I work in the city so the Wall Street Programmer is kind of interesting. It's nothing like where I work because I'm not front office, in fact I'm not even back office, since I don't work in a bank, but it's interesting none the less. I'd really like to work with traders for, er, about a day, purely to see what it was like, but I'm guessing it would be horrendous.

Happy Christmas!

It's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for the Delphi community of late. For a long time it's been looking pretty negative but things have started looking up then back down again and it's still not clear where the future lies for Delphi. It all started going a bit wrong with the release of Delphi 8, which was a bit of a disaster. But there have been bad releases of Delphi in the past and it's recovered from them. Then Delphi 2005 came out and that was pretty horrendous too. From the newsgroups it sounded like one hell of a buggy release, never tried it myself since I haven't been doing much Delphi work for a while. The one ray of hope was Allen Bauer, who seemed to be single-handedly fixing all the bugs and releasing unofficial hotfixes. Kudos to Borland for allowing him to do it, but the question still remains why they weren't releasing them officially. Now we have Delphi 2006 and from initial reports this looks good. More stable, better performance, some features that Visual Studio doesn't have. But still there are quite a few problems for Delphi. First, the Delphi market is tiny and getting smaller (in the UK at least). Second, if you're developing in .NET, C# or VB.NET is the obvious choice of language, since almost every example on the net is in one of these languages. Delphi's trump card is the fact it still supports Win32 development. The big question is whether Win32 development has a future. But at least Borland have realised to give Delphi any chance at all they need to focus on making it the best quality product they can. If they'd continued down the road they were with Delphi 8 and 2005, Delphi wouldn't have a hope. Then recently there was more bad news as Danny Thorpe left Borland for Google. He was obviously a pretty clued-up guy, but I always like to think that nobody is indispensible. Only time will tell what effect it has. Of course one ex-Delphi person went on to create C#, which ironically has probably caused more of a problem to Delphi than his departure had on the development of Delphi...

Not wanting to become a Google blog, but here are some more random thoughts on Google. How do I get my PageRank up? Probably one of the most asked questions around but there are a few things that confuse me. If it's all based on links to my site, why won't Google actually tell me about all of them? It seems to only tell me about a select few, even though I know there are more around. Why did the Random Pub Finder have a Page Rank of 3 but now it's 1, what did I do wrong? Why do other very similar pages have higher ranks even though they seem to have just as many links to them? Why does Google claim one of these sites has links from health sites when it clearly doesn't??? It's all very weird. Of course, Google Analytics tells me nobody is reading this anyway, other than somebody from the Department for Homeland Security...

Such a simple idea for software, but still brilliant. Real-time analysis of your web server logs, so you can see who's online at anytime.

Just wish I'd thought of it...

I use so many Google products it's getting ridiculous. I use GMail (with its Notify app), Google Analytics, AdSense, their search engine, their desktop search engine, Google Sitemaps and now their blogging tool. And I don't pay a penny for any of it. And it's all better than any of the competition. In fact Google pay me for the ads, not a lot admittedly because I hardly get any hits but I've read about people who make a tidy income from AdSense. I remember a few years back there were lots of free things on the web until all the dot coms went bust. Obviously Google are making a good amount of money from the targetted advertising but how long can it go on? Who knows...

OK, I've moved my blog here, because it looks like Blogger has better tools than Bloglines. The old blog is here