blog.free

It's about time that I should assume that I lack the time to spend on this blog.

It was fun while it lasted (except for the past few months), but now every weekend that comes and goes and sees me not doing something on this blog is a weekend of pain. This year, my life changed a LOT. I'm no longer using Delphi in my daily routine, I have a beautiful young daughter requiring some attention (not to mention her mother, my wife!), and I also work at a place that makes me spend way too much time traveling back and forth. That will improve in time as I'm due to move closer to home, but, if you factor reason #1 above (no longer using Delphi), then you can see that even with a bit more free time on my hands it will be a pain doing something in Delphi, especially the type of experiments I was doing lately that require repeated (PAINFULLY SLOW) installs...

So, rather than feeling bad about each new weekend that I don't get to spend some time on this blog, I opted for the easy way out: delete the blog (I hate sites that stay frozen in time for years in a row!).

So, in a couple weeks I'll be deleting this blog. If there's any useful bit of information that you found here and want to preserve/re-use/re-publish, then feel free to do so. It will all be gone on the 1st of June.

Goodbye and best of luck to all lasting Delphi users out there.

P.S.: This is not a "talk me out of it" type of post. My decision, which has been in the making for quite some days now, is final. This post exists simply because I didn't want you guys and gals finding out that there was no more blog at this location.

[EDIT:]GRRR! Damn blogger ate my edits! :)
Here I go again...

First, thank you all for your kind words. Even though the idea behind this post was to allow everyone some time to copy/paste some stuff, I'll allow this post another 6 months and see what gives by then.

Answering some questions:
- There's no ";" after blog.free because the following instruction is an "end."... ;) Actually, just kidding as I'm the kind of guy that will add a begin/end pair to a single instruction if/then/else just so to be able to add the ";"... This one was mostly out of being tired...
- I'm not using VB nor any MSFT product. What I'm doing currently involves using Flex Builder 3, Python and Javascript (not all in the same project!).
- Part II of Thinstalling Delphi: this is the main reason for not being happy with this blog, or rather, the lack of time to do it. As I think I've said before, my previously thinstalled Delphi won't work anymore refusing to even run, and capturing a new one would take quite some time and effort. At this point, even "simply" going through my notes would require some time to understand/test them...

Should I find the time and will to do it, I'll give it another try, but I must say that I'm currently a bit disappointed with Thinstall: several previously running thinstalled apps no longer run, which is probably due to some updates to my system, but that's not my idea of making a portable app: having to recapture now and then... As for alternative virtualization products, all those I've tried so far had even worse issues... (Note to self: SELECT ALL, COPY, just in case!)