to the topic at hand.

Is the future scripted?

A part of me want to say yes, because there is more than enough power in modern script-engines to create really powerful desktop applications, services and/or games. But a script engine can’t write itself. You can’t write a script engine in JavaScript because sooner or later someone has to write JavaScript, if you get what I mean. Somewhere along the line a programmer has to use a language which compiles to native, be it C / C++, object pascal or some other native language. I even remember a guy writing his own operating system in BlitzBasic, but he used like 70% inline assembler so I’m not sure he qualifies as a basic representative.

So while it’s tempting to say yes, considering the widespread adoption of languages like python, pearl, ruby and javascript – it just can’t be true. And that statement has launched an avalanche of well-meaning but ignorant feedback from my younger friends; who doesn’t know what native is all about and as such protect their faith in scripting to the death.

So no. You can’t get through to them.

The smart thing

Since myself and the group of programmers I work with are marketing object pascal as the best language for web and cloud development; and we have adapted object pascal to be more in-tune with how development in our day and age works, like anonymous procedures, records, properties and whatnot — i should be pro 100% script right?

Well I’m not. Smart Mobile Studio represents, in my view, one of the best solutions for writing cloud based software. Primarily because you have full access to nodeJS, which in turn mean you can write both the server and client from the same codebase.

The secret lab that shall not be named

But it’s only the best solution because the medium, namely the browser and JavaScript, is so fluid and flamboyant in nature. You can do some tricks in JavaScript that would be suicide under native languages, but in the padded room of JavaScript everything goes.

But does that mean I have become sort of “anti native code”? Absolutely not. In fact I love Delphi to pieces, and C# (native mono compilation) and I even have an off the record love affair with C++. First of all because it’s the only thing I know how to do, part from JavaScript which I’m very, very good at. But I also think it’s important for all of us to get our ducks in a row.

The view I have is that scripting is not really programming is it? I mean “really” programming. Scripting for me is a bit like sculpting. You sit down and sculpt data structures and setup boundaries using a language which, subjectively speaking, is the intellectual equivalent of putty rather than brick. So it’s a bit like carving a madonna out of a piece of soap versus a solid piece of engineering forged in steel.

Or how about this: native programming is a bit like coding a gene-pool, while scripting is the same as body-building. With scripts you carve out the form, the relations and setup the pathways between them. But without the underlying generic programming, there would be no intelligence or program to carry out the build-plans to begin with.

Native languages feel more edgy to me, more solid and concrete. You can’t cheat and get away with it under native object pascal or C, because it wont even compile. You are also closer to the hardware since the code you write is ultimately the binary pattern fed to the processor. While scripting languages are.. well, fed to a dispatcher after going through a lookup table.

A young solution

I really am amazed by how the younger generation solve things, because they are – without knowing it – doing a better job than we did 20 years ago. Instead of writing a server from scratch like we would probably do for a new piece of technology, they implement the “new” bit using the protocols already in place. So they get the job done, but in a way very different from ours.

So the new server is not a new server, it’s the same old HTTP server you have been using for 15 years, except now the URL’s are command and form-fields are parameters. Things like REST was not invented by a seasoned developer, it’s actually a perversion of the HTTP protocol if you like. But it works, and it’s even turned into a standard now.

Kids are growing up with pre-fabricated clouds where we had Atari and C-64.

Same with python. You dont setup a cluster with C or object pascal, no you use python and it will execute parts of the same program on different computers to spread the payload. And that makes sense, since native code would be much harder to disperse over X number of nodes. So suddenly scripting makes sense over native. At least in that particular scenario.

The only real problem with “young thinking” is that it doesn’t generate money the same way we are used to. When you use only free compilers, editors and server kits – how will a young developer approach systems like Delphi?

I really want Delphi to survive and I want the object pascal language, be it Smart Pascal, FPC or Delphi or Oxygene; I want it to thrive. I want young programmers to see and experience how rich and beautiful object pascal is and how much it can do for them; and also how much they can deliver through that language.

But how can you even hope to persuade a young man or woman who makes less than $800 a month to fork out $3000 for a development system all their friends call “old and outdated”?

AppMethod is cool. It’s cheap, its affordable and students and hobbyist programmers can pick it up. It’s still a bit pricey compared to Smart Mobile Studio, but I hope Embarcadero makes enough money to keep going.

Last pondering

Smart Mobile Studio is probably more in tune with the new reality, since the kids growing up now are in fact growing up with “the cloud” as their foundation. Remember we grew up with commodore 64, Atari and those kind of things. Our children are growing up with cloud servers, JavaScript powered phones (Mozilla phone), Linux and the open source movement.

Perhaps I should just forget trying to make sense of their thinking. Trying to enumerate all the technological changes I have gone through from childhood to now is exhausting. I tried to tell my son what a modem was and how we connected to the internet no longer than 15 years ago — he just looked at me with big eyes and went “Dad. Please. Its ancient history”. And my daughter found a cassette tape and could not imagine what it was. She thought it was scotch tape 🙂

It’s just so weird realizing that my kids have no idea what a cassette tape is and will never have first hand experience of a modem!

I guess we all play our part.

My part is to try to get object pascal kicking and screaming onto the cloud. I am content with that role and think it’s a privilege to even be mentioned in the history of object pascal. But a future based on scripting? I sure hope not!

What are the kids using?

When it comes to languages, I can honestly say that the official list is wrong. Dead wrong. One language may have more source online that others, but that doesnt mean it’s less used. It depends completely on what group of people use it and what it’s used for. A language used primarily for commercial applications will by nature have less code in the public domain than a language which is free, open-source and generally available.

This is the case we see with Delphi. There are probably hundreds of thousands of companies using Delphi in the world, but they use Delphi to produce closed-source products. As such their code never leaves the house (so to speak) and you wont find it on github, sourceforge or google code.

But having talking to probably hundreds of teenagers coding lately, here is my general impression, in order of magnitude

• JavaScript
• Php
• Python
• Ruby
• Swift
• C# and dot net
• C script
• Erlang and friends

Of native languages the list havent really changed that much over the years:

• C++
• C
• Objective C
• Object Pascal

The javascript thing is the one to watch. Not just because that’s where I’ve invested my time and money, but because no other language is seeing anything near the amount of attention JS is getting. Not even close. And the two basic platforms is the browser, which for kids is regarded as the operative system itself (conceptually, not factually ofcourse). The browser IS where you experience computing and connect to the world.

The second aspect and one I find very exciting myself, is the nodeJS side of things. Here we are seeing a tremendous growth compared to other technology. And the reason is exactly because it’s connected to the first-hand experience people have. Those who master the browser and the DOM will eventually be able to reach customers and create systems which are platform independent, international and dynamic.

Do we have anything to learn from this? Bucket loads! But we should never lose sight of the fact that we also have much to teach.

And with that my pondering stops for today 🙂