Free Pascal

I must admit, that often I am using Free Pascal to compile my written programs, so I thought that it would be a great idea to write something about it. I really don't like Borland Turbo Pascal, which we need to use in School and as I know on the Information Technology Exam we will be using Free Pascal, so I don't see anything logical here.. Personally, for me Pascal programming language is quite poor, it is old and not comfortable, but quite easy to learn that we could understand the basics of programming, but currently, when we have so much programming languages such as Java, VB, C# that aren't alike to the best C, C++ and Assembly, but .. (Microsoft is Shit, don't use C sharp and DirectX) .. if you want to make your code multi-platform.

To get back to the Topic, Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) is an 32 and 64 bit professional Compiler, what is great, that it is available for different processors, like Intel x86, Amd64/x86 64, PowerPC, Sparc. The 1.0 Version, which is discontinued supports the old m68k CPU and works on Amiga Classic Computer, BeOS, SunOS, QNX and the current stable version is targeted for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic), Solaris, SkyOS and MorphOS - which is Amiga Related Operating System. Current Stable version is 2.0.2, but you can use the developer versions, which you can call beta. Free Pascal has a lot of features, as I know, when Borland announced that Turbo Pascal will be discontinued (Delphi appeared) one Student wrote his own Pascal Compiler which had excellent support for TB 7.0 code and later his personal project grew to a big one as we see Today. New versions support Delphi features as well as Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces) Moreover, it supports MacPascal to assist Apple computer users. Lets don't forget that Free Pascal support function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and similar features. Lets remember that Free Pascal is Open Source Software which you can download free from SF.

More about Free Pascal

Audioscrobbler Plugin

It was a quite long time I was writing at this Blog, I was quite busy with other stuff, but today I thought it will be useful for you to know about the Audioscobbler plugin for your media players such as Quintessential Player and similar. Audioscrobbler system is a database, which tracks the music you are listening to and exactly stores everything into the database from your sent metadata and creates statistics about your music. It is stable and you will not see it, because everything works in the background, unless you configured something differently or some error appeared about which you will be notified. Even you should be interested to what you are listening, to see your favourite song, album or band. Furthermore, from your statistics you can get recommendation to related bands and music of your taste.

You can install Audioscrobbler plugin for your favourite Media Player, as I know Audioscrobbler is supported for these Players: Winamp, Quintessential Media Player, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Yahoo! Music Engine, Yahoo! LaunchCast, Foobar2000, QCD, J. River Media Center, AlbumPlayer and MP3Toys by installing an extra plugin, which you can download free from Last.fm website. Every name of the song and other meta data are sent to Audioscrobbler server and are added to your profile, to get your own profile you just need to register with last.fm and in your player enable the plugin with your username and password. From this database, you can do a lot if you have the knowledge, you can use this data as a text file or xml data.

It is important that your mp3 music metadata would be valid, but because the data is checked, some of your songs might not appear in the database, last.fm listings, it is using the MusicBrainz.org database, which in the future will be even more advanced, it just removes bad songs. If you want to look at an example, here is My Profile.

By the Way, Last.fm together with Audioscrobbler offer much more, an Internet Radio is available as their service, through which you can transmit your own music or listen to other people, maybe even to your friends, who has a similar music taste, you just need to download their radio player and install it, it is light and does not take a lot of resources. Moreover, last.fm is offering a service, with which you can show your stats on your personal website or Blog, you have a lot of choice how they will look, you even can create your own style through the last.fm site, you will be able to use simple html code or javascript to show the recent tracks or anything you choose. In my opinion, I think you already are interested to use Audioscrobbler, so it is time for you to visit their sites.

More about Audioscrobbler

The Developers of Audioscrobbler Site