who is fingerman?		Frank Ingermann - i'm a Delphi / SQL programmer from Aachen, Germany.
why is this site in English?		I'm half Dutch, half German, my mother{'s?} language is Dutch but I work in (and think) English most of the time. I usually have little spare time (yes, I program for a living..) - definetly too little to maintain three language versions of the site, so I chose the language with the largest potential readership.
why not fingermann?		a) www.fingermann.de was reserved already and b) it's easier to tell some few people I know to omit an 'n' then telling the rest of the world it must be there :-) Besides, in Dutch "Mann" is spelled "man" anyway... (btw. try www.ingermann.com - a person who sells everything for home-brewing beer - must be in the family genes <vbg>)
why this site?		I've been making some Delphi components and Firebird stuff in the last few years that I'd like to publish on the web.
why now?		My main project atm, fiSPEd, is nearing completion (ok let's say it's approaching a 1.000 release :-) so it became about time to have a site where interested folks can look at it and download it. If you're one of those, see here. (written March 2002)
why does it look so boring?		It's built to supply information, and do it *fast*. It's not about being fancy, but about function. I'm using a 56k modem line and I generally hate sites that are cluttered with tons of graphics and ads. I'm an Object designer, not a Web designer. And last but not least: I don't care. It works perfectly for me. Hope it does for you, too.
why focus on Delphi?		After the usual C64 / 1541 start, I took off with Turbo Pascal 1.0 (no actually it was Oxford Pascal on an old Apple II at school), then began with OOP when TP 5.5 appeared and I'm doing nothing but Objects ever since. Coming from FoxPro/dBase/Paradox databases I started with Client/Server SQL in '95. I can't read C (always suspected the 'C' comes from 'Cryptography' <bg>), I don't like Basic but I do *love* Delphi and I never had a problem I couldn't solve with it...
why focus on Firebird?		Always having been a great supporter of Open Source, I was very happy in '99 when Borland announced the release of the InterBase sources. Still being a great supporter of Open Source, I was very unhappy later on when Borland decided to "Un-Open Source" it again. <snipped lots of comments about Borland and their product strategy here - as long as they sell Delphi I don't mind> Bottom line: Firebird is a really great SQL database. Development is very active. Firebird developers care about Firebird users. Bugs are fixed very fast. You get fast and good-quality response to support questions in the newsgroups. The thing is stable, it performs great and it is completely free of any license fees, *true* Open Source. So why on earth should I pay for... (guess the rest please...)
why focus on IBObjects?		After years of dabbling with the BDE, for the first time I have a way of not only accessing a database, but really control it and make the most out of it. It forms an abstraction layer that is just big enough to let you do anything you want with your DB - but without any installs or dlls. I like programs very much that get copied and launched rather than installed, and IBO lets me do just that.