In 1997, I bought a new PC, and specified that I wanted a SuperDisk drive on it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The LS-120 drive was a reasonable alternative to the Zip drive, and it had the advantage of being able to read 3½″ floppy disks as well as the 120 MB SuperDisks, at nine times the speed of a normal floppy drive. I had one at home, my mate CMoS bought one too, and we bought a new web development PC for work with a third drive.

Over the years I’ve had various ways of dealing with data beyond the ASCII range in web applications. I’ve had horrible things go wrong when maintaining a “home” and a “live” version of Manx, when I had machines with different versions of MySQL, and I never understood why dealing with UTF-8 across the Perl–MySQL bridge went wrong so much. However, time has healed these wounds, so here is my little crib sheet for getting things right.

I’ve been wondering how to let other people collaborate on a database without it turning to crap. You see, I’ve been updating Manx, a catalogue of old computer manuals, for a few years now by myself. Manx lists the manuals produced by a bunch of old computer companies, and records scanned copies that have been put online. On the surface, the database is very simple. The records of each publication can be objectively correct; if you have the manual in front of you and the title, part number and publication date match the database, your work is done.