From code to the connected world. Explore notes on technology, retail, and the craft of building things.
Pancake Media AS builds digital signage, the Concierge kiosk and the Visitation visitor system on one Azure platform, and offers consultancy where my experience is now available. I have bought a 20 percent stake. Here are the people, what they build, what the consultancy covers, and why I invested.
Introducing nostalgia.nostdahl.com, a small collection of classic games rebuilt from the Commodore 64 era, an ELIZA you can talk to on an emulated TRS-80 Model 100, and a new 3D story adventure set in Ålesund. Self-contained Windows downloads, a CRT toggle, and a few questions for you.
After two years of AI helping us build the product, this year we shipped it inside it: automated log analysis for safe storage devices, a troubleshooting assistant for service engineers, and support triage. The one rule that made it possible, the evaluation set that keeps it honest, and what we got wrong.
The coding agents could read our repository. The support team asked the obvious question: can the assistant look at the device's logs itself? The Model Context Protocol is how we said yes. What MCP is, how an OpenAPI description becomes an MCP server, and the security rules a safe-storage company needs first.
Avalonia is the most flexible UI framework I have used. The same C# and XAML runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, in a browser tab, on a phone, and on a Raspberry Pi with no desktop at all, drawing straight to the framebuffer. What that flexibility looks like in practice, where it comes from, and where it still costs you.
A benchmark design for seven tasks across React, C#, Delphi, SQL and support work: how to score outputs, record repeatable runs and compare OpenAI and Anthropic models. Measured results are not yet published.
Coding agents are not just for single-language start-ups. How my teams in Bari, Sofia, Kyiv and Gothenburg use them across React, C#, Avalonia, firmware and a Delphi codebase that arrived on a NAS: what works per stack, what we never let them do, and why the pipeline is the real safety net.
Many Delphi and Lazarus projects are still built on one developer's machine with no tests and no pipeline. This article brings the habits from my day job to Object Pascal: DUnitX and FPCUnit, command-line builds, an Azure Pipelines build, pinned dependencies, and the security basics that come almost for free.
Introducing What.Music - a passion project that combines music appreciation with community voting. Over 1,100 artists and 3,300 songs have been ranked through weekly and monthly voting rounds...
The one rule of desktop threading is that only the main thread touches the user interface. Here is how to follow it in Object Pascal with TThread, Synchronize and Queue, how to stop a thread cleanly, how to share data safely, and where Delphi's parallel library fits in.
A browser-free dashboard for the sensors in my home lab, built with Lazarus directly on a Raspberry Pi. Subscribing to MQTT topics in a background thread, plotting with TAChart, running full-screen as a kiosk, and the practical details of building on ARM.
Desktop tools rarely live alone anymore. This article fetches readings from a REST endpoint with a bearer token and parses the JSON response, first with Delphi's THTTPClient and System.JSON, then with Free Pascal's fphttpclient and fpjson, and shows how an OpenAPI (Swagger) description makes the client code mechanical.
SQLite is the obvious local database for desktop tools. Instead of a vendor data-access layer, this article binds the native sqlite3 library directly from Delphi and Lazarus with one unit that compiles in both, covers deployment and field habits, and adds UnQLite for documents instead of tables.
I have bought a 20 percent stake in Ace Solutions AS, an Oslo company that delivers safe storage, entrance control and cash management technology to retailers and enterprises. It is a financial investment in a field I know well and still find fascinating, not a new job, and I have questions for you.
Coming from C# or Java, manual memory management is the scariest part of Object Pascal. It does not need to be. Five ownership rules, the try..finally pattern, component owners, reference-counted interfaces, and the tools that catch leaks before your users do.
Build a small temperature log viewer in Lazarus, from installing the IDE to a working chart, and then compile the same source on Windows and Linux. Includes the layout, file handling and platform gotchas that catch newcomers.
A tour of modern Object Pascal for people who remember Turbo Pascal from school. Units, records with methods, classes and interfaces, generics and anonymous methods, with notes on where Free Pascal differs from Delphi.
In 2022, ChatGPT became the talk of the town because of its capacity to produce text and respond to complex queries in a manner that almost seems human. It has grown extremely famous in a matter of…
User requirements are a complicated combination of several criteria and are frequently in conflict with one another. Businesses should map out these demands, decide which ones they wish to address…
Both Delphi and Lazarus compile the same language, so which one should you learn? I compare licensing, platforms, component libraries, tooling and community, and finish with the questions I ask before choosing one for a project.
