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:::_____:::::::::::..............................................INTRODUCTION
by Tiago Sanches

Finally, issue 9 is out!

After a long, long time APJ is back. What happened?

Well, mainly due to mammon_'s lack of free time to handle everything concerning the journal by himself and whatnot (which may have led to a shortage of contributions), APJ had to be discontinued as of last year. The good news are that the journal is back, many people have volunteered to help out and so in the future a staff may actually be a reality, allowing things to run smoother than they have. On a side note, mammon_ is still administrating the journal, even if time constraints don't allow him to get as involved in its management as before.

Anyway, about this issue, there are articles ranging from CGI programming, written by Michael Pruitt, to the continuation of Chris Hobbs' gaming series (that Chili prepared for ASCII distribution). A new column has also been created, concerning the emerging PalmOS platform, featuring a very good introductory article by Latigo.

G. Adam Stanislav contributed another article for the Unix side, along with Feryno Gabris, who presents an ELF compressor, whose text may look somewhat cryptic at first if not for the source code provided, both NASM oriented. Also for NASM, therain shows how to write VxDs and Jonathan Leto provided an article for the beginning assembly programmer.

To close the list is a "back to the stone age" low-level programming article by Kalmykov.b52 for when everything you have is MS-DOS and, lastly, it's Jan Verhoeven's payback day as he says: "This time the joke is on you!".

All in all this issue is packed with very good articles, not mentioning the great trigonometry macros by Eoin O'Callaghan in the snippets section, as well as some other pieces of code from Jake Bush and at the end the issue challenge that this time focuses on pattern matching algorithms, featuring a great work done by Steve Hutchesson along with code presented by buliaNaza.

Just a reminder for contributers on submission guidelines: articles must be written in English and may focus on any aspect of assembly language for any level of programming, but remember that they must be in ASCII text format. Here are some rules to follow:

• lines should have a maximum of 80 characters (including the 'New Line' character), with no left or right margins.
• article subsections should consist of a subsection name, a following line of hyphens to underscore and be preceded by two carriage returns.
• Paragraphs should not be indented and must be seperated by a blank line.
• Code indentation (opcodes) should be about 8 chars.
• Don't use TABs, use spaces instead!

That said, remember to supply a name or handle and a title for the article and check the contents of the current issue for a general idea of the magazine's format. You can mail the articles, snippets or any other contribution to me at:

{sanches@host.sk}

Hopefully, with your help, issue 10 will be out faster than this one and the journal can start being released on a regular basis again.

As mammon_ would say, enjoy the mag!

Tiago Sanches