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... )

• Lazarus 1.8.4 has been released. Bug-fix release but still worth having. Go get it!
• From the Questions-I-Never-Thought-to-Ask Department: How was sheet music written after quill pens but before computers? With a music typewriter, of course.
• How to become a morning person. Yes, there are ( Read more... )

I just uploaded a new, corrected and expanded PDF ebook edition of FreePascal from Square One to my website. It's free ( Read more... )

• Twitter has gone absolutely off its rocker since Parkland, and now it's just haters hating anyone who disagrees with them. (No, that's not new; it's just never been this bad.) I stumbled across a site called Kialo, which is a kind of digital debate club, in ( Read more... )

• I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He's best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he's also written several books on astronomy ( Read more... )

• Lazarus 1.8 is out, based on FreePascal 3.0.4. No staggeringly important updates, but a lot of really good (if smaller) improvements. There's a color-outline syntax highlighter that makes it easier to spot the BEGIN/END pairing in large ( Read more... )

• I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That's why you're getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.
• Some researchers at UW Madison are ( Read more... )

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

• I'm ok; stop fretting. I caught a very bad chestcold, which has ( Read more... )