Daniel15’s Blog

TCP sockets in Pascal are generally hard to use; Free Pascal doesn’t come with any high-level socket libraries by default, only a relatively low-level socket library. Some external libraries are available to make using sockets with Pascal easier, and one of these libraries is Synapse. Synapse is an easy-to-use socket library for Pascal, and in this blog post I’ll try to show how to use Synapse to connect to a remote server and send/receive data from it.

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Well, as you can see here, my blog has a new layout. The layout itself was written from scratch by me, although some parts of it were based off a nice two-column CSS layout tutorial I found whilst searching in Google. This layout is not yet complete, I’m still working on it. What do you think so far?

The only problem now is my lack of blog posts. I haven’t really had time to blog, but I’ll definitely try to write some more posts here soonish

Today, I fixed the “transparency” issue on the Facebook Flash Embed application. Rather than using a transparent background for all Flash animations, it now allows you to set the background colour. Some animations that did not display correctly previously will now appear correctly.

Additionally, a few minor bugs with the Import a Flash “embed” code were fixed as well. FlashVars in <embed> tags should now work properly.

As usual, please report any bugs to me

A funny easter egg I recently came across in Windows XP, relating to files created in the future:

1. Set your system clock to a date in the future (something far in the future; eg December 2030).
2. Create a new file (anything, a blank text document will do).
3. Set the system clock back to the real date.
4. Open the directory containing the newly-created file.
5. Choose the View → Arrange Icons By → Modified option.
6. Tick View → Arrange Icons → Show in Groups.
7. Look at the group heading of the newly-created file:
   

Of course, that should be “Millenium”… Millennia is plural

Around 46,000 students did their English exam today, me being one of them. The English exam sucks; I’m so bad at writing essays . It was alright, but I screwed up a bit of it. Basically, we have to write four essays — Two text response essays (essays based on texts we read in class), a language analysis piece (analyse the ways language is used in some articles), and a persuasive/opinionative piece. I spent too long on the analysis and persuasive pieces (as these are what I’m good at). I completed one of the text response essays and then noticed I only had like 25 minutes or so to do the last one. So it was horribly rushed and probably quite incoherent

So yeah, I’m soooo glad that exam is now over; it was the one exam I was really dreading. The exams I have left are:

Monday 5th November
3:00 PM–4:15 PM — Specialist Maths Exam 1 (non-calculator)

Friday 9th November
9:00 AM–10:15 AM — Maths Methods Exam 1 (non-calculator)

Monday 12th November
11:45 AM–2:00 PM — Maths Methods Exam 2 (calculator)

Wednesday 14th November
11:45 AM–1:30 PM — Physics

Thursday 15th November
9:00 AM–10:45 AM — Chemistry (ewwww )

Friday 16th November
3:00 PM–5:15 PM — Specialist Maths Exam 2 (calculator)

So yeah, after that, No more school! On to University next year. I’m hoping that I get an ENTER score above 87, that way I’ll get into Computer Science at Melbourne University

Edit: Some people were asking about the title of this post. It was referring to my MSN Messenger display name, which I had set to “It’s Survivor: English Exam Edition. 46000 students, 4 hours, 3 essays. Who will survive?” for a while

The code for the MySpace Friend List Export script I wrote a while back is now available for download. If you’re a PHP programmer and are interested in viewing the source code for it, take a look at http://stuff.daniel15.com/php/myspace/get_friends.txt

The code is quite ugly, but, well, so is MySpace. That’s my excuse.

Saw this in a MySpace bulletin… And it’s mostly so true. Except for 11 and 13, which I kinda disagree with
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Based on requests from users, I’ve now made the Flash Embed Facebook application much more user-friendly. Now, instead of entering in the Flash animation details manually, you can paste in a Flash embed code, and everything should be detected automatically. I tested this with some YouTube videos, CollegeHumor videos, and Miniclip.com games, and it all seems to be working fine

As usual, please report any bugs here as a comment, or via email.

Thanks to everyone that’s been testing my “Flash Embed” Facebook application and reporting problems to me. I’ve added a “Latest News and Updates” section to the application, so users are able to quickly see the latest updates. The bugs that have been reported so far are:

• The animations display with a transparent background, even if a background colour has been specified in the Flash animation. [Unconfirmed]
• The icon for the application does not have a transparent background. [Fixed on 2nd October 2007]
• The dimensions of the Flash animation need to be entered manually. I’m not quite sure how to fix this, though (as I don’t think there’s a way to automatically detect how big the animation is).

If you find a bug in the application, please tell me about it (either by posting a comment here, or emailing me at facebook -[at]- daniel15.com)

Thanks guys!

If you want to put a Flash animation on your profile, you may use my Flash Embed application, available from http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=fa3e01813e0bb57df6c615a84f3e6838. You can also use this to add videos that give you an embed code (eg. YouTube, Metacafe, etc.)

Enjoy!