Ruminated Rumblings

A few weeks ago I started down the path of discovering how to GeoCode addresses for Delphi. This is related to a project we had where we wanted to show a map of a given point and then show facilities located near it on a map. I had originally started working with maps.live.com (which is a MS site). They have a decent little interface for JS that seemed to work for what I wanted AND I didn't have to store the annoying little GeoCoding addresses anywhere. This works great if all you want is a single address. For instance, the code below works for single addresses: < html > < head > < title > Address Lookup </ title > < meta http-equiv ="Content-Type" content ="text/html; charset=utf-8" > < script type ="text/javascript" src ="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6" ></ script > <script type= "text/javascript" > var map = null ; ...

Serge Dosyukov recently posted about the speed of the Delphi installer. While I agree that it's annoying to have to wait for the initial installation, I find that one of the largest failures in most development environments (including Delphi) is uniformity in a group setting. For some reason, you can use products like subversion to manage your source code, but there is no product to standardize and manage your development environment. In our case, we have a handful of developers who all are working on different aspects of a large application (>1 million lines of code). We need to be able to manage the third-party add-ons and Delphi patches in a uniform way. The only method of doing this (to my knowledge) is to carefully install everything in the same paths and, usually, same order. At one point I thought we could be clever and tried to install all add-ons to a networked drive for every workstation to minimize the amount of thrash we encounter when installing SP for the add-ons....