Ruminated Rumblings

For everyone who isn't hiding under a rock, Embarcadero has agreed to acquire CodeGear from Borland. I'm sure all of us who have been annoyed with Borland for the last 5 years are relieved that the other shoe has finally dropped. Why 5 years you ask? Let's call a spade, a spade, and say the last really good release of Delphi was Delphi 7 until Delphi 2007 hit the scenes. That comprises a 5 year window where Delphi basically floundered around trying to be things that the core audience really didn't care about in a way that hurt sales and led everyone to assume that there would not really BE another good version of Delphi... ever. Fortunately, Delphi 2007 came out and changed that. Not right off the bat, it did take a service pack (or two) to get things flowing relatively smoothly, but I think everyone pretty much agrees that 2007 is the version to beat now. The biggest question is probably, "What's the future of Delphi?" Not in a "Delphi sucks" s...

Adding to my previous post on detecting virtual environments, here's the code for detecting Virtual PC. Note that it's a conversion from CodeProject, the original author is here . I also didn't write the conversion, I'm simply accumulating the VMM detection code here. Original credit for the conversion goes to Dennis Pasamore who did the bulk of the conversion work with some assistance from Avatar Zonderatau. Code: function TForm1.IsRunningVirtualPC: boolean ; asm push ebp; mov ebp, esp; mov ecx, offset @exception_handler; push ebx; push ecx; push dword ptr fs:[0]; mov dword ptr fs:[0], esp; mov ebx, 0; // Flag mov eax, 1; // VPC function number // call VPC db $0F, $3F, $07, $0B mov eax, dword ptr ss:[esp]; mov dword ptr fs:[0], eax; add esp, 8; test ebx, ebx; setz al; lea esp, dword ptr ss:[ebp-4]; mov ebx, dword ptr ss:[esp]; mov ebp, dword ptr ss:[esp+4]; add esp, 8; jmp @ret1; @exception_handler: mov...

CubicDesign on delphi-talk.elists.org recently asked the question: "How do I know/detect if my software is running under Windows [or a virtual environment]?" Well, it turns out that it's a lot harder to tell than you would think. Apparently, the VM (VMware, Xen, Wine, etc.) doesn't really want you to be able to do this. At least not easily. For VMware, there is a decent little C routine called jerry.c that does the trick. Jerry actually uses a simple communication channel that VMware left open. It's not 100% foolproof since the admin can change the channel, but that's not likely going to happen unless the system is specifically designed to be a honeypot. If you're running on a honeypot and still have a legitimate reason for detection, you could look at the much more complex scoopy implementation which inspects how the system is actually virtualized using the SIDT CPU instruction instead of a communication channel. Another reference (red pill) is here . F...

Has anyone tried to convert a Western-style calendar to either the Islamic or Hebrew calendar system? I've spent a bunch of time looking for a Pascal unit to do just that so I could include Muslim and Jewish holidays in my holiday class but haven't found any great resources. I finally found some C/C++ code that did the work and converted it over to Pascal. Keeping in mind that this is still a new conversion and that I didn't write the actual conversion logic, I'm publishing the code to help other would-be calendar converters. All of the conversion algorithms (and credit for them) are from Calendrical Calculations by Nachum Dershowitz and Edward Reingold. I added the Day and Month name strings from various Google searches on things like Hebrew Month Names and Islamic Month Names, etc. I've compared the resulting output to both published calendars and to other conversion tools that do not provide their source. So far, I haven't seen any discrepancies other than so...

Having spent a lot of time recently working on a ping scanner using Indy, I noticed that there's a lot of questions still on using SMTP with Indy. Let me first say that I am not an Indy expert. I get along with it successfully but find I still have to research things frequently. With the disclaimer out of the way, we can get to the offering. A while back I wrote a handy little unit to simply send a mail message with or without attachments and with or without providing authentication. It even has support for OpenSSL. I use this unit in a number of applications and have seen it successfully send hundreds of e-mails without issue. I recently added support for threaded message sending to take advantage of the multi-core system I'm now running on. This code has had a few additions (like the logger) that I've gleaned over time from various newsgroup postings, but I didn't record the authors so let me credit the anonymous Internet authors who support Indy. It's really amaz...

Anyone else out there ever run into the need for a simple little list of holidays? I do a fair amount of stuff that involves questions like "Are we off on such and such a day?" where you have to figure out, "When is Easter this year anyway?" That's pretty easy if you look it up on a calendar. Now try doing that in code. At any rate, I wrote a tiny little class to provide some basic holidays out. Help yourself to the code, it's not complicated, just annoying. The biggest trick is finding the information in the first place. This is US-oriented, but I'd be glad to extended it if someone wants some other days in there. It would be helpful if you could provide the holiday information you're interested in though (i.e., My Personal Holiday is the 3rd Tuesday of May or whatever). Oh, one last caveat. If the date doesn't appear (like Inauguration day), the DateTime will be a 0. That's fine for comparisons, but if you just do a dump of the dates, it g...

Zarko Gajic posted about this topic on his Delphi Tips recently showing how one could use a case statement with strings. His solution basically passes in an array on the stack and then iterates through it providing the index number of the matching string. I don't often want to do this, but the idea comes up occassionally enough that I thought I'd play with it a little. The first thing that struck me with this is that passing things on the stack is bound to be slow. Any time you can avoid memory allocation in your routines, do it. The way Zarko wrote his StringToCaseSelect routine created a COPY of the information on the stack. In my testing, just changing the CaseList: array of string to CaseList:const array of string improved the performance of the code by almost 30% for his example. Mind, I'm not using hyper-precise counters; however, it definitely makes a difference. Secondly, I was curious how the performance changed if I used the old stand-by: If then else. Using the ...