I've been using a couple of small InterBase databases for testing and learning purposes while doing some mobile and web development. I have a Windows 2016 Server in my office with InterBase XE7 and 2017 installed using different ports. Since I work from multiple virtual machines and sometimes a laptop, I just put the databases on the Windows server to access them all from whichever development environment I happen to be using. Both InterBase instances on the server were using the Developer license that comes with Delphi--requiring a restart once a day.

A few days ago, I wrote about signing your commits so they'll show up on GitHub as verified. After that process is in place, every commit requires the passphrase associated with the signing key to be re-entered. This gets old quickly if you're committing frequently (which you should). Fortunately, there's a way to cache the passphrase to make this much less burdensome. Unfortunately, the cache only lasts 10 minutes.

Coming from a long history of Windows VCL development with Delphi, I have often used data-aware controls to quickly hook up data sets to controls and grids. As I've been doing more mobile development, I've taken a look at LiveBindings and like its extensibility. So, I decided to try my hand at extending it!

First off, I shamelessly admit the title is just a little misleading but it was so catchy, I couldn't resist! However, setting up a quick Drupal website did turn out to be the easiest way I could think of to get around some limitations in the environment from which I was trying to transfer a Delphi project.

Software "Easter Eggs" have long been a fun thing to stumble across. Hidden features, not documented in the standard user guides but found by users (or leaked by developers) are then spread by word-of-mouth as everyone has to go find and see it for themselves then tell their friends. Often, these gems are small and don't take much time as developers sometimes have to sneak them in. Others, like flight simulator in Excel 97 are more involved.

There's been a lot of talk about the speed improvement in Delphi 10.4.2. Indeed, I've felt it is snappier as well so I thought I'd run tests on my own projects and see how they fared

My results were less impressive than other speed tests...