Richard's IT Blog

After beginning to use Lazarus more and more I there a few things I want to write about. I can't say I have studied its workings well enough, or asked around enough. Perhaps there are solutions to the issues, or there are reasons for their being the way they are, but I feel I must raise them all the same. I am welcome to any corrections or criticisms.

Does new FCL functionality need to depend on 2.5.1 compiler or LCL/IDE features?

The first point I want to raise is the matter of the FCL, the LCL and the Lazarus IDE.

07/10/2010 - After some rereading and some observations made in the mailing list, I have made some corrections, with notes, and added some notes to help those new to FreePascal (like myself) and those new to some of the Linux tools.

After some struggles to install Lazarus and FreePascal from source I created some scripts to set them up properly and they are working well. I think I am 90% there, enough to get me focused on programming than installing.

Long time no blog - blogging is hard.

Today it is about my favourite Firefox addons. When you move around a lot one thing you miss is your favourite addons. This also gives me the chance to download them quickly when I am on a different computer as an added bonus.

After a rather long thread on the Freeswitch mailing lists I managed to get G729 passthru working on Freeswitch (svn 17048).

Requirements

mod_g729 should be enabled in modules.conf.xml.

In vars.xml G729 should be added to the codec prefs, or should be the only one if you are sure the provider(s) support G729.

  <X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="global_codec_prefs=G729,PCMU,PCMA,GSM,G7221@32000h,G7221@16000h,G722"/>

I wanted to add some Windows version information into my Lazarus/FreePascal programs and tried these two options, one from Anders Melander , http://melander.dk/articles/versioninfo/ and the other a part of RXLib, a general Component Library developed for Delphi and ported to FreePascal, both of which are wrappers around the Win32 GetFileVersionInfo (and related) API functions.

Geshifilter is a Drupal module that displays syntax highlighted source code, and it is necessary for any blog that aims to shows source code to its readers. It is based on the Geshi Library which supports dozens of languages only six of which you've heard of.

Something you don't think you need until you see it.

The font size in the Administration Menu is 9pt, too small for my liking (your eyes, you mean - Ed).

To change it edit the file //sites/all/modules/admin_menu/admin_menu.css and change the font size. I prefer 12px.

/* $Id: admin_menu.css,v 1.25.2.4 2008/11/02 21:36:22 sun Exp $ */
/**
 * Administration Menu.
 *
 * Implementation of Sons of Suckerfish Dropdowns.
 * @see www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish
 **/

One area in Drupal that has always tripped me up is the matter of line breaks, paragraph breaks and formatting.

The culprits here are the Line Break Converter, the HTML Filter and the HTML Corrector.

It is an issue I have always had to work my head around, but I think I am now getting the hang of it.

Wherever the Line Break Converter comes across a line of text ending without a <br /> it adds a <br /> to ensure that when the web browser displays the page, the following text starts on a new line.

Configuring Drupal for different publishing roles can be very time consuming. There are lots of modules to install, settings to configure, permissions and roles to grant, input formats, content types, and the whole bandwagon, and these can be very difficult to setup again when you create a new website.

You have to duplicate your database, delete your content and start again, hoping that you don't forget stuff you need.

One of my pet hates on the web is grey on white fonts. They really annoy me, perhaps my eyesight isn't that good. For 600 years since Gutenberg mankind has been fed a healthy diet of black fonts on a white background, and all of a sudden the last twenty years has seen web page designers using grey and other pastel colours on a white background.