I spent a lovely, blue-skied morning walking around Shoreham-by-Sea yesterday, conducting a survey for OpenStreetMap. The purpose of the survey was mainly to look at the shops and businesses in the centre, with a definite side quest to sit with a coffee and almond croissant and do some people-watching, if the opportunity should present itself.

Today, I spent a lovely bright morning having a walk-cum-scramble around the village of Fulking, just north of Brighton. I encountered beauty and history with every step, as I surveyed the village and surroundings for OpenStreetMap. I had with me a checklist of ten questions that I wanted answers to, so they were going to direct my path around the village.

In 1997, I first dumped the ROM from a DEC VT320 video terminal and decided to try to decode it. The processor in these terminals is a member of Intel’s MCS-51 family of microcontrollers, in this case a Siemens SAB8031A, with a 64 KiB ROM.

I wrote a disassembler and simulator (both long since lost) and started trying to decode the ROM, having never used an 8051 before. I got the disassembler to only decode the parts that I needed, following the call path so as not to get confused by what I assumed would be large chunks of data in there. I still have a printout from February 1998 of the state of annotated disassembly at the time, tiny lettering on 112 lines-per-page printout, running to 67 pages. I had to give up soon after coaxing the simulated terminal through the power-on self-test, thinking that there were probably subtleties of the 8051 instruction execution that I had got wrong, because I didn’t know how to stimulate it into doing anything interesting.

For donkey’s years I have been developing web applications with Apache httpd, Perl, CGI and MySQL, because that has always been the default setup on my web host. I know I should be moving away from nearly all of these, with the exception of Perl, but that would involve me doing something funky with a new server environment, containers, droplets or, sigh, anything that gets kicked into next year’s resolutions.¹

Another great story I came across while indexing Blackwood’s Magazine. This was published anonymously in July 1879, but a later compilation of short stories published by Blackwood’s revealed the author to be M. C. Stirling.

In 1991, six of us chartered our favourite yacht, Sea Tramp, and sailed over to Alderney. When we arrived on Saturday afternoon after a seventeen hour crossing, we were eager to tuck into any food more substantial than sandwiches and Cup-A-Soups. We picked a restaurant near the harbour and grabbed a table. The restaurant was divided into several rooms. Our room contained our table and a larger table which had been empty when we arrived, but was soon filled with a party of eight as we enjoyed our starters.

I’ve been looking at the Internet Archive’s collection of issues of Blackwood’s Magazine, indexing them for the FictionMags Index. This job has been slowed considerably by discovering just how readable these magazines are. I’m not even just considering the amount of fiction they contained, but I’ve been reading fascinating, solid news articles about issues of the day, from 140 years ago.

The following short story by Bram Stoker was published in the Christmas Supplement of the Dublin edition of the Daily Express on 17 December 1890.

I’ve now been running for 3½ years, having completed the Couch to 5K programme with my son in January 2021. I’m lucky enough to live on the South Downs in England, so I have a wealth of interesting off-road opportunities to ensure I never get bored. I’ve also found many friends to run with and, at some point, the conversation always turns to distance running, and the marathon in particular.

I believe that water is for sailing on; not drinking.¹ If the water in question is the Solent, it’s not even for swimming in. I should know, I’ve tried it on a busy Saturday afternoon.