I haven’t given up on my previously-mentioned project but it has been slow-going because of the sheer amount of work to do. I’ve always been strictly focused on iOS work at my day job so I’m not thinking about Android very much.

In the meantime I’ve been consolidating all the files I have littered everywhere. I had a bunch in Dropbox but we recently moved to iCloud, and I also had a bunch on my NAS, and also zipfiles of home directories from UNIX machines gone by. As I move things around and consolidate directories, I found a bunch of old software projects, some of which were completed, some of which were not.

To add to this, I’ve got private git repositories on Bitbucket and GitHub, and I trust neither company with my stuff. Luckily my NAS can operate as a git server so I’ve made git repositories for them (they never had any in the first place – some of them are > 20 years old!). I even have an old project on SourceForge.net, which I’d prefer not to remain on. Not surprisingly, these projects don’t build with 2022 tools.

This gets me thinking about the impermanence of software and how they can rot even when nobody is building anywhere near them. I’ve got a PHP project that won’t run on MySQL 5+, and Win32 project that has no Makefile and was originally built on Borland C++, and even a .NET project that targeted .NET Framework 1.1 and scrapes HTML from a site that doesn’t even exist anymore!

A fun challenge would be to get each of these projects building again, and where they no longer work because of external dependencies, find a substitute. I will write up my efforts for each of these projects under the archaeology category.

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