Cisco EA3500 Router Purchase

The router we currently had - not sure of the make/model - was apparently about to die. I did some quick searches on-line for routers and found a clump from Cisco, Linksys and D-Link, as was expected. I was more interested in the price than the brand as these were the brands I would stick with anyway.

Being the patient person, I did not order on-line I went down to Office Depot because we had a gift card from a previous purchase/return.

We purchased the Cicso EA3500 for the following reasons:
1) Dual band
2) Four-ports
3) USB port

Several models had the first two but only models above $100 had the USB port.

FYI: Office Depot took our $10 off a $50 purchase we received from Office Max. Thank you Office Depot.

Setup: Well, this is where I was surprised. I had my 13-year old son do it and all I did was take it out of the box and watch.

1) Start the setup program with the provided CD.
2) Plug the router in and make all the connections (I told him to watch what cord was the WAN cord from the previous router)
3) Press continue on the installation program
4) Provide a password for the wireless
5) Reboot router
Done!

Thank you for a pleasant installation, Cisco!

Freeing Delphi Dynamic Arrays

This post is about freeing dynamic arrays in, Delphi.

In, Delphi, as in others, dynamic arrays useful in many instances. Here is a good link on a basic understanding
http://delphi.about.com/od/beginners/a/arrays.htm This is not what this post is about.

Let's declare a dynamic array and we will use the same variables as the link above so to make it easier to understand

var
  Students : array of string; 
  nCounter: integer;
begin
  // set the length to something
  SetLength(Students,5); // this will hold six students
  // loop through and load the array with some data
  for nCounter := Low(Students) to High(Students) do
  begin
    Students[nCounter] := 'My student #: ' + inttostr(nCounter);
  end;

  // do something

  // way one to free array
  Students := nil;

  // way two to free array
  SetLength(Students,0);

  // way three to free array
  Finalize(Students);

end;

There you go!

Enter ASCII Characters

Several ways to accomplish entering ® or © into text. In Word® you can select it from the fonts. You can also use the Character Map in Windows and find your character and hit copy.

The cool way is to hold down the ALT key and then, using the keypad, type the appropriate ASCII number. For example:
® = ALT + 0174
© = ALT + 0169

You can use this for any of the ASCII characters.

Happy typing.