Recently, I ran into links leading me into the Delphi corner of the web which eventually ended up stumbling into what remains of my Borland blog from 2004. I’ll refrain from actually linking to it as I don’t want to make it somehow appear relevant even though Borland no longer exists. Prior to leaving Borland (CodeGear), and again after I left, I’d requested of those in control of the blogs to kindly remove the remaining posts which even at the time were 3 years old but clearly I had no such luck.

The real problem is the lack of control over Embarcadero’s, a company I never worked for, use of my name with “archive” attached as the title of this now defunct blog that I wrote years prior to its acquisition of Delphi. Now, it’s not like this bothers me on a frequent basis but occasionally when search my name like I did when Bing came on the scene I inevitably get that little reminder that it’s still there. Interestingly enough Bing doesn’t link there though on Google it’s the 7th link and on Yahoo it’s 3rd! That alone is reason enough for me to switch to Bing!  :)

Admittedly, I never thought this many years ahead when I first started blogging but there are days, every now and then, I wish I had.

Updated April 11, 2010 Interesting to read that Sun has/had a policy where blogger's have rights to their own works. I wish Borland had the same.

I’ve written 500+ blog posts and not until I developed a Starter Kit did I start getting so much direct email though the Contact me link on my blog. Of course, not all of it ends up reading like this (comment), far from it, rather let me give you an example:

i 2 m working on facebook app
i try install ur starter kit but it not appear
need u 2 send me solution urgent
i didn’t understand plz help

This kind of writing drives nuts. Perhaps if my kids were teens I might appreciate this a bit more but they’re 5, 3 and 1. While this isn’t an actual email it is representative and as you can imagine, not exactly the kind of thing I look forward to reading. I used to feel obligated to respond to nearly everyone who felt the desire to reach out to me via the Contact me link but seriously? I don’t know, and don’t really want to know, if there is a name for this “style” but I find it difficult and halting to read. How it makes sense to reach out to someone with a message like this asking for help? Yeah, this ain’t it.

Granted, in some cases it may simply be a language barrier but I’ve gotten plenty of messages written in this “style” where it’s pretty clear that’s not the case.

I’ve banked with BofA for well over a decade and earlier this year (2008) started using their My Portfolio feature that allows for categorizing transactions and linking accounts from other financial institutions providing an aggregated Net Worth view. That was at least until they lost all of my data. Earlier this month I was prompted to change my online user ID and I walked through the multi-step process that had me change my user ID, password and site key. After all that, I logged in an clicked on the My Portfolio view which has been particularly useful to get a quick overview in today’s sinking market but much to my surprise, ALL of my data was gone. The feature had been completely reset losing 7-8 months worth of accumulated data, hundreds of categorized transactions and all of my linked accounts.

Now, I understand to BofA this feature is provided as a courtesy but I’ve spent a significant enough number of hours categorizing transactions and I’m annoyed at having lost all of the data. Of course, at this point I’m in the classic situation of dealing with mega-company support. There is a support case created but that was now four days ago and I have little hope of actually having the data restored.

So, long story short if you’re using Bank of America’s My Portfolio feature understand there is no backup option and there is real potential for you to lose ALL of your data. Unless they can restore my data it’s unlikely I’ll start using My Portfolio again any time soon.

Anyone else have this experience?

[UPDATE: Dec 22, 2008] Called Customer Service again and the tech this time was aware of the problem and mentioned BofA uses a third party company to help provide the My Portfolio service and apparently the bank has a case filed with that company. I was told that other customers had experienced the same problem.

[Update Jan 9, 2009] A member of BofA's online banking technical support called me back to let me know they've lost my data. They also confirmed that I'm not the only user affected by the problem but that they have no way to correct what's happened. It sounds to me like the real issue is that this problem has impacted a limited number of users and they simply don't want to invest the time to figure out what happened. She alluded to the fact that my data may still be there but there is no way to go back and undo what's happened which may be a worse problem as it would mean that my data is now sitting in some no man's zone including account information for my linked accounts. Finally, she mentioned that if at some point things changed she would get back to me.

Last week I was in Austin, TX at a clients site and my MBP was sitting on a table running Windows Vista when it went to into sleep mode which is very normal. What wasn’t normal was the fact that it never made it out of sleep mode. I hard reset it and tried to boot it again but it never made its normal chime sound and I was unable to get it to boot into either OSX or Vista. I tried a PRAM reset and several other incantations including, among other things, a reset with the battery removed and reseating the RAM all to no avail. That left me with out a machine for three days out of a five day contract and now I’m hoping it will show up by tomorrow.

You may recall I recently blogged about our Mac Mini which died within 18 months of purchase. Now, for me this doesn’t bode well for Apple. I’m basically 0-2 when it comes to Macs lasting more than 18 months which I think is terrible. I’m writing this on a Dell which I’ve never had a problem with that’s 6 years old and I have another Dell that’s pushing 12 years old and still running.

In the case of this MBP, it’s a $300 repair job and I had to give permission for the drive to essentially be erased. I know for a fact that it’s not the drive because I sat in the Austin Apple store for 2 hours pulling files off of it onto my iPod Touch using (the most excellent) AirSharing app. Anyway, at this point while I think the MBP is an excellent laptop otherwise I’m seriously not impressed with Apple’s quality control. Granted the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are certainly different than your standard Desktop machine with ample cooling but less than 18 months of uptime??

