I like everything about this episode of ITV's information technology program, hosted by Tony Bastable.

• Aired in 1984
• The program features a transmission of data for owners of home computers, specifically owners of home micros, at the end of each episode
• Features the reply "I haven't been caught yet" by Pete Perkins, to the question on whether it's legal to copy the functionality of the Apple II and IBM. He also refuses to have copied it, btw, rather they are compatible
• Talks about amateur radio enthusiasts, one of the first generation of hackers
• Cold war references to Afghanistan resistence buying Z80A Central Processing Unit chip in Tokyo, while you can't even buy Sinclair computers in the duty free section in Heathrow, out of fear that it falls into the wrong hands
• A request for british high street computer retailers to not only sell the hardware, but also offer classes on how to use it, in their retail buildings, because that's what the Japanese do.

At IWC in Dusseldorf in May, I managed to break my old website. I broke it, while I was trying to fix it, so that I could export all my old posts, and import them into Known that runs this site. Turns out updating a site with code written in 2003-6 from PHP 5.x to 7.2 can result in a number of things. The main thing being that the site doesn't work any longer.

Not long after IWC I went to one of the meetups in HWC where Calum and Neil were kind to lend me some of their coding and troubleshooting expertise, and guided me to find what had broken. The main issue was that some mysql functions had changed names altogether, and Neil also managed to figure out that variables no longer had global scope, so everything had to get an overhaul.

After the overhaul, the site was loading, but wasn't displaying any posts, and I didn't manage to get that sorted, and I wasn't sure where to start, to be honest. Today, I decided to see if I could fix it, and it turned out ereg_replace doesn't exist anymore, and I use it for some god awful function that converts the plain text of my entries stored in the database, into marked up paragraphs. I didn't manage to figure out how to get that function to work again, so instead I removed it altogether.

The downside is that the text of my posts on my old blog has no paragraphs, but that can be fixed later. The considerable upside is, that my old site is available again, and that I can now focus on figuring out how to get all the entries imported into this site, so that all my old entries can get indiewebified.

#iwc #php #known #hwc #indieweb