When Gunnebo bought BELA this autumn, SafeControl Manager came with it, and it is written in Delphi. Twenty years after my last serious Delphi program I installed Delphi again, and Lazarus the same evening. Here is why Object Pascal still earns a place on my workbench, and a few questions I am still chewing on.
A Delphi service tool from the early 2000s still runs in the field, and when it fails I usually know why within an hour. The reason is madExcept. How I set it up, what a bug report contains, how stack traces get their line numbers, and the compiler directives that make the whole thing work.
Once you decide to move your application to a cloud platform, you need a way to manage your infrastructure and resources. If you choose Microsoft’s Azure as your cloud computing service, you have two…
In the previous article, we talked about what Kafka is and its ecosystem. We also talked about how Kafka works and how to get started with it. In that article, we also discussed several important…
A database is an organized collection of information (data). You can store data in a database and retrieve them when needed. Retrieving data would be faster than traditional data storing methods…
The whole world have advanced into the digital age and as a lot of appliances, gadgets, and accessories now depend on internet for their operation. These devices are designed with state-of-the-art…
Having worked as a product owner for years, I finally decided to take things to take the next level with a certification training known as a Certified Scrum Product Owner.
All good things come to an end and LEAP is no exception. It was a great week full of interesting and enlightening sessions. Day 5 was a fitting end to the week with its focus on Design with best…
I just left Microsoft Headquarters after another interesting day at LEAP. Today’s topics were quite interesting, especially DevOps, because of all the innovations that are being made. I’m actually a…
Day 3 of Microsoft LEAP was just completed. It was a day packed with many interesting keynotes regarding improving the availability and recoverability of Azure applications. By now, you know the…
I’m at Microsoft for LEAP and we just wrapped up another day of interesting discussions. If you missed my update regarding day 1, make sure to have a look at it here .
This year is already off to a fantastic start! I am so excited to be here at the LEAP conference at the Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond Seattle. LEAP is a perfect way for me to keep up to date with…
Traveling to the US for the second time, I had the chance to take a weekend off to do some sightseeing. Even though I had just a few days, I wanted to cover as much ground as possible.
I came to New York in a jacket I bought second hand for EUR 25 in my hometown Ålesund. It is nice, warm and comfortable – and this is what is important to me. If 60-70% of your closet is not used, why…
Socioeconomics or social economics is a branch of social science that tries to understand the effect of social structures and processses on economic activity. At its basic, it studies the relationship…
Chris Baldwin, Chairman, President and CEO of NRF kicked off this year’s event with his insights and forecasts for Retail in 2020. Unfortunately, I missed his session due to a malfunction in the NRF…
Many of my colleagues and friends ask me why I celebrate Christmas while being an atheist. In the Nordic, we actually do not call the holidays Christmas, we call it Jul or Yule. Yule or Yuletide…
After working in Sweden for 5-6 years I took the train from Gothenburg to Stockholm for the first time to attend a workshop on Customer Experience and Customer Journey Mapping. Since commuting across…
What better way to start the week than crunching and visualizing data. I joined the Dashboard in a Day workshop by Microsoft and Random Forest, a one day hands-on workshop designed for business…
Let’s face it, nobody wants to be labeled as the savage who’s ruining the earth. One of the impacts of environmentalists is that they have successfully managed to make people feel that being…
Luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci are everything a shopaholic would want. These brands have been classified as the cream of brands that have kept them as the most wanted items. Thus, with the…
I had the opportunity to attend the Norwegian Trade Conference in Oslo 24th September featuring some of the most interesting retailers in Norway, and even a couple of international speakers. The focus…
The number of retail chain stores closing over the past few years has dramatically increased. Yet, as of 2019, large stores announced the closing of almost 7000 stores. This is comparatively more than…
Working in IoT we sometimes need to handle large data streams of information, that might or might not be totally accurate. Streams might contain noise, inaccurate/unreal readings and other unwanted…
Finally it is vacation time again – and I can spend some precious time with my family 🙂
In this article, I will be discussing one of the most trending topics in IoT. I will take you through a beginner level tutorial on MQTT which is currently the most used protocol in IOT projects.
Earlier this year, I visited US for a couple of weeks, and having a genuine interest in retail technology, I visited quite a few retail stores. I went to see classical stores, but also had the chance…
The IoT (internet of things) world is bursting, in 2018 there were 23.14 billion connected devices, and it is projected to get to 30.73 billion by 2020 (from statista.com).
