You may be wondering where I am, given that I haven't posted a Contra entry for over a month. I didn't want May to conclude with zero entries posted, so I figured I'd take a break here and get you up to speed.

Here's the deal: My publisher has asked for a Fourth Edition of Assembly Language Step-By-Step. It's been thirteen years ( Read more... )

I'm scoping out a fourth edition of my book, Assembly Language Step by Step. I got wind of a simple FOSS utility that could be enormously useful in that effort: SASM (SimpleASM), which is an IDE created specifically for ( Read more... )

• I got caught in an April Fools hoax that (as my mother would say) sounded too true to be funny: That Tesla canceled all plans to produce its Cybertruck. (Read the last sentence, as I failed to ( Read more... )

• Lazarus 2.2.0 is now available for download. It's based on FreePascal 3.2.2. I've been playing with it now for a couple of weeks on both Win7 and Win10 and it's terrific.
• I find this new Chrome technology pretty disturbing ( Read more... )

Yesterday the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the Raspberry Pi Pico, at the boggling temporary low price of...$4US. It's ( Read more... )

Monitors are getting big. Computers are getting small. I think ( Read more... )

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... )

• 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... )