Ruminated Rumblings

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 ...

I've assumed, incorrectly apparently, that the Vista "Run as Administrator" function is akin to the sudo or su function in *nix systems. For those not familiar with sudo, it basically provides a one-time elevation of privileges to execute a special command or a command requiring additional user rights. Su basically creates a new security context using the super user and switches into that context (i.e., in a shell, typing su and then the super user password gives you the "super user shell"). Vista does not appear to hold this idea, or at the very least, not entirely. The thing that started me down this path is my use of the subst command. For those who haven't read some of my other articles, I use subst to create a virtual environment letting me work on multiple projects without having to pull the source code down from svn (i.e., c:\source\code1, c:\source\code2, etc. get swaped out to be j:\ for which ever path I'm working with at the time). At any rate...

Here's a couple of interesting little tidbits for those using Delphi 2007 and trying to create manifest files to require your program to run as Administrator. For those who don't know what this means, we're talking about running a program and receiving the wonderful little pop-up "A program is trying to take over your life"... well, something like that anyway. You will need your program to receive elevated privileges if you want to do certain things. In my particular instance, I wanted to write to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT registry entries. This isn't supposed to be a full reference to what a manifest is, how it works, etc., etc. Microsoft has documented the UAC in some depth and I recommend using their documentation if you want to really understand your options. First, the manifest structure is basically just an XML document that tells Vista how it should handle the program. For elevated privileges, it should look like: < assembly xmlns ="urn:schemas-mic...

This is my first attempt to create a blog of my thoughts on coding and technology. I've been developing software for many years now and have an interest in many of the current (and not so current) languages and technologies. I primarily develop with CodeGear's Delphi and have used its predecessors all the way back to Turbo Pascal 3.0. I have specialized in health care technology so some of my posts may be about that industry in specific, while others will discuss various techniques I find either interesting or useful. Hopefully, the reader will find the information either relevant or useful. With a touch of luck, perhaps even both.