About DelphiDabbler

DelphiDabbler.com

Photo of author

Who owns it?

That'll be me, Peter Johnson. I'm an intermediate level, amateur programmer living near the beautiful little town of Aberaeron in Ceredigion, West Wales, UK with my wife and two dogs.

Why the name?

My programming language of choice is Borland Delphi. I "dabble" in computer programming purely as a hobby. And one who dabbles is a "Dabbler"!

How long has the site been around?

The site in its DelphiDabbler.com incarnation has been up since the autumn (fall) of 2002. It was hosted by Ghoulnet until April 2006 when it was moved to TDMWeb – owned by the publishers of The Delphi Magazine.

See the old site
You can look at an incomplete version of the old PJSoft site on the Wayback machine

Previously I had a site named Peter Johnson's Programming Pages located on free web space provided by the ContactBox ISP. I branded the site and my software as PJSoft. It was finding that there was another PJSoft out there that eventually motivated me to register my own domain name. You may still see references to PJSoft in my Delphi code and out on the web. The old site is still up but it simply redirects to this site.

An even earlier version of the Peter Johnson's Programming Pages site lived on the Tesco.net servers. This site is long gone.

My Programming Background

  • Started in 1977/8 programming in BASIC on an early micro belonging to my employer – probably a CP/M machine.
  • Bought a Tandy TRS-80 and wrote horrible spaghetti code in a truly basic BASIC. You've got to start somewhere!
  • Traded up to a Sinclair QL, writing programs using its SuperBASIC interpreter. Started to learn Pascal on the QL and, much later, C (using a Public Domain port of the C68 compiler). I now no longer use C and have forgotten a lot of it. I loved that old QL an still have it in the loft somewhere!
  • Went to college in Leeds and did a BTEC National course in Computer Science, using Pascal and COBOL. The course left a lot to be desired, but at least I developed a much improved programming style.
  • Took programming theory as a subsidiary to a pure maths degree with the UK's Open University. We used Pascal and Prolog. I really want to avoid Prolog for evermore! The pure maths was great and endowed me with a complete understanding of recursion.
  • Further developed my skills using Pascal on the UCSD P-system, running on my first PC – a 512Kb PC XT. I truly hated that PC and avoided the PC family as a result for as long as I could. The QL was much more advanced.
  • Created a few simple programs using Turbo Pascal. A couple of these live on as Windows™ programs: much modified versions of my Game Of Life and 8 Queens programs are still available on this site.
  • Found nirvana when Borland Delphi version 1 was released and I've stuck with Delphi ever since. Object Pascal is by far my favourite language.
  • Have dabbled in Java and have read up on Oberon and Eiffel. One day I must revisit these languages and play with my compilers.
  • In 2002 started to learn Perl when I launched DelphiDabbler.com but then gave up on it when I discovered PHP. I love it, particularly the improved OOP support that came with PHP 5. I objectified this site using that OOP support in late 2008.
  • Never having been too hot on databases, I had to learn some of the basics quickly when I decided to make some parts of the site database driven. Taught myself the rudiments of MySQL in 2004.
  • In 2005 I discovered the Free Pascal compiler and have been experimenting with it. Much of the code in the Code Snippets Database has been tested under Free Pascal and a lot of it works. The CodeSnip offline viewer supports Free Pascal as a test compiler.
  • In the middle of 2005 my learning was centred round improving my XHTML, CSS and JavaScript skills rather than working with Delphi.
  • Towards the end of 2005 I changed my focus back to Delphi. In early 2006 I began moving over to Delphi 2006 from Delphi 7. I've played around with .NET and really don't like it much – you won't find any .NET code on this site.
  • In 2006 I managed to wreck my development laptop. I borrowed another, less powerful, machine and reverted to Delphi 7 as a result. It was only in 2008 that I replaced the borrowed machine with a much more powerful shiny new laptop.
  • Having finally got a Vista machine my main effort in 2008 has been to make sure my code runs on it – and it's not proving easy! I also reverted to Delphi 2006 from Delphi 7, but still use Delphi 7 frequently, mainly for writing demos.

My Other Interests

Music, that's one ... rock, reggae, jazz and classical. Used to play the acoustic guitar in my youth, but not any more.

The Chimp at Dunster BeachThe Chimp on Holiday 2The Chimp on Holiday 1

My real passion is for classic and sports cars – classic British sports cars of the hairy chested variety are my particular favourites: Triumph, Morgan, Austin Healey, Jaguar, Marcos and TVR being just some.

And mine – is a 1996 TVR Chimaera 400. There are a few photos of it on the right.

Choose a thumbnail and click it to view the full size photo on Flickr.