Today (or maybe tomorrow, depending on who you talk to) is the 25th anniversary of Borland's introduction of the Delphi RAD environment for Object Pascal. Delphi changed my life as a programmer forever. It also changed my life as a book publisher for awhile. The Delphi Programming Explorer, a contrarian ( Read more... )

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I haven't done a lot of programming for the last couple of ( Read more... )

About two years ago I started piecing together a book on FreePascal based on my 1992 Bantam book, Borland Pascal 7 From Square One. I set the project aside in part because I needed to get my assembly book updated and back into print--something that took most of a year and all of the personal energy I could summon. But there was another problem: The ( Read more... )

• Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous: Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs ( Read more... )

• Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.)
• Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in ( Read more... )

• Sorry for the recent quietude here; the weekend was a whirlwind, and it took all of yesterday just to catch my breath.
• Scott Kurtz' PvP webcomic celebrated its first ten years by showing us that Brent Sienna actually has eyes. Wow.
• Allan Heim sent me a pointer ( Read more... )

An offhand comment in my May 18, 2007 entry gave rise to several interesting emails, all about whether or not concurrency in programming is important. I'll weigh in here with an interesting and perhaps inflammatory opinion:

1. Concurrency is extremely important.

2. It's also ( Read more... )

As people who have known me a long time will understand, I was clearly not born to dance, appreciate opera, or play competitive sports. I may also be incapable of sarcasm, perhaps because I don't use it much and nobody expects it.

Ok. A couple of people have written to me in shock with respect ( Read more... )

• The Make Blog aggregated a page describing "drilled chili beef." Basically, you freeze a beef roast, drill a bunch of 3/8" holes down its long axis, and then stuff some appropriately shaped chilis into the holes. (They're called "finger chilis," looks ( Read more... )