Shhhh.... It's vewy, vewy, qwiet awound here... eheheheheh!

OK.. OK.. OK.. I know I've not been as active lately on blogging.  I've been kinda waiting for certain, ahem, events to go down so I'd be able to really talk about that big bag of beans that just got spilled.  However, there's been some non-spin-off related news that I should really point out.  Our very own David Lock has been working on a little side project to create a TurboMan video game!  You can read about it on his blog starting with this post.  Also, unless you've been under a rock for the last few weeks, Nick Hodges has been doing some excellent introductory videos using the soon to be released Turbo Delphi product.  So stay tuned to the Turbo Explorer site and David's and Nick's blogs for some fun and exciting things.  I'll try to keep folks up to date on anything that may be happening surrounding the fact that you "may have heard that Borland is planning on divesting itself of the Developer Tools Group."  I guess you can count this as the calm before the storm?

Some really good press amidst all the Turbo-mania...

This article on FTPOnline, Borland Brings Back Turbo has a very insightful statement:

"For those who might have been worried that Borland's spin-off of the developer tools to a separate company (whose name is still yet to be announced) might herald a sunset of minimum additional development and maximum milking of customers, this announcement should be a welcome relief. This is clearly a long-term strategy. Borland (and the successor company for the developer tools) is not milking the installed base, but rather trying to regrow the community. It is a bold and risky strategy in this era of commodity developer tools, but perhaps the best alternative for Borland and the successor developer tools company to remain relevant."

Bold and risky, indeed.

The Adventures of TurboMan - Part 1

Watch the new adventures of TurboMan!

More Turbo stuff...

Go Digg this article

ComputerWorld Australia: Borland Revives 'Turbo' for developer tools

Long-time Turbo Pascal and Delphi supporter, columnist, and book author, Neil J. Rubenking: New Borland Line Salutes Turbo Pascal Spirit

The Official Press Release: Borland's Developer Tools Group Announces Plans to Rev Up Classic Turbo(tm)

Update 1:

Even Slashdot is getting into the fray: Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video (Remember this is Slashdot we're talking about here.. so there is bound to be some... ahem... rather clueless and uninformed comments ;-)

Update 2:

Now The Register has their entry in the Turbo-mania thing: Borland enlists Turboman for Windows tools

They're baaaack...

Yep.  The rumors are actually true.  There will be "Turbo" versions of Delphi, Delphi for .NET, C++, and C#.  You can read some information here about it:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2000205,00.asp

and here:

http://www.turboexplorer.com

Yes, there will be free versions of the Turbo's.  They're the Explorer editions.  Go to turboexplorer.com to get information and news about the availability of these editions, along with tutorials, games and contests.

More conspiracy... AMD & ATI...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3367&tag=nl.e622

OK... it's getting wacky, folks.  If AMD starts folding in the high-performance ATI GPU chips into either the CPU (interesting...), or into the chipsets (so last century), they could end up spanking Intel's currently integrated graphics solutions... which are marginal at best.  Of course, they'll probably use that nice low-performance shared memory :-(.  2006 is shaping up to be an interesting year on so many levels...

Now.. NVidia fan-boys start slamming ATI, and ATI fan-boys start slamming AMD and/or NVidia...  For me, I marginally prefer ATI over NVidia... however my current laptop (a Dell Inspiron Latitude D820) has an NVidia chipset, but my last few laptops all had ATI (Dell Inspiron D810, IBM Thinkpad A31p).

So does Intel snap-up NVidia as a defensive move or do they beef up the "V//V" (is that veev, or vive?)?  I expect something will happen.

Fun, Funny and The Nod

Recently I've been trying to read the Creating Passionate Users blog more regularly since they seem to always have some valuable insight into topics that range from user behavior to group dynamics to making the mundane fun.  I really liked the posts about Usability through fun which says that it's OK for something that is not normally associated with "fun" to actually be fun.  To some folks, it may be unfathomable to think that some accountant spending all day twiddling with a spreadsheet would ever equate that with "fun."  Likewise, a developer spending hours on end trying to crack the mysteries of some webservice, a database schema, a UML model, or just trying to reduce a poorly written algorithm from order n² to n^Logn, may also refer to the experience as tedious and frustrating, but in the end rate the overall experience as "fun."  Developers are certainly an interesting crew.  The rest of society just looks as us as those poorly groomed geeks hunched over a keyboard in some dark room writing nothing but gibberish into the computer.

So why do so many of us consider this as "fun?"  We would most surely not think of it as "funny."  (Ok maybe the word picture of some tie-dyed, long haired bearded hippie may seem "funny."  O wait... I work with David I ;-).  I remember the first time I encountered a computer and computer programming.  There was a feeling of accomplishment and power after writing my first "Hello World" program.  And maybe that's also part of why we do what we do, we're a bunch of narcissistic control freaks ;-)?  Maybe it's just that we're also a highly creative group that are able to easily tap into both the left and right side of our brains?

This brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while.  How can we capture, identify, and otherwise articulate the notion that programming can be a  "fun" and pleasurable experience?  How can we, as this new Borland spin-out (currently referred to as "DevCo"), get the current and next generations interested in pursuing a career in software development?  What about providing low- to no-cost versions of Delphi, C++Builder, and C#Builder and blanketing the earth?  Clearly Microsoft has begun to go down this path with their no-cost Express editions of Visual Studio and the Coding 4 Fun site.  I applaud their efforts since the more you can grow the total number of developers the bigger the whole pie is and thus the larger "DevCo's" slice can become.  One thing that may hinder some of this effort from Microsoft is their sheer size.  They're a huge monolitic, faceless, unapproachable corporation.  Sure, they've been actively trying to present to the world their kinder gentler side through all the various bloggers and massive PR machine.  But how truly "genuine" is this effort?  I'd like "DevCo" to be the company that is approachable, honest, innovative, highly relevent and above all FUN!  Being associated with "DevCo," either as an employee or as a customer, should be regarded as being fun.  I think we can be a serious contender, and have fun at the same time.

Which leads to my next point; The Nod.  How many of you regard Delphi or C++Builder as your "secret weapon?"  It's your "edge," right?  It'd be cool to walk into a coffee shop and see someone with their laptop open with BDS up pounding out some code.  You'd be able to give them "The Nod."  That unverbalized communication that tells the other person that "you just know" and "you're both in with an elite bunch."  I've had this happen in many other apsects of life.  What about the time you just bought that new car and you know it was one of the first for that model year?  The first time you're driving around town and you see some stranger in the same model and year... You make eye contact and get "The Nod."  I remember when I had just gotten a brand new Ford Mustang SVT Cobra.  Since only about 3500 or so were built in that model year, it's a pretty exclusive group.  So when you drive around and see someone else in the same kind of car, you get "The Nod."  This still happens to this day.  I've gotten and have given "The Nod" many times over the last few years.  Remember the J.D. Hildebrand quote in the old Windows Tech Journal, "It's going to change our lives, you know."?  What is interesting for this discussion is the following quote, which was "He cocked his head for a moment and then grinned back at me, nodding. 'I know.'" (emphasis mine).

Is all of this just some crazed lunatic waxing poetically or just pining for the "good ole' days"?  Maybe ;-)... but try and reserve judgement for a few weeks and see if "DevCo" doesn't start taking steps toward fulfilling some of what I'm describing above.  The "DevCo" team has quite a few rounds left in the clip...

Foxit...

Nick pointed to this application, Foxit that is a light-weight PDF reader... Well I was digging around the site and found out that they have an SDK that allows you to embed a PDF reader into your application.  They even mention that it is fully usable from Delphi.  It's actually really easy if you look at the... ahem... PDF document on how to call into the DLL.  It's just a simple matter of passing in a DC.  So you could just create a TCustomControl descendant and override the Paint method, and pass the Canvas.Handle property to the FPDF_RenderPage() function.  I wonder if Nick realized that they support Delphi?

Conspiracy Theorists Unite!! Microsoft Acquires SysInternals...

http://www.winternals.com/Company/PressRelease92.aspx

I'm leaning toward this not really being a "good thing" in the near term... however it may end up being so in the long run.  I wonder if Mark will still use Delphi for his MMC plugins?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

While we're in a holding pattern regarding the final fate and disposition of the Developer Tools Group (aka. DevCo) at Borland, there continues to be more good news on the hiring front, or should I say re-hiring.  So today marked the return of another former Borland developer to the BDS team.  Some of you may or may not know him, but Lee Cantey has just rejoined the Developer Tools Group.  Lee had been with Borland for many, many years and came up through the tech support ranks.  He's also one of the key developers on the C++ compiler and tools team, which includes BCC, ILINK, TDUMP, etc...  Lee not only carries with him a huge amount of talent, but is brings back a wealth of institutional knowledge.  I'm sure there's going to be more than a few occasions where he's going to hear, "Hey Lee, do you remember where the source code is for <some internally developed tool>?"

It's great to have Lee back on board!