This blog's not dead: more open source

While clearing out some stuff I came across an old blue laser I still had stored away from a time we did play some small lasershows, and I remembered the software I wrote to create those shows - it was my first Windows project that took nearly a hundred hours of work. Searching the net or references to this, I found it still mentioned in 2009, about ten years afterwards and eight years after the last change I made to it.

Reading that people want more features, but me not having a lot of time, I decided to use that for another experiment: trying out an online version control system other than SourceForge. I somehow remembered Launchpad and decided to submit the code there:

Heathcliff for Catweazle LC1 - Yoghurt Mixer

If you wonder about the name: Catweazle LC1 is the unit we used to direct the laser beam, and from ads in that time, LC1 was something about purposed healthy counterclockwise turning or something yoghurt acids. The output is by soundcard (usually for debugging) or better CD-Player (through .wav output) - the left and right channels control the x- and y-axis of the LC1 (or other similar units).

Continuing to play with Launchpad, the other open source project you'll have encountered here would be Collection Templater, which has gone version-controlled as well. Though while the later is published under the LGPL, Heathcliff even is GPL'ed, since it odoes not have as many dependencies (actually, the only ones are Toolbar2000 and Toolbar97, which I intend to get rid of as well at some point)!

Launchpad uses the Bazaar version control system, which I like more than cvs or svn at this time.

A wizard for collections

Collections are a very helpful tool to manage small to medium-sized lists that are still small enough to be kept in memory, with comfortable methods to add, remove, sort, filter and more. The only downside of TCollection is that a unit containing the code for a simple collection, where each item has only a handful of properties, can be large and repetitious. And by saying large, I mean up to a thousand lines of code , which often lead me to using a quick but less comfortable TList or even TStringList hack - until I wrote a small utitiliy to help me create the two necessary classes with all their functions with just a few clicks.

Collection Templater shows you a list you can fill with a few property names and types and the names of the two relevant classes (descendants of TCollection and TCollectionItem), and uses a template to create the collection unit you want, including:

• Sorting by each field
• Filtering for each field
• Loading from/Saving to .ini files
• ToListItem methods for virtual TListViews
• Switches to easily disable each of these features
• JavaDoc style documentation on each function
• Proper indent count everywhere (something the Delphi IDE still seems incapable of)
• Template in external file do allow you to adjust it to your preferred formatting or to add more features (codetemplate.pas)
• Both FreePascal and Delphi

The generated code (example here) is not perfect - you may want a different order for ListItem columns, it doesn't know comparison and assignment method for nontrivial types and a few minor things, but it'll place ToDo marks for these places so you'll easily find and finish them.

I might try to make a Delphi wizard out of it at some point, but since I don't know about such mechanisms for Lazarus and use it for both, that doesn't have a high priority.