Aw dawg, this is just my whateva-whateva site.

If you missed the show, check out each of the two hours here:
* Hour 1 (19.2MB mp3)
* Hour 2 (19.2MB mp3)

It was a blast, and I'll be back for another two hours in the future!

Carey's other guest for Monday's show has canceled – so he's offered me the opportunity to be on the show for the full two hours!

I graciously accepted. Be sure to listen for both hours on Monday!

He's also purchased dialafix.net and pointed it at the wiki article (which is far easier to say on the radio than "http://wiki.DjLizard.net/Dial-a-fix"). Thanks a million for your support, Carey!

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It would be nice if people would stop squatting domains so that people who actually want them could get them at a fair price. It's not fair that dialafix.com is taken and being used for no real good purpose. Thanks for cluttering up the internet, jerk.

With each subsequent release of Delphi, Borland has put roadblock after roadblock up for me. I love the language, but not necessarily the VCL, IDE, or the company.

The latest is that Delphi 2007 has been optimized to work in x64 and Vista… but you have to pay expensive upgrade fees to get these features that should have (in my opinion) been released as a patch for Delphi 2005. It's $899 for a new user license. The VCL is very unaware of Unicode, too, which in a modern development environment is ridiculous.

I was using Turbo Delphi 2005 (which is free, but limited in that you can't install optional components and there's no command line compiler). Was. There are too many limitations for me to be able to continue.

TNTUnicode was just sold to TMS Components, so a once-free component (which I was going to use to add Unicode support to Dial-a-fix) is now a for-pay component. I was going to figure out how to purchase Delphi 2007 but I'm just too depressed to do so. One of the main reasons that Dial-a-fix updates have been delayed is my frustration with limitations. The other reason is my life, which has recently resolved into normality again. I'll be able to start working on this stuff after the upcoming radio show on Monday.

Also, there's hundreds of bugs in Delphi's VCL that cause stupid things to happen (double buffering isn't even supported very well, for instance. Unicode support is non-existent, as I said above).

I think I'm going to switch to C++. This is going to be a daunting task (especially since I don't know C++, but then again, I didn't know Object Pascal either, and I made the transition pretty easily even though it had been 10 years since I worked with Pascal) but it needs to be done.

Microsoft's free version of Visual C++ isn't very limited at all. That's okay though, as I received a free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard from Microsoft. Thanks Microsoft! I also got Office 2007 Professional for free. I've never seen an opportunity to receive a free copy of any versions of Delphi; if any have existed, I missed the opportunity. Still, Delphi, which is a great teaching language, isn't very accessible unless you're actually a student at a university (at which point you get a massive discount). I'm just a hobbyist trying to write freeware and there's no Turbo Delphi 2007 in sight. I don't know if they're going to release a Turbo edition of Delphi 2007, but it doesn't matter anymore – I don't want to upgrade. I've removed Delphi from my system and have installed Visual Studio 2005 Standard in preparation to start over again. Besides, even if there was a Delphi 2007, it wouldn't allow me to install things like TMSUnicode, etc. Installing third-party components to add support for something that should have been in Delphi since Windows NT 4 is always fun.

Besides all of this annoyance, I should be writing this in C++ anyway, as I'm starting to get deeper and deeper into Win32, having to translate C++ into Object Pascal every time I need to know how to do something lower level. MSDN was written with C++ in mind. I might as well use the language that Win32 was documented in and be done with it. No more translation required! No more trying to figure out what esoteric data type I'm supposed to use ("cardinal"? What the hell is that?)

This all means that Dial-a-fix will go even faster and will become more intimate with your system, letting you know about problems that no other software has ever tried to look for. The filter driver article I just wrote is only one example; The new (Codename) Dial-a-fix++ will scan all of your drivers for missing filters and even ask your permission to repair them for you.

Wish me luck.

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PS: Carey Holzman of Computer America mentioned Dial-a-fix again! Check out the 1st hour of the May 2nd show.