Credits

Embarcadero and TeamB

I’d like to thank Embarcadero and TeamB for the excellent support they provide. Being a member of TeamB gave me access to a lot of interesting things, and of course to a free copy of Delphi, and trips to the USA. I have met a lot of interesting and nice people, since I have been on the team. People whom I’d probably never have met otherwise, and from whom I have learned much.

TeamD

I’d like to thank my friends of TeamD for helping me with this website, with a lot of other things, and for being such pleasant online company.

FrameFun

I’d like to thank Ben Hochstrasser for his excellent FrameFun tool. I used it to frame some of the pictures on this site, something I had tried to do manually before, but with limited success, after a long time of trial and error with a normal bitmap editor. It is of course written in Delphi , as the URL already indicates.

Jekyll and RedCloth

Because making a small change to these web pages could sometimes mean making the same change to more than 40 files, I decided to go for content management or at least a static site generator. The content management solutions I have found needed installations on the server or on localhost, used databases, etc. which is not what I wanted.

I first thought of writing a simple solution myself, but then found Jekyll , a tool written in Ruby which generates full HTML pages from templates and text files in several formats, like Markdown , Textile and (X)HTML. It took me a few hours to finally understand the mix between YAML Front Matter syntax, Shopify Liquid syntax and the files in several predefined directories, but then managed to set up a solution that generates everything I need, in a very flexible way.

My sources are now done in Textile. This format is converted by the RedCloth library. The newest, version 4, was heavily refactored and is now approx. 40 × as fast as it used to be. Before, conversion of all texts took more than a minute, now it is done in a few seconds.

I am very grateful to the authors of Jekyll and RedCloth. It makes maintaining this website a lot easier.

Pygments

Pygments is a static highlighter written in Python which can highlight a huge range of languages and produce a range of different output formats, including HTML. On the Pygments site, there is a web version that lets you upload files, too.

For a while, I have been using Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter, which is very powerful, but is a JavaScript highlighter, which won’t run when scripts are disabled. There was also a noticeable lapse, each time you opened a page that used it, before the script was finished, and in the meantime, the web page would not look as it should.

Looking for a static replacement, I found that Jekyll can use Pygments to do the highlighting, by using a special Liquid tag in the sources, specifying the language and a few other options (line numbers, starting line number, etc.). It is not very fast — probably because Jekyll has to create a file with the appropriate extension, pass it to the pygmentize command line program with the necessary options, read the output and add it to the target file for each snippet of code in the source files. That really slows down the generation process, but it is otherwise very convenient.

Inkscape

Most of the vector graphics on these websites were done in the excellent Open Source program Inkscape , this includes the old and the new Delphi helmets, the TeamB logo as well as many diagrams , glyphs , icons and badges .

GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a well known, great Open Source raster picture manipulation program, probably the best image manipulation tool for those who don’t want to spend money on Adobe Photoshop. I use it for most of the photos on these pages.

JEDI

I’d also like to thank the people of JEDI, for coping with me, supporting me, and sometimes even listening to me. ;-)

Newsgroups and forums

And last, but not least, I like to thank the people on the former Borland and current Embarcadero NNTP newsgroups and web forums for what I have learned from them.

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