During the last few days, it has been reported that Yubico is replacing some of their physical security keys, due to a firmware problem. This reminds us that IT security is evolving, bugs are found…
I recently had the chance to join Henrik Lindberg from Acando for an Agile Scrum workshop. In this post I will write about the workshop and the basics of Agile and Scrum. There is so much to learn and…
May 29th, Satya Nadella CEO of Microsoft invited Nordic customers and partners for a small conference in Sweden, putting forth his ambitions for the future. This was Nadella’s first ever visit to…
Machine learning is gradually becoming the driving force for every business. Business organizations, large or small trying to seek machine learning models to predict present and future demands and do…
Finally the day is here, and it is time for another InnoTown in my beautiful hometown Ålesund. Ålesund’s Art Nouveau architecture is known far and wide. The myriad of turrets, spires and beautiful…
Gunnebo Business Solutions AB is working on establishing an international, dynamic and enthusiastic software development team who will build sophisticated security and business applications. Within…
The utilization for Milestone’s Xprotect smart client gets more limitless with every version. It supports hardware accelerated video decoding, and this means that you can be able to view very high…
It’s the time for Easter, a time for a vacation. Many of you are eagerly waiting for Easter week which is always celebrated on first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon following the Vernal…
With the progress in humanity, innovations are starting to move towards being digitalized. The vast majority of all human data are stored using digital methods. This would involve the use of…
As you all know Gunnebo Business Solutions AB are currently recruiting software developers in multiple fields. We need to strenghen our team with both JAVA, C# .net and Node.JS developers to work on…
I had a great opportunity to visit London during the weekend, to experience the luxury fashion industry first hand. Whether you want to spend big or just browse, London is a luxury shopper’s paradise…
Customer Support Associate for the future of Security Solutions in our support team – Join Our Team!
The Microsoft LEAP is an event for the developers worldwide who are looking for original training from Microsoft. It takes place annually in Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. The five-day…
Cloud Computing have become one of the most profitable industries in the world and cloud will remain a very hot topic for a foreseeable future. There is a huge competition among cloud service…
The concept of business value and intelligence is aimed at more productive measures through the utilization of various tech application and analytical tool for the assessment of raw data. Business…
This is my third article from Microsoft LEAP and todays’ focus is the use of microservices and Kubernetes.
The second day of Microsoft LEAP we focused on Deploying for the Cloud. Deploying applications in the cloud and offering Software, Platform and Infrastructure as a Service are hot topics at the moment…
In January, I had a great opportunity to join the NRF Big Retail Expo and Microsoft LEAP on behalf of the Gunnebo Business Solutions Retail team. In the gap between the two events, I had a week of…
My third day at NRF Expo’2019 was devoted to the future of retail. With all innovations, what can we expect from commerce in some 10 years? Ask the futurist – and you will get the picture of the…
The second day of NRF Expo’2019 was devoted to the changes the retail industry is facing these days and the novelties we are to expect in the nearest future. Brilliant speakers, including John Zavada…
With this article, I am starting a series of reports inspired by visiting NRF 2019 retail’s big show which took place on January 13-15 th in NYC. As noted by the organizers, NRF is the world’s largest…
What is the main feature of a good app? It enhances customers’ lives through the set of well-conceived steps in user experience (UX) design. Proper UX speeds up interactions and makes activities…
The holiday season is upon us once more. Families are celebrating Thanksgiving, Mawlid, Yule, Christmas and New Year. All of these holidays cumulate up to the most exiting event of the year: The…
The news about wildfire raging in Red Forest reminded me of my visit to Chernobyl this February – and of even more distant past when I first learned about this place.
Freek Vermeulen, an associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School, is already known to InnoTown attendees. In 2013, his InnoTown talk became one of the highest rated.…
For the 15 th time, the InnoTown Innovation Conference inspires the audience with motivational talks and practical business cases. As always, it gathers brilliant speakers who share their personal…
The digital transformation and customers’ new behaviors give you, as Retailers, both new opportunities and challenges.
Outlook add-ins are integrations developed by third parties in order to extend Microsoft Office Outlook functionality beyond the core set. They enable users to share different content (such as tasks…
The Gunnebo Business Solution software consists of many sub-projects and with customers spread across the world, localization and language is very important. To have an effective process, all the…
Gunnebo is kicking off yet another open source project these day s, a S SL/TLS library for the PIC24 microcontroller from Microchip. It is a mikroPascal library developed by and for the open source…
During my visit to Bulgaria, I had the chance to visit Microsoft Innovation Center in Sofia. The center is located centrally in Sofia Tech Park not far from the airport.
Today is Wednesday, and I am on my way to the bi-weekly sprint meeting with our team from ICB in Sofia, Bulgaria. Currently, we are working on task management routines in our web and mobile…