Archive for the 'Devel/Software' Category

Apple, again.

Still hate the company so much, even the products are pretty good, until the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 is more like usual smartphones, which are medicore at best. I wanted the leak to be wrong, but it was right. Hah ! I have more hope for such an arrogant company but the product is just medicore.

I will always be in a controversy on Apple since I love it as much as my hate on it. It is innovative and it is so arrogant. I checked the MacBook time and time again, but I will not accept such a hardware at such a price, it is so heavy, but people take like it was a fashion.

Microsoft is just a dumb company doing dumb businesses, not much about hate since they are simply too stupid to be hated. I will still use their products since they are a bit more “convenient” (Rest assured, I paid for my license to use them).

Simple Polarity Inverter for foobar2000 updated with new SDK

Lost my old sources, re-created using foobar2000 SDK-2010-01-19.

Simple Polarity Inverter v1.02 for foobar2000 v1.0 (file size 47.88 KB)

FreeBSD 8.0 released

Talked on upgrading about 11 months ago, but didn’t have time. It is already 8.0. Hopefully I’ll be able to do it before 2010.

My stance on iPhone

I’m still not convinced, although most of my (more advanced) friends were using it. I won’t like to key in stuffs that I have to look at it to not be wrong, nor I won’t like I don’t know which keys were I pressing.

I love my Nokia E71, or my slow Sony Ericssion M600i, which I will surely know which keys I have pressed.

Apart from that, the stubborn Apple corp. culture has driven me away from any of their products (except QuickTime Pro on Windows, which I happened to pay for, as a software package from Apple).

FreeBSD 7.2

It was released even before I have time to upgrade my servers to 7.1.

FreeBSD 7.2 official announcement

FreeBSD 7.1 is officially released

I’d been waiting for it to upgrade my servers (they are still running on FreeBSD 4.x). It’s here finally. Thank you very much, team FreeBSD.

FreeBSD 7.1 official announcement

ACDSee Pro, finally unicode

It has been almost 10 years since I bought my license of ACDSee V3.0 in 1999, it doesn’t support unicode until today that I received a complimentary upgrade e-mail (for my ACDSee Pro 2.0 license) to the latest ACDSee Pro 2.5.

I have been waiting for this day and it has finally come.

Symbian & Nokia

I welcome the announcement of Nokia on open sourcing Symbian, but to attract 3rd party and amateur developers, the digital signing process must not be too restrictive as they are in S60 3rd edition and onwards.

Although I liked the idea of Open C API, I haven’t worked on it much than vanilla Symbian C++ on Nokia’s Carbide C++ IDE environment, If they can really make Open C API works like the standard API on UNIX/Linux without too much of the digital signing process, I think that will attract a lot more developers than the current digital signing model.

Let’s see how Nokia proceed with the Symbian OS, their recent phones have been quite buggy regardless of the quality of their 3rd party software.

I hope Nokia take it seriously with their actions as there are already Openmoko (an open source Linux phone stack) phones coming without too much restrictions on the developers/users like the old days of Symbian S60 2nd edition phones but without the hassle of developing on Symbian OS.

Updated Simple Polarity Inverter for foobar2000 v0.9.x

Updated from the old one to version 1.01, it is a 3 in 1 channel polarity inverter, no longer limited to both channels, you simply pick inverter for channel 0, 1 or both 0 & 1 from the DSP manager.

Simple Polarity Inverter v1.01 for foobar2000 v0.9.x (file size 46.02 KB)

Hope you like it.

Borland’s ‘Turbo’ products and Roadmaps

From the published Roadmaps, I’m glad to see that there are further development on the tools. I was worried about the development of the tools and held off upgrading to BDS 2006 after reading Borland’s intention to sell the IDE business to somebody else (well, partly because of my purchased VCL components might not work with it).

I like Borland’s development tools since Turbo Pascal on CPM and I had purchased and used C++ Builder since version 1, and currently C++ Builder 6 Pro is my major development tool (I am a C/Assembly guy, and C++ is my natural choice, ha ha).

I have recently worked on other IDEs, like Sun’s NetBeans IDE (for Java projects), Nokia’s Carbide.c++ (Eclipse developed IDE for Symbian C++ projects) and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Pro 2005 (for Windows Mobile development, very slick IMHO). I’d considered completely changing to VS2005 Pro but I miss the C++ RAD environment, and I have my clients running apps 24/7 that I still need to support.

I think the free Turbo explorer series will get more developers to appreciate Borland’s RAD environment.