Time to get on with some cleaning up

A quick bit of catching up…

First, a week ago on March 15, it was my 17th anniversary of becoming CTO at DevExpress. Thinking back on all those years, it’s amazing how things have changed along with the platforms we support. Silverlight, anyone? As always, the problem is essentially a toss-up: do we support X, or should we concentrate on Y? Anyway, at the moment, it seems that the main Microsoft-centric development platforms are WinForms (because Windows apps in the corporate world are still very much at the forefront of app development), Blazor (because JavaScript is so hard to learn when writing web apps???), and MAUI (for multidevice apps, and bye Xamarin). Of course, ASP.NET Core is also still extremely viable for those people who are waiting to see what happens regarding Blazor, and VCL is the main “platform” that is not Microsoft-related.

Second, three or so weeks ago, I was having the most awful problems with my main laptop (a Dell XPS 13 9370). Literally I was getting ten or more BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) every day. And when it’d reboot I’d even get weird hardware issues (“where’s the boot drive?”). Me, get real work done? Riiiiight. Eventually, after trying several “solutions” (hmm, maybe it’s the new Thunderbolt 4 dock I bought myself as a Christmas present, let’s try the old one I was using … nope, that wasn’t it), I bought a new Dell XPS 13 Plus 9320, upgraded the 1TB drive it came with to a new 2TB one, installed everything I use, and then retired the old laptop. And then, just for fun last week, I decided to take out the old 2TB drive the old laptop had and replace it with the 1TB drive that had come with the new XPS 13. No BSODs to be seen, so it seems that it was the SSD drive that was faulty. Well, damn, could’ve saved myself $1K+ by just replacing the drive.

Third, since I now had a spare working laptop, I decided to retire the old XPS 15Z I’d been using as my Delphi development machine (which was so old that it wasn’t capable of upgrading to Windows 11), and transfer everything to my new spare. And still no BSODs to be seen!

Fourth, just for fun, now that I’d refreshed my Delphi machine, I decided to refresh my Delphi skills by writing a program on it to calculate π to 1000 or more decimal places. Why? One reason is that pi-day in the US was March 14 and 15 years ago I’d written an app in C# to do exactly that, and second, Jim McKeeth had written a blog post on how to calculate π, including using a BigDecimal library, on that day and had to admit that “unfortunately I was still only able to get about 20 digits accurately.” I shall publish a blog post about my efforts tomorrow.

Fifth, especially now that I had an unused XPS 15Z, it was high time I recycled a bunch of old no-longer-needed laptops, tablets, USB hubs, and other computer hardware I’d been keeping in my office closet. Which of course required resetting the operating systems on them all first. Tedious but at least I could do it all in parallel. Yesterday, I dropped them all off at our local electronics recycling center, and, since it’s a charitable organization, I gave them a donation as well.

And it’s still only March!

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