DelphiTools.info has been mobile-enabled thanks to WPtouch, it should now serve a version more friendly to Android-based devices, iPhone & others. The two Android apps hosted here have been updated with QR code links to the Android Market.
I’ve updated the GLScene.org main page with information on where you can find support newsgroups and forums, since the nntp newsgroup went down and are unlikely to come back up (thanks Paul Van Dinther, now from PlanetInAction, for the help in accessing the wiki).
The old site has been resurrected there too, as the wiki engine lost most of the images added during the last years… I’ll be looking into setting up something to replace both with a more functional content manager.
The reason behind this dust being shaken is that I’ll likely be initiating a GLScene for Android project (for Java / Dalvik).
There is something about WordPress that reminds me of Delphi, not the language or the IDE, but the spirit. On the one hand, its a convenient and comfortable environment out of the box, to which ready-made functionality can be easily added, and on the other hand everything under the hood is still accessible and tweakable without having to fork in a major way (like Delphi, unlike most of the rest of them).
Anyway, I’ve added support for printable versions of the articles here, thanks to Lester Chan’s WP-Print, a wee bit of CSS & php tweaking is all it took. Hopefully the dead-tree lovers that asked for it should be satisfied, as well as those few that manually tried to append a “/print” to the url 
This morning while debugging a statistical ichthyo-parser I stumbled upon what looked like a Delphi 2009 compiler bug: the compiler was outputting gibberish ASM opcodes… But after further investigations, it appeared this wasn’t completely gibberish, but that it was (somewhat) correct MSIL bytecode!
What’s more, a quick hexadecimal examination of dcc32.exe yelded that this MSIL codegen looks like it can be forced by using an undocumented command-line compiler switch: -af
The resulting exe won’t run because it’s a mismatch of Win32 headers and MSIL bytecode… What do you think?
Did CodeGear plan supporting unmanaged code in managed executables or managed code in native executables?
Update: here is a screenshot of the switch in action.
SamplingProfiler was initially released in the Delphi ASM newsgroup, and I’m curious about the audience of this website, so I’ve setup a small poll.
How familiar are you with code profiling and/or Delphi code optimization? Can you tell apart instrumenting and sampling profilers merely by their respective heisenbugs, or is that profiler business sounding like a TV series from the last century?
I’ve reorganized the site a bit since the relocation, tweaked WordPress behind the scenes, added OpenID support for comments and hopefully sorted out the over-aggressive spam filter.
The support forums are now also hosted here, no OpenID support for them just yet, but I’ll enable it as soon as it’s out of beta. For bug reports and features/suggestions, the forums are the place to post (easier to track things).
There will likely be a new SamplingProfiler release in the next days, which will add support for CPU-usage-based sampling, ie. profiling only takes place when the CPU usage goes above above a treshold (either at the system or the process level).
MapFileStats is a simple free utility to obtain executable binary size statistics derived from a “.map” file.
Use it to know which units contribute the most to an executable’s size, which DFMs are the largest, which units you have dependencies on but barely use in your executable, or merely to know exactly what gets into your executable.
You can integrate it into the Delphi IDE via the Tools menu, see the MapFileStats page for more details or to the download page and see for yourself!
Previous host experienced downtime issues, so DelphiTools.info has been relocated on a new host. Not everything is back up in order just yet…
Update: download, screenshots & links back online, but comments seem to be lost forever…
Update 2: did some tweaking with the help of YSlow, site should be loading faster now.
Update 3: was able to access the old database, restored the lost comment.
I’ve opened a forum for SamplingProfiler, destined for peer support and bug reports:
http://delphitools.info/forums/
I don’t have any previous experience with freeforums.org as a host, but I don’t expect the traffic to be huge, so it’ll probably be good enough.
Forums are now hosted locally.
Another channel through which you can reach me would be via posting in the CodeGear newsgroups.
http://DelphiTools.info/ shall be the url for this page for the foreseeable future, the one you can bookmark!
When time allows, I’ll post my other Delphi-oriented tools here, hence the name of the site. For now I’ve just added a few links, I’ll be adding more and reworking the site pages as I get more familiar with WordPress.
