My wife and I went to Fenway the other night to see the Redsox play. It was our first visit to Fenway. I like the stadium despite the small size. As a matter of fact, I said to me wife I felt like we were at a minor league game because of the stadium size. Plus, the stadium seems to be very family friendly with a kid throwing the first pitch and a kid making the standard “Play ball!” announcement. The vibe and stadium size reminded me of the two minor league teams in New York. However, that opinion changed once the game got started. The crowd definitely fills the stadium with cheers and you definitely feel like you are at a major league game once the first pitch is thrown.
Boston fans are definitely loyal fans. But unlike St. Louis where just about every wears red, Boston fans have no one color. Sure the Redsox fans are wearing some type of Redsox shirt but some shirts are blue, some are white, some are red…I even saw a green Redsox shirt. Go figure. One of the things I like about going to a Cardinals game in Busch stadium is seeing the sea of red.
Contrary to popular belief, I thought the ticket prices were reasonable and definitely cheaper than a Yankees game. Granted I paid for my tickets through the normal channel and I didn’t get ripped off by some scalper selling a $40 ticket for $150. The food is also cheaper at Fenway compared to Yankee Stadium. The only thing that was more expensive is the beer.
Fenway charges way too much for beer. Yes, a beer at Yankee stadium will run you something like $8 but it is twice the size of the wimpy $6 beer at Fenway. So by the end of the game we spent as much as we would at Yankee stadium but that was only because we had to buy more beers at Fenway than we typically do at Yankee Stadium.
I upgrade my server install of VMware GSX Server with VMware Server, a free virtualization product for Windows and Linux currently in beta. The VMware Server install went smoothly. It detected the GSX install and uninstalled it for me. It copied the appropriate settings over to VMware Server and my virtual machines were up and running again in a matter of minutes.
VMware Server is an improvement on GSX Server. Most notable improvement is that it works with virtual machines created with VMware Workstation 5.x. No more hacking the .vmdk file to make it work with GSX.
I’ve been working away the last few weeks on a new web service SOA testing tool. However, today I decided to take a break and see what else is happening in the world. One of the things I played with today is Google Calendar. It’s pretty cool and I think I will try it out for the next few weeks.
Google Calendar got me thinking about synchronizing my calendar, which is currently stored in Outlook, with Google Calendar. This lead me to the Google API at http://code.google.com/. The API uses REST principals with Atom and RSS feeds. Now I have even more fun things to play with.
Bruce McGee made a newsgroup posting listing some great examples of interop between Delphi and the .NET world. Two that really caught my attention are:
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http://cc.borland.com/Item.aspx?id=22688
Unmanaged exports. Run .Net code from Win32 applications without COM interop. Delphi and managed C++ support these, but C# doesn’t.
http://cc.borland.com/Item.aspx?id=23615
Virtual Library Interfaces (VLI). Run Win32 code from .Net
applications without PInvoke. Not sure if any of the other .Net
languages support something similar.
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I’m working on a new project and have a need to parse XML Schemas found inside WSDL documents. After a few google searches I discovered the concept of a Schema Object Model (SOM). The .NET Framework has a SOM parser as does MSXML. There’s also a SOM parser for Java as well. Because I’m writing a Win32 application, I started learning the ins and outs of MSXML’s SOM parser. As a learned more I did additional google searches and discovered Delphi has its own SOM parser.
Interfaces such as IXmlSchemaDoc and functions such as LoadXMLSchema and LoadXMLSchemaStr are undocumented but the source can be found in source\win32\xml\XMLSchema.pas. There is also sample code for parsing an XML Schema available BDN. With the aid of the sample code I was able to get my sample project working.
And in case you are wondering, the VCL library has a component called TXMLSchemaDoc that wraps Delphi’s SOM parser into a handy component. You will not find it in the tool pallet though. For what it is worth, I found working with the interface (IXmlSchemaDoc) easy and I have not tried the TXMLSchemaDoc component.
Ever wonder how much money WinZip brings in per year, or how much money Jasc, makers of Paint Shop Pro, makes annually? Corel now owns these two and Corel is planning to go public, which means disclosure to this information.
Thomas Warfield over at A Shareware Life has posted the numbers and a link to the entire prospectus. Give it a quick read and see that shareware stars do make big money. At least these two do.
CNet news is reporting that Apple has announced Boot Camp, a new software package that makes it possible to run Microsoft Windows on the new Intel-based Macs. How awesome is that! It’s one step closer to making me want to buy a Mac. Now what would be really awesome and close the deal for me is to have “Devco” create a Delphi compiler for the Mac OS and make it easy for me to port my VCL applications to Mac.
I’m having problems resolving a couple of domain names and track the problem back to DNS. I use Networksolutions’s DNS for the domain names in question and to my surprise Networksolutions.com is down. Joy, joy.
Update: Networksolutions is back! Looks like the outage only lasted an hour or so. I still don’t know what happened through.
Final update: Here’s the alert message posted on Network Solutions web site:
<div class="quote">“April 4th, 2006 11:00am EDT - This morning our collocation provider suffered a global outage from 7:56 a.m. to 10:02 a.m. (eastern) that impacted our systems. The provider’s outage affected access to Network Solutions products and services. The provider has resolved their systems and access to our services has been resorted. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience. You may experience latency today as we continue to restore our services to full capacity.”</div>
I mentioned earlier that Network Solutions was experiencing an outage that effective some of my domain names. The problem was resolved and all was right in the world again. Then this evening I got a call from Network Solutions apologizing for the outage. Wow! Nice touch. Kudo to Network Solutions for making this one customer feel special.
Four years ago today thecave.com changed its look and became my personal blog. A lot has happened since that time. I got married, left my corporate job to start my own company, made trips to Paris, Nice, Brussels, and Italy, was the ICCA NYC chapter president for a year, and most recently moved from New York City to Salem, Massachusetts. It’s been an incredible ride that is showing no signs of slowing down.