SuperDuper! vs Carbon Copy Cloner

I've been using SuperDuper! for quite a while now. But once in a while the incremental backups fail. I haven't found a satisfactory explanation, so I started looking for a replacement. David Dean suggested Carbon Copy Cloner which is what I now use.

June Photo of the Month

This photo was taken at Año Nuevo State Reserver. Wikipedia also has a good bit of information on Año Nuevo. This is one of the most amazing parks to visit. These little pups just roll all over one another.

California with it's sizable budget problem is entertaining the possibility of closing over 80% of the parks, including Año Nuevo State Reserver and every beach and park in and around Santa Cruz. Most of the photos you see on my website are taken at these parks and every year I buy a State Parks pass to support the parks. Who knows what will actually happen. Only time will tell, but needless to say I really hope they find another solution since overall the closure will do more harm than good. You can read up on the potential closing here.

In other news, the National Parks will be free to visit three weekends this summer. Check out
Fee-Free Weekends In Your National Parks.

Touch

At 5pm today I presented my talk on Touch at Delphi Live!. This is all raw, straight from the labs, by the Delphi frameworks team, which I'm part of now. Everyone seemed excited. The energy level was pegged on excitement. After all, this is some cool stuff. I'd like to thank everyone for attending the session and for packing the room. Standing room only it hot! Temperature wise that is.

So check back for more low down on Touch.

Peace out Delphi Live!.

Delphi Live! on Twitter

I haven't had a chance to make it to Delphi Live! yet, partially because the the VCL team and I were working pretty late to get the demos that Micheal Swindell showed off, but if you aren't following Delphi Live! on twitter head over to #DelphiLive.

Thanks guys for the tweets! And I'll see you a bit later today. Right after I finish a few last minute things myself :)

Oh, one last thing. All those photos in Michael's talk were taken my yours truly.

Only a couple more days before Delphi Live!

Engineers from around the world are already flying in building up the excitement for Delphi Live! in the halls around here so this should be a fun week. It's also been quite a while since I've been able to meet our customers face to face so come by and say "hi" at beatmeet the team on Thursday at 7:30pm to 8:30pm. If I yawn it's not your fault, having a two year old at home I normally head to bed pretty early.

Friday will be another exciting day with my talk from 5.00pm to 6.15pm. I really wish I could say something more about this talk other than it's straight from the Embarcadero Labs so it's pretty raw! Raw is good.

I never thought I'd be doing this, but I've been using Google Docs to create my slides for Delphi Live!. I can't believe how well it's worked to give other team members direct access to the slides for feedback. My only complaint is the PDF conversion looses the Courier font.

What Windows really Needs

I've been using Windows 7 beta and now the RC since the beginning of the year. Today I had to tweak some things that I'm surprised weren't just working out of the box when I realized something. Every version of Windows just piles more into the Control Panel without changing what shipped in the previous version. The dialog that shipped in the previous version becomes the "advanced" version and a new version is introduced, possibly with some of the same options. Way back in Windows 95 many of the properties dialogs made sense, but today it takes a couple dialogs to get to those old crusty ones.

Also, whoever made the decision to set the menus to be left handed by default is a strange duck.

Update: After looking at this for some time this is a few different things that caused some strange results. A bug in Windows, a bug in Delphi action menus and a really odd setting behavior on Windows.

May Photo of the Month

Swallowtail butterflies have always been one of my favorite butterflies. It's very difficult to get close to them. They always flutter away. This photo was taken with my newly purchased Canon G10. I happened to have it on my person when getting out of my car here in Scotts Valley and there it was sitting next to my house. The photo you see is pretty much right out of the camera. I only applied a little bit of sharpening and levels.

Little known fact: if you spend enough time with them you can become very allergic to them.

Opera

In early April I posed that I was using Google Chrome. It was brought up in the comments that Opera has many of the features of Chrome. Honestly, I hadn't realized that people were so attached to their web browsers so I decided to run a test. I've been using Opera exclusively on one computer exclusively for most of April and here are my findings.

Opera renders a page slower than Chrome.

Scrolling a page is way slower in Opera.

I could not load pages from Barrons (www.barrons.com) so I had to use another web browser for this website.

Chrome works way better with GMail than Opera. Two things that bugged me are loosing formatting when copying and pasting and the rendering in general was off. Way off in some cases.

For some odd reason I started using AIM in GMail (I know, don't even mention it), well breaking out the chat from the web browser into it's own little mini web browser chat window doesn't work as it does in any other web browser. Opera goes MDI on me while all other web browsers go SDI.

I've become accustomed to how Chrome opens a new tab via right click open in new tab to the right of the current tab and not selected. Opera selects the new tab which isn't always the choice I want when reading. Typically I open links to read later and continue reading as to not stop the train of thought and have to revisit it later. Opera interrupts my train of thought.

I'd be willing to bet that Opera is better on mobile devices. I'd love to give it a try on my iPod Touch. Safari on the iPod Touch leaves some to be desired.

Task Manager needs the GPU

Here is a screen capture of the Windows 7 Task Manager. I would really like to see a graph of the GPU. The ATI utility has something like what I'm asking for, but I've got NVIDIA video cards. Anyway, just my little wish for the day.

Google Chrome

I've been using Google Chrome since it game out and I really like it.

I like how you can drag the tabs around easily and create a new window by just dragging the tab off the window.

I like how each tab is run in it's own process.

I like the performance.

I find the user interface a little unconventional but it works. The simplicity of it is really nice.

I like the search at the top vs at the bottom like Firefox.

Delphi Tips and Tricks: Quickly Switching Between Chunks of Code

I learned this trick from Chuck Jazdzewski so it's a goodie but oldie and real simple.

If you are working on two chunks of code that you need to go between you can use a comment like this:

  {Exit(0); //}Exit(1);

Remove the first curly brace and instantly and easily your code changes:

  
  Exit(0); //}Exit(1);

There is also a version of this for C++:

  //*
  return 0;
  /*/
  return 1;
  //*/

Remove the first slash and instantly and easily your code changes:

  /*
  return 0;
  /*/
  return 1;
  //*/

April Photos of the Month

I've been really bad with posting photos of the month lately so I'm going to post two. These are from Nā Pali Coast State Park on the island of Kauaʻi near the wettest spot on earth, Mount Waialeale.







These were taken with a Canon G10.