JJG Journal

As a follow-up to a previous post about programming and my preference for Delphi as the "best" programming environment, I just found this jewel: A completely free and blazingly fast programmer’s text editor that was coded in…you guessed it: Delphi. Called ConTEXT, this baby does syntax highlighting of just about any programming language ever invented, has on-the-fly multi-language support, support for UTF8, macro support...Continue Reading »

I’ve just put some vegetable soup on the burner (yes, I am a vegetarian, but that’s another topic) and have 20 minutes until things are cooked. ‘Thought I’d use this time to put down some thoughts on current American Drug Policy. Basically, it is irrational and counterproductive. The government has no business telling people what to do in the privacy of their own homes as long as no third party gets hurt. That’s true for the bedroom, the living room and the front porch.

For a rational discussion and alternate approach to public drug policy see the current...Continue Reading »

One of the things that you’ll have to pick up when studying Physics is programming. When I started my undergraduate education in the early 1980’s, the University of Heidelberg in Germany which I attended at the time, offered some programming electives which were terrible. You sat in front of a terminal that was connected to some kind of mainframe and tried to somehow convince the thing to run some code snippets. All output was text based and FORTRAN was the language of choice in those days and I was rather turned off by the whole experience. A couple of years earlier Commodore had...Continue Reading »

When MS introduced Vista I toyed with writing an industrial automation application on this "new and exciting" XP update. I immediately found out that hardware drivers, especially such drivers that you’d need for industrial applications, e.g., I/O interface card drivers, multi-serial card drivers, are NOT supported under Vista. Thus after playing with Vista for a while and familiarizing myself with it’s ‘advantages’ I dropped my plans of migrating to this platform. This was about 8 months ago. Meanwhile I’ve had only negative experiences with Vista…the...Continue Reading »