Over in another place a bunch of us are reminiscing about the good old days when we wrote #Fortran, #COBOL, #Algol and #BCPL. I finally admit it. I'm old.

I recommend not upgrading your #PHP. I recommend not using PHP at all.

Freshly combed #beard, so I can sneak in to #MountAthos and set up their first #Anglican monastery. See you over at @BrotherDave@HolyMountain.CofE.social!

One of the great things about unemployment is that I now don't have to fix #PHP installations that were chosen by the idiots I work for.

This is how you write release notes! Keep them brief, and say what bug you fixed. And also you should note that if you listen to music on your phone and you don't use Smart Shuffle then you are doing it wrong. #Apple, of course, also did it wrong when they removed #AlbumShuffle from their player. #SmartShuffle's raison d'être is to fix Apple's bug.

#SoftwareEngineering #BugFix #professionalism #MediaPlayer #iPhone

Oh dear. In my ongoing heroic quest to catalogue the to-be-read pile I have reached the bit which I thought I had protected from water damage when there was a leak several years ago but turns out I actually didn't. Most of the victims are at least still readable but some are just going to have to go in the bin.

I haz a sad.

#books #bookstodon

Happy #WorldStandardsDay! Unless you're unfortunate enough to be in Trumpistan in which case it will be on the 8th of December.

Does there exist a #Kindle-a-like with an 8 or 9 inch screen?

#Ebooks

My #perl module Net::Random was originally written back in the dark ages when you couldn't expect a machine to have a good local source of #randomness. It fetched random data from online sources. It has not been useful for a long time and so it will disappear from the #CPAN in the next few days.

The #BBC have done a great job with their #obituary of #JeffreyArcher. The headline calls him a "disgraced politician and convicted liar". The fourth sentence reads "he will be remembered as a man affected by a defective moral compass". On his literary output we are told that "few critics praised Archer's prose style, his sense of humour, or the emotional depth of his characters". And it ends "he died a wealthy man, albeit one whom very few trusted".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80095q7p7jo

Today in IT hate ... #bash!

Can't edit a shell script while it is running, because bash doesn't just read the whole thing into memory and execute it, it reads a few bites at a time and then starts executing, reading more as necessary starting at the offset it last read up to. An intermediate write means that bash then ends up with inconsistent gibberish in memory. This might have made sense for original #sh running on Ken and Den's original #PDP7 with 4K-words of RAM but it's stupid these days.

Some cheeky little cunt just recommended this to me: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0273785419

Wow! Someone on #Kickstarter has invented a worse ... shelf!

Have a good laugh at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printableaccessories/dropvault-0.

These shelves are mechanically complex (some even require electronics too) and waste space because you need twice as much space for these special shelves as you do for normal shelves.

It's got to the point in implementing my #Readerware replacement that I need to think about data entry and lookup. And look what I just dug out of my bits box ...

#cuecat #barcodes

RE: https://hsnl.social/@eloy/117308390679818819

The second Vatican council has a lot to answer for

If you don't follow @roots then you are in a state of sin. The drawings are beautiful.

They also explain why the grass in all my local parks was burnt to a yellow crisp this summer but with bright green patches of weeds all over. Compare the root systems of https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/385/rec/2 and https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/291/rec/1 with that of https://images.wur.nl/digital/collection/coll13/id/1434/rec/1. The grass has predominantly shallow roots, the weed predominantly deep roots.

#science #art #OverlappingMagisteria

I have a rule to never *ever* buy anything immediately just because it looks cool, or is a great deal, or "this special offer must end soon". Anyway, these looked cool, and arrived today from Aliexpress!

#notepad #windows95 #PureEvilReified #RetroComputing #hashtag

I, of course, would never fall for this.

#chess #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry

This is my semi-regular request for suggestions on a replacement for #Readerware, whose author has passed away so it's no longer maintained. Requirements: I need to catalogue #books, #music and #video; no subscription; no cloud bullshit; must be able to import/export in a sensible format such as CSV; must support all major platforms (ie Mac and Linux); support for FreeBSD would be nice; prefer a desktop application, not complicated client/server stuff.

#library #database

Today's #unemployment achievement is that I unplugged and removed my old KVM from my desk, and replaced it with a newerer biggerer betterer one. The old one would share two monitors between two machines, the new one shares three monitors between four.

"That's not much of an achievement" I can hear some of you say. None of you have seen the absolute pigsty of a tangled mess of cables that is the back half of my desk.