The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

I wrote down everything I know about floppy drives. Did I get something wrong? Let me know!

https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2023-08-28/

Another weird #PHP question. I'm using Homebrew on OSX11.7 to maintain multiple PHP versions (7.3 - 8.2) I had been using pecl to install xdebug which worked fine for 8.1 however since homebrew upgraded me to 8.2 pecl still thinks xdebug is installed even though it's not for the current version (it is for 8.1)

pecl's ext_dir is correct pointing to an empty /usr/local/lib/php/pecl/20220829 for 8.2...

Can pecl not be used with multiple php installs?