I still have VT100 terminal, but it’s in storage. I figured I could pretend that it was on my desk if I made a font that looked like the old beast, including the gaps between scan lines.

Once I’d started, I needed the reverse video form of it, and the forms correctly underlined, and double width, and double height and double width. Blinking is more problematic 😉

A while ago, I recovered my old font files from some crufty old SuperDisks, but did nothing more with them than copy them to my network storage, in the hope that that is a safer home. Last weekend I was reading about the Fedora Fonts SIG, and decided to bring the old font files back to life. The Fonts SIG is concerned with packaging fonts for Fedora, but their pages have some interesting pointers on how they might be created as well, so I grabbed an old font and explored the tools that are available.

I’ve been working on a project to fake some network protocols to test one of our systems at work. One of them is Network Time Protocol. I daren’t just set my PC to random years and then serve this time to the target system, so I wrote a little NTP server in Perl, which allows me to lie about time to other people.

I’ve just signed up for an OpenStreetMap account and thought I’d try out the offline map rendering, as I’ve just started a project to document the changing face of Alderney. The wiki gives some good instructions for downloading the rendering XSLT scripts, but my first attempt to use them resulted in some very strange coastline clipping in the final SVG. With a bit of hunting, I came across a Perl script in their collection that cleans the coastline data up nicely.

It took me several months to rip my 1500 or so CDs to a network drive, from where I can stream them wirelessly to my Squeezebox Classic. I’m very happy with that solution. Now, the problem becomes “what do I do with the CDs?” You can see from the picture that they take a lot of space. I’ve been searching for a way of storing the CDs and artwork without the jewel cases.

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.