In a very nice hotel in the Peak District today, though it's just for a wedding rather than any special celebration of the 200th post of stuff like this:
Happy invoicing!
- Microcomputer Software Lives Again, This Time in Your Browser - "Today, the Internet Archive announces the Historical Software Archive, a collection of prominent and historically notable pieces of software, able to be run immediately in your browser." Using a port to JavaScript of MESS, sister project to MAME, you can now run original software at full speed in modern browsers - from VisiCalc on the Apple II to Elite on the Sinclair Spectrum, with more being added all the time. (The projects also needs volunteers to contribute code, if you fancy putting, for example, your unused PDP-11 skills to good use.)
- Can you really redeem a 100-year-old coupon? - "Eighty-seven-year old Laurine Williams from Pennsylvania... wrote a letter to General Mills in 1984, set it aside and didn’t mail it until November 2012. And, in that misplaced letter, she was asking to redeem a coupon that was more than 100 years old." The coupon had no expiry date and entitled Mrs Williams to a cook book in return for a dime.
- How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life - "The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age." It's likely that the F-1 engines will soon return to use, thanks to the work of a group of young rocket scientists
- Aerial Views Of Old London - "Even before Aerofilms was established in 1919 to document the country from above systematically, people were photographing London from hot air balloons, zeppelins and early aeroplanes." A great gallery of photographs from the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute.
- The bizarre Wikipedia edits of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik - "On the most-read encyclopedia in the world, the history of the tiny Swedish city of Kungälv is written by a mass murderer." The question is, now that Breivik's Wikipedia identity has been established, should his contributions be allowed to stand?
- Victorian Font Rasterization - "When typography entered the digital age, font designers faced the challenge representing font glyphs by an array of pixels. At high-resolutions, this was a relatively straight-forward process. At low resolutions, however, representing the sinuous curves of typographic characters by a course grid of pixels was more challenging, requiring carefully-honed images to create characters that looked correct at small sizes... This was not the first time designers confronted this challenge, however. Adherents of cross-stitch embroidery also wrestled with fitting font shapes to the cells of a fixed grid." I'm still waiting for a cross-stitch representation of Galaxians or Defender.
- Could New York City Subways Survive Another Hurricane? - "A good place to see how and why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority just barely survived Sandy last fall is the entrance to a tunnel at 148th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Central Harlem, where, just before the storm hit, a crew of carpenters built a plywood dam 8½ feet tall by about 55 feet wide. That ad hoc, low-tech, last-minute construction held the New York Harbor at bay and not only saved the city hundreds of millions of dollars, but also made it possible for the subway to come back to life as quickly as it did." A detailed look at the huge engineering effort that went into saving and restoring the New York subway in the face of a hurricane.
- How to lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes - An examination of the official report on the software failings that led to the infamous Knight Capital loss of $465m: "The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten codebase (the bug itself due to code that hadn’t been used for 8 years), and a really poor, undisciplined devops story."
- Beans and Noses - "One piece of advice I keep coming back to is about managing expectations. It came from an old friend, just a few days after I’d started my consulting practice... He told me his First Rule of Consulting: No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose."
- Mickey Mouse Becomes A Speed Dealer - "The following comic book Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man was released by Disney in 1951. In the strip, Mickey and Goofy discover a new medicine called ‘Peppo’ that represents amphetamine (speed). Their enthusiasm for the chemical pick-me-up leads them to become salesman for the product in Africa:"
Happy invoicing!
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