Update I should clarify that I had to sign knowing that I might get the machine back without any of my data, not that it would be intentionally wiped clean. One more thing, if you buy a Mac be sure to buy Apple Care unfortuantely it’s not just a gimmick it’s really needed.

Update #2 According to Apple’s service status web site a replacement part has to be ordered so hoping for the machine to show up tomorrow just went out the window. The genius in the store said "5 days but probably sooner" and that was last Wednesday.

Update #3 Apple has released this note that I’d guess most likely accounts for the problem with my laptop. Found on Gizmodo. Sounds like the repair might actually be free.

How is it that blog posts like the one below from Matt Asay on c|net’s News.com can become a top headline on Techmeme? Is this sort of headline grabbing BS to be expected now that CBS owns c|net? 

I’m not going to do it justice by linking to it so if you want to you’ll have to search. I believe this story and headline were written for no other reason than to generate traffic for c|net. Mr.Asay is clearly out-of-touch with the Windows software development world if he actually believes the data he’s referring to. Couple that with the fact that companies like CodeGear and tools like Delphi can go a long ways towards alleviating the pain of moving to a new version of Windows by changing their runtime frameworks to help either adopt or mask the differences between versions allowing developers to continue to focus on the task at hand.

Fortunately, a number of comments in reply to the post are appropriately taking him to task. Of course, the downside of all this is that it accomplishes c|net’s goal of driving traffic to their site.

I’m not sure of the selection criteria for Techmeme but it just took a step down in my book.

If you’ve been following my blog recently perhaps you’re aware of activity related to a post I wrote back in September asking for a free version of the Delphi command line compiler. In a response to a comment asking if I’d ever tried the Free Pascal compiler I stated:

I haven’t tried the Free Pascal compiler for a number of reasons including the fact that it’s RTL/FCL violate Borland/CodeGear’s copyright. I’ve looked at the code closely and IMO copyright issues abound.

At that time, there were a few replies but over the last few days members of the Free Pascal core team as well as the FP community attacked me personally over this statement. Upon request I published one example illustrating my point using Classes.ExtractStrings. Unfortunately, this was met by further attacks until a comment from Marco van de Voort and subsequent email apology from Daniël Mantione, both members of the core Free Pascal team. The following republished with Daniël’s permission:

from: daniel.mantione@freepascal.org
to:strefethen@<deleted>
date:13 Nov 2007 15:25:14 -0800
subject:Weblog Mail from 'Dani&#235;l Mantione' on 'Steve Trefethen’s Weblog'

Hello Steve,

I would like to offer apologies on behalf of the Free Pascal development team for the aggressive comments on your weblog. The situation puzzles us; that code you showed is more similar than one would expect with an independend implementation, yet it doesn’t look like being taken from Delphi source. Michael, who comitted it, cannot remember having written it so it might have been contributed by someone, but searches through e-mail archives haven’t revealed anything yet.

Anyway, it’s good that this is on the agenda now. Copyrights are something we have to be carefull about.

Best regards,

Daniël Mantione

In further support my statements I added five additional examples all from classes.pp which covers roughly 16% of that file, which is not exactly a "fringe file". I’ll add that this more recent review took but a few minutes and is by no mean extensive nor exhaustive unlike a review I did earlier this year. Daniël has since provided me plausible explanations as to how these issues might have arisen and indicated that the core team is reviewing sysutils.pp and classes.pp.

Unfortunately, this is neither a new issue nor limited to sysutils.pp and classes.pp. I’m disappointed that seemingly no one from the Free Pascal team or community discovered nor, to my knowledge, raised these issues years ago.

And, fwiw, I haven’t been employed by Borland since June 28, 2007 nor, as was implied in a comment, do I have any financial interest in the company whatsoever.

Of course, this raises the issue of how do you go about validating the originality of Open Source source code in general? And no, I don’t have a good answer.

Blake Watson has written a very good review of Delphi 2007 on DevSource which is worth the read. The review is fair and balanced and it's hard not to like the conclusion:

But if you're still clinging to Delphi 7, it's time to let go. Seriously.

There is, however, one part that needs a clarification and that's:

If you're familiar with Borland Developer Studio 2006, this is analagous to the feature called “Delphi for Microsoft Win 32”. That's important because the IDE is still .NET-based, even though it doesn't target .NET.

That's not correct. The Delphi Win32 IDE is not ".NET based", not even close. In the Win32 IDE there are a small number of features, mainly related to code parsing like refactoring, implemented using .NET but the post I wrote back in November 2004 is still accurate today. In case you're wondering that post may look a bit odd only because it was moved from the old Borland blog server and the comments were preserved by appending them to the post.

So, rest assured the IDE is very much written in Delphi Win32 using the Win32 compiler/RTL/VCL that ships with the product. If you still have doubts there have been plenty of people who have removed the .NET dependency from the IDE which you simply couldn't do if the IDE were truly ".NET based".

Ok, now that I got that out of my head I can go enjoy my weekend. You have a good weekend too!