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 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.

Years ago, I used to deliver yachts during the summer holidays. It was a great way to get a cheap holiday and explore a new place every night. We would sail the yacht Sea Tramp from its home on the Hamble to wherever most people wanted to charter it from over the summer, which could be Cornwall, the Channel Islands or Brittany, for example.

I’m 78% through my annotated disassembly of Tehkan’s arcade game Star Force and I was just wondering what quality indicators other people use to rate Z80 code that they read? What makes you nod in satisfaction, or sneer in disapproval?

I had offered to teach an evening of map reading with the local training ship of the Nautical Training Corps. This had come about after leading them on an evening walk from Woodingdean to Rottingdean windmill during the summer, with them carrying maps, and me explaining what we were seeing along the way, such as a local trig point and tumuli and the windmill itself, on Beacon Hill.

I’ve been using rsync to maintain a copy of a website on an external hard drive, which I bought and just started as is, but there are a few problems that I’ve been looking to correct. Firstly, external USB drives come pre-formatted for Windows, with an NTFS filesystem. This works just fine on Linux, with the drive being mounted with the ntfs3 driver. The nice things about this is that I could, if required, just plug it into a Windows machine and copy files straight off.