Droid Comic Viewer

I love comics. I usually subscribe to them even when I stay in South Africa, miles and miles away from the civilized world. The only problem I have is, these comics take up a lot of space, so storing them is usually a mission.

When I want to re-read some of my comics then I need to go and dig it all out again, so when it comes to archiving my comics I like the .CBZ format and re-reading my comics on my PC.

Luckily the Android has a similar application called Droid Comic Reader. It allows you to read .CBZ comics on the Android.

Here is a nice video showing the off the capabilities ...

NESoid for Android

Something else I discovered while researching what phone to get was this little application. It is called NESoid, and it is a NES emulator for the Android. With the QWERTY keyboard on The HTC Desire Z, I think this little application will work great.

Here is a video showing off the NESoid capabilities ...

HTC Desire Z

So I decided to get a new phone. My new phone will be the HTC Desire Z. It is an Android 2.2 smartphone.

This phone has all the Android features like GMail integration, Google Docs, Google Calendar and so on.

The other benefit is, it has the HTC Sense software, which I like a lot. The waiting list is about 2 weeks long, so hopefully by the beginning of December I will have my new phone.

Delphi logging by Exception

I had to help a friend out the other day. He is taking over some Delphi application from someone. That someone decided that the Delphi application is too much work. Now this friend of mine warned me that the code was not very good but I did not expect this piece of beautiful code. Beautiful as in, "What the Hell was this guy thinking".

So we start off with this piece of code

procedure TfrmMain.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
 status         : integer ;
 sc_no          : integer ;
 tmpstr         : string;
 cnt            : integer ;
 comms_protocol : integer ;
begin
  Application.OnException := HandleException;
  ...
end;

So this is not bad, we just register on the top level exception handler in the form's constructor. This event handler code looks like this

procedure TfrmMain.HandleException(Sender: TObject; E: Exception);
var
  filename: string;
  logfile : textfile;
begin
  filename := changefileext(application.exename,'.log');
  assignfile(logfile,filename);
  if fileexists (filename) then
    append(logfile)
  else
    rewrite(logfile);
  writeln(logfile,datetimetostr (now)+':'+e.message);
  if cb_debug.checked then
    application.showexception(e);
  closefile(logfile);
end;

Now in this section I would have liked more begin;end; blocks but some people like to make reading code difficult so not too big a problem. Essentially this code just logs the error to a file. So still not bad.

And then the "What the Hell" moment

try
  raise Exception.create('Program Started');
finally
end;

So this guys wants to log that the application started. Instead of refactoring the log procedure to support program logging he just raises an Exception and does nothing with it. Even worse, in Delphi debug mode, Delphi would stop by default, so now you have to switch off the break on exception option in Delphi just to run his application.

So there you have it, how to log messages by using exceptions in an application and please do not try this at home, this guy was a trained professional*

* A trained professional idiot that is.