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Thoughts from David Cornelius

Do What You Love To Work At

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I listened to a podcast today entitled, The myth of turning your hobby into a job. It discussed how so often people discover too late that doing something you like doesn't keep its luster once you have to keep doing it day-in and day-out in order to support yourself. The thing they once enjoyed with a passion has become a drudgery, an obligation.

It got me thinking about my career history.

Interrupted Slide Transition

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I'm writing a book about cross-platform development with Delphi and in one of the chapters that covers accessing phone features, such as the camera and location services, the demo app I present stores a list of parks with a name, picture, and coordinates for each. I put the list of parks on the first tab and a picture along with an edit box for the park name on second tab.

I somehow managed to interrupt the slide transition two-thirds the way through, leaving a funny display on the screen.

AutoGetIt

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Installing and upgrading Delphi is a pretty big task. With support for eight platforms, a dozen different databases, multiple web services and servers, a rich run-time library, and an ever increasing array of programming tools and IDE productivity aids, I'm in awe that for the most part, the process is fairly smooth. I'm sure there are those still on Windows 8.1 or older or have machines with limited memory and slow hard drives that bemoan the time it takes or incompatibilities they encounter.

Dev Machine Setup List

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I do almost all of my development from virtual machines. I use VMWare Workstation Pro for this and it has served me well for many years. I like the snapshot and cloning aspects plus being able to move a machine to a different drive, back it up, and even put it on my in-office Windows server and free up local memory and hard drive space.

As I've done this a number of times, there are some steps that I replicate on every machine for consistency and convenience. Everyone will have their own way of doing things and favorite tools--these are mine.

Delphi Locked-up with Git

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I needed to reinstall Delphi 10.2 recently and when I did, I finally decided to check the box that asks if you want to hook up a source code repository. I've always managed source in repositories outside of the IDE, but decided to see if and how much productivity improvement could be had it was built in with the project manager. I use Git so selected the installed git-cmd.exe file when prompted.

Multiple InterBase Instances

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Way back in 2000, InterBase 6.0 was made open source. Soon a fork was made in the code and Firebird SQL was born. I started using this new powerful database engine and as InterBase went back to being a closed-source product, stuck with the free version or used other database engines. Many tools and Delphi component sets still support both IB and FB as they are still quite similar